Silence

I was listening to WNRN the other day in the car, to Regina Spektor singing "You're using your headphones to drown out your mind," and I thought about how different it must have been for Dickinson. How silent.

Dickinson was certainly a person with a raging internal life. And she didn't have nearly the resources we have to drown that out. She had reading. And alcohol. And denial. And love, of a certain sort. All those things can drown out what threatens to overcome us from within. But she wouldn't accept one of the great tools available: religion. And so all she had was the "argument with ourselves," as Yeats called it: poetry. And that doesn't drown it. It throws gasoline on it.

So I thought about what silence may have been like to her. To us it's an abstraction. Even sitting here on a quiet Sunday night in my somewhat secluded home up off the road, I can hear the cars going by on the road. If I actually listen, which we've all trained ourselves not to do in order to not be overwhelmed, I can hear the traffic from the larger road a mile away and the many smaller roads nearer. And my refrigerator motor humming. And the click of the heater going on and off. And the sounds of neighbors closer than any Dickinson had. And their dogs. And the keyboard I'm tapping this out on. Should I want it, there's the TV, the stereo, the radio, the Wii, the ipod, the cell phone, the internet. . . what am I forgetting? All tools that have the effect of drowning out my mind for some period of time.

So the silence Dickinson had access to wasn't just auditory. It was a place that could or could not be filled. It was, at times in her poems, a companion: "I and silence/ Some strange race/ wrecked solitary here," as she says. Dickinson wrote into this silence, with this silence, maybe to this silence. She wrote with her mind, not in retreat from it. And I think this is one of the attractions of her work. It speaks as if there is no place to hide, that one must look and confront and experience. And we no longer have to.

RIP Nancy Spero

So Nancy Spero, a wonderful visual artist, died about 10 days ago, and I've been thinking a lot about her and Dickinson. Both were radical women who bent the media they created in to make them do what they wanted. They had no respect for boundaries, one might say. Spero (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Spero) was a feminist who exposed the experiences of women in ways that could not be ignored. When what she wanted to explore got beyond her own hands, she moved from printmaking to collage, using the works of others to punctuate her work. When it got to raucas for the frame, she created installations, painted it onto walls. When it wouldn't sit still, she went to video. It was the art she followed, not the theory or the reality of the boundaries of form.

I first came to Spero's work through her use of the Sheela na Gig, an ancient Irish (Celtic) figure of a woman reaching down with her hands and holding open her vagina. (Probably to scare off her date!) Spero used these figures as a frieze in one of her emplacements. Imagine a room framed by them. This performance of the feminine inspired me as did her ambition and daring.

Dickinson is like this, too. She strips her words of all the comforts of context or narrative until we are alone with the words, "wrecked solitary there." And she also used drawings and collage to enhance her work, usually for comic effect. (See http://www.emilydickinson.org/cartoon/carindex.html) But mostly it's the exuberance of their work that links them, their impatience with people who say "what," as Dickinson put it in one of her letters. Their willingness to go directly into experience and drag it onto the page, the wall, the screen that makes them so compelling.

Their work is hard to translate, to capture, to "print," as Dickinson would put it. Dickinson's work resists the page or defies it. Spero's work often had to be walked through or stood within. So the experience of the work becomes the work. The texts themselves aren't stable enough to offer a defined version. The viewer/reader is always left with something to put together, to decipher or decide. This is the art that moves me.

Carlo

When I was in high school I know I thought Emily Dickinson was a cat person. She just seemed like the type, spinsterish reclusive, one of those old ladies you find hoarding cats in some New England town from time to time. I could hear her pen scritch-scratching across the page like cat's claws, torturing me with her enigmas, kneading her sharp little symbols into my brain while I tried to sleep, just like my cat did. But most of what I thought I knew in high school turned out to be wrong, and this is no exception.

I don't really have anything against cats (except one in particular who used to pee on the burners of our stove at night!). I've had them as pets, loved them, don't want them anymore. But I did have something against Dickinson at one time, that model of the woman poet without a life, pining for love, writing furious poems to no one.  But I was wrong.  She knew love.  She had Carlo.

Carlo was a dog "as big as myself," as she put it, a Newfoundland that her father gave her. She named him after the dog in Jane Eyre and spent 18 years with this bear of a dog, walking around town with him, writing while he filled up most of the empty floor space in her room. This was a revelation to me. It would be one thing for Dickinson to have a dog and not a cat, but a Newfie, a big, human sized dog? And here I'm showing some of my prejudice (which I've also had to modify lately - but more on that later) because I am a "big dog" person. I grew up with Saint Bernards and always thought that dog people were either "big dog" or "small dog" types. And I would have bet that, absent cats, Dickinson would go for the tiny, yappy type. So I had to look at her poems again in light of this revelation.

Having a really big dog is a certain kind of challenge.  You have to be able to communicate with and command the dog. A misbehaving Chihuahua is an annoyance (ask me how I know!), but a misbehaving 125lb Newfie or Saint is a menace. They have to respect you and know you mean business.  You can't just be pliant and accommodating. You can't be a "That's ok, I'll just sit in my room and write" wimp. So knowing about Carlo made me look at Dickinson's personality again.


And when I looked again, I saw her irony ("Thanks for the surgery," she says to Higginson when he doesn't understand her poems.) and her passion. I saw the strength it took to choose to write, her fearlessness in the face of our biggest fears: loss, abandonment, death, loneliness. I could see the sensuality in the poems when I thought of her sitting down beside this big, black dog stroking his fur. I could see the power I had overlooked in her willingness to make direct statements ("Renunciation is a piercing virtue-") as well as enigmatic images.

And Carlo shows up directly in the poems sometimes.  One of my favorites is "I started Early - Took my Dog-" (#656 Franklin, #520 Johnson):

I started Early - Took my Dog -
And visited the Sea -
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me -


And Frigates - in the Upper Floor

Extended Hempen Hands -
P
resuming Me to be a Mouse -

Aground - upon the Sands -


But no Man moved Me - till the Tide
Went past my simple Shoe -

And past my Apron - and my Belt

And past my Bodice - too -

And made as He would eat me up -

As wholly as a Dew
Upon a Dandelion's Sleeve -

And then - I started - too -

And He - He followed - close behind -
I felt His Silver Heel

Upon my Ankle - Then my Shoes

Would overflow with Pearl -

Until We met the Solid Town -
No One He seemed to know

And bowing - with a Mighty look -
At me - The Sea withdrew -


Although Carlo only appears in the first line, he is a presence in the poem.  There's a sly nod to him in the line "But no Man moved Me." Carlo is male but not a "Man." And Carlo hovers in the background, in danger of being  abandoned if she accepts the sea's caresses. He complicates the poem.

There's a good discussion of the poem itself here:
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/dog.html

Of course, as I write this, I have on my lap my 5lb Chihuahua, Ancho.  But more about that another time!
svf
How does Carlo affect your reading of Dickinson?

Welcome!

   Welcome to my blog! Over the next few months, I will be blogging on Emily Dickinson. Some of these postings will be readings of the poems, some will be responses, some will be discussions of the influence of her poems on the way I see or understand things or even on the things I see or want to understand. It's not meant as an academic exercise, hence the title: "Living with Dickinson."

      And, as you visit and comment, we can raise questions, disagree, converse and explore. What's your favorite Emily Dickinson poem? Why? What do you wish you knew about Dickinson? What do you wish you didn't know? Why do you read her poems?