Back to Emily
Dear Friends,
We'll spend some time today in reference to the ongoing destruction in the Middle East, but we'll keep our central efforts on a return to Emily Dickinson, taking her as a spiritual rather than literary teacher.
First, back by popular demand (thanks, RM):
We never know how high we are
Till we are called to rise;
And then, if we are true to plan,
Our statures touch the skies—
The Heroism we recite
Would be a daily thing,
Did not ourselves the Cubits warp
For fear to be a King—
This will get us on our feet for the Lorian Standing Exercise, and relates to another, more demanding standing poem and our today's main focus:
The Props assist the House
Until the House is built
And then the Props withdraw
And adequate, erect,
The House support itself
And cease to recollect
The Augur and the Carpenter -
Just such a retrospect
Hath the perfected Life -
A Past of Plank and Nail
And slowness - then the scaffolds drop
Affirming it a Soul.
The scaffolds drop -- or the body drops from a scaffold -- and the Soul is affirmed. We'll consider some of the other places this poem means to take us (like auger/augur). What is it to be "adequate, erect"? There is an echo, too, of Keats's speculation in a famous letter, which Dickinson could just possibly have known: Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!
If the soul is a house, what or whom does it house? Consider Malachi 3:1, which would certainly have been in Dickinson's active vocabulary and represents a key moment when slow preparation turns to sudden habitation:
The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple.
Helen Vendler, always the sharpest eye with Dickinson's poems, underscores an emphasized contrast (see her Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, Belknap Press, 2010). Notice that the house once completed does "cease to recollect" its means of being built, in the manner of Zen teachings about leaving the boat once you've crossed to the other shore. The perfected life, however, "hath" indeed "Just such a retrospect," so even perfected still looks back on the materials and the slowness of its becoming.
We'll use this very difference to affirm our own Souls, not just some time in the far off, but today at 11am, Eastern. Join in by all means!
wishing you joy,
Michael
