hat, among other things, I admire about Emily Dickinson is that although she grappled with her belief in a Deity, she never submerged her identity in that belief or relinquished her grasp of what she conceived to be the reality of the human condition. I admire her tough-mindedness, tossed out in action-packed, tightly formed lyrics, bright with both thought and feeling. And I admire the honesty of her consciousness, so forcefully articulated that the body of her work has become a model for a journey such as hers.
She had no easy answers, no cure-alls for the human condition. True, often she could not keep all the loose ends together, and at those times she went over the edge into despair; but she was game for the adventure, insistent on maintaining an independent identity, tough- minded and honest about her view of the Deity's remoteness and (at times) perversity, prideful in her rebelliousness, and acid in her attack on dogma. She was, indeed, a spiritual warrior.
Born in 1830 into an oppressively patriarchal household, a household she left only on rare occasions throughout her life, she seems to have had a somber childhood, lacking that joyous spontaneity which we see in so many of her poems. Her relationships - except for those with her brother and his wife and children, who lived next door, and several young men friends during her youth - were characterized by a long-distance intensity maintained via letters, blossoming on at least one occasion into a love relationship which, too, remained long-distance. She ultimately preferred this remoteness, for it preserved the separateness of her identity. Here is how she put it in "The Soul Selects Her Own Society."
The Soul selects her own Society -
Then - shuts the Door -
To her divine Majority -
Present no more -
Unmoved - she notes the Chariots -
Pausing -
At her low gate -
Unmoved - an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat -
I've known her - from an ample nation -
Choose One -
Then - close the Valves of her attention -
Like Stone -
One could, of course, speculate that her relationship with a male Deity, as well as her relationships with men, were patterned after her relationship with her father - a stern, remote, demanding, undemonstrative, and yet a caring man; or that her restricted movement, the result of an authoritarian father, resulted in a narrow focus. Both views have been presented by others, and I shall not review them here. Let me just observe that we don't discuss Sir James Barrie's sexual difficulties every time we talk about Peter Pan! And we know next to nothing about Shakespeare's personal life. And concerning breadth of experience: Thoreau prided himself on the fact that he had "traveled widely in Concord." So, while giving thanks for the perspectives of psychoanalysis, let us (for now at least) look elsewhere for our insights.
Just as one is born with a personal heritage, one is also born into an intellectual and cultural heritage. Emily Dickinson's intellectual heritage was a waning New England Calvinism, propped up by fervent and frequent religious revivals. She left Mount Holyoke as a young woman because she found herself literally surrounded by Mary Lyon's preaching and beseeching, and by the conversions of her classmates. Even her family was finally swept up in the fervor. But Emily held out!
Meanwhile, over in Cambridge, a philosophy more suited to her temperament and intellectual predisposition had been developing: Transcendentalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson had converted the Calvinist/Unitarian God into a gentler pantheistic spirit which he called the Over-Soul. And Henry David Thoreau, a more practical theoretician and naturalist, had set up his experiment in simplification at Walden Pond. Emily had read them, as well as Margaret Fuller and others. What is crucial here is that this crisis of faith threw up for debate and redefinition the great issues of that time: deity, nature, the subjective and objective nature of the universe, conscience, consciousness, good, evil, the collective, the individual, etc. Emily Dickinson espoused many of these redefinitions, with the notable exception of allegiance to the Over-Soul. For her, Jehovah, whom she constantly questioned, was still real; but He was a stripped-down model, so to speak, without the trappings of the usual Christian dogma.
The ideological importance of Emily Dickinson, then, lies in the fact that she is at the heart of the tensions produced by the nineteenth century crisis of faith: the metamorphosis of "God" into "god." Interestingly enough, it is only thirty-six years after her death in 1886 that T.S. Eliot, also born a New Englander, published "The Waste Land," the monumental Twentieth Century work which explicitly identifies the breakdown of faith, culture, and morality in Western civilization. But Western civilization had to go through severe economic and political changes before "The Waste Land" could be written; Dickinson's spiritual journey can be considered as part of only the first trickle in a broad historical stream that eventually rampaged across the plains of Europe and America.
That Emily Dickinson was aware of the risk of the Journey, there is no doubt. In Poem #1151 (as numbered by Editor T.H. Johnson), she commands:
Soul, take thy risk. With Death to be Were better than be not With thee.Clearly, to her, Death is preferable to not unfolding one's own consciousness, one's "Soul." It is through the land-and-water imagery, which she repeats in many poems, that she makes this point most dramatically. Poem #201 is a good example:
Two swimmers wrestled on the spar -
Until the morning sun -
When one - turned smiling to the land -
Oh God - the Other One!
The stray ships - passing -
Spied a face -
Upon the waters borne -
With eyes in death - still begging
raised -
And hands -beseeching - thrown!
Here the ocean symbolizes the risk of spiritual "wrestling"; the land symbolizes security, an end to uncertainty, spiritual peace, or even conventional Christianity. The swimmer who remains in the water is viewed by those on board ship - who themselves are presumably headed towards land - as a face and hands, "begging" and "beseeching," requesting some sign that validates faith, a sign that, however, does not seem to be forthcoming.
The same could be said for some of Dickinson's poems: often the signs are not forthcoming. The experience can be like taking a Rorschach test: you see different ideas each time you read, and pulling the poetic shorthand into a coherent whole can be difficult at best. For me, Poem #249 is one of those. It seems at this reading to illustrate the pull between the carnal and the spiritual :
Wild Nights - Wild Nights! Were I with thee - Wild Nights should be Our luxury! Futile - the Winds - To a Heart in port - Done with the Compass - Done with the Chart! Rowing in Eden - Ah, the Sea! Might I but moor - Tonight - In Thee!
The tension in this poem is between "thee" and "Thee." With "thee" - a potential lover/friend? - the emotional and physical turbulence of "Wild Nights" would be pleasurable; but there is no turbulence if you are in safe harbor, that is, if you are "Rowing in Eden" (second and third stanzas). However, Eden is a confining, dull place, lacking adventure, while this poet's predilection is for adventure. So although there may be safe harbor from the physical ("thee"), the spiritual adventure leading to God ("Thee") is still available, if only for "tonight." The carnal morphs into the spiritual. The constant is this poet's robust temperament.
Furthermore, water here is not just symbolic of the spiritual adventure and its accompanying risks, it is also a symbol of eternity, the ultimate setting of the Journey: "Periods of Seas - /Unvisited of Shores -/Themselves the Verge of Seas to be-/eternity-is Those-." (#695) Although the soul is at first overwhelmed in the vastness of time and "Seeks faintly for its shore," it soon becomes "acclimated" to its condition and "pines no more" for the land. (#1425) In the latter two poems, the ocean of the spiritual adventure meshes with the ocean of eternity, and we see that one takes place within the other, and that the larger, eternity, can overwhelm the smaller, the journey of individual consciousness.
For Emily Dickinson there is no turning back! Hope - that feeling shared by all - turns out to be a "plank of balm" over which the individual must walk, in spite of constantly hovering disappointments. But where does that plank lead? It leads to the "escapeless sea" from which "The way is closed they came." (#1264) The word "plank" has an appropriately ominous overtone because the adventure is a lifelong one as well as a life-and-death adventure. But, says Dickinson, "The mind was built for mighty Freight/For dread occasion planned." (#1123)
What is the human condition that makes the crossing difficult? Poem #301 describes it succinctly, if starkly:
I reason, Earth is short - And anguish - absolute - And many hurt, But, what of that? I reason, we could die - The best Vitality Cannot excel Decay, But, what of that? I reason, that in Heaven - Somehow, it will be even - Some new Equation, given - But, what of that?
And what of Nature, certainly an aspect of the human condition? Nature deceives us. In Poem #1330, we are told that "Without a throe/A Summer's soft assemblies go/To their entrancing end." The lovely attributes of summer die in the Fall, which has its own beauty. But this fact makes summer a "dissembling Friend." Should we pray to God about such sad things? The Poet tried! "And did God care?/He cared as much as on the Air/A Bird - had stamped her foot-/And cried 'Give Me'- ." (#376)
Yet the thin line beyond which lies disbelief is never crossed. In spite of the insecurities, in spite of the reality of death, in spite of the deaf ear of God - in spite of all that, "To lose one's faith - surpass/The loss of an Estate -/Because Estates can be/Replenished - faith cannot - ... " Faith is "Inherited with Life- " and to relinquish it leads to "Being's - Beggary- ." (#377)
The painful tenuousness of our poet's position is subtle yet clear. Just as a curve in calculus gets closer and closer to its asymptote but never quite reaches it, so does Emily's disbelief approach Jehovah. It never quite gets there; to have it encompass Jehovah and turn Him into the Over-Soul, to transform God from objective truth into the objective/subjective truth of the pantheistic Over-Soul, was a step Dickinson was finally unable to take.
Yet she wonders what manner of Deity this is who never seems to take any steps to alleviate the human condition. That she sees him as remote is seen in many of the foregoing quotations. It's true that in an early poem (#61), she experiences Jehovah as a "personal" deity when she addresses him in little girl style as "Papa above," for example. But a father speaks, and this one too often does not! Poem #1251:
Silence is all we dread. There's Ransom in a voice - But silence is Infinity. Himself have not a face. And at times, when God does speak, what He says is perverse (#1317): Abraham to kill him Was distinctly told - Isaac was an Urchin - Abraham was old - Not a hesitation - Abraham complied - Flattered by Obeisance Tyranny demurred - Isaac - to his children Lived to tell the tale - Moral - with a Mastiff Manners may prevail.
In other words, once the tyrannous Deity was sure that Abraham would obey Him, He didn't bother to force Abraham to kill Isaac. In later years Isaac relates the story like a well-trained dog to his children! From a conventional perspective, this poem is outrageous.
In Poem #724, God's perversity is seen as a part of the inscrutability against which we mortals forever bang our heads in vain:
It's easy to invent a Life -God does it - every Day - Creation - but the Gambol Of His Authority - It's easy to efface it - The thrifty Deity Could scarce afford Eternity To Spontaneity - The Perished Patterns murmur - But His Perturbless Plan Proceed - inserting Here - a Sun - There - leaving out a Man -
We are the murmuring "Perished Patterns" worried and hoping that God wouldn't act in a spontaneous manner to get rid of us because that would be tampering with eternity. But, unfortunately, we're wrong. The Poet reminds us that His "Perturbless Plan" will work its way out in such a way that the end result is the same, whether or not he places a sun here, or omits a human being over there. Without enthusiasm, grudgingly, Emily Dickinson acknowledges that God can indeed casually and spontaneously alter what to us are eternal patterns.
If this smacks of rebelliousness, it is. Anyone who carefully nurtures an individual consciousness outside of what is generally accepted, who seeks re-enforcement from whatever source (say, the writings of Emerson and Thoreau), and who eagerly peruses that great anti-Christ, Lord Byron, does not surprise us by writing at the end of a poem: " We apologize to thee (to God) for thine own Duplicity - ." But Dickinson's rebelliousness takes an even more serious turn when she almost explicitly attacks such cherished Christian Doctrines as that good people go to Heaven and sinners "to Jail" (#234); that belief can heal (#1270); that we are carriers of original sin (#1601); that heaven will compensate us for the lonely struggle of getting there (#1603); that God and Jesus are one and the same (#357); and so on. No wonder such ideas were denounced from several pulpits around Amherst. And no wonder that her father kept bringing her books intended to improve her wayward ways. All, of course, to no avail. What, then, is Emily Dickinson's bequest?
Only a few steps separate the spiritual rebelliousness and struggle of Emily Dickinson from the demise of the Deity that Eliot writes about in "The Waste Land," (1922). But a change in ideology does not occur in a vacuum. Eliot's poem is brewed in a larger pot: the horrors of World War I - twenty-eight years after the death of Dickinson in 1886. The scramble to cut up the world into markets was fought out between the great European powers both in their colonies and in Europe, where poison gas and submarines were added to the arsenal of war technology. The moral disgust and outrage at Western civilization that had erupted among artists is best exemplified by the Dada movement (Zurich,1916). Under these strains, the thread of belief frayed and often broke, leaving large numbers of people spiritually ready for new beliefs - such as, for example, totalitarianism.
Our own, purely American form of spiritual bankruptcy, came only after World War II, from which we emerged onto the world stage as the key imperialist power. Intellectual and spiritual impoverishment resulted from, among other things, the suppression of thought during the ensuing Cold War.
Needless to say, a spiritual and intellectual rebellion took place. Lead by independent thinkers, journalists, and artists, it included the Beat generation of nomadic youth who searched for "beatitude," and who did much to initiate a long-overdue questioning of social priorities. The dissent was deepened by Korea, Vietnam, napalm, anti-personnel missiles, the gradual corruption of our natural resources, Watergate, radiation from power plants, right up to today's global actions with accompanying limitations on rights and freedoms at home.
In this context, the spiritual struggle embarked on by Emily Dickinson - and by extension the various liberation movements that came after that - may seem somewhat antiquated, almost quaint. Yet we know that there is nothing quaint about them. Spiritual struggle, ever connected more or less obviously to economic and political aspects of life, has always been part of what makes us human beings. Emily Dickinson's was well-articulated, and it seemed lacking in economic and political aspects only in so far as she was not conscious of the implications of being a woman in a patriarchal household. Quite aside from its aesthetic merit, her poetry is important to us for this reason.
And also for another reason: the stakes of life and death are higher now, and there is a tendency for many to sink into rigid ideologies, to forego the rational for the intuitive, or to subordinate themselves to some meditation-nutritional hierarchy of so-called seers and gurus who instead of demanding that we come to consciousness, work to submerge our identities in theirs and to mystify us with hocus-pocus. This kind of spirituality lives off fuzzy definitions, "feelings," substitutes painful choice with tarot card readings, and, in general, does not move us forward. Rather, let us use Emily Dickinson as a humanistic model of someone - passionate and rational and intuitive - who always struggled against submerging herself in man or deity!
© Joyce Nower