| Concerning the Edification of the Young A.L.W. in Regard to
Death, Religion, Loneliness, and Poetry
As curious as it might sound, to the best of my memory Emily Dickinson provided not only my first formal introduction to poetry, but also instigated my first conceptualizations of Death, Religion, and Loneliness.
I was a child insomniac. This being the case, and since I could not yet read, my parents provided me with a number of books-on-tape to keep me in bed, my restlessness so curtailed. In retrospect, all of the tapes were pretty damn creepy, but I listened to them multiple times over nonetheless. Most of the tapes were fairy tales of the kind that hadn’t be “Disney-fied”, which meant that they invoked what I now recognize to be strange sexual innuendoes, bodily-manifested punishments, and gendered triumphs and chastisements. You know the type—they’re fascinating! But by far the creepiest tape of all was the biography of Emily Dickinson.
(FYI—If you really want to send your children into a state of shocked rapture and propel their insomnia to new levels, buy them the tape of “The Light Princess,” wherein a princess is cursed at birth to have no moral or socially-reliant center—no self-consciousness at all in the Hegelian sense of needing to locate the Self through the Other—which leads to her actual loss of a relationship with the force of gravity; she literally floats through life lacking the capacity to love her parents or her Prince Charming until the spell is broken. Or better yet, have them listen to my all time favorite, “The Gouda,” in which an ex-circus-trapeze-master- dwarf, with a potentially fatal genetic disease, procures the help of two children to find a stolen cure, all the while running around New Orleans during Mardi Gras disguised inside perfectly realistic manikins.)
But back to Dickinson. The details of the tape are, for the most part, rather vague in my memory. But what does stand out are two specific segments of the narration. First, I can recall an account of Dickinson’s education. If my memory serves, Dickinson was sent to a religious boarding school in which daily attendance at chapel was mandatory. And every day after the service, all of the students who had been saved, or had felt God’s presence, or had accepted God into their lives—something to this effect—would be asked to stand. The gravity of the question was impressed upon the young students and they were cautioned not to stand in deceit. At the beginning of the school year, a good number of students remained sitting, but as the year progressed, more and more stood up. And finally, only little Emily was left sitting, feeling utterly wretched and alone. And soon thereafter, or so the tape implied, she was to leave school and return home to self-isolation and poetry.
Now, I really have no idea if this history is correct. I certainly don’t trust my memory in this case and I have no idea who researched the biography in question. But this scene, as I recall it, sure made an impression on me. In fact, all of my associations regarding Dickinson and her poetry (which I had never seriously revisited again until this week) are colored by the image of a little girl in a shadowy church, agonizingly isolated from all the other child and adult believers. And isolated also from God. And since as a child I had no religious upbringing, I could easily imagine myself in Emily’s position, lonely and branded by a mystifying inadequacy or rejection. And later I was to recall this image when my best friend tutored me in the child’s prayer, “God is great, God is good…,” questioning why I didn’t already know it myself.
As to my second memory of this narrative, I vividly recall my impression of “Because I could not stop for Death - / He kindly stopped for me -” which led me then and forever more to associate Dickinson with death. For what a shocking reality that first line hits you with! My younger self could never have interpreted or articulated the sentiments the poem invoked in me, but I now understand why I found Dickinson’s Death so disconcertingly frightful at the time: Dickinson’s Death is decidedly free-roaming. It is possessed of its own agency and is strangely comic; it sits on your shoulder as you go about your mundane tasks, patient and quiet.
I can align my reaction to Dickinson’s portrayals of Death with the disconcerting flickerings I feel in response to the celebration of death in the Mexican Dia de los Muertos. My reaction to this celebration, which importantly stands, in my mind, as a signifier for a cultural Otherness I can never quite assimilate, is much the same as my stance toward Death’s presence in-the-everyday in Dickenson’s poetry. In Dickinson, Death is there, winking at me, representing the unintelligibility of what must inevitably come to pass just as, in my stance as a foreigner observing the Dia de los Muertos, the grimacing paper-mache skeletons paraded through the air and the fruit-laden graves thrust the unintelligible, comic Otherness of both the otherworldly and the culturally alien, to the forefront of my consciousness.
There is a pain - so utter -
It swallows substance up -
Then covers the Abyss with Trance -
So Memory can step
Around - across - upon it -
As One within a Swoon -
Goes saftely - where an open eye -
Would drop Him - Bone by Bone -
(Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. R.W. Franklin. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1998.)
PS—If I have children they’re going to listen to those very same books-on-tape.
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