Jarkko Pylväs: Woodcut of Emily

From post of
4 September 2010

What else this morning? The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson Facebook Page has posted the most beautiful woodcut of E.D., made especially for them by a Finnish artist, Jarkko Pylväs.

I am so struck by the image. It's like a photographic negative, or black chalkboard with designs etched in white, or an electrified afterimage, as when you look at something dazzlingly bright, shut your eyes, and the image inverts and repeats aglow. It captures E.D. and what she's about beautifully. She's surrounded by feathers, webs, "gods eyes" (ornaments I made as a very little girl, yarn wound and woven around a cross of popsicle sticks - called "gods eyes"), a crescent moon, stars, snowflakes, moonbeams, and starlight. He has captured E.D.'s likeness, idiosyncratic image instantly recognizable - hair parted in a bun, pudgy nose and full-lipped mouth, ribbon crossed at her throat - yet has managed to capture a most elusive quality, a sense of her poetic capacity. She does not look directly at us, as in the iconic daguerrotype. Rather - and more evocatively - she has thought of something; pensive, she looks away, off to the side, heeding the starlight and gods eyes and feathers and webs and stars - she hears beyond the genius of the sea.

Thank you, Jarkko.

Jarkko Pylväs, Woodcut of Emily, 2010

par avion

epistolary exchange from this afternoon, via emails

Dear Mr. Charyn, I wanted to drop you a line to tell you that I greatly enjoyed your novel. I've been enjoying your facebook page too. I don't have an account (I'm hesitant to sign up) or would leave this message there.

I recently listened to your great interview on WAMC's Booktalk with Joe Donahue. I don't see it linked on your facebook page - so here it is in case you're not aware that it's available online.

Also, evidently this morning NPR ran a piece on the NYBG Emily Dickinson garden exhibit. I enclose that link since you will be there next weekend.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago Lenore R. linked to a blogpost of
mine that touched on your novel. She left a comment, and I replied to it though I don't know that she ever saw it. So (FYI) here's that link, too.

Again, I greatly enjoyed your novel, the way you channeled E.D., seemed to enter into her mind, or a very credible (because imaginally truthful) variation of her mind. It's Memorial Day weekend and this morning a local radio host [Rick on WKZE] made unusually interesting comments along the lines of how so many artists toil their entire lives and never achieve fame or fortune - but when they die, they are discovered and it's at that point the worth of their artifacts skyrockets. He suggested that on this holiday we remember not only fallen soldiers, but all who have come before us and left their marks, their legacy. I think of Emily Dickinson in this regard. She seems to me to have achieved an unusually vivid posthumous immortality (of which she herself seemed both patient and prescient). I personally feel a growing connection with her - somehow by getting more insight into her I have been gaining a better understanding and acceptance of myself (as a woman of divided mind who for a long time unwittingly fought against artistic aspects of myself). What a very interesting intertwining and mingling of like minds - all of us who are so touched by her Muse. It seems to suggest something to me too about the nature of consciousness - that there is something so capacious ultimately about the compelling and living idea of E.D. that we are all drawn to her and inspired. I'm finding my own sense of theology, of the most profound personal beliefs, challenged and deepened in considering her. I am formally starting to think of myself as a latter day transcendentalist!

Thanks again, Mr. Charyn, for being a Muse yourself in all this. Have a great Memorial Day weekend and (if you haven't made it already) a safe and pleasant leap across the pond. Yours, Belle

***
Dear Belle, thanks so much for your very kind note! Yes, Emily was "a fallen soldier." But I think she was able to find a great deal of pleasure by traveling inside her own head.
Best, Jerome Charyn

Two illuminations of Emily

Here is an excerpt from the essay I read at the New York Public Library yesterday, by poet Ted Hughes. It is the most beautiful and precise illumination of Emily Dickinson's poetry that I have ever read - an astonishing piece of writing in itself.

... she was able to manage such a vast subject matter, and make it so important to us, purely because of the strengths and ingenuities of her poetic style.

There is the slow, small metre, a device for bringing each syllable into close-up, as under a microscope; there is the deep, steady focus, where all the words lie in precise and yet somehow free relationships so that the individual syllables seem to be on the point of slipping into utterly new meanings, all pressing to be uncovered; there is the mosaic, pictogram concentration of ideas into which she codes a volcanic elemental imagination, a lava flood of passions, an apocalyptic vision; there is the tranced suspense and deliberation in her punctuation of dashes, and the riddling, oblique artistic strategies, the Shakespearian texture of the language, solid with metaphor, saturated with the homeliest imagery and experience; the freakish blood-and-nerve paradoxical vitality of her latinisms, the musical games -- of opposites, parallels, mirrors, chinese puzzles, harmonizing and counterpointing whole worlds of reference; and everywhere there is the teeming carnival of world-life. It is difficult to exhaust the unique art and pleasures of her poetic talent. With the hymn and the riddle, those two small domestic implements, she grasped the 'centre' and the 'circumference' of things - to use two of her favourite expressions - as surely as human imagination ever has.

Ted Hughes, "Emily Dickinson," Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose (London: Faber and Faber, 1994) (first published as the introduction to A Choice of Emily Dickinson's Verse, London: Faber and Faber, 1968)

***
At the MOMA bookshop, where I stopped in to look for an art catalog on Rothko, another book, Maira Kalman's Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World), caught my eye. I rifled through the pages and came upon a familiar-looking image. Then I propped the book open, stepped back, and took a picture.

Harmonics

Hello darling. Cool overcast morning, back from my walk at the conservation area. Now sitting at my desk paging through the facsimile edition of Emily Dickinson's Herbarium. I feel extremely fortunate to have been able to borrow it from the library - it was on the order of $138 at the NYBG shop (wow). It is a beautiful book. I wish I could show it to you. Dickinson's compositions of plant matter on each page are so beautiful. It's more than Nature's beauty - the forms, structures, shapes, colors and complexities of each floral species itself. It's the way she arranges them, tucks the stem of each into a paper slot labeled in her careful script. Each of the 65 pages is different.

Emily Dickinson put the herbarium together when she was 14 years old. To me (not only me) they are visual metaphors for poetry, harbingers of her poetry to come. Spare, economical, perfectly chosen, masterfully arranged statements, all subtly relating to one another, within a page and within the album as a whole. I'm really quite blown away by it.

Taken together, it suggests a musical composition to me, a piece of chamber music perhaps. There is movement - patterns shift and the number of objects varies on each page, suggesting an abstract narrative as I go through the book, or the reflection of the order of a higher plane. (It would make an amazing slide show or film, accompanied by a musical score.) Page 1 (as numbered in the facsimile edition) is an image of the front cover of the stationery store-bought album. ED's composition begins on page 2.
It seems to me to start with a strong chord: a large specimen at the center of the page surrounded by four smaller specimens, one in each corner (a total of five on the page). The composition proceeds in a measured slow movement; the following six pages have three specimens per page, except for one which has four. Page 8 introduces another movement, becoming increasingly complex. Later there is a sustained, rapturous series of pages that leap to 6, 7 and as many as 9 or 10 unique elements in exciting juxtapositions on a page. The final plates lead back down to a stately finish: 7, 5, a dramatic 2, 4, and a final chord of 5. Throughout the book there's discussion, an attempt to show, to convince, argument, truth to be expressed, to lead you to an overwhelming question, do ask what is it and make the visit.

A piece of chamber music comes to mind as I turn the pages. What is it? It takes me a few moments of whistling (which attracts Gwynnie who comes running up to rub against my legs) to remember what it is. A Brahms sextet. I find the CD and put it on. A wonderful recording with Isaac Stern, Jaime Laredo, and Yo-Yo Ma, among others. I put it on, the String Sextet in B-flat major, Op. 18, for two violins, two violas, and two cellos, composed (according to liner notes) in 1860.

So Emily wasn't thinking of this piece when she composed her herbarium in 1844-45. But I wonder what music she might have been aware of at her young age - besides hymns that is - Beethoven perhaps? Perhaps her own melody, what she had already glimmered of the music of the spheres. Very mysterious how the music comes to you, says Jerome Charyn in a video that I watched the other day. Indeed.

houses to hold countries

I dwell in Possibility -
A fairer house than Prose -
More numerous of Windows -
Superior - for Doors -

Of Chambers as the Cedars -
Impregnable of Eye -
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky -

Of Visitors - the fairest -
For Occupation - This -
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise -

#657, by Emily Dickinson

***
In May 2009 Bill Murray read a few poems, including the one above (@ 2:35), to members of the construction team building Poets House, a national poetry library and literary center located on the Hudson River in Battery Park City (the facility opened to the public in September). After reading the poem Mr. Murray made a little speech.

Thank you for building this and putting yourselves into it, the way the poets put themselves into their words and the way all New Yorkers put themselves into what they really gravitate to, what really makes them a man or a woman. And this site is - I know you all feel it when you come here - I know I feel it when I come down here - the fact that it's going to be here is a pretty nice piece of bliss, it's a little bit of balm, it's the hope that comes out at the end from Pandora's Box.

***


***
I like what Bill Murray said and connect it with the appreciation I feel for the good carpenters who built the lovely church down the road from me with obvious skill, love, and care, more than 160 years ago.












***




***

Sweet Mountains -- Ye tell Me no lie --
Never deny Me -- Never fly --
Those same unvarying Eyes
Turn on Me -- when I fail -- or feign,
Or take the Royal names in vain --
Their far -- slow -- Violet Gaze --

My Strong Madonnas -- Cherish still --
The Wayward Nun -- beneath the Hill --
Whose service -- is to You --
Her latest Worship -- When the Day
Fades from the Firmament away --
To lift Her Brows on You --

#722, by Emily Dickinson

The Artist is Present

I'm reading a wonderful book, The Passion of Emily Dickinson, by Judith Farr (Professor of English at Georgetown, now emerita). Her insightful and well-researched take on Dickinson makes more sense to me than some other interpretations I've come across. My perception of Emily has been deepening considerably as I read more about her and she has entered my imagination. As well, the major dramatis personae in her circumscribed circle are starting to be no longer merely names. They are coming to life for me, like darkroom photographs emerging from chemical baths. I'm getting a sense of their personalities, of their complicated interconnections and interactions, and especially their effects on Emily.

Right now I'm in the midst of a section of Farr's book that discusses Emily's decision by her early thirties to clad herself in white, and around this time, her conscious, gradual withdrawal from general society - a decision, ultimately, to literally not show her face. (For example, she stayed upstairs when visitors, including those of her former close acquaintance, came to call; she loved children and would lower a basket laden with her homebaked cookies, from her window.)

I hadn't given much thought to her white dress before. If anything I had dismissed it as an eccentricity and de-emphasized it as I considered her. I associated it with something immature and girlish that I found vaguely trivial, offputting, and that I couldn't relate to. But reading Farr, it's like a light being turned on. I have a sense now of Emily's consciously donning her garb as an expression of her complex, impassioned, integrated iconography.

The author discusses the idea of Emily's conscious decision to become a kind of reclusive artist-nun, a bride (though not Miss Havisham-like) of a lover - God, but not (as with a Catholic nun) only God, but also an earthly lover - whose face she is not destined to see (or to experience again), in this realm. The theme was prevalent in Victorian poetry and painting, such as Tennyson's poem St. Agnes' Eve, and Pre-Raphaelite paintings that combined feminine images of purity with romantic eroticism. The author presents compelling evidence that Emily Dickinson was aware of this contemporaneous strain of English Victorian thought, and argues compellingly on their influence on Emily. To make a long story short, women in white, carrying lilies, were a powerful subject for Pre-Raphaelites and other English Victorians, and Emily Dickinson, in America, found affinity in these themes and made them her own.

As I muse about all this, I'm thinking of Emily Dickinson as not only a poet and great letter writer (she often merged and blurred the forms - but why, after all, should an artist be required to be a strict categorizer?) - I'm adding another dimension to my conception of her - that, in modern parlance - of performance artist. Her white wardrobe and resolutely reclusive way became another way by which to express her tightly and authentically integrated sense of self (hedgehog she, no fox).

I think of the image of Emily Dickinson, wearing white and quite literally averting her face from everyone but her most intimate inner circle of relatives and friends and contrast it with a mental image (courtesy of Colm Toibin's essay) of Marina Abramović, in her current exhibition at MOMA. Dressed in a long flowing scarlet gown, for the duration of the show (through the end of May) she sits all day long at a table and regards the face of each person who elects to sit before her. Abramović exposes her own face to be viewed by all and sundry, requesting (as communicated by museum guards) only a space of about ten seconds to, I suppose, reboot herself on some level, before lifting her head and looking into another face.

Emily Dickinson: white dress, and she liked to carry lilies - not white lilies though, as one might suppose, but red-orange ones - according to Farr, color associated with passion & suffering. Goes deeply private, reclusive, hides her face.

Marina Abramović: scarlet dress (passion & suffering). Does she carry flowers, ever? I don't know. Goes deeply public, out there, shows her face...

I'm an Animal

No glimpse of Tom the Handyman today but hope springs eternal. He made me laugh. Nice wall - that'll screen out the highway noises. That's the plan. Thank you KZE for playing Stella a little while ago. I was out walking and missed it but appreciate it all the same. I have a fantasy of encountering a good looking stranger who asks my name. Stella the Aah-tist, I say, saying the word with a Boston accent, the way David Gray sings it. What do you do? I write. What? Poetic love letters. Loss, longing. Blog equivalent of the blues. Janis Joplin. Rosé though, not bourbon. Lilacs - I like the way those things smell. Yeah. Here - inhale. What I should have said. Oh emissary brain why must you always lose my chance? I kept walking. I could have stopped! How sweet it might have been to pause in the middle of the road on the innocent sunlit day, extend my arm, observe him inhale, create a memory, make his day. It won't happen again, not that way, the lilacs are almost done. Inhaling lilacs - what I'm doing now. They're on my desk and the fragrance steals over me. I experienced an olfactory dream last night, the most delicious sensation in my sleep, scent applied after her bath by a beautiful lover, unfortunately not me, but I inhaled as she passed. She entered the bedroom to meet her waiting lover and shut the door behind. Oh intoxicating fragrance and lucky man to behold the pale gray satin she had slipped on just for him, feathery white ornament in her soft dark hair, sandals on her feet, and the bouquet about her, fragrance of Parisian design, not innocent as a nosegay, muguets des bois or French lilacs, but a consciously applied pheromone to love, explicitly designed to draw him in...

The One I Call

Two breakfasts today, first, banana yogurt pancakes and turkey sausage, then, at quarter to three, scrambled egg with onion, potato, tomato, and cheddar, along with refreshing chilled grapefruit. D was going to grill lamb to go with the taboulleh salad but he's gone missing in the haze. It's in the high 80s and I'm at low ebb, taking it easy, listening to the radio on low and paging through Emily Dickinson's beautiful letters. "... forgetting is a guile unknown to your faithful cousin...", she wrote in 1879. I relate very much, and substitute "friend."

***
My reading this afternoon is desultory but interesting. I'm shuttling among volumes. I'm in the midst of Emily's letters to Samuel Bowles and his wife Mary. I didn't know who they were so I looked them up in the index of the Dickinson biography I own, by Cynthia Griffin Wolff (inscribed in neat penmanship by me, 1/31/87, New York City; purchased at, I believe, the delightful Three Lives Bookshop in the Village (does it still exist?)), and read the relevant pages. Then it occurred to me to see if Bowles is mentioned in the Charyn novel (which I've put down since I last sat quietly on the artist's porch or beneath his lilacs - the novel is strongly connected for me now with those pleasant hours). Indeed he is, quite a scene, culminating in, ostensibly, an attack of sciatica. I know nothing about sciatica but I believe that Mr. Bowles' eyes seeming to "disappear in his skull," his beginning to shake, and ultimately "shuddering once" is of a different nature. Oh that Emily, not an altogether reliable narrator - though given her nature, the truth outs. Like Lolita on the sofa with H.H., Emily too, thankfully, is an actor in her own pleasure - "I touched his beard, not to excite, but to console him. Yet it did excite me, the silk of it, that fine jungle of hair..."

Exacerbated perhaps by the sultry heat I have a dreamy amalgam of Emily's actual letter-writing voice; an image of Mr. Samuel Bowles, the handsome, engaging, and energetic editor of the Springfield Daily Republican, who while devoted to his children and his wife was attracted to lively, witty, attractive women and maintained complicated, intimate relationships; and an image of a couple in a parlor, the ages we are now, who look not so different from you and me.

***
From Emily Dickinson, by Cynthia Griffin Bell (page 398):

Some of Dickinson's readers have speculated that Bowles may have been the object of her unrequited passion. There is no way to disprove such a theory, but it seems unlikely. It is easy to imagine Emily Dickinson's falling in love with a married man, especially if he returned her passion; it is easy to imagine her becoming resigned to never being able to marry him. But it is not easy to imagine her doing so when the married man in question was already engaged in flirtations of varying degrees of seriousness with her sister-in-law, one of her sister-in-law's friends, and a learned Northampton woman [Maria Whitney] whose ardent feelings were reciprocated. Nothing in Emily Dickinson's character suggests that she would have been willing to become one of a group of admiring females... Perhaps the most telling evidence... is Bowles's inability to appreciate the power of her talent or the depth of her intelligence. What Dickinson consistently craved was a response to the subtlety and range of her own intellect, imagination, and sensitivity; the intractable loneliness that seems always to have beset her derived not primarily from her secluded life, but from the absence of genuine equals with whom she could be "herself." The love poetry speaks consistently of parity and mutuality, and whatever his other virtues may have been, Sam Bowles could probably not have offered these to any woman. It never seems to have occurred to him to offer them to Emily Dickinson.

***

Okay, maybe I can work with this, compose a craigslist ad? No - better! An NYRB personal.

Married, perimenopausal poetic blogger stuck in country seeks response to her subtlety and range. Weathered garden nursery worker leered hungrily at me as recently as yesterday - why not you? He didn't know from marine bells - browallia, barked his wife. Right! I'll quote Emily Dickinson letters at you. She rocked, as I'd like to, but don't fear - I look nothing like her. Have been described by ancient paramour as earth goddess mixed with otherworldly love poet. Yeah that, and trapped in post-Chanel Martha Stewart body, when a different body type was the ideal. Cut to the chase: mature Slavic good looks, and if you like prehistoric Venus figurines you'll love me, only better. Lifesize, not palm. Hair long enough to pin up, and I know now to pay attention to the back of my neck. Hope you like spicy Sicilian chicken, roast chicken, taboulleh salad, scrambled eggs, chocolate chip cookies - because that constitutes the core of my culinary repertoire. Add to that a casual approach to housekeeping, although I'll hop to immediately if you say please do underwear...

***

I guess that ad in the NYRB would set me back - what? A lot. Needs editing. Maybe I should post it on craigslist. Nah, I'm too lazy, especially with slow downloads. I know. Right here, right now.

Hitting send.

un chanson d'amour, de la vie, je vous aime cherie...

Signed Sealed Delivered

Looking at a volume of Emily Dickinson's letters. I read a line in the introduction and turned to the full letter. It speaks to me very much. Why can't I just let go? Withholding. My mind cannot stand to be confounded. April 16, 1862, To Mr. Higginson,--Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?

This morning the fridge was a disorganized mess, with produce virtually spilling out of it. I intensely dislike our fridge. It is ergonomically all wrong, and I must stoop and bend (both!) to locate and pull out what I need. Getting out a carton of orange juice, if it's at the rear of the bottom shelf, is an ordeal.

I set myself to food prep and cooking. I did more than I expected to do, got into it, enjoyed going through the movements - retrospective choreography, I know all the steps - and now the fridge is a minimalist showcase of bowls and pots filled with prepared dishes. Yesterday I made (yes, yet again) Spicy Sicilian Chicken - I had all this eggplant. Today I took the chicken off the bone, transferred the leftover stew into a smaller pot, and instead of washing the stockpot decided to make... stock, thus clearing the freezer of a large bag of chicken bones, and the vegetable bins of aging celery, leek tops, etc. Also I made taboulleh salad, a cauliflower gratin, and a beautiful salad for lunch - arugula with tuna, feta, chickpeas, avocado, tomato, and carrot. D came home with the tuna and chickpeas and made more balsamic vinaigrette. The salad was delicious, truly the sum better than the parts - it was a transformation, not just "sliced endive" purporting to be salad - the flavors and textures melded and melted in my mouth. I'm already looking forward to breakfast tomorrow - banana yogurt pancakes with maple syrup - since I cooked turkey sausage and stirred together the dry ingredients for pancake mix.

I am enjoying the Emily Dickinson letters, her inimitable voice, intelligent, warm, direct - cutting always - without fuss, pretense, agenda, or archness - right to the chase. I think about her. I have something of her spirit. Perhaps there's a type. Of course there is. Kindred spirits.

Up in the aerie now with a glass of wine, Sabali by Amadou & Mariam has just come on now, dreamy Eurotechno heaven (la la la la la) and mysterious spoken voice - I'm dancing in my seat as I type - (bye bye it ends, signing off). An hour ago I wrote, A beautiful late afternoon. I'm on the back porch. It is in the 70s with a light breeze. The French lilac by the porch railing is in glorious bloom, dark lavender canticles (chanticleers?). Long bells. Sleeves. Divine fragrance disperses in the warm air. The Korean spice viburnum that we moved last fall because it never bloomed loves its new spot and is adorned with airy fat popcorn balls. Chimes ring, birds sing, and I hear what I think of as a "tree frog" - a charming croaking of what - a toad?

Plus I did laundry, so I feel very organized. Turned the radio down low and lay down on the sofa in the living room. I fell asleep and as I drifted awake I thought, and mouthed the words, You are my hawk, and I your dove.

Say a prayer for the pretender, Jackson Browne now sings. God I love that song.

And now, Stevie Wonder. Good time to hit send.

Kisses.

Bluebird

Charming roadside garden and stone wall in progress, created by the gentleman who with his customary finesse operated the bulldozer on Sunday...

***

#1395

After all Birds have been investigated and laid aside-—
Nature imparts the little Blue-Bird-—assured
Her conscientious Voice will soar unmoved
Above ostensible Vicissitude.

First at the March-—competing with the Wind-—
Her panting note exalts us-—like a friend-—
Last to adhere when Summer cleaves away-—
Elegy of Integrity.

--Emily Dickinson

echo

Beautiful stranger, each day I come upon these fields and woods
In hope of another glimpse of you.
In two weeks and a day I have seen you twice.
The moment before I first saw you
I gazed across a field and mouthed “I love you”
At the day, or me, or nothing in particular, or everything at once.
When I looked at the path again
There you were, on the path of the overlook
Striding in my direction, umbrella in hand.
Brown, curly hair, soft well-trimmed beard.
You smiled, and I smiled
You said hello, and then I hello, as we passed.
Our eyes met and then I looked away
Stricken with shyness

I looked down as we passed
And that was that.
I finished my walk, and got in my car
And realized what an impression you’d made.
Two-thirty. I noted the time.
And have thought of you since.
The second time, I couldn’t look
You, shirtless, emerged from the meadow, and crossed my path.
Speechless, abounding, I was helpless to behold you.
You hurried to your car
The door slammed
You must have gotten dressed and then
You drove away. I heard but couldn’t turn and look.

How thrilled I’d been, the unwound hour previous
To see your car, bronze-gold
With a berkshire plate.
He’s here.

I have consulted Whitman, to figure out what to do.
I carry a slip of paper which I imagine, if I see you,
I might slip to you, the way Emily Dickinson proferred
White lilies to the astonished Mr. Higginson.
The note contains Whitman’s words, not mine.
“17 October [I must be careful–hunters are permitted to bow deer now-Will this keep you away?],
"Pondering Walt Whitman,” I penned.

To You, it’s called.
STRANGER! If you, passing meet me, and desire to speak to me,
Why should you not speak to me?
And why should I not speak to you?
Written in 1860, it speaks to me now.

Why not speak to you, indeed?
Whitman, in another poem, counsels not to.
(And there is plenty reason for me
To chastely keep to myself.)

I imagine little scenes with you –
I hand you the slip of paper, you read
You follow after me, take me in your arms, give me a kiss.
Wait, I say, Whitman said speak, not kiss.

Perhaps I slip it to you on the path
Look back as you read, astonished.
Or perhaps I place it on your car
Tucked on your windshield
Or under a stone on the hood of your car.

Will you know it’s from me?

Or I imagine meeting you on the path again and being brave enough
To ask you out for coffee.
We go to Le Gamin.

But if I am Echo, are you Narcissus?
Will you push me away?
Are you, even, straight – or gay?
Straight, I’m sure of it – else why the voltage as you passed?

I long for you and ache
In despair I look for you
Mr. Whitman comforts me.

From another poem, To a Stranger,
He offers advice to the lovelorn.
I am not to speak to you
I am to wait
I am to meet you again
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.
I thought I had it figured out –
You come Fridays
But yesterday – no

Or maybe I scrap the note
And if I see you on the path
I say, “Hello, passing stranger”
Perhaps you recognize it – perhaps you teach English
And so you know what I mean.
Or you are puzzled, and if you ask
I say, over my shoulder, walking past,
google Whitman, passing, and stranger!
And then you know.

18 October 2008

Dinner for Four

I've been thinking of Jackie lately. I find her very human. On Saturday at the hairdressers, catching up on fashionable print magazines, I was struck by the cover of the current Vanity Fair. It features a head shot of a young Jackie. She was already married to John, but he hadn't yet been elected President. It's a beautiful image. She has healthy and lightly tanned good looks; her expression is unabashedly forthright and at the same time dreamy and sensuous. Take me as I am.

I like to think I have an inner Jackie – a goddess aspect like hers. Whichever goddess loves nature, poetry, and refined beauty, refinement and delicacy – truth with beauty and quality, never false sentiment. Aphrodite, with a drop of Athena? Maybe.

Last night towards morning, in a groggy half-sleep I thought about what would make an ideal small dinner party. I imagined Jackie Kennedy having an intimate supper with Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson.

I don’t know what conversation Jackie, Jefferson and Emily would have had. I picture Jackie at the head of a beautifully set table, with her guests on either side, dining by candlelight. Jackie smiles, her voice a murmur.

The three are kindred spirits. They revere nature, as well as high ideals. They draw strength from one another. After the meal they venture for a stroll around the Greenport Conservation Area, Jefferson in his silken threads and powdered wig, Emily dressed in white cotton, tiny as a sparrow, her hair pulled back, and Jackie, smiling. (I'm observing all this, or – heck, it’s my fantasy - Jackie stands in for me, since I can’t even pretend-imagine being confident enough to keep company with Jefferson and Emily.)

On the drive back from the preserve Jackie steers past the new Walmart consumer processing facility, sprawling and cheerless as a penitentiary, or a leveled Iraqi site, Basra on the Hudson.

Emily remains silent, but her hand flutters to her mouth.

Jackie sighs. "It's all so terribly hard on the spirit," she says, reaching to touch the lap of Emily's dress for a moment by way of comfort.

Jefferson, in back, looks out the window. He is horrified by the disfigured earth, disappointed that the divine gift of matchless landscape has been unceremoniously destroyed, especially to such wasteful and dubious purpose. All life has been removed, he thinks, nothing can grow.

But Jefferson is not altogether surprised, because he always understood that insensate, selfish forces were afoot in our country from the earliest days. They reside in each individual, to varying degrees, are played out within families, within communities, within a culture, all over the world, and between nations, over the millenia. These forces were too much for him sometimes and he’d retreat to his peaceful agrarian estate at Monticello to heal his spirit, regenerate. (Or so I imagine, having seen the series, John Adams.)

Maybe those, like Jefferson, like Emily, like Jackie, need to retreat to a protected, safe, reclusive space because they see all too clearly the brutish forces that without second thought would destroy them the same way they roll over everything that God holds dear.

We Can Do Nothing Unless We Are Asked

Written on Sunday at a "plein air" creative writing workshop, led by Kathe Izzo, on the grounds of Olana. Kathe shared with us an excerpt from Plant Spirit Medicine, by Eliot Cowan, and a repeated phrase in the piece resonated with me as we moved to the next exercise. Kathe fanned a deck of Tarot cards on the table and asked the participants (about a dozen adults on a beautiful afternoon) to select a card and to go outdoors in the fresh air to write whatever thoughts, observations, associations that might come to mind.

I select a card from the spread Tarot deck. “We can do nothing unless we are asked.” Vampires cannot come in unless they are invited. I think, I’m not a self-starter – it takes a gentle group like this to get me writing.

My card. A black-cloaked figure – like a vampire! But it’s not one. I think the figure is female, the hair is pulled back in what in one glimpse might be a bun. (Just now I’m interrupted by a little chipmunk that comes up beside me – I give it some apple from my purse. Possibly against the rules, but I’m into interspecies communication these days.)

Back to the figure: Emily Dickinson, I think, though she wore white. But she’s dead now, of course, on the other side – so perhaps she wears a black cloak of death. Emily and ecstasy – her poetry is ecstatic – it is in that state that she apprehends nature and forms it into a pellet-poem. Like Gertrude Stein’s “cows” – the odd code word for orgasm. (But I’m not thinking of Gertrude Stein, and certainly not of Alice B. Toklas.)

Emily. Her back is towards me and her shoulders are bent, her face hidden. She is erect, but I have a sense of loss, of mourning. I feel that she cannot turn to show me what she has come down to water’s edge to show – unless I ask her. She can do nothing until she is asked, like a muse who is present only when she is invoked.

I imagine stepping into the card, crossing the yellow desert to Miss Dickinson. She turns to me as I approach and her face is kind, relieved to have been freed from her suspended state. She extends her arm to me, beckons me to the shore, and her face lights as she finds someone who is interested in learning what she sees, seeing through her eyes, ready to stand with her, hand in hand, as the tidal water flows forever under the bridge and the ancient Castle of Olana beckons like an improbable throne.