If only because of its seeming incongruity with a brain “wider than the sky,” the central fact of Emily Dickinson’s life has become her seclusion. As she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1869, “I do not cross my Father’s ground to any House or town.” Like the relatively modest dimensions of her poems, this self-imposed constraint—of the property line within Amherst, Massachusetts, then the Dickinson home itself, then her bedroom—proved no barrier to a cosmic poetic imagination which “went out upon circumference,” and to which no subject, tone, or emotion was foreign. Erin & Wes discuss four of Dickinson’s best-loved poems, whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on grief, pain, violence, death, reason, identity, and encounters with the divine: numbers 340, 372, 320, and 477.
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0:19 Erin: [email protected] subtextpodcast. If only because of its seeming incongruity with a brain wider than the sky, the central fact of Emily Dickinson's life has become her seclusion. As she wrote to Thomas wentworth higginson in 1869, I do not cross my father's ground to any house or town. Like the relatively modest dimensions of her poems, this self imposed constraint of the property line within Amherst, Massachusetts, then the Dickinson home itself, then her bedroom, proved no barrier to a cosmic poetic imagination which went out upon circumference and to which no subject, tone or emotion was foreign. Today, in the first of a four part series on Dickinson, we're discussing four of her best loved poems whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on grief, pain, violence, death, reason, identity and encounters with the divine numbers 340, 372, 320 and 477. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, have you seen any of the many Dickinson TV shows or films that have come out in the past? I guess since I don't know, the Belle of Amherst or something, have you seen any of these kind of newer adaptations?
1:56 Wes: No. I know there's one where she's a lesbian, which I refuse to see, but
2:02 Erin: people just got into an argument about this in a class that I was in a few weeks ago about whether or not she was a lesbian. I think last summer I watched A Quiet Passion, the Terrence Davies film with Cynthia Nixon, which was pretty. I don't know. Terrence Davies movies make me feel uncomfortable for some reason. I'm sure if I, if I interrogated it there would be some explanation, but just, I don't know, the atmosphere of his films or something. And maybe, maybe that's the right thing to feel is uncomfortable. But have you been up to the house? They used the house, I think, in filming. It's so, you know, the outside, it's. I didn't check this, but no, haven't
2:37 Wes: been to the house? No.
2:38 Erin: Oh, wow, you've gotta go as a Bay Stater. Is that the demonym for Massachusetts people? I think it is.
2:44 Wes: Isn't Maryland the Bay State.
2:46 Erin: It might be. Anyway, as a Massachuted. Whatever. As someone from Massachusetts. Yeah, there you go. That's. I was too polite to say.
2:56 Wes: No, it is the Bay State. Yeah. Massa is the Bay State. All right. I just looked it up.
2:59 Erin: Okay. Okay. What is Maryland, the Ocean State?
3:03 Erin: No, that's. That's. That's Rhode Island. It's the. I don't know what it is.
3:07 Wes: The Old Line State or the Free State. I've never heard that. I lived in Maryland for quite a while, too. Wow. Okay, Mass. Okay. So as a Bay Stater, I should see Emily Dickinson's house. Yep.
3:19 Erin: Definitely. Are you a fan? A Dickinson fan or.
3:22 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I. You know, I'd been. Been a long time, so I can't say I'm a fan as a. As in the sense I'm terribly familiar recently. But she's amazing. I mean, you know, from what we prepared for and the other reading that I've done. Yeah, she's amazing. She's a true exceptional genius.
3:39 Erin: Yeah, I think that's right. I didn't like her as a kid, and it's been a long road to kind of overcome that. I think I was trying to figure out why, and I think it was this book that I had of lives of the writers or something like that, in which I thought that she had bad manners or something.
3:57 Wes: You know, refusing to open your door to talk to people might be considered bad manners.
4:05 Erin: Any example of someone, like, not. Not actively trying to please other people probably horrified me, but I'd love to talk to you.
4:10 Wes: I. I'll talk to you through the door. I'll write you a letter.
4:14 Wes: And I love that. I'll write you letters all day long.
4:17 Wes: Ten letters a day if you want, but I'm not coming out.
4:22 Erin: Awesome. Yeah. My committee chair is a huge Dickinson fan and scholar. There are a bunch of people here that are huge Dickinson scholars. So, in fact, I just went to. You know, I was preparing a lot of Dickinson for my exams, and over fall break, I went up to Amherst to see the house, which I've been many other times, but I saw that the flowers around the house, they had, you know, just, like, planted some decorative flowers, and they were all dying because it was late October. And so there was just, like, one plant that had a blossom on it that had rather a flower on it. So I went inside and asked the woman at the desk if I could cut the flower off for a friend of mine. So I was all thrilled. So I. Yeah. So I dried it and brought it back to Utah for my professor and said it was a flower from Dickinson's head. Because she's, you know, my professor's also a gardener and, you know, very interested in Dickinson's, her study of botany. So some random plant that some docent probably put there, but it was growing in her soil.
5:27 Wes: So I was thinking, yeah, she studied botany and a lot of other things. She had a really good liberal arts education.
5:33 Wes: And I was thinking, reading this. Yeah, this is another sort of perils of a liberal arts education story, because she's an amazing poet on the one hand, but she doesn't want to leave her room on the other. At a certain point, if your education is good enough, why leave your room? Right. Reading about her reclusion, I was thinking, yeah, maybe that's a workable solution. But how does the bathroom thing work? I assume she came out for the bathroom, but yeah, botany. No.
6:04 Erin: And just thinking about that refusal to leave her room. I mean, in a way she's. I guess you might say that she's taking the limitations that were already put on women at that time and almost like turning them into an extreme formal conceit. She's also not bending to any of the societal expectations of women at the same time. But like, insofar as a woman who is, you know, an Amherst housewife is somewhat confined to the house, you know, doesn't get to go out and have adventures and stuff like that. She's like, okay, what if I. What if I take that deadly seriously and just never, ever, ever even leave my room?
6:38 Wes: You know, Wasn't one of her. One of the people involved in the publication of her poetry or just from listening to other podcasts? I didn't listen closely enough, but was engaged in like, orgies and all kinds of sexual adventures. Do you know about that?
6:51 Erin: Yes, I did know about this. This is her brother and her. The woman that the brother had an affair with. I don't know the details of this, but the brother had an affair with a woman with a really memorable name, whose name escapes me. One of those three named people. I gotta look this up now. Mabel.
7:11 Wes: Mary Lou Retton. That's right.
7:13 Erin: Mary Lou Retton. Mabel Loomis Todd. There we go.
7:17 Wes: Okay, yeah. Yes, sounds familiar. And she and her husband had kind of an open relationship.
7:23 Erin: And she had an affair with Austen Dickinson's brother, who was married to Emily's kind of best friend Susan and sister in law, obviously. Yeah. And then afterwards, Mabel Loomis Todd comes into possession of all of the fascicles. And then she edits everything so that she takes out all of the irregular punctuation and regularizes. Sheena Higginson, I think. Regularize the meter and make all these changes. Yes. But a lot of things that we would not expect were going on in Amherst at that time. So it was not maybe the picture that some people have in their minds of some kind of stayed. I mean, at least not in the Dickinson household. In the Evergreens, there was some. Some funny business going on.
8:07 Wes: So anyway, one. One way of rebelling is to get with whatever sexual subculture was available. But Dickinson chose the opposite route.
8:18 Wes: As far as we know. I know scholars would love to speculate that there must be something more. You can't just be a good poet. You have to have people having lots of forbidden sex.
8:26 Erin: Right. I think the scholarship that tended in that direction centers on the fact that some of Emily's letters to Susan were edited after her death. Yeah. So I think Mabel Loomis Todd has a lot to answer for. I mean, a lot of people hate her in Dickinson scholarship.
8:41 Wes: She was jealous, apparently.
8:44 Erin: Yes. But also, I don't know. You know, she could also maybe be credited for Dickinson's literary reputation. I mean, it took a long time for us to get back to the original. Right. But she was the one who kind of saved the stuff and who really was intent on doing something with it. And Vinnie G over to her, I think, you know, Vinny didn't really know what to do with it. This is. Sorry, Lavinia, Emily's sister. So if it hadn't gotten into Mabel Loomis Todd's hands, maybe we wouldn't even have the poems at all.
9:08 Wes: Right. So she was very reluctant to publish, although she was corresponding a lot with people in a position to publish her. And she got some encouragement and encouragement to publish. And she published, I think, maybe 10 in her lifetime. But one. Only one that she actually sanctioned. Just going on memory from secondary reading here. But yeah. So I think maybe she had an ambivalent relationship to the idea of publishing. I mean, I think she herself says it. What is it? It's as foreign as her. As the firmament is to Finn or something like that.
9:39 Erin: Yeah. She calls it the auction of the mind of man.
9:43 Wes: Right. Okay. Yeah. So there's this anxiety about what that would do to her work if she were publishing for a wider audience. Obviously she had an audience, the people she was sending the poems to. And she was getting a lot of admiration for that. But the idea of going to something broader Seemed to create some anxiety for her.
10:04 Erin: Yeah. And yet, I think, you know, my professor, who loves Dickinson, is convinced that the poems are written with the knowledge that these are going to have a kind of eternal readership, you know, so there's just a delay, maybe. I mean, you know, if she knew Too famous, then it would have really messed up her life.
10:23 Wes: So it would have. It's better to become famous after you're dead.
10:27 Wes: She would have just become insufferable and.
10:31 Erin: Oh, you're so cruel about these things. You think everyone's gonna be turned bad when they become famous. There are lots of famous people who are nice.
10:39 Wes: No, I know. I'm not. I'm just joining the anxiety, which is that it seemed like her anxiety is. It would corrupt her and turn her into something insufferable. And that is a danger. But not that it happens to everyone.
10:51 Erin: That it would corrupt the work, I think. I don't know how interested she is.
10:53 Wes: Corrupt the work.
10:54 Erin: Yeah. Yeah, I see. I immediately take it as a character thing.
10:59 Wes: Well, no, I meant both. Yeah. So I was thinking of rock stars. For some reason, I had this flash of an image of her wearing leather pants, just going to the opposite extreme and being a rock star and getting into rock and roll, which would be a little early, I guess, but, you know, for that. Drugs, sex. Drugs and rock and roll. But becoming a badass.
11:23 Erin: You're doing to her what the scholarship obsessed. Obsessed with her is doing. Get Hailee Steinfeld to play her.
11:30 Wes: Yes. I insist you be less pure. Forget about the white dress. So she always wore a white dress, right?
11:39 Erin: Yeah. They have just a copy of the dress, but they have the dress on a little mannequin in the house. So you could see it sort of. Sort of standing there headless. And it's. I don't know. There's something about it that's oddly appropriate. Anyway.
11:52 Erin: Should we dive into the first one? I selected three poems, which are all about kind of grief and death. But it's difficult to select poems that don't have that as a theme. So I'm being only slightly facetious. Okay. So we're starting with. And we're using the Franklin numbering, which is. I've talked to several people about this, and the Franklin numbering is considered the. Really the correct numbering. So this is number 340 or I felt a Funeral in My Brain. None of the Dickinson poems are titled, so. No, we'll call it 340. Here we go. I felt a funeral in my brain and mourners to and fro kept treading, treading till it seemed that sense was breaking through. And when they all were seated, a service like a drum kept beating, beating till I thought my mind was going numb. And then I heard them lift a box and creak across my soul with those same boots of lead again. Then space began to toll as all the heavens were a bell and being but an ear and I and silence. Some strange race wrecked solitary here. And then a plank in reason broke and I dropped down and down and hit a world at every plunge and finished knowing then.
13:12 Wes: So I felt a funeral in my brain. She goes right for the bodily, right for the corporeal instead of the mind, Right?
13:24 Erin: Yeah, she has mind later. And then I have this strange lattice thing that I. You probably can't see. It's all in pencil. This strange lattice of, you know, connecting like brain. And then in the second stanza, it's mind. And then in the third it's soul. And then in the fourth it's being. And then finally in the fifth stanza, we get eye. She sort of joins with this separated brain that she's talking about in the first line, right? Because there's a separation. I felt a funeral in my brain. The eye and the brain are already kind of, you know, they're at opposite ends of that first line and they're sort of disconnected from each other. Strangely, she's disconnected from her own brain or mind in this. You know, what's strange about this poem to me is that a funeral is communal and ritual and involving a community. And so sort of like figuring out who the mourners are in this parallel and what, you know, is shifting. Whereas in something like. Because I could not stop for death, you know, the allegory is much more straightforward. She's the dead person who's, you know, the ghost seeing her own grave and all that. This is much more complex. Trying to track the reference and what she might be referring to with the analogy is, I think, a little more difficult.
14:42 Wes: The use of brain is striking. She said, in my mind or something like that, it's more clearly about her imagining something. And here you kind of get the image of mourners treading about in a space that is actually a physical space. And maybe it's even evocative of being dead and having worms or maggots. I think that's kind of a far out reading. But it's an association I made. So, yeah, that's quite striking to say brain. It gives you a more interesting image and treading. Right. So the mourners are treading within her brain, and her brain is the place where the services being held.
15:29 Erin: Yeah. I like this idea, both of. Both of the maggots and of the corporeal about the brain. You know, I think in somewhere, I remember reading that this might be describing, like, a migraine. You know, somebody had that idea. You know, it seems more likely. Or. I mean, I think that reading works, actually. But I think, you know, most scholars think this is describing some kind of mental breakdown. But the use of the physical, oddly, seems to, as I think you're suggesting, seems to kind of shore up that idea that it is like a mental breakdown or that. I don't know, it calls attention to the sort of. The physicality of that of maybe of depression or of something else.
16:08 Erin: Yeah, but I really like this idea of the migraine because of the ear, the ringing in the ear. You know, people, I think, have. Have. Have made that connection. Yeah, you have, I think, more regular migraines than I do. I have. Just weird. Sometimes I'll get, like, the aura without the migraine. But you get terrible migraines and weird auras. So you. You're the expert.
16:27 Wes: Well, it's under control for the most part. Yeah. I get more. The aura. And my aura is a hallucination of the smell of smoke.
16:34 Erin: Right, right.
16:35 Wes: So it's weird.
16:37 Erin: The. The burning pyre.
16:38 Wes: It's more like a fire. A fire in my brain.
16:41 Wes: I felt a fire in my brain, and it smelled like smoke. And that ain't no joke.
16:48 Erin: That's my problem.
16:50 Wes: But, you know, and I get some nausea and maybe headache, but it's more like the more severe symptoms would be nausea and the smell of smoke, which is very distracting and disturbing. So. So, yeah, so I like this idea that this is related to a migraine, which can feel like a mental breakdown if it's bad enough.
17:07 Erin: Right, right.
17:09 Wes: And in this case. Right. And it. And it gives us. It explains this, like, beating, beating, and my mind is going numb and the treading, treading and all those types of sensations, but I think they're equally apt for describing maybe. Yeah. The onset of some kind of madness, some kind of unreason. Right. The Planck and reason breaks at the end, but at the very beginning, sense is breaking through. And it seems to be the treading of the mourners that might help. Sense, breakthrough. And sense I take to be. I take that to be sense as opposed to irrationality. But sense maybe also in the sense of sensory experience, as if. Right. A ray of light might penetrate into the church where the service is being held or something like that.
17:57 Erin: Yeah. I think, you know, the primary fact about a Dickinson poem is compression, and compression in which so many possible readings can work for one line. And they're all right. You know, they're all correct. And I think, you know, you could read that sense so many different ways. But I was thinking about this idea of breaking through, because later reason is the floor. And you could take that to mean that unreason or a lack of sense is sort of like the basement of the mind. You know, the thing that you fall down when you lose your mind is that sense the floor through which the mourners actually are breaking with their force. So that the mourners are actually causing reason to break. They're causing the plank and reason to break. Right.
18:41 Wes: Oh, okay. That makes more sense, actually.
18:43 Erin: But no, but it also works the other way. Right. Which is that.
18:46 Wes: Yeah, so it reads in opposite directions, potentially.
18:50 Wes: The treading of the mourners could be helping her keep it together, or it could be the thing that's threatening to make her lose it.
18:57 Erin: Exactly. And again, like, what are these mourners? You know, are they the senses themselves? You know, are they inside the body? Are they something physical? Are they. You know, later, with the. In the next line, the service like a drum, you know, that could just be taken sort of like as one's heartbeat in one's ears, I think, you know, so are the. Are the mourners kind of just related to that? Is this the pulse? The. What exactly are they mourning? You know, that's. That's the other part of this, that we never find out what's being mourned. What's the dead thing? It becomes her only in the last stanza. It's a funeral for her, for something about her. But what.
19:32 Wes: What would be mourning that she might have said. She might have more clearly conveyed the fact that she is in mourning. But instead it's. She's displaced this onto these little homunculi who are treading around in her brain. And if the second reading, you know, if the second reading that you're proposing is right, then you can see this displacement is sort of a denial of her own mourning. And the denial is kind of crazy, making potentially in that displacement. So that's really interesting again, because then the beating of, you know, the service like a drum, which is a weird image, I don't think, of a funeral service like that. Right. Something that would beat like that. It's as if the prerogatives of mourning or the impulse to mourn. That might be the wrong word, impulse, but they're trying to break through and they're not able to do it.
20:22 Erin: The drum, I thought, was reminiscent of these larger implications of the negative elements of the communal. That's one of the things, I suppose, that's also ambivalent here, is if that fourth line gives the mourners a positive valence, then we might think of the funeral as being, you know, a way. A way to prevent the total mental annihilation of grief. On the other hand, if the funeral is assaulting the sense, the reason, then it's the reverse of that.
20:52 Erin: It's the thing that makes you go crazy. And the drum being related maybe not to funerals, as you're suggesting, but to something like war or, you know, these kinds of lower passions that are communally shared, indicated by a drum. You know what I mean? Like something to. I think, of something communal with a drum. Right. It's about what, Marching ritual.
21:15 Wes: Yeah. And she was most productive during the Civil war, right? From 1861.
21:20 Wes: 1865. She wrote most of her poems, or at least half, and she wrote a bit about the Civil War and especially about. Yeah. The death and dying involved in the Civil War. So it makes sense. It makes sense, yeah.
21:34 Erin: And one of the readings of her seclusion is that she was so affected by the people around her that were dying. So she was subjected to these funerals, and it made her want to just not participate in the communal, in the social at all. In addition to the, you know, the difficulties that she had with the sort of revivalist Christianity that was going on around her at the time and her refusal to partake in that. So I think the beating drum is indicative of both her own heartbeat, so she's sort of implicated, but also in this kind of ritualistic, social, oppressive kind of valence that something like a funeral might have for her.
22:12 Wes: I mean, I suppose a martial funeral service might have. Would there be a drum? Would there be?
22:18 Erin: I think so, yeah. Bagpiper and drums, I think, of. For martial funeral. Yeah.
22:23 Wes: And she talks about boots of lead.
22:24 Erin: Right, so, exactly. Yeah. That's. I was afraid to go all the way to the Civil War, but I kind of was thinking that a little bit. You know, one of my professors was, like, very offended with the idea that she didn't write about the Civil War. She was indifferent to what was going on, you know, So I was primed to read it this way.
22:43 Wes: Well, I think she wrote a poem where she compares dying soldiers on the battlefields of the Civil War to heaps of moan. I mean, it's not direct. I think she's in. As indirect in that poem as she is in all her poems, but.
22:56 Wes: But this heaps of moan is. Yeah, yeah, is great.
23:00 Erin: Yeah. So the mind is going numb, which is, you know, again, it's a little bit. There's a mind versus the operation of this poem. The poem itself is sort of like a supermind. You know, again, I'm just interested in this disembodiment or tweezing out of several people within the self. I like homunculi as your. As the mourners.
23:22 Wes: Well, yeah, as you pointed out before, brain becomes mind. And so the thing that's going on in her brain is what's going on in her mind. And that. Just the numbness. That last sentence of the second stanza, last line, I guess it could reverse or reinforce the last line of the first stanza. So sense was breaking through. Mind was going numb. So we gave a variety of readings for that last line in the first stanza. Sense as in reason or, you know, madness or sensory experience. And here numbness, I guess, is oblique to all of that. Numbness would be a failure to experience. And I. I think it would be different from madness or different from sense in the sense of, you know, getting it together. Right.
24:11 Erin: And we would think it would be a kind of relief. Instead, it seems like. Yeah. That the unwanted result of sensory overload that the. The beating has in the previous line. And we'll talk more. I think, you know, this. This idea of numbness will be important when we talk about 372.
24:29 Erin: So, yeah. You know, and also what you said about the. About the sentence or the line. Right. This whole. There's so much suspension going on here. I just want to talk, you know, formally for a second, because the next stanza begins with. And lots of lines begin with. And in the poem because it's, in fact, just one sentence. There's so much suspension. It's all kind of happening in this one kind of unfolding. And it's arguably not even a sentence. Right. It ends with the EM dash. So it's not really complete, as many of her poems do. There's just an unbroken progression happening here. So then I heard them lift a box and creak across my soul with those same boots of lead again. Then space began to toll. So we have this idea that the. And I looked this up. Bells can have lead clappers. They don't usually, but they can have lead clappers. So I started to think of this idea of the bell, you know, space began to toll. Right. So that all of space is contained within the frame of the bell. So that's kind of a great image of a head, if that's what she's talking about. Right. Like if the whole thing is taking place within the space of her cranium, to use another corporeal term, then the boots inside are like the lead clapper that's causing the space, the vacuum there to toll.
25:51 Wes: Yeah, that's great. Right. The space, you know, now we're really far away from the brain in the sense of the. You know, the meaty thing inside the cranium. Now we have, you know, we went to mind. And now we're to space on your reading. Right. So space and. And we get this overlapping or coincidence between the cosmos. You know, space in the sense of the cosmos read. It would become the heavens. In the next stanza, or being in her own mind, those two things come together. And of course, it's a nice paradoxical image as well. Right. The idea that space itself could make a sound instead of just being the medium in which sound propagates, that something could be produced by emptiness. Right. And the bell is, of course, a funereal bell. It's a bell that's tolling for someone who's died or for what is lost. And I suppose for what it is that she's lost and represents her sense of loss.
26:52 Erin: Yeah, that's right. I think there's another. There's a third. If we think of space and air as being one kind of element in the stanza. And then the lead, the metallic another, you know, there's a third which is, you know, the elemental parallel doesn't quite work. Of box and creek. I'm thinking of wood. Right. So, like, the further complication of this is that it all must be taking place inside a church with a wooden floor. This isn't like they've gone out into the churchyard because they're not creaking on. You can't creak on earth. And the box too. Right. This isn't even a coffin. It's just a plain box. Plain wooden box.
27:30 Erin: Emphasizes that wooden quality is all. Yeah. You know, without using the word for
27:34 Wes: a moment, it leaves you confused or not. You don't quite know at first that that is a. Is a casket. Or at least if you're slow enough like me. You don't know immediately that that's a casket. And it's a bit. Right. Just the word. I was going to use the word disrespectful. But. Right. You wouldn't say, yeah, Mom's dead. Let's get a box for her, bury it, put it in the ground. It's a more ordinary and plain way that doesn't sanctify the container in which the person or thing that one or idea that one has lost, that's gonna take them to the beyond. What is the word that I'm looking for? Minimizing or what?
28:15 Erin: I don't know. Maybe you're thinking even of something like sacrilegious, you know, because there's something a little bit. She's not taking it terribly seriously, I think. Yeah. I think maybe disrespectful. Unless you're Faulkner. And then everybody's in it. But mom is always in a box. She's not even in the ground, but, you know, and smells as well. Right. That migraine aura that she creates by
28:40 Wes: her putrefaction, she did it when she was alive. She might as well do it when she's dead.
28:46 Erin: I think it's humility here. Right. Because she could put herself in a box. Maybe she'd put somebody else in a coffin. Right. But her. It's a box, and we don't even know what's in it because she hears them lift a box and creak across her soul. But what's in the box again? Who are the mourners? What's in the box? What's the floor? So there's. It's like a. It's not even really her. It is her, but it's also just a piece of her or something of her. It's her horcrux. I don't know. It's something.
29:12 Wes: If it were a Twilight Zone episode, we'd eventually see Inside the Box and we'd see her in the movie.
29:17 Erin: Right? Right. Well. And in the end, she is in the box. Right? Yeah. But, yeah, I think box is indicative of her particular kind of humility and her not taking herself seriously. Because I think it's important at this point that we say that this is kind of. I mean, it's a serious poem, but it's also a really kind of playful poem. You know, there's something really funny I find about this poem. No.
29:40 Wes: Yeah. And it's got a charm to it, but it's playful and charming and not. It's not a poem that makes you feel sad, even though, in a way. And it is about. So I think box is very apt in the sense. It's another image that gets at a resistance to mourning, because that seems to be what's going on in the poem. So to minimize or to. Mourning is turned into madness. Mourning is turning into the beating of a drum, into martial image, in that case. And of course, when you're at war, then I guess it isn't a casket, it's a hastily made pine box that they're putting people into the ground, or if you're lucky, or they're putting soldiers in the mass graves. So in that martial context, the life becomes cheaper. And that may be one of the things that is bothering her. That's the way I'm seeing this, as a resistance to mourning. And that resistance to mourning often has a manic quality. And we all do it all the time. I think I've probably mentioned the Louis CK bit. It's a bit about how people use their devices to avoid having any feelings, especially feelings of sadness. So manic defenses like that are everywhere. Or being outraged by politics, getting into a fighting mood. In other words, into a martial frame of mind, which of course only produces more loss. So it's a nasty cycle to avoid the feeling of loss and then to go into fighting mode and produce more destruction and then go through that again.
31:14 Erin: And you don't think there's anything healthy about the angry response at times.
31:19 Wes: It's funny. I was talking to someone about this the other day.
31:21 Erin: I was too. This is interesting.
31:24 Wes: I have a friend who claims that the paranoid schizoid position, which is a psychoanalytic concept from Melanie, a great psychoanalyst named Melanie Klein, and refers to primitive defense mechanisms that she thinks are there in everyone as infants. And then we mature out of them to some extent, but they get re aroused. And so that includes splitting, where we make people out to be all good or all bad or paranoia and projection and things like that, which you see a lot in political thinking. I think the way people think politically is often quite psychotic and primitive. And it's quite common in people who you otherwise think are very rational. The plank and reason has not broken, except when it comes to politics.
32:13 Erin: Right? Right.
32:14 Wes: It's useful if you are truly in a position where your life is at stake and you need to fight for your life, then you need to be able to demonize the other and be angry or outraged. It helps. Right. You don't want conscience interfering with killing someone if it's kill or be killed. The problem is we read lots of situations that are not existential, as if they were. And we go into kill or be killed mode when it's not actually that mode. And that includes, for instance, in the Holocaust where if you asked the interviewed Nazi soldiers or SS officers who had participated in killing infants and why did you do this? Well, it was us or them. You know, it's not like I wanted to kill babies, but we had to get rid of the Jews or they were going to get rid of us. So people start engaging in these preemptive strikes and they can become to the point of it being genocidal. So that's the problem. You need it. You need a point where outrage is going to motivate you to resist or react. But it can also be crazy making.
33:18 Wes: So I don't know that there's a good way around. There's no solution to that. Right.
33:23 Erin: Yeah. The instance in which this came up for me was far less profound than what you're talking about. But just I have a couple people in my life who are going through sort of breakups of various forms. And it was suggested that perhaps anger is necessary so that you don't attack yourself. It's healthy to be angry toward the other person for a bit. Right?
33:42 Wes: Yeah, it's healthier than self attack.
33:44 Erin: Right. And then you can feel sadness, but there's something like sort of self preservation, something of self preservation in the anger. It was suggested that I was sort of immediately going to sadness and I needed to have a bridge in this conversation that we were talking about where we were all talking about sort of like different. Different ways that we have of coping with certain things like these breakups, be they of, you know, whatever variety. That anger was a healthier place to go to than this. Blaming oneself.
34:15 Wes: Yeah, I think if someone is prone to self attack and self hate. So that's the melancholic avoidance of mourning. You can avoid mourning by getting depressed. So it's a very different thing. According to Freud, being depressed and attacking yourself. Mourning is a process of letting go and getting engaged with memories of what you loved that you've lost. And then kind of reality testing and saying, okay, that's no longer there. And I accept that melancholia or depression, in a way you maintain you're in denial about the loss and you remain unconsciously attached to the thing and refuse to let it go. And you identify with it. So that when you attack yourself, you're attacking the thing that you've lost. You're pretending that you are what you've lost. And the self attack is a complaint against the disappointing thing that you've lost. Right. The thing that's disappointed you by leaving you. So yeah, if you go into therapy in that Mode. The therapist should, to some extent, help you hate other people instead of hating yourself. Help me to help you to hate me? Other people, yes. But at a certain point, yeah. And no. Yeah. You get them to hate you.
35:27 Wes: As the analyst, you know, if you kind of get them to be willing to go into a negative. What we call a negative transference. But. But in any case, yeah. But at a certain point, people can use hatred of others or anger at others to avoid responsibility. So beyond that, there's the depressive position, which is not depression, and it's something to be worked through, but it's sort of a forgive and forget mode or some sort of repair and reparation. So you could see the other person as a person and see their flaws and mistakes, the things that they did wrong, and see your own role in it, all that therapy stuff. But at a certain point, yeah, anger. Anger is better. Certainly better than self attack.
36:13 Erin: Right. And we could talk about humor's relationship to this, but I think all of this is actually super important for when we discuss 372. So this is all great, and I think relevant groundwork for that. To go back to the poem. I think of this poem as being somewhere in the halfway point or somewhere on the sliding scale between a poem like Because I Could Not Stop for Death, which we're not covering, but which is very, very fanciful, very allegorical, very funny kind of treatment of the self dying versus, on the other end of the spectrum, something like 372, which is, I think, not really funny at all and not fanciful at all and not. I mean, you can argue there's always a little bit of fancifulness in certain metaphors and similes. They have, you know, an element of the surreal kind of built into them. And certainly in Dickinson, they're so powerful that they are maybe more surreal than most. But I would say this is somewhere on the sliding scale between those two things, you know, because this is. The box is. And the creaking across my soul. I mean, there's something. To me, there's something funny about that image. And so we could argue, you know, anger and maybe humor, too, are kind of these defensive positions against the grief. And I'm reading a little bit of humor as a defense mechanism in this. I could be wrong, but. Right. So.
37:24 Wes: Yeah. And the humor. Humor is a form of manic. What I've called manic defense, which we use. And we all. We all need them. It's a more mature. Yeah. The other manic forms that are less palsy.
37:34 Erin: Okay. Well, yeah, and I think there's something manic, just about the whole, you know, as I think I was kind of hinting at earlier about the whole structure of the poem, the fact that it's one sentence, you know, so the dashes both stop you and propel you forward. Right. So you could argue that the meter, you know, which is. This is a common meter. So ballads, Danza 4 3, 4 3. Pretty regular, which is a sort of like, drumbeat in and of itself. But the fact that we're both sort of pausing and moving forward with the dashes kind of complicates this idea of suspension and how quickly or slowly we're moving through the sentence at any given point. But I think it's probably a little too complex for us to talk about on the podcast because of the reliance of notation and the visual in that. But anyway, so let's go on to as all the heavens were a bell. So this is where we've already talked about this space and the sort of emptiness of that as ringing and then being. But an ear, the tree falling in the forest. We're the ones. We're the ones to ensure that it makes a sound or something like that. Being itself is the thing that sort of like, witnesses the space and gives. Or the heavens. And gives the heavens. Bell. A sound.
38:47 Wes: You know, it's interesting because, yeah, the typical opposition is between heaven and earth or solid ground. And here the heavens have become a bell. The space has become something that produces sound and being, which I suppose I'm associating with the earth now with that other side of the opposition, with sort of substantive reality. Right. As opposed to space is the thing doing the listening. Really, really cool, innovative image. Right. And one of the things that makes her great.
39:19 Erin: It is so funny that, you know, being is like the least corporeal of any of the images used here. I mean, I think being is even less corporeal somehow than mind, because mind at least has something to attach to. I mean, I suppose being does. Right? It has a body maybe to attach to, but it's so in the ether here, except for it's an ear. So it becomes corporeal, but it becomes the thing that is itself. Maybe, you know, the helix of the ear and the structure of it maybe is itself a kind of. Gosh, I'm just thinking of this now. Inside out bell. Right. Okay. Yeah, yeah. We both had the idea at the same time. Or you.
40:01 Wes: No, you had thought about this and then you gave it to me. You just gave the idea. I'm Trying to take credit for it, of course, but. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Because I think she's complaining about the idea, right Being butt and ear. It's as if right being is going to crowd her out. Her and silence are some strange race, wrecked and solitary. This goes to the essence of the problem, which is that. So as an ear, right, Being would be something passive rather than active, receptive. Right. It just listens. And what does it listen to? It listens to this space itself producing a sound, or nothingness itself, or heaven itself producing the sound. And maybe there's something of the divinest that. So we might think of the divine as sort of divine substance is sort of crowding out the reality of the individual. Think of someone like Spinoza, right, who makes all of being. God is just substance. And we are but modes of God. We are properties. We are barnacles on the body of God on his vast whale body.
41:15 Wes: And so our reality, and this is, you know, this is sort of perennial theological problem, is the danger that God's reality, his beingness, is so expansive that we can't be much in comparison to it, or that it'll crowd us out, or that it puts us in too passive a position. So that's what it sounds like when she's comparing to being but an ear. And what is the alternative? I and silence. So she associates herself, herself with silence, which is an interesting. Right. Because that seems kind of empty as well.
41:53 Wes: But this is supposed to be the greater reality. Maybe this is about the silence of solitude and being able to think one's thoughts and being able to comprehend oneself. Right. Being able to be who you are without these other sounds distracting you and confusing you from that identity.
42:13 Erin: You know, one of the readings that, you know, I was almost a little embarrassed to say, but I think maybe you've given me a little confidence. I was almost thinking, because I was trying to think of what's the nothingness that makes a sound. And the thing I thought of was tinnitus because it happened to me. I was getting a ringing in my ears after having not slept and then listening to loud music. I was getting a little bit of temporary tinnitus. That also made me think, and this is maybe related to our Marshall thing. I don't know if I could get there, but that made me think. In movies, you know, when somebody has a bomb go off near them and then the sound in the movie creates that high pitched, like, squeal, everything gets crowded out and you get this. It's this really Genius way they have in the movie of sort of like reproducing probably the ringing in the ears of the main character that we're supposed to be sympathizing with. And it also gives us this sense of wanting it out, wanting the sound to go away and to feel oneself as whole and know that, you know, that because we're sort of joining in the sympathies of the main character that, like, we've been actually unharmed by the bomb, you know, what that has gone off or something like that. I think of that, and therefore the silence being away from that as making an inherent sense to me, if the whole world is like this bomb going off, which would be related to the Civil War imagery, as I think we're already kind of hinting at, then the silence and being away from those types of things. That threat of the world ringing out with alarm bells or something, you know, would be the desire of the eye. In the poem, you mentioned the maggots in the. In the first stanza. And I was thinking a little bit, but I didn't have a connection. I was thinking about Death's duel, the John Donne funeral sermon, his last funeral sermon, and talking about the worms going into the body. Right. And so I had been thinking about death stool, but I thought, that's not really relevant. And then here, of course, I see it now. There's. This is not from Death's duel. It's from one of his other meditations. I see the. The no man is an island idea in the desert island image of Silence and the eye. I don't know how that's connected, but I'm wondering if the little sort of specter of Dun is going through here. And maybe, I don't know, maybe no man being an island, the eye needs a companion, and that companion is silent. Every Robinson Crusoe needs their Friday. I don't know. There's something there.
44:35 Wes: Yeah. That's really interesting. Some strange race.
44:39 Wes: She and Silence, who. Yeah. Are an odd couple.
44:45 Wes: Is Silence even a person? It's an odd couple. They live in an apartment together. One of them is messy, one of them just doesn't do anything. Silence is always complaining to her about everything. No.
44:59 Erin: Anyway, Silence is so Tony Randall. Yeah.
45:03 Wes: Yeah. So they're castaways in. In an alien world, which will become relevant because she's going to talk about dropping through worlds. It's as if this reality is one alien to her. She's a stranger in a strange land. She's been shipwrecked in this plane of Existence and belongs somewhere else. And what is the complaint about? It seems to be that the bells that toll the morning funereal bells are. Well, let her alone. And she wants to be with silence, but they keep making noise. So it may be that there's an element of mourning wrapped up with being that's inescapable. Which again would. Would speak to something about the divine, as in the corporeal absence of the divine. Right. The fact that the divine is non empirical, that we don't have ready access to it. Right. God's absence or God's invisibility is a loss.
46:02 Erin: So for me, because I was trying to understand how then in the last sentence, the eye is finally merged with the body. It's finally in the box. And I wondered if it was something, you know, which you're helping me understand. I wondered if it was something about the solitude of the previous stanza that then allows her to get into the box at last to kind of merge with it, the death finally kind of happening. And maybe that's related to this idea of being sort of abandoned by the divine. Perhaps that's the final. I don't know, the last straw that then breaks the plank in reason.
46:36 Wes: Yeah. I mean, you might associate mourning and faith though, right. Faith has to overcome the absence of a physically available other. It has to do that by giving up that demand, which is a kind of mourning. I'm just thinking out loud and speculating. Obviously. I don't know if this is great reading or not, but the question is, regardless of how you read it. Yeah. That. This is the question. What is it that's bothering her? What's wrong with Emily?
47:04 Erin: It's eating Emily.
47:06 Wes: Worms Emily. Yeah. Okay. So in the end the plank of reason breaks or a plank in reason breaks and she drops down. So she succumbs to the madness, which I guess she's in some sense been resisting and dropping down into another world. There's a little bit of hint of there of Hades or something. Except for her it's multiple worlds, it seems like. Right. Inherent world at every plunge.
47:33 Wes: Multi dimensional. Emily Dickinson, before that sort of science fiction was in vogue.
47:38 Erin: She has a cosmic consciousness, I gotta
47:41 Wes: say, and it ends with finishing knowing. So we get. We get an association between the failure of reason and the failure of knowing. Although potentially not knowing is a positive thing. Right. It's knowledge is what gets us into trouble in several senses. Right. There's knowledge of the tree of good and evil, but there's knowingness, there's the knowing itself has kind of A manic pretense to it. By knowing things, we comprehend the world. Right. And it's much more plausible for human beings. Potential omniscience. Right. Through science and other means is something that almost feels reasonable to that. It's not that we're ever going to be God and be able to control the universe. Right. But we might know the universe. We might know the entire universe. So knowledge is quite a power to be available to human beings. It can make us arrogant, it can make us think. We know things that we don't know, get us into all sorts of trouble. So finishing knowing, giving up on knowing is quite a good thing on one reading. So maybe this is what she needs.
48:44 Erin: I love that. Yeah. Yeah. Because I was thinking finished could mean ended or completed. I finished my studies.
48:51 Wes: Well, no, I think that actually, I think that's better.
48:55 Erin: Well, I think, you know, plausible way to read. It's exactly the way you're reading it, which is, you know, maybe. Maybe the idea of giving up on knowing is some somehow inherent to the idea of I completed this course of study and now that's it.
49:08 Wes: You'd finish knowing. Yeah. Can mean knowing everything or stopped that project of knowing. And maybe you stopped the project of knowing because you now know everything or maybe you just found out that it's no longer relevant.
49:22 Erin: But I love this idea that it's just a plank that she falls through while reason is the perfectly constructed or not so perfectly constructed because it can break. Right. Delicately constructed, but fragile, I should say deck or something that you. I've fallen through a plank in a deck before onto ground that was just pitched. It was not like big fall or anything.
49:47 Erin: It's. Yeah, it's dark under there. It's scary. And there are lots of critters. Yeah.
49:55 Wes: So, well, how does a gallows work?
49:57 Erin: Aha. Oh, you're smart. I never thought of that. Exactly. Right. Because the. That's so. Right, because. Yeah. There's usually a trap door.
50:06 Wes: Yeah. I mean, it just occurred to me. So it seems like one possibility why I hired you.
50:11 Erin: Yeah. That's such a good idea.
50:16 Wes: You know, I was just thinking. Yeah. The suddenness, as if someone is now receiving their death sentence.
50:21 Erin: Yeah. So there are trap doors. There's also, you know, the standing on the chair and having it kicked out from under you. There's. Yeah, right. Right.
50:28 Wes: And then at every plunge. Right. So it. But she. So this dropping down and down becomes multiple drops. And it's as if she's going through multiple floors, you know, multiple. So each new plunge. She breaks through to something new. And this is where I imagine Rick and Morty or some other cartoon, a multi dimensional thing where she's in one world and everyone's John Malkovich in that world, and then she's in another world and everyone's pink and she's another world. And she does that, flicks through multiple worlds indefinitely until she has known every possible world, she's seen all possibilities, maybe. And then she's done. It's like your life flashing before your eyes, but it's like the entire universe and all possible universes flashing in front of your eyes.
51:22 Erin: I love that. It's amazing. Okay, so I think we'll finish talking about I Felt a Funeral in My Brain in part two. We're going to talk about a good companion poem to this one, which we've already referenced a few times in this part, which is number 372. After great pain a formal feeling comes. So we'll talk about that in part two. Thanks Wes, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to lettersoubtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook, subtextpodcast, and on Twitter njoysubtext.
