Show notes
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of 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. Upcoming Episodes: Rosemary’s Baby. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or@patreon.com. Hey, welcome to Part two of our discussion of the poems of Emily Dickinson. In part one, we talked about number 340 in the Franklin numbering system. I felt a funeral in my brain. And in this part we'll talk about number 372. After great pain, a formal feeling comes, which I think think kind of tread some some ground that we've already talked about with its boots of lead tread some ground we've already talked about in in part one. So I think kind of Makes a good pair. I guess I'll go ahead and read it first and then we'll dive right in. 1:03 Wes: Yeah. 1:03 Erin: Okay. After great pain, a formal feeling comes. The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs. The stiff heart questions was it he that bore and yesterday or centuries before the feet mechanical go round a wooden way of ground or air or ought regardless grown a quartz contentment like a stone. This is the hour of lead remembered, if outlived as freezing Persons recollect the snow first chill, then stupor, then the letting go. 1:42 Wes: So, yeah, we're getting this image of feeling of numbness, I suppose, that comes after great pain. Except she chooses a very interesting variation on that idea, which is formality. So it's a formal feeling. And then she's using this word ceremonious in the second line. Right. So formal as in ceremony or in social form. I suppose you could even say impoliteness. And all the. The. In the social face that we put on things, the thing that covers up are, you know, more complicated and visceral and often intense feelings that lie beneath. Is that right? 2:22 Erin: Yeah, I think so. You know, this. This poem, I wonder if it's almost describing the exact same experience as. As the poem we covered in the previous part, but just with a. With a darker valence. Because there's. There's a sense of. In the formality, there's a sense of a funeral, of the funereal. You know, the nerves sit ceremonious, so it's as if you're sitting through a funeral. But then what's really great about that is that they're like tombs. So she connects this idea of the funeral, or of the funeral, of ceremony and of formality, with stiffness, which itself is, you know, it's like a Russian doll image that itself has the implication of death and the tomb and, you know, something like rigor mortis inside it. 3:05 Wes: Calling it a tomb is. I mean, it's a really interesting image because we think of nerves as, like Mrs. Bennet, nerves. 3:12 Erin: You have no compassion on my poor nerves. They're very active. They're vibrating all the time. 3:18 Wes: Right. So, yeah, we think of nerves as, I guess, cylindrical threads, tubes high strung, like the Internet, tubes that run through our body and conveyors of pain. And so the nerves are no longer active here. So they've been very active. And now they're dead, in a sense, they've been deadened. They're tomb like. But again, we get this idea of sitting ceremonious as if the tomb is a monument to Something lost, something has died. Right. You know, I think the funeral. You know, your reference to funeral is good. Something has died and, you know, the pain that was there is gone. It's died. And it's like losing someone. 4:01 Erin: Yeah. Which is a really interesting idea if it's the pain itself that's lost. You know, I never thought about that. That's really interesting. 4:09 Wes: More ordinarily, Right. We're in pain because of what we've lost or someone that we've lost. But in this case. So I'm giving it. Yeah. A less orthodox way of reading it, which is that the pain itself is the thing that's been lost when we're in the state of numbness. Yeah. 4:24 Erin: Right. No, I really like that. I think. I hadn't thought of that. So I'm kind of thinking on my feet now, but I'm. You know, when you're in real physical pain, mileage may vary on this experience, but real physical pain, it sort of obliterates everything. 4:42 Wes: Right. 4:43 Erin: And then afterwards, that kind of like. I don't know, that resounding sense. I'm thinking of the bell from the previous stanza. Maybe something about that rings after. But you're also like. It's also hard to recall physical pain after it's over, you know, so. So there's. There's this heightened. It's. It's reminding me of what we talked about in part one, with the tinnitus crowding everything out. That's kind of like pain. And then afterwards, the silence is kind of. You know, you almost can't recall what the pain was like. And the silence becomes a kind of numbness. I don't know. I want to. There's a better connection that I could be making there, or rather a more clear way, one, I think, between these two qualities. But I think they're all interrelated insofar as we can just say that our idea of pain, of emotional pain, probably only comes from our experience of physical pain, which is maybe. I don't know that I want to say that, but the words that we use, the fact that we would use pain for an emotional pain, which is something quite different from physical pain, almost seems to me then to be related to the idea of. I felt a funeral in my brain. And this. This contrast that we kept making in part one between the corporeal and the spiritual, or even like the vacuum of space, all this other stuff. Right. So I think that those two senses of pain. What I'm trying to say, those two senses of pain aren't really Interrelated. And it's important that maybe both readings kind of coexist here. 6:05 Wes: Yeah. 6:05 Erin: So we have the stiff heart questions, was it he that bore? So again, we have this idea of, you know, of death, right. Because the tombs, the idea of stillness, the still heart does not beat, the stiff heart doesn't beat. And so that's another further idea of this is almost physical pain resulting in death, some physical injury that's resulted in death, and now what's left over is just this deadened state. But I was interested because these two lines I'd never given much attention to, frankly. Was it he that bore in yesterday or centuries before? You know, it's a. It's talking about Christ's passion, right. Another one suffering as being maybe profound as that or joined to that. But on this reading, I was interested maybe in the idea of the formality inherent in this connection. Seeing oneself or trying to see oneself within a structure, the structure that Christ's Passion, say, for the Christian, tries to give to suffering an explanation, a sense of its purpose. So the idea of trying to use a structure to make sense of something, but one can't make sense of it. Trying to use a referent, a historical basis, some kind of reason, maybe even just why the suffering happens, you know, it happened because of this. Any kind of structure to try to make sense of something seems to me to be inherent in that idea of formal. 7:26 Wes: Right. 7:27 Erin: But when the thing is actually so, so painful that it obliterates reason, you know, the formality after the fact of trying to make sense of it has less and less purchase, which is, I think, why the speaker doesn't know, can't remember, you know, what's the difference between this historical person and me? Because the structure is all, all, all confused. 7:46 Wes: So the stiff heart questions, was it he that bore? What? Bore the sins of mankind? 7:55 Erin: Yeah. Or bore the pain of the Passion, if we want to say there's another. Right. 7:59 Wes: Was it he that suffered for us? 8:01 Erin: Yes. 8:02 Wes: Yeah. So I'm wondering, is the stiff heart doubting now? Is it having a crisis of faith, or is it trying to relocate pain right to Christ? Is it Christ's pain or is it my pain? 8:17 Erin: Yeah, I think it's both of those things. 8:19 Wes: And yesterday or centuries before, so we could see, you know, if the pain that she has experienced is something recent, as in yesterday. Then the question becomes, yeah, is this my pain that I felt yesterday and now that I'm numb to, or is it someone else's pain? Sort of a bit of identity diffusion here, or is It. Christ's pain, which is interesting because it goes along with. That's kind of part of how this numbness after great pain works. Right. It's almost like you're out of your body, you're disassociated, maybe, as you were pointing out. Yeah. It's hard to even remember what that pain exactly was like, and in what sense it's even one's own. So what's happening here? Does it become a. A vehicle to faith or a. It might be the opposite. Does it interfere with faith? I mean, it might be a vehicle to faith in the sense that you realize that the pain can be relocated to Christ. Right. And that if now that it's gone from me, the formal feeling could even be a religion. 9:23 Erin: Right. 9:23 Wes: The ceremonious feeling could be a religious feeling. But if it's a religious feeling, it's not a very passionate religious feeling. 9:30 Erin: Yeah. 9:31 Wes: I don't know. I'm thinking out loud here. I didn't quite understand this. 9:33 Erin: Yeah, no, I think that's all. I think that's all, really. 9:35 Wes: Right. 9:36 Erin: And I think that that passion. I think that, you know, she's placing passion and religion on opposite ends of the spectrum. Numbness and formality in religion, I think, are kind of going together in her little drawer here. And that's one of the reasons why this religious thought occurs in this numb, formal kind of mode. When we discuss 320, there's a certain slant of light. I read that poem as making reference to the stigmata and to this, you know, to further this idea of suffering joining with Christ's suffering. And the idea is that it's a. I don't know exactly how this works in the Protestant faith because it's quite different, because Catholics, because they believe in works, they believe that suffering can actually be transformative, that you can actually offer suffering for other people. All this other stuff that has to do with purgation and things that would not have a corollary here. So suffering is probably in Protestantism, just supposed to be instructive and unite you to Christ's suffering in some way. That is. Yeah. You're supposed to be able to understand something about what Christ did for you through. Through that experience of suffering that you kind of join with him in. And maybe. And maybe it'll also teach you something about yourself and the fact that the instructive quality has broken down here. Oh, when did that happen? Right. If I was supposed to learn a lesson from this, but I can't even remember what the point was, you know, What? I mean, like, there's some. Something is really broken down. And so I think that what she's trying to say, you know, maybe I'm reading the biography in here a little too much. Right. But we know that she was a sort of, at times almost anti Christian person, is that if we read pain and suffering through this formal lens, there's actually a diminishment. 11:15 Wes: I see what you're saying. It seems a little sacrilegious in the sense that she's identifying this relocation of pain and I suppose, guilt maybe to Christ's sacrifice. And in that sense, it's as if we're numbing ourselves. We're using religion to numb. It's the opiate of the masses. 11:33 Erin: Exactly, exactly. 11:34 Wes: She's a Marxist. 11:35 Erin: Yes. 11:37 Wes: Yeah. So it does. Yeah. You know, on reflection, just talking to you about this, it does seem like a bit of a critique. 11:44 Erin: Yeah, I think she's frequently doing that. 11:46 Wes: You know, I imagine her sitting in church and the formality of it and just being bored and being like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna write a poem about how much this sucks. 11:57 Erin: Yeah. 11:58 Wes: But specifically, it could be the funeral service, which also can be pretty boring, honestly. 12:04 Erin: Oh, of course, of course. And I think any of that, you know, any ritualistic funeral service, communal, religious, it's all kind of related to this critique because we wouldn't have those rituals and those funerals if it weren't for the religion undergirding it. Right. So it's all bad. It's all boring. 12:22 Wes: Can feel like it hasn't. It doesn't do justice to the real person because you have someone just reciting something or. Right. You know, hopefully you have a good eulogy or. 12:33 Erin: Yes. 12:34 Wes: People speaking in. Maybe in an impassioned way to the life of the person. But to the extent that there's a priest or someone like that giving a. I don't know what they give, what they give a sermon at a funeral or homily. But to the extent you hear them speak a little bit. Right. Some are good and some are not so good. Not every priest is such a good public speaker. And so it kind of mars the whole thing, in all honesty, in my experience. 13:04 Erin: That's right. You know, she frequently. Dickinson, in her poems, compares herself to a volcano. You know, Vesuvius at home is the famous title of Adrienne Rich's. Yeah. Like she. There's this one poem that I love called A Still Volcano Life, which is one of my favorite poems of hers, in which she says that a quiet earthquake style. Well, I'm not gonna get it right. But my nature is Vesuvian side. Naples. The north cannot detect. So anyway, she compares herself with the city south and northerners, not kind of understanding the sort of, you know, Vesuvian eruption that she has going on underneath the surface. And in moments like these, and talk of funerals like these. 13:41 Wes: I do declare. Right. 13:43 Erin: No, well, yes, a different kind of Southerner. But it always. I always think to myself, like, oh, what? Dickinson's whole mind would have been changed if she'd just been to one Italian funeral because there's so performative and ridiculous. Actually, they're not anymore since. Since people have been given drugs to sedate them at this point. But, you know, nothing ceremonious about watching your great aunt throw herself into a. Into a hole. 14:10 Wes: Right, right. 14:12 Erin: And people like literally tearing out their hair. Anyway, there was. See, that's why. That's. You know, that just really. It's silly that I even bring this up. However, I think that Dickinson is looking for that kind of thing. You know, she's comparing herself to this all the time because she's like, where's the real emotion? Where's. Where's the. She's sort of like this inner Italian who needs to. Or Mediterranean person who needs to have, you know, some sort of dramatic. 14:35 Wes: Or. 14:36 Erin: If we want to think of the American south, she's like, you know, she'd love Tennessee Williams. You know, she wants to just break out and go totally crazy and flip out. 14:43 Wes: Well, who wouldn't…
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