Emily Dickinson Reading Circle, 11 December 2015

Emily Dickinson Reading Circle, 11 December 2015

Guest Speaker Cindy Dickinson (No Relation)

The Brain -- is wider than the Sky --

For -- put them side by side --

The one the other will contain

With ease -- and You -- beside --

The Brain is deeper than the sea --

For -- hold them -- Blue to Blue --

The one the other will absorb --

As Sponges -- Buckets -- do --

The Brain is just the weight of God --

For -- Heft them -- Pound for Pound --

And they will differ -- if they do --

As Syllable from Sound --
                     - J632/Fr598/M273

[ To hear this poem read aloud, go to  https://youtu.be/LHwYa33Ofk4  ]

Cindy. I like the whole poem – but the last line is just so fun you can’t really verbalize why it’s such a great line.

Margaret. You know, before you start Cindy, that reminds me of Dave Porter, who, in The Modern Idiom, says that she starts out with incredibly strong lines and then goes nowhere – and I find just the opposite to be true; she ends in this incredible way!

Cindy. She does do both, yes. And you know a reason I feel sorry for Dickinson is that I’m fairly certain she didn’t want all of these to be published. [laughter]

Greg. Not to mention her letters. [general agreement and laughter]

Cindy. Sometime I want to do a discussion of “Blue,” because. I feel that she does use color a lot but I feel there’s something a little different about blue – because, hold them -- Blue to Blue; you can’t really do that exactly and yet it says so much. There are other examples.

Margaret. You know, Rebecca Patterson wrote an article that was reproduced in Emily Dickinson’s Imagery, on color schemes in Dickinson, and so she covers “blue.” It’s really interesting – her “blue peninsula.”

Barbara. Why is it one of your favorite poems, Cindy?

Cindy. Well, thank you for asking. I was hoping someone would. [laughter] I’ve always been intrigued by someone just starting out with The Brain, because this is a case where when you see it in the edited version and brain is not capitalized, it looks odd, so that capital B helps a lot, but, the brain basically standing in for the human against – so much – nature, religion – and knowing to use the word brain and not mind, or thought, but actually physically grab the organ; it’s so Emily Dickinson. It tells a lot about what she knew – her science training; it says so much about her religious views that were not necessarily current with the times but I suspect people thought as she did but maybe didn’t verbalize it. And it’s a deliberately deceptive poem. There are no hard words in this poem and yet she manages to put them together in a way that you just have to keep thinking about them. And it rhymes! We talk a lot about the slant rhymes, but she also rhymed, and this one rhymes very well. I know all the lines of this poem, but when I get to the fifth line, I always skip to the thirteenth line; The Brain is Deeper than the – I can’t always remember what order they’re in. That probably says more about my brain than hers. And I like that she casually throws in the first stanza - With ease -- and You – suddenly there’s a figure in the poem – we have no idea who it is – like in “You, gentle reader.” [laughter]

Margaret. Cindy, read out the fifth and thirteenth lines and tell us why you jump.

Cindy. Well, now I’m questioning if that’s where I jump. … I don’t know, Margaret. Maybe sometimes I don’t remember the first lines, 2 through 4 – I go to For -- hold them -- Blue to Blue, because the sky is blue. I think that’s what I do. They would work up until you get to the sponge part. [laughter]

Polly. She may have written it that way and changed it.

Cindy. Thank you, Polly. Yes. The unseen variants.

Polly. You know her answer to that poem, don’t you?  1354 in Johnson.

The Heart is the Capital of the Mind —
The Mind is a single State —
The Heart and the Mind together make
A single Continent —

One — is the Population —
Numerous enough —
This ecstatic Nation
Seek — it is Yourself.
                        -J1354/Fr1381/M522
[ To hear this poem read aloud, go to  https://youtu.be/IlDqqNu5O1Y  ]

But that was after she had learned a lot in all the in-between poems. [laughter ]

Alice. The other thing about this one is that she’s using this extremely simple form, 8 – 6 syllable count, and each one is exactly the same except for the final noun. So she’s working with these very simple parameters that make it seem like an old ballad. … What one syllable word can describe the sea, that she would need? Blue pretty well does it.

Cindy. And then you have the sponges and the buckets; what more basic domestic image could you pick. In a way the weakest part of the poem is in the beginning because you’re just putting the brain and the sky next to each other ….

.

Alice. But you have to start simply so that you can go on.

Margaret. For the one the other will contain there is a variant, “the one the other will include.” And then the line breaks, which I find incredibly significant – “Sky is on a separate line.” Then “sea” in the next stanza is on a line by itself. Then you get sky, sea, and then “of God” is on a line by itself. And the last line, which is different from the edited version, is where “do” is on a line by itself, which is unusual you don’t often get that verb, it’s usually a noun that’s going to get dropped. I find the patterning of those associations somehow speaks to the comparison of putting things side by side, and the syllable of sound at the end …. The putting the things side by side in terms of color, and in weight, and in saturation, so that suddenly “blue” carries weight. We know color carries saturation, but the saturation being talked about is absorbing – the sponges, like water. It’s such a simple poem in terms of its wording, it raises all sorts of incredible issues with me in terms of the way we construct our experience of the world.

Greg. I’m seeing that the first line, The Brain -- is wider than the Sky does accomplish one end in that it gets the reader to want to find out why.

Alice. It’s a flat statement that contains within that one line … there’s a wonderful thing on and interview with Mary Oliver recently. They were discussing her poem about the wild geese, and the first line is “You do not have to be perfect.” They asked how this poem came about and she said she was having a discussion about self-contained lives, end-stopped lives” and that was how this poem came about and it wasn’t because she was thinking deeply about end-stopped lives, it just came about. It’s the same thing here; The Brain is wider than the Sky.

Greg. Oh yeah? [laughter]

Margaret. Cindy said earlier in her opening remarks about how fascinating it is to understand the poet’s own process. I wonder if poets in the group would like to talk about that.

Barbara. Let’s not all look at Mary Clare. [laughter]

Margaret. I mean, in terms of The Brain -- is wider than the Sky, how do you read it, in terms of the fact that you yourself write – Oh, Barbara too. You write poetry, and I think Barre does, too.

Barbara. I didn’t have the line in front of me, so I was really paying attention to Cindy reading it, and I say “Yeah, it is!” I just thought, “I agree with you. tell me more.” It’s very inviting.

Margaret. Why do you agree?

Barbara. Well, it’s interesting that she uses Brain, not Mind. If I think of my mind, it covers the physical, the mental, just a whole lot more than just the sky. That’s why I agree with it.

Margaret. But you know, if she had written “The Mind is wider than the sky,” I don’t think it would have worked, and I don’t know why.

Polly. It doesn’t command attention.

Greg. It sounds like a cliché’ and “The Brain” doesn’t sound like a cliché.

Connie. The brain is a concrete thing. The mind is all over the place. It’s an idea.

Margaret. Well, it doesn’t exist. I’ll explain that. We have a habit in all languages, not just English of what’s called reification, turning activity into things. In grammar it’s called nominalization, turning verbs into nouns. We do it for the sake of cognitive economy. Think about trying to describe how you got here. Cindy would say, “Well, I took a car journey from Pittsfield to Heath.” We all know what she did, then, and how she meant it. But had she said “First I had to find my car keys,” etc you lose the person whose listening to you, so by collapsing it into the car journey you have created a cognitive economy where you don’t need to say all of that. As a result, we tend to assume that there are things, and the minute we do we create metaphor. So, for example, Mind does not exist. The activity of minding is what the brain is doing, and the brain is controlling of course not just your rational thinking but also your emotions and sensations and everything else. It’s integrated in the brain, and that produces an activity in the brain that we call the mind. But the minute we start talking about the mind we think of it as an object. Therefore it can be something that can contain something else, or be contained by something else, which is all metaphorical when you think about it. The container schema is one of the most basic schemas that we have and in fact it’s one of the schemas that is generic for Dickinson’s poetry.

Barre. What do you think that she meant by the word “sky?”

Alice. I think it’s what we see. She takes this little three-letter word, and down underneath it are all the myriad associations people have

Margaret. Don’t forget, 3-letter words, Sea, Sky, God. If you take the conceptual metaphor stuff, that really runs through all of her poetry, where air is the sea metaphor, then you can see here that the sky and the sea are part of that air/sea image metaphor.  The sky is the physical sky, but it is also the heavens, Circumference, everything that she does in terms of understanding.

Alice. Also, this is very theological. Sky is the middle layer, water is the bottom layer, and God is above, The saints and the cherubim are in the sky, in the air are the birds and in the sea are the creatures of the sea.

Margaret. Did God create us in his image, or did we create God in ours? That’s the question that’s being addressed here.

Polly. But usually it’s the soul, no the mind, that is God’s. It goes back to God, and that’s what she was brought up to believe.

Margaret. And God, does God have weight? Again, it’s a transformation of meaning. The weight of God, metaphorically would mean he’s very strong, he’s heavy, he’s present – weight in its metaphorical sense and not in its physical sense, so you get those subtle shifts in meaning.

Alice. I love the sound of that last line, it’s just wonderful. And you can’t separate them.

Margaret. But you can! Syllable is a grammatical term that you would use when you were parsing a poem or talking about language.

Margaret. Yes, but linguists, who are supposed to know language, right? They have never ever been able to say what a syllable is. You recognize it, yes, but they have never been able to agree on how to define a syllable.

Greg. We know its man-made, and sound is not
.

Polly. Animals make syllables.

Alice. Bow Wow Wow?

Connie. I think they would think of that as three separate words. [much laughter]

Greg. You can argue that, but I sense that Emily Dickinson was not using the word in that way, that animals are making syllables.

Alice. And when you’re speaking, you’re very aware of syllables. Certainly when you’re singing you’re very aware of syllables.

Connie. You can’t take a breath within a syllable, it has to be uttered in one breath.

Margaret. What is she identifying syllable and sound with? Is syllable to brain as sound is to God? Or is syllable to God as sound is to Brain? And if so, what is she saying in terms of their difference?

Alice. The man-made to the God-made

Margaret. Yes, but which is better?

Alice. Oh, she’s not doing a value judgement.

Margaret. Oh, I think she is. When she says the brain is wider than the sky, that’s a value judgement, right there in the first line. And she’s ending, in this very, very provocative line that you can read in many different ways.

Alice. I think the last line in this particular context is merging syllable and sound, so there’s literally no difference.

Margaret. But she’s saying they will differ if they do …

Alice. IF they do.

Polly. If they do; that’s a big if.

Margaret. Yes, but they refers back to the brain and the god.

Alice. Yes. So if the brain and God do not differ, syllable and sound do not differ.

Margaret. Oh, I see. Thank you. OK.

Margaret M. The poem isn’t trying to say which it is, it’s trying to tell you that you don’t know which it is.

Someone. That makes it a fascinating poem.

Alice. Exactly. She is not going to give you something that lays the law down.