Emily
I've been inspired by the New Yorker article to study Emily Dickinson.
I've done this before in an earlier post involving her face, which is very interesting to me because of it's lateral asymmetry.
I cut the famous picture in half in paint and reassembled the halves right to right and left to left.
Today on my weekly downtown adventure I checked out two books on the subject;
"Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief" by Roger Lundin and
"After Great Pain, the Inner Life of Emily Dickenson" by John Cody.
I couldn't find the one the New Yorker was talking about.
John Cody is a psychiatrist a subject I am very interested in, as I state in my profile.
I don't know what Roger Lundin does for a living except write, but I am moved to quote the first paragraph of the foreword by Mark A Noll.
"One of the tragedies of modern life is the division of intellectual labor into disciplines. "Tragedy, though, is probably not the right word, for, while this situation is self-inflicted and filled with irony, it allows neither expiation for practitioners nor catharsis for readers. Rather, the rendering of thought and writing into discrete fields of study appears to be welcomed since it affords multiplied opportunities for cognoscenti to exclude uninitiated outsiders, aspiring authorities to set up fiefdoms, and the programs of annual learned societies to parade the latest fashionable clicheé The greatest loss occasioned by acquiescing to the rigid disciplinary boundaries is the distortion of reality.
In fact, poets pray, biophysicists take their kids to the movies, novelists cash their checks financiers bake bread, missionaries propagate the species as well as the gospel, jocks read books. no singular vocabulary, no single set of intellectual insights, can encompass the breadth and depth of lived existence. When academic discourses deny or underestimate the wholeness of life, they cheat their adepts.
And they cheat the rest of us, for readers will need all the help we can get, and from every resource imaginable, if we expect to have even a chance to understand even a portion of the world that whirls about us."
Put the word "music" in place of the word "life there and you have the core of my complaint of academic music.
The schools perform autopsies and provide Gray's Anatomy rule books.
Kids with their guitars in garages play music innocent of rule books.
The academics play rule books innocent of music.
Anyway, this is about Emily and her interesting face.
Looking at it, I wonder about the formative process. If the face is so asymmetrical what about the brain?
Is there a great difference between the right and left hemispheres causing a disconnect between perceived reality and imagined reality?
Yet with full awareness of both?
So that the deep recesses of the mind readily find counterparts in external stimulae?
It's something for contemplation, and I do.
Because of my interest in finding music that reaches an audience and affecte them to the bottom of their wallets.
Let's see if I can find those pictures.
Here's the New Yorker one.
You an see the fascinating duality even in this painting.
Labels: Fascinating duality
posted by Lane Savant at 4:48 PM
6 Comments:
Ironically, my office computer opens up to the day you did the Emily Dickinson piece over a year ago. I guess that is when I started reading and participating on FFTL. So when I clicked on August 2008, and her twin photos showed up I thought that it was a computer glitch, or as Yogi Berra used to say, "Deju Vu all over again."
"tepi" on Amazon wrote:
AFTER GREAT PAIN : The Inner life of Emily Dickinson. By John Cody. 538 pp. Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971. SBN 674-00878-2 (hbk.)
This book is a fascinating psychoanalytic reading of ED's tortured life, by a professional psychiatrist who devoted seven years to it, and is unsparing of the falsifications indulged in by most of her biographers and critics. ED cultists, in particular, loathe the book (always a good sign) because it gives us a very human and very tormented Emily Dickinson, a woman starved for love who had serious psychological problems which retarded her emotional development, and who almost certainly suffered a nervous breakdown as a result.
Why any of this should disturb the open-minded I have no idea. The Dickinson household was certainly a very strange and abnormal place, and the Dickinson children had a far from normal upbringing. The aloofness of the father, his inability to show love or warmth and relate in a normal fashion to his children, would have a devastating effect on any child.
The arguments I have seen against Cody have been very weak, though proof of the rightness of his thesis is very strong. It runs all through the poems and has been analyzed in great detail by Camille Paglia in Chapter 24 of her _Sexual Personae_ 'Amherst's Madame de Sade : Emily Dickinson' (pp.623-74).
The poems Paglia quotes are authentic Dickinson poems. No matter how much worshippers at the shrine of their 'Saint Emily' would like to wish them away, they will not go away. Also, they have meaning.
My advice would be to read both Cody and Paglia. They're both fascinating writers, they both know what they're talking about, and I think that what they say helps us to understand aspects of both Dickinson and many of the poems she wrote.
Emily Dickinson was a very complex figure, and everyone tries to claim her for their camp - Cultists, Christians, Psychiatrists, Sadeians, etc., - but I guess the truth is that, although there's a certain amount of truth in all these positions, Emily Dickinson is just too big to be contained. She bursts free of all categories. Like her poems she explodes into a multiplicity of meanings, perhaps because, like them she wasn't about something, but about everything.
Wikipedia and Google are just not too sure about Mr/Dr John Cody. Amazon listed several other books he co-authored. In the real world, John Cody was an archbishop, a cardinal, a musician and singer, an artist, a poet, an actor, and the retired CEO of J.C. Penny.
Roger Lundin it seems is a retired English professor:
From Publishers Weekly
In this readable new biography of the reclusive poet, Wheaton English professor Lundin concentrates on Dickinson's ambivalence toward Christianity and its effects on the self. He traces her inner debate through a careful analysis of Dickinson's poems and letters, and he concludes that she was "one of the major religious thinkers of her age." According to Lundin, Dickinson's struggle with suffering and the character of God mirrored the major forcesADarwinism, the Civil War, the spread of industrialismAthat tested and altered American Protestantism. Lundin also contends that Dickinson's notion of God as silent and severe was drawn from her relationship with her father, Edward Dickinson, a remote patriarch who disdained the enthusiasm and emotion of religious revivals. The "Pugilist and Poet," as Dickinson described herself, longed to believe in God's loving care, but her sense of human frailty would not allow her wholly to accept His existence. In addition, she could not profess firsthand knowledge of the fruits of grace; nor could she detect any signs in her own soul of the holy joy that others claimed as they accepted Christ. Her choice of "poetry as a surrogate for traditional religious belief," writes Lundin, set her on a path to solitude, a path that led away from marriage, church and the world outside Amherst, Mass. Lundin's close readings of Dickinson's poetry and his careful analysis of Dickinson's historical and social context make a persuasive case for the implicit religious dimension of Dickinson's life and work.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book Description
Garnishing awards from "Choice," "Christianity Today," "Books & Culture," and the Conference on Christianity and Literature when first published in 1998, Roger Lundin's "Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief" has been widely recognized as one of the finest biographies of the great American poet Emily Dickinson. Paying special attention to her experience of faith, Lundin skillfully relates Dickinson's life — as it can be charted through her poems and letters — to nineteenth-century American political, social, religious, and intellectual history.
This second edition of Lundin's superb work includes a standard bibliography, expanded notes, and a more extensive discussion of Dickinson's poetry than the first edition contained. Besides examining Dickinson's singular life and work in greater depth, Lundin has also keyed all poem citations to the recently updated standard edition of Dickinson's poetry. Already outstanding, Lundin's biography of Emily Dickinson is now even better than before.
Most people's faces are quite different from left to right, or right to left--leading to the egotistic need to photograph "my good side". I remember that they used to claim that actress Jane Wyman, former Mrs. Ronald Reagan, had a face that was perfectly symmetrical. Up close, Richard Chamberlain had a similiar mug; perfect symmetry--not that he looked like Jane. Ms. Emily might have been two people struggling to live in one body; two spirits trapped together. She was "starved for love". Hell, who isn't?
Glenn
Hell, who isn't indeed?
Actually the difference is exaggerated by the fact that her head was turned a bit for the photograph, making her neck look larger on one side.
Also the light comes from the side washing out her jaw line on her left.
But those pouty lips really do it to me.
Whoof!
And that intimation of a Diana Rigg like sneer.
Ruff!
Soho the dog (I think) had a post in which she appears as a flaming redhead.
Aaaoooow!
I got the jones alright.
Nobody ever whistled at me when I was alive.
..............Emily
Hallo, Lane!
Yeah: Let's eliminate barriers between "disciplines" and throw away the rule book in writing music. One of Puccini's best compositions is the introduction to Act II of "La Boheme" in which he has a whole string of consecutive fifths, which is a grave "no-no" in the rule book, but it sounds great!!
Tschuess,
Anonomann
Actually the real problem was the time I lived in, no internet dating, no on line poker, no instant access to every poet's work who ever breathed, no women's rights--both to orgasm and a say-so on the issues of this world. My father was a strict uptight asshole, that is a fact; but given half a chance I might have been a babe. Or as Dana Carvey said in Wayne's World,"If Abraham Lincoln had been a babe, would her name have been Baberaham Lincoln?" Thanks, Dougie, for being the one true lover boy.
...............Emily
Emily, there are thousands who love you
And not just for your art.
It's the only group I willingly and joyfully join.
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