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.