Paul Scott Derrick Grisanti - Lines of Thought

However, when we do bother to question her language , we discover the sensitivity and precision which allow us to grasp the magical aspect that cloaks the world without destroying its magic. Dwelling upon the abstract foundations of human existence, she makes them concrete without making them brittle. Her penchant for capricious metaphor partially names the abstract, but cannot ever exhaust it. This poetic naming allows us to “see” the mystery, but always to see it as mystery. In this way her language brings metaphysical inquiry into the homely realm of everyday experience.

Her position was that of her words; she occupied that pallid zone between the two distinct worlds of mystery and experience. She could often write from the viewpoint of the dead because, speaking behind the closed door of renunciation, she conceived herself outside of life. “‘Tis not that Dying hurts us so –” she says with an authoritative voice, “‘Tis living – hurts us more.” And that symbolic death of renunciation occasioned by the painfulness of life becomes, in the case of Emily Dickinson, a conscious apotheosis into the immortality of language:

A Death blow – is a Life blow – to Some –

Who, till they died,

Did not alive – become –

Who had they lived

Had died, but when

They died, Vitality begun – (J816/Fr966).

With her poet’s sensibility, she deeply felt the transforming power of words. She realized that language, properly created, was a certain transcendence of life, a kind of immortality, the permanence beyond the flux, and that, in exercising this transcendence, she became her words.

Therefore it should not be objected that we compare a poet of one century with a philosopher of the next, who very likely did not even know her work. Their common field is language, which preserves them both in time. Existing, for us, as language, they are a part of that historical conversation which composes the human spirit. As Heidegger says:

Obedient to the voice of Being, thought seeks the Word through which the truth of Being may be expressed. Only when the language of historical man is born of the Word does it ring true. [...] The thinker utters Being. The poet names what is holy. We may know something about the relations between philosophy and poetry, but we know nothing of the dialogue between poet and thinker, who “dwell near to one another on mountains farthest apart.” (360)

WORKS CITED

Heidegger, Martin. 1970 [1949]. Existence and Being (ed. Werner Brock). Chicago: Henry Regnery Company.

Ransom, John Crowe. 1963. “Emily Dickinson: A Poet Restored” in Sewall, Richard (ed.) Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays . Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc.: 10-24.

Tate, Allen. 1936. Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons.

* Originally published in Atlantis 5, 1-2 (June-November), 1983: 55-64 and reprinted in Western Humanities Review 40, 1 (Spring), 1986: 27-38.

1 The essays most pertinent to this paper are “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” “On the Essence of Truth” and “What Is Metaphysics?.” They are published in English, along with a fourth selection, “Remembrance of the Poet,” in Heidegger (1970).

2 The word “nihilation” was coined by translators R. F. C. Hull and Alan Crick to approximate Heidegger’s use of the German term Nichtung. They say, in a note on this word: “ Nichtung is a causative process, and nichten a causative and intransitive verb. Ordinarily we would express the process in positive terms and would speak, for instance, “of the ‘becoming’ of Nothing of the ‘de-becoming’ of something, as would be clear in a term like Nichtswerdung or the Entwerdung of Meister Eckhart” (Heidegger: 368-369).

Heart Is Where the Home Is. Some Reflections on the Line between Wisdom and Knowledge *

1

On the 16th of November, 1853, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s mother died. She was 85 years old, and had been living with him and his family for 18 years, since 1835, when he bought his first house. His daughter Ellen, then 15, was away from home at the time, at a boarding school in the village of Lenox. So Emerson had to inform her of the loss in the family by mail. In a brief but moving passage, he described his mother’s funeral like this:

Your grandmother’s end was so peaceful, and all remembrances of her life in everybody’s mind so pleasing, that there was no gloom about the event such as usually belongs to it. Only the house has one less home in it, one less to be interested in, & to enjoy what befals you. (Rusk 1939: 399-400)

Now I can’t speak for you, but there is something about the sentiments expressed in these two sentences that touches me very deeply. It obviously touched Ellen very deeply, too, because she never forgot these words. And when Emerson himself died, almost 30 years later, she used the same phrases in remembrance of him, and the gentle effects of his life (Baker 1996: 356-7).

There are many things I could say about this heartfelt, informal epitaph, and each one would take my talk in a different direction. I could point out how it confirms Emerson’s will to see the good in every aspect of human experience, including the death of a loved one. I could consider the importance in Victorian America of the written message of consolation to the bereaved. (Emily Dickinson became a private expert in composing this kind of delicately comforting letter to her family and friends.) I could also talk about how death is the ultimate teacher, in that it finally makes us understand what is really important in life. Or, taking that idea one step further, I might discuss the various ways we can think of death as a form of revelation.

But I prefer to leave those subjects, each one interesting in its own way, for another occasion and to focus our attention instead on something else, on the feeling and sense of the expression itself: “Only the house has one less home in it, one less to be interested in, and to enjoy what befals you.” Maybe, if we listen to these words carefully and deeply enough, we can take this sentence as a model for poetry, a model for what it is and what it does.

2

Those of us who are implicated in this questionable business of teaching literature are constantly tempted by the urge to broadcast explanations, to explicate—or even worse, to dictate meanings. I suppose that urge is comprehensible; explanation is, after all, one of the subtlest forms of power, of assuming authority. But are we really serving the literary work, or the minds of our students, when we yield too readily to that temptation?

What Emerson’s sentence means— a manifold truth of emotional experience—is already available to everyone, even though the exact source of its strength may not be so easy to define or to pin down. But then, literature is not about definitions. The important thing is to be able to touch the source of emotional strength, not to be able to define it.

Maybe the most uncomfortable problem we have to learn to live with is the fact that our discipline is useless—at least, materially useless. What do we do? We talk. What do we work with? Words. If we take Emerson’s passage as a model for poetry, what is it?

The truth is that it almost seems easier to say what it’s not.

It’s not, for example, a mathematical formula (oh how we love our mathematical formulas!). It’s not a grandiose theory; it can’t be tested and proved or disproved by experimental procedures. It doesn’t set out some important process for saving time or energy, some new technique to simplify our work. It’s not even something you can buy or sell. And nevertheless, in spite of its uselessness, it constitutes a lesson—a lesson about both living and dying, about love and care—that Ellen, at the age of 15, learned and never forgot.