Oct 22 2008
The well of loneliness?
I have not written on this blog for quite a while. It has been a difficult month, full of retrospection and introspection, with some good moments but, basically, lots of inner self questioning, if such a combination of words exists in the English language. There has been pain inside and also outside, in my “circle of trust”, and it has had a very strong impact on me. I hope eventually the whole experience will make me a more insightful human being and a better person.
So, if I had to choose poetry to illustrate the moment — I recall mentioning poetry earlier in this blog as my foie gras in a world of prosaic corned beef, or something of the sort — there should be some Emily Dickinson. Sagittarian, tortured, passionate and suffering goddess of illuminated seclusion, her writing dissects the anatomy of feelings in a methodically simple way. I would say it is the kind of poetry where each word weighs a ton, and there are so few that missing one single element in her compositions results in major loss.
I read on a website the other day that the poem I quote below was allegedly written for her sister in law, with whom the poetess was apparently infatuated. Perhaps associating lonely Dickinson (the typical Puritan spinster, at least in form) with lesbianhood is an oversimplification, but let’s agree that as we read her it is impossible not to perceive that certain component which denotes someone as being really sensitive to the female world. But no more words from me, let’s hear it from Miss Dickinson herself:
What mystery pervades a well!
The water lives so far,
Like neighbor from another world
Residing in a jar.
The grass does not appear afraid;
I often wonder he
Can stand so close and look so bold
At what is dread to me.
Related somehow they may be, –
The sedge stands next the sea,
Where he is floorless, yet of fear
No evidence gives he.
But nature is a stranger yet;
The ones that cite her most
Have never passed her haunted house,
Nor simplified her ghost.
To pity those that know her not
Is helped by the regret
That those who know her, know her less
The nearer her they get.
It appears that the lesbian code can be cracked by replacing the word “nature” in the poem with the name of the undisclosed destinataire, Susan Gilbert. Regardless of whether it was Susan or somebody else the poem was directed to, I cannot but marvel at Dickinson’s deftness in portraying the mystery of others, the hidden self, or selves, of le grand autre. The well (the other) is a mystery, a lonely, perhaps exciting mystery. Sometimes, paradoxically, the nearer we get to it — as to nature itself — the more unfathomable it becomes.
