notes from a dark room

By dark room I don't mean a darkroom. I don't mean a figurative dark room, as one might represent a grief or a depression. I mean precisely what I say, a room in which there is little light. There various reasons why this room lacks light, one is that the puppy unplugged --- more than unplugged, somehow messed up (chewed?) the only light source other than the dim bulb on the ceiling. Another is that today is a gloomy wet treat of a day bestowed on us by Dennis.

I was drawn away from my ECE just now for various reasons. Perhaps you have noticed that I tend to assign several reasons to everything that happens in my world. My mom, when I was growing up, had a habit of
prefacing her statements about unusual or uncomfortable events by saying "For some reason." So for example she would say: "For some reason my foot has turned green and fallen off." Or: "For some reason
there is a brontosaurus in the back yard and it has eaten our dog Skippy."
I think that particular kind of dinosaur is supposed to be vegetarian, so there's a whole other set of reasons to contemplate.

I was drawn away from my ECE because of reasons too boring to contemplate. I have just been reading Camille Paglia on Emily Dickinson.
According to Paglia, Dickinson is and always will be "the greatest of women poets." I am normally quite bored by such worship of a poet whom I never bothered to read unless a poem of hers was quoted
somewhere as was frequently the case. I always thought of Dickinson as "prim." I'd picture her demurely seated in the parlor doing God knows what --- whatever is done in parlors, I always assumed just sitting. I did see Julie Harris performing the one-woman-show "The Belle of Amherst" when I was about thirteen, but what I remember more than anything specific pertaining to the poet is the recipe for brown bread that came in the Dickinson biography that I think my mom purchased after the show.
My mom tried the recipe and it was a notable disaster.

I was always bothered by the rhyme and meter in the Dickinson poems I encountered. I didn't always find her diction praiseworthy, I thought she chose words for the sake of the rhyme and meter so she could not be trusted (I tend to feel that poets who do this cannot be trusted).

Camille Paglia (whom I basically loathe) has an interesting take on Dickinson. I don't know how original it is, as I am not familiar with Dickinson scholarship. Paglia calls her "Amherst's Madame de Sade." ("Sexual Personae --- Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson") She focuses on those poems which say grisly things about body parts, and makes comments like: "The brutality of this belle of Amherst would stop a truck. She is a virtuoso of sadomasochistic surrealism."

So now I have this new take on Miss Emily in her parlor. This poet who according to most biographers suffered through a great deal of unrequited love is not meditating on the beautiful and the pure all the time, but she's picturing things like: "If ever the lid gets off my head/
and lets the brain away," or, "The Brain is just the weight of God/for Heft them Pound for Pound." Paglia comments: "The poet hefts the brain like
a shopper picking through cabbages at the market."

Paglia happens to be a great admirer of the Marquis de Sade, or so she says. I suspect this is an affectation which is related to Paglia's sensational style of scholarship. To me, "sensational" scholarship is a bit of an oxymoron. Paglia is approved of by the great Harold Bloom;
what he says about "Sexual Personae" is "[it's] an enormous sensation of a book." I wouldn't disagree, but he goes on to say "in all the better senses of 'sensation.'"

Paglia is a self-proclaimed enemy of nature, which, she says, can only seem beautiful to the shallow. Throughout the two chapters of the 700-page book I was able to get through, she repeats the adjective "cthonian."
Nature is actually not comprised of beautiful sunsets and daffodils,
but is a threatening noxious soup of destruction. And sex, which is "the natural in man," is "daemonic."

I don't know why, in light of these sentiments, Dickinson is so appealing to Paglia, except that in those poems she quotes, she seems to have a similar pessimistic view of humankind's relation to nature.It's likely that Dickinson had an unorthodox view of sexuality as well; from what I've read it seems likely she didn't experience much sex.

I would not recommend Paglia's book. A better book on Dickinson is by Paula Bennett: "My Life a Loaded Gun." Paglia is more of a cartoonist than a scholar.

I have had from both these books a crash course in the complexity of the mind and art of Emily Dickinson. It still seems stultifying to say she's "the greatest woman poet;" she's perhaps one of the more conspicuous, and
none of us now can have the historical impact she had --- there are, after
all, so many of us. Paglia thinks MEN are to be thanked for the fact there are so many of us and we have so much freedom. When I'm done with my ECE, I'm going to take "Sexual Personae" out back to the fire pit.

--- Harriet.