Emily Dickinson: Session 1

James Finley (0:00)

You're listening to a podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation. To learn more, visit cac.org.

Greetings. I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:11)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

James Finley (0:13)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to our time together, turning towards the trustworthy guidance found in the life and in the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

Before I begin, I'd like to make a few practical points. The first is that there's no titles to Emily Dickinson's poems. Rather, the first line is used as a title. So the poems that I'll be using throughout all these sessions, I'll give the first line.

If you go to Emily Dickinson's poems, and then Emily Dickinson on Gone, Emily Dickinson on Death, 30, 40, you'll find more poems than you'll need for free just to have the poems.

The next point I'd like to make as an observation is that Emily Dickinson is difficult. She's not easy. I find her to be very difficult. She's very challenging. So my task here, as in all the Turning to the Mystics podcasts, is how to make her teaching as accessible as possible without watering down the depth of what she's saying. And the second thing is that I'm also going to feel very free to apply her teachings to the Turning to the Mystics podcast. Emily Dickinson says what the Christian mystics say. Therefore, she's a Christian. But she's not saying it as a Christian. So I'm going to feel free to translate what she's saying outside of Christianity. We'll be doing it with William Blake also and Rilke. And I'm going to feel very to make explicit as the context that we're working in.

And so with that, then we'll start. You know, in the introductory session with Kirsten, we always started out with who Emily Dickinson was historically, to help us understand who she is spiritually.

It's who she was historically. I say was because she's dead.

We're still historical. We're not dead yet. But even though we're not dead yet, who are we spiritually? She's helping us to understand who eternally are spiritually, in eternity, transcending time and time, because that's what she did in her poetry. So in that first session, we saw that in her autobiographical foundations of what formed her poetry, we went through some of those. One is she mentions the terror that she had. Different commentators suggest different things, what it might be. But what most settle on is that the family, the Dickinson family suffered from an eye condition, from an eye malady. Most of them just put up with it. It would come and go. But with Emily, it was very serious. Sometimes she had to go away for several weeks at a time. To a clinic where she wasn't allowed to read anything or write anything. She was literally afraid that she was going to go blind. That was her terror. Had she gone blind, that would have been tragic. It raises a very good point. Sometimes the quickening comes to us, the mystical quickening comes out of joy.

But often it comes out of trauma. There's some time that in the depth of trauma, that is in the fear of losing some vital resource within yourself that you can't see or you can't talk or you can't walk. In the fear of losing some vital resource within yourself, you can come upon within yourself that which you can never lose. Because it's not for the having. You don't have it. It has you. And so it's almost like a paradoxical gift comes shining out of the terror place. And certainly that's with her in the fear of losing her eyesight. The position that I'm going to be taking here is this. Is that even had she lost her eyesight, and as tragic as that might have been, she would not have lost what she was poetically able to see. And put it in specifically in faith terms, she would not have lost the ability to see the presence of God presencing the infinity of itself and life itself. She wouldn't have lost that. And that's the approach I'll be taking here. And it's the approach that I'm going to be taking in the first poem. The opening stanza is just a certain slant of lights, four stanzas. I'll read all four stanzas, then go back and read each one, and then walk through it prayerfully, very slowly. There's a certain slant of light, winter afternoons, that oppresses like the heft of cathedral tunes. Heavenly hurt, it gives us, we can find no scar, but internal difference, where the meanings are.

None may teach it, any.

Tis the seagull despair, an imperial affliction, sent us of the air.