Emily Dickinson: Session 2

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

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 for Trustworthy Guidance to the Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson.

And in this session, I want to begin with the poem, the first line of which is, The soul selects her own society. Poem number 303 in The Collected Word.

The two poems that I've chosen for today, I've chosen because I'm going to have three sessions. We had one already. This is the second, and then the third. And what I decided to do in the first two, is just select two poems. It's just because they're all like this. I mean, hundreds and hundreds of them goes on and on and on. So I just chose them because it just happened to be two of them that struck me. You can almost choose any one of them. And so that's why. See, if the soul selects her own society, she's always trying to help us become aware of the interiority of ourselves. And so what is it that my soul, my interiority, who and what is it that's nurturing the interiority of my soul, of myself, and therefore my society?

And to me, what this means is, we're kind of headed with these poems for today.

It would mean, therefore, insofar as we're moved by her poems, she's in our society, and she helps to find our way to our society. And also, we're in hers. So we're all alone together, we all belong to each other. And so I thought that was very significant to me. And then the second poem, it would be Lonelier Without the Loneliness, is how do we find our way in to that society of oneness? We find it in the interiority of our own solitude and the quietness of our own. So that's, to me, I think, was the significance of these two poems. And somehow they belong together, I kind of felt. So in the very first one, then about the soul selects our own society, the interior society would nurtures and guides the interiority of our own soul. And then secondly, we find our way in to that society, paradoxically, infidelity to our own loneliness, to the aloneness of ourself, and nevertheless alone than one alone, like the infinite intimacy of solitude. And so I thought they belong together that way.

So I'll read the whole poem first, and then we'll walk, we'll go through it. The soul selects her own society, then shuts the door to her divine majority, present no more. Unmoved, she notes the chariots pausing at her low gate.

Unmoved, an emperor be kneeling upon her mat. I've known her from an ample nation.

Choose one, then close the valves of her attention like stone. That's the poem.

I think she means by her soul, my soul, our soul. She's referring to the interiority of herself. She's referring to the experiential, intimate interiority of who she experiences herself to be and is called to be. I also think then for the soul to choose its own society is the soul chooses that which nurtures us, that nurtures our soul and guides us and illumines us. So for her in the wide scale, nature was her society. The birds and trees and the sky overhead and the slant of light on a winter afternoon. I think also especially what she learned in the school about God's presence or the divine presence hidden in nature. Also, the people who are her family, they're sitting around the dinner table, her father, her mother, siblings, her family, her friends at the school she kept in contact with. That's the society of her soul. But deeper down, she says, the soul selects her own society, then shuts the door to her divine majority. I think she means this, is that there's a place in her, in the interior depths of herself, where she spent hours alone in her room, it's where the poetry comes from. She could tell the people in her own family don't know that place and wouldn't understand it even if she tried to explain it. A lot of the friends that she had, there's all the people that are her friends. She loves them, they love her together. But there is a certain place where it can't go there. And so she's called out of kind of an inner integrity, shuts the door to the divine majority. It's like with us, you know, when we go to have our quiet time with God, the busy details of the day decide to come along with us. They're sitting there too. So we have to choose to shut the door to the majority. But notice it's the divine majority, because God's infinitely in love with everyone. It isn't a judgment of anyone. It's the majority, a divine majority, that doesn't understand what she's interiorly called to be faithful to, in her solitude, in which her poetry flows. In an interior sense, then, to her divine majority, and they're present no more. There's like an interior way that a door closes.