Feb
28
Emily Dickinson’s Humanism? Or Is That Making This Too Complicated? On Poem 464, "The power to be true to You"
Filed Under dickinson, love, poetry | Leave a Comment
The power to be true to You… (464)
Emily Dickinson
The power to be true to You,
Until upon my face
The Judgment push his Picture –
Presumptuous of Your Place –
Of This — Could Man deprive Me –
Himself — the Heaven excel –
Whose invitation — Yours reduced
Until it showed too small –
Comment:
This poem could be read, at first glance, as a simple statement of faith. Worries about the judgment of others, perhaps even about eternal judgment, can stem from the opinions of others. Such opinions “deprive” the speaker of the proper place of the Lord in her life, despite the fact that Heaven and its host have complete control over Man’s place in the cosmos, and his being invited to participate in the divine.
But let’s start with that superficial reading, ignoring the fact that a lot of the grammar actually used in the poem has to be smoothed out far too much to get there. There’s something being asked in that reading – whether man has such power to displace the divine. How could he have such power, and what is divinity anyway?
With those questions in mind, let us sort out the details: What is the power to be true to anyone? To be true requires faith in that person – that’s why speaking the truth about others, oftentimes, is far less effective than we think it to be. Most of us use the truth to destroy others: we use it as something over or against them. And then we wonder why we ever needed the truth, when lies might have been more effective for our purposes. But to “be true” is an involvement with the truth regarding another that is tied to what we want to be true – the dual implication is that we want the best and want to be better ourselves.
- I’m steering clear of the capitalized “You,” because while it can be taken to be an obvious reference to God, I think “power” can take us another direction, and that other direction is where I want to go ever so briefly. -
This “power” the speaker has lasts until something happens to her/his face. One wonders whether that happening is an external thing – is there a witnessing of something that changes the mind? Or maybe it is an internal thing – does the facial expression of the speaker change, signaling something happening within? – or maybe both these things are true simultaneously. The idea of “Judgment pushing” does not help this issue – the Judgment could be given to the speaker by others, or be the speaker displaying a judgment he/she has made which literally “pushes” the contours of the face into an expression.
“Judgment” has caused the displacing of something which gave the speaker “power,” and we noted above that such “power” is probably not a bad thing.
“Of This” begs the question, “This?” It could refer to anything in the previous stanza, almost. Most likely it is “power,” but it could also be “judgment,” and it could even be “Your Place,” as we noted in the “first glance” reading above. Whatever “This” is, it is something which man could cause the deprivation of. “Himself” is probably “Man,” as Heaven is indeed beyond him, but also can give him excellence. “Man” can be made better through what is divine, and divinity does stoop down to make others brilliant. “Whose” probably refers to “Himself,” but it could also be “Heaven,” and one has to wonder who could reduce an invitation for either Man or Heaven with their own invitation until “it showed too small.”
So there are a number of questions on the table. But there is a central theme uniting all of them – the faith of the speaker as regards another. Judgment of all sorts can make us doubt another, but should it be abandoned because of doubt? “This” has to be that central concern, that concern about keeping the faith, as judgment comes from two directions potentially in the first stanza, and “Your Place” is closely concerned with the “power to be true to You” anyway.
The opinions of others affecting the speaker’s faith through her judgment become the key. We can see the blame placed squarely on “others,” on Man as a whole, if we take the “power to be true” to be a natural power intrinsic to the speaker. There is good reason to understand it as a natural power. Heaven excels all Men, bequeathing to them what they say and are that is correct. And if there were a contest between the lover of the speaker and the others who object went head-to-head, that lover would far outshine them.
This is a love poem when all is said and done, I think. The issue of knowledge about those we love is a heavenly issue, because only God knows who we truly are. For everyone else, we need to have faith. And faith is more a suspension of judgment than anything else: in this world where we don’t know, we have to try to trust as it is more natural, even when it doesn’t feel exactly correct. For opinions are what artifice stems from, and all artifices dissolve in the light of the divine.
Feb
27
This is one of those things that I should have brought to your attention earlier…
Filed Under media | Leave a Comment
…I don’t agree entirely with Mr. Lanier, but his fundamental sentiment -
The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we’re devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.
- is absolutely correct. When he writes this shortly thereafter -
Compounding the problem is that new business models for people who think and write have not appeared as quickly as we all hoped. Newspapers, for instance, are on the whole facing a grim decline as the Internet takes over the feeding of curious eyes that hover over morning coffee and even worse, classified ads. In the new environment, Google News is for the moment better funded and enjoys a more secure future than most of the rather small number of fine reporters around the world who ultimately create most of its content. The aggregator is richer than the aggregated.
The question of new business models for content creators on the Internet is a profound and difficult topic in itself, but it must at least be pointed out that writing professionally and well takes time and that most authors need to be paid to take that time. In this regard, blogging is not writing. For example, it’s easy to be loved as a blogger. All you have to do is play to the crowd. Or you can flame the crowd to get attention. Nothing is wrong with either of those activities. What I think of as real writing, however, writing meant to last, is something else. It involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive to yesterday’s moves in a conversation.
- I realize I have to share this essay with all of you, from which the above quotes are pulled. There are wise people on this planet, and it is good to know.
Feb
27
Gracchi gave me the “Thinking Blogger Award” and wrote an awful lot of nice stuff about this blog and others blogs he likes here. Now this meme originated at this post, and quite honestly, I wish the originator of the meme had given me more criteria to work with, for I’m not sure exactly what blog doesn’t make me think. Everyone has original and thoughtful content, and I’ve learned a lot from any number of blogs.
Nonetheless, there are five I’m reading and responding to regularly that are enormous aids in my thinking, and I think they should be singled out and given this award. It is quite an honor, after all, to have helped at least one person think. And I’m sure, given my obtuseness, these blogs have inspired others to do that rarest of rare activities:
1. Shannon: her livejournal expands the notion of thinking, because she’s a difficult photographer. She sees the darker side of life, and there’s something wistful, not necessarily “evil” or “has to be changed immediately,” inherent in that world. If you can’t see much of her work – I think much of her LJ is friends only – try the link on the side (conveniently labeled “Shannon”) which goes to her website. Her LJ has prose, but it is the pictures which speak most.
2. Amy King: I wish I could write poetry like she does. I know there can’t be anything easy about how the words flow, but wow, she makes it look really, really easy.
3. Amber: I don’t comment here anymore, because I always read her blog via RSS, since she always finds something interesting to bring my attention to. Her concern with legal and libertarian issues may not be unique, but she might be the best at blogging about it, at least from the perspective of keeping my attention.
4. Kristine Lowe: So much of the Internet is concerned with what the Internet means from marketing and media standpoints. The key is to get a good, informed discussion going, and that, quite honestly, rarely happens. It does happen at her blog.
5. Josh: The latest posts on Anselm are the tip of the iceberg. His blog is deceptively simple, even when it is polemical. Look for his posts on American foreign policy in Ethiopia, or on the movie “High Noon,” or on temptation and sin. He assumes his reader knows a lot, and he just wants to add a little bit extra to that knowledge – a rare virtue in this age where people thinking shouting in comment threads is going to change the world.
Feb
27
Joy, Pain, Character and Hedonism
Filed Under Uncategorized | 1 Comment
I used to think that the problem was my being cynical. Then I caught myself attempting to express joy after a period of pain, and thought myself corny. So then I thought the problem was the word choice employed.
Now I’m pretty sure that isn’t the problem, because so many people who are good writers and speakers can’t bring voice to this sort of formulation, at least for me, adequately.
I think the key is this now: the people who are apt to try and find joy in life, despite pain, I admire enormously. And when they try to emphasize the joy they feel, and dismiss the pain or explain it, I don’t want to hear it. I think pain runs more deeply than we realize. There are just so many times in the past that I’ve lost control of my emotions for utterly random reasons, well after something awful had happened. I assume they’ve gone through a lot worse, and been a lot stronger.
And yet I don’t want those whose character I admire to feel they have to live up to being something better than they are. The best of us make mistakes, and I guess I’m happy with that nowadays – there seem to be a lot of people who demand others be ideals or models of perfection of a sort, and they just can’t see that to demand such a thing is to dehumanize people for their own self-interest. A lot of other people want to marginalize people by romanticizing or exaggerating attributes that are quite positive already.
I guess I don’t want to see some people, with exceptionally strong character, find joy too early because I want to see them get far greater rewards than what they can give themselves. In this world oriented towards immediate gratification, those who have struggled for more and lost tend to get even more dirt kicked in their face. If life is just about paying one’s cell phone bills, car insurance, and drinking non-stop from Thurs. night until Saturday night every weekend, then a lot of people are getting a lot out of life. Ironically enough, because they don’t understand any sort of pain truly, they make anyone with any ambition for themselves or others look problematic.
I’m just tired of it. I want to see better people, whom I know many of, be treated better. I just want a world where people who are more serious about how they behave and think are treated justly.
Technorati Tags: Joy, Pain, Character and Hedonism
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Feb
25
A Note On How Conservatives Use Resources
Filed Under politics | 2 Comments
This article in Dissent Magazine asserts that conservative foundations are far more generous and interested in their interns than liberal ones.
This article from Slate from a while ago talks about how conservative foundations might not be part of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” simply because the money to go around is so meager.
I want to be clear: I don’t think conservatives invest enough in the next generation: they’re too practical and too ideologically narrow, and money alone is not the measure of an investment. Yes, ISI and the libertarian IHS give out scholarships. How many are given out again? How many students are there in the US? – Yeah, that’s what I thought. -
There’s no active searching for talent, and for me, that’s the problem (hence, the link to the article about conservative media. You’d think people might want to fund it to increase long-term opportunities for talent). All the places that are being complained about by the Dissent author could very easily pay their interns, and organize reading groups and classes and lodging in such a way that people can network. The improvement could happen overnight, and like that, liberals’ commitment to their youth would be assured, and look very much like the conservative commitment now.
I highly recommend that conservatives put money into groups that actively, not passively, seek out talent. Start looking at students who are writing regularly for campus publications, look for students in student government who are thinking about bolder things, look for the student saying smart things in class that’s contrary to the professor’s view, etc. Don’t just assume merit will show itself – in this day and age, the best things, we find over and over again, have a tendency to get buried. An organization or two should absolutely be created to find conservative talent and place it – that’s it. The organization should have no other function than that, otherwise it will start trying to get talent for itself, and will try passive ways of letting talent make itself known. And the organization needs to look beyond those who constantly market themselves. We know full well that there’s too much marketing going on, and that there are people doing substantial work. Why aren’t we trying to find them?
Again, to be explicitly clear, the way conservatives go about “finding talent” is passive (just like the way employers work, which is another ridiculous thing), and there are people who are “doers” who get the same opportunities over and over again because they push for the same sorts of honors, and truth be told, not everyone is going to be motivated by honor. Some people want to be part of a community that actually wants them, and that isn’t eager to weed out based on some arbitrary notion of the best, or give awards one-time-only and then focus on another person entirely. The big problem created by the fact that conservatives don’t look is that there is no sense of a long-term commitment between individuals and the organizations out there. Education isn’t about “here’s your training, now go into the world and use it.” We’re always learning, and the assumption that such a time in our life can actually be wholly stopped for other concerns is outright idiotic. Yet it is the fundamental premise governing relations between the elders in the conservative movement and the youth, no matter how much generosity one provides to interns (and if you look at what I’ve written carefully, you’ll notice you can pretty much make the exact same argument for the old and young in America generally. The general problem is that we don’t care to have communities).
Technorati Tags: merit, conservatism, youth
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