“Where the Meanings Are” – Four Poems by Emily Dickinson – Part 2

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of four of Dickinson’s best-loved poems, whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on grief, pain, violence, death, reason, identity, and encounters with the divine: numbers 340, 372, 320, and 477. Upcoming Episodes: Rosemary’s Baby. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: [email protected]. Hey, welcome to Part two of our discussion of the poems of Emily Dickinson. In part one, we talked about number 340 in the Franklin numbering system. I felt a funeral in my brain. And in this part we'll talk about number 372. After great pain, a formal feeling comes, which I think think kind of tread some some ground that we've already talked about with its boots of lead tread some ground we've already talked about in in part one. So I think kind of Makes a good pair. I guess I'll go ahead and read it first and then we'll dive right in. 1:03 Wes: Yeah. 1:03 Erin: Okay. After great pain, a formal feeling comes. The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs. The stiff heart questions was it he that bore and yesterday or centuries before the feet mechanical go round a wooden way of ground or air or ought regardless grown a quartz contentment like a stone. This is the hour of lead remembered, if outlived as freezing Persons recollect the snow first chill, then stupor, then the letting go. 1:42 Wes: So, yeah, we're getting this image of feeling of numbness, I suppose, that comes after great pain. Except she chooses a very interesting variation on that idea, which is formality. So it's a formal feeling. And then she's using this word ceremonious in the second line. Right. So formal as in ceremony or in social form. I suppose you could even say impoliteness. And all the. The. In the social face that we put on things, the thing that covers up are, you know, more complicated and visceral and often intense feelings that lie beneath. Is that right? 2:22 Erin: Yeah, I think so. You know, this. This poem, I wonder if it's almost describing the exact same experience as. As the poem we covered in the previous part, but just with a. With a darker valence. Because there's. There's a sense of. In the formality, there's a sense of a funeral, of the funereal. You know, the nerves sit ceremonious, so it's as if you're sitting through a funeral. But then what's really great about that is that they're like tombs. So she connects this idea of the funeral, or of the funeral, of ceremony and of formality, with stiffness, which itself is, you know, it's like a Russian doll image that itself has the implication of death and the tomb and, you know, something like rigor mortis inside it. 3:05 Wes: Calling it a tomb is. I mean, it's a really interesting image because we think of nerves as, like Mrs. Bennet, nerves. 3:12 Erin: You have no compassion on my poor nerves. They're very active. They're vibrating all the time. 3:18 Wes: Right. So, yeah, we think of nerves as, I guess, cylindrical threads, tubes high strung, like the Internet, tubes that run through our body and conveyors of pain. And so the nerves are no longer active here. So they've been very active. And now they're dead, in a sense, they've been deadened. They're tomb like. But again, we get this idea of sitting ceremonious as if the tomb is a monument to Something lost, something has died. Right. You know, I think the funeral. You know, your reference to funeral is good. Something has died and, you know, the pain that was there is gone. It's died. And it's like losing someone. 4:01 Erin: Yeah. Which is a really interesting idea if it's the pain itself that's lost. You know, I never thought about that. That's really interesting. 4:09 Wes: More ordinarily, Right. We're in pain because of what we've lost or someone that we've lost. But in this case. So I'm giving it. Yeah. A less orthodox way of reading it, which is that the pain itself is the thing that's been lost when we're in the state of numbness. Yeah. 4:24 Erin: Right. No, I really like that. I think. I hadn't thought of that. So I'm kind of thinking on my feet now, but I'm. You know, when you're in real physical pain, mileage may vary on this experience, but real physical pain, it sort of obliterates everything. 4:42 Wes: Right. 4:43 Erin: And then afterwards, that kind of like. I don't know, that resounding sense. I'm thinking of the bell from the previous stanza. Maybe something about that rings after. But you're also like. It's also hard to recall physical pain after it's over, you know, so. So there's. There's this heightened. It's. It's reminding me of what we talked about in part one, with the tinnitus crowding everything out. That's kind of like pain. And then afterwards, the silence is kind of. You know, you almost can't recall what the pain was like. And the silence becomes a kind of numbness. I don't know. I want to. There's a better connection that I could be making there, or rather a more clear way, one, I think, between these two qualities. But I think they're all interrelated insofar as we can just say that our idea of pain, of emotional pain, probably only comes from our experience of physical pain, which is maybe. I don't know that I want to say that, but the words that we use, the fact that we would use pain for an emotional pain, which is something quite different from physical pain, almost seems to me then to be related to the idea of. I felt a funeral in my brain. And this. This contrast that we kept making in part one between the corporeal and the spiritual, or even like the vacuum of space, all this other stuff. Right. So I think that those two senses of pain. What I'm trying to say, those two senses of pain aren't really Interrelated. And it's important that maybe both readings kind of coexist here. 6:05 Wes: Yeah. 6:05 Erin: So we have the stiff heart questions, was it he that bore? So again, we have this idea of, you know, of death, right. Because the tombs, the idea of stillness, the still heart does not beat, the stiff heart doesn't beat. And so that's another further idea of this is almost physical pain resulting in death, some physical injury that's resulted in death, and now what's left over is just this deadened state. But I was interested because these two lines I'd never given much attention to, frankly. Was it he that bore in yesterday or centuries before? You know, it's a. It's talking about Christ's passion, right. Another one suffering as being maybe profound as that or joined to that. But on this reading, I was interested maybe in the idea of the formality inherent in this connection. Seeing oneself or trying to see oneself within a structure, the structure that Christ's Passion, say, for the Christian, tries to give to suffering an explanation, a sense of its purpose. So the idea of trying to use a structure to make sense of something, but one can't make sense of it. Trying to use a referent, a historical basis, some kind of reason, maybe even just why the suffering happens, you know, it happened because of this. Any kind of structure to try to make sense of something seems to me to be inherent in that idea of formal. 7:26 Wes: Right. 7:27 Erin: But when the thing is actually so, so painful that it obliterates reason, you know, the formality after the fact of trying to make sense of it has less and less purchase, which is, I think, why the speaker doesn't know, can't remember, you know, what's the difference between this historical person and me? Because the structure is all, all, all confused. 7:46 Wes: So the stiff heart questions, was it he that bore? What? Bore the sins of mankind? 7:55 Erin: Yeah. Or bore the pain of the Passion, if we want to say there's another. Right. 7:59 Wes: Was it he that suffered for us? 8:01 Erin: Yes. 8:02 Wes: Yeah. So I'm wondering, is the stiff heart doubting now? Is it having a crisis of faith, or is it trying to relocate pain right to Christ? Is it Christ's pain or is it my pain? 8:17 Erin: Yeah, I think it's both of those things. 8:19 Wes: And yesterday or centuries before, so we could see, you know, if the pain that she has experienced is something recent, as in yesterday. Then the question becomes, yeah, is this my pain that I felt yesterday and now that I'm numb to, or is it someone else's pain? Sort of a bit of identity diffusion here, or is It. Christ's pain, which is interesting because it goes along with. That's kind of part of how this numbness after great pain works. Right. It's almost like you're out of your body, you're disassociated, maybe, as you were pointing out. Yeah. It's hard to even remember what that pain exactly was like, and in what sense it's even one's own. So what's happening here? Does it become a. A vehicle to faith or a. It might be the opposite. Does it interfere with faith? I mean, it might be a vehicle to faith in the sense that you realize that the pain can be relocated to Christ. Right. And that if now that it's gone from me, the formal feeling could even be a religion. 9:23 Erin: Right. 9:23 Wes: The ceremonious feeling could be a religious feeling. But if it's a religious feeling, it's not a very passionate religious feeling. 9:30 Erin: Yeah. 9:31 Wes: I don't know. I'm thinking out loud here. I didn't quite understand this. 9:33 Erin: Yeah, no, I think that's all. I think that's all, really. 9:35 Wes: Right. 9:36 Erin: And I think that that passion. I think that, you know, she's placing passion and religion on opposite ends of the spectrum. Numbness and formality in religion, I think, are kind of going together in her little drawer here. And that's one of the reasons why this religious thought occurs in this numb, formal kind of mode. When we discuss 320, there's a certain slant of light. I read that poem as making reference to the stigmata and to this, you know, to further this idea of suffering joining with Christ's suffering. And the idea is that it's a. I don't know exactly how this works in the Protestant faith because it's quite different, because Catholics, because they believe in works, they believe that suffering can actually be transformative, that you can actually offer suffering for other people. All this other stuff that has to do with purgation and things that would not have a corollary here. So suffering is probably in Protestantism, just supposed to be instructive and unite you to Christ's suffering in some way. That is. Yeah. You're supposed to be able to understand something about what Christ did for you through. Through that experience of suffering that you kind of join with him in. And maybe. And maybe it'll also teach you something about yourself and the fact that the instructive quality has broken down here. Oh, when did that happen? Right. If I was supposed to learn a lesson from this, but I can't even remember what the point was, you know, What? I mean, like, there's some. Something is really broken down. And so I think that what she's trying to say, you know, maybe I'm reading the biography in here a little too much. Right. But we know that she was a sort of, at times almost anti Christian person, is that if we read pain and suffering through this formal lens, there's actually a diminishment. 11:15 Wes: I see what you're saying. It seems a little sacrilegious in the sense that she's identifying this relocation of pain and I suppose, guilt maybe to Christ's sacrifice. And in that sense, it's as if we're numbing ourselves. We're using religion to numb. It's the opiate of the masses. 11:33 Erin: Exactly, exactly. 11:34 Wes: She's a Marxist. 11:35 Erin: Yes. 11:37 Wes: Yeah. So it does. Yeah. You know, on reflection, just talking to you about this, it does seem like a bit of a critique. 11:44 Erin: Yeah, I think she's frequently doing that. 11:46 Wes: You know, I imagine her sitting in church and the formality of it and just being bored and being like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna write a poem about how much this sucks. 11:57 Erin: Yeah. 11:58 Wes: But specifically, it could be the funeral service, which also can be pretty boring, honestly. 12:04 Erin: Oh, of course, of course. And I think any of that, you know, any ritualistic funeral service, communal, religious, it's all kind of related to this critique because we wouldn't have those rituals and those funerals if it weren't for the religion undergirding it. Right. So it's all bad. It's all boring. 12:22 Wes: Can feel like it hasn't. It doesn't do justice to the real person because you have someone just reciting something or. Right. You know, hopefully you have a good eulogy or. 12:33 Erin: Yes. 12:34 Wes: People speaking in. Maybe in an impassioned way to the life of the person. But to the extent that there's a priest or someone like that giving a. I don't know what they give, what they give a sermon at a funeral or homily. But to the extent you hear them speak a little bit. Right. Some are good and some are not so good. Not every priest is such a good public speaker. And so it kind of mars the whole thing, in all honesty, in my experience. 13:04 Erin: That's right. You know, she frequently. Dickinson, in her poems, compares herself to a volcano. You know, Vesuvius at home is the famous title of Adrienne Rich's. Yeah. Like she. There's this one poem that I love called A Still Volcano Life, which is one of my favorite poems of hers, in which she says that a quiet earthquake style. Well, I'm not gonna get it right. But my nature is Vesuvian side. Naples. The north cannot detect. So anyway, she compares herself with the city south and northerners, not kind of understanding the sort of, you know, Vesuvian eruption that she has going on underneath the surface. And in moments like these, and talk of funerals like these. 13:41 Wes: I do declare. Right. 13:43 Erin: No, well, yes, a different kind of Southerner. But it always. I always think to myself, like, oh, what? Dickinson's whole mind would have been changed if she'd just been to one Italian funeral because there's so performative and ridiculous. Actually, they're not anymore since. Since people have been given drugs to sedate them at this point. But, you know, nothing ceremonious about watching your great aunt throw herself into a. Into a hole. 14:10 Wes: Right, right. 14:12 Erin: And people like literally tearing out their hair. Anyway, there was. See, that's why. That's. You know, that just really. It's silly that I even bring this up. However, I think that Dickinson is looking for that kind of thing. You know, she's comparing herself to this all the time because she's like, where's the real emotion? Where's. Where's the. She's sort of like this inner Italian who needs to. Or Mediterranean person who needs to have, you know, some sort of dramatic. 14:35 Wes: Or. 14:36 Erin: If we want to think of the American south, she's like, you know, she'd love Tennessee Williams. You know, she wants to just break out and go totally crazy and flip out. 14:43 Wes: Well, who wouldn't? She's in a very puritan New England environment, Right? 14:47 Erin: Yes. There was a second great awakening at the time, and the idea that she needed to make a profession of faith which was performative and perhaps somewhat emotional, which she refused to do. But that's, I think, a very different style of emotion than the one that she might be idealizing. 15:04 Wes: But she was religious ultimately, Is that right or. No? That's the impression I got. She wasn't. 15:09 Erin: No, I would say not. I would say very much not religious. I think she's anti Christian to the point of being. It looks like religion oftentimes because she's using it as something to kind of like, push off. I think she wishes. I think she wishes she could be religious. And she's oftentimes sacrilegious. It's complicated, but I think ultimately she abandons. She's really not a typical person of her era and her place in that regard. So it's strange sometimes to read some of the poems. 15:40 Wes: So the second stanza. Yeah, it sounds like she's become Like a puppet or a marionette. 15:47 Erin: Yeah, I like that. 15:49 Wes: The feet mechanic will go around a wooden way and then that way, you know, we go. It's ground or air or odd, I suppose. Odd as in anything. 16:00 Erin: Yeah, something else. Odd else. Something else. Yeah, I guess she misspells it. 16:05 Wes: Yeah, the wooden way or whatever it is that the feet are going to be on. It doesn't have to be ground, it could be air. It could be anything really. What does that mean? 16:15 Erin: Yeah, the wooden way. You know, I'm thinking again of the creaking across the floor, you know, the floorboards of a church maybe, or of a house. The round. I guess that would have to be a track. But it's also sort of. I'm thinking of her kind of going all the way around the world. You know, the circumference that she goes out upon in another poem. But the wooden way. I thought of wood because it's regardless grown. I don't know how to read that. But yeah, it could be wood or it could be ground or you could be walking on air or something else. It doesn't matter what you're walking on because you're not paying attention because you're not engaging with your surroundings. And then I thought of. Yeah, so the floor, whether you're inside or outside, there's a singularity into which everything is collapsed into sort of meaning meaninglessness. 17:04 Wes: Right. So there is no. In a sense, there is no ground. I mean one is numb and one is. Because become like a puppet devoid of emotion, devoid of subjectivity. And then there's also no firm ground on which one is moving. And then regardless groan, which is. I suppose we're taking that to be. Well, it may be refer to the contentment itself, I don't know. Or the wooden way. Regardless. Groan. A quartz contentment like a stone. Yeah. This kind of lifelessness and formal feeling have now become a kind of contentment. And regardless grown, regardless of where they come from. 17:45 Erin: Yeah, this pushes against the mechanical. So this is the surprise one feels when the seasons change or flowers grow or something like that. And you find still things are still going on even though you expect them to have stopped because you're numb to them. Maybe it's even the speaker herself who is growing and moving on without thinking it possible. But another thing I was thinking of actually with the feet mechanical go round. Of course, this movement should. Should have alerted me to it. Right. Maybe it's the hands of the clock going around. So the hour growing late, things, things going on, things getting, you know, the Hour growing, whatever the. The day growing dark. Something like that. And of course it's. It can also be feat. Of course, in a poem, gotta think of poetic feat. So she's still writing this poem somehow. And regardless the poem is growing, regardless of her pain, she's able to write. And what is it ought? Maybe it's the words, maybe it's the ink and paper or something like that. 18:47 Wes: Wow. Yeah, this is cool. 18:48 Erin: And to the mechanicalness though, and the provisional idea that it could be this or it could be that kind of butts up against the mechanical in that same way. I think maybe the jagged lines here. Right. Are kind of destroying the mechanics of a typical poem. Cause this is a very strange formal poem for what she's talking about. It starts with four lines of pentameter, so we almost think it's about to be a sonnet. There's 13 lines and it's not. And in the middle we get something that's almost like a ballad stanza, but broken. So we get 4, 2, 3, 2, 4 is the stress pattern over five lines. So it's not the typical four line ballad stanza, the common meter. And then the last stanza we get three, three, and then two lines of pentameter to ant. To end. So there's something really wonky about this middle stanza. And then the poem kind of like regains its footing at the end. So it's performing something. The mechanics she's talking about are actually breaking down. And that seems to me to be related to this idea that she can't find. She's just going through the motions. But actually, what is it? What's under her feet? What's going on? The feet are kind of. They're mechanical and yet tripping over themselves here in the middle. Just free associating here. 20:02 Wes: Yeah, Yeah. 20:03 Erin: I don't know if that's all right, but. 20:04 Wes: No, it's interesting to. Yeah. To associate it with the poem itself and the formality of the poem, the form of the poem and the question of whether it's mechanical or whether it rises to the level of expression. Right. Whether it's just nerves sitting ceremonious or whether some feeling is coming through it. But in any case, we get this quartz contentment as a correlate of the numbness that comes after pain. 20:33 Erin: I'm even wondering, looking at that first stanza, it occurs to me that there are lots of Latinate words in there and it's quite formal. So this middle stanza represents a real disturbance. And then quartz contentment on the outside. Quartz maybe. Does it look just like a regular stone. And it's when you break it that you discover that it has that kind of geode. 20:56 Wes: I'm not sure. I just think of it as looking like diamond, but I don't know. 21:01 Erin: Right. Cause it is itself quite beautiful. But if you get it just in a raw unbroken form, it can look like just a beautiful kind of milky rock. Is that right? 21:10 Wes: Right, Yeah, I mean I think it's milky. It looks kind of like you know, remember the original Superman where he his cave? 21:19 Erin: Yeah, yeah. 21:20 Wes: With all those. It's kind of like got a pillar like it's a bunch of like pillar like things clustered together. It's a really like a prototypical crystalline structure. That's what we're meant to think of as that crystalline structure. But yeah, it's some of it see through. It's not entirely necessarily see through, but I don't think it's like granite. I don't think it's like opaque rock on the outside. And then you break it open. As far as I know. I'm speculating. 21:46 Erin: No, you're right. I think it's. I was thinking it looks like a rock, but it looks like. Like it has that beautiful color but it's shaped like a rock. And then when you break it. I was, I was trying to connect this to There are two ripenings, A poem of hers where she talks about the maturing and the burr versus the outward maturing. So I thought something about like being split open. But yeah, it doesn't work. 22:06 Wes: I don't think it's like that, but I'm not entirely sure. But it is something. You know, crystalline structures are structures that grow too. 22:15 Erin: Oh, right, right. 22:17 Wes: And she would know that with her study of science. Yeah, they're almost like they're inorganic, but the way they grow and the way they work is a kind of proto organic in a weird way. It's like self organizing quality of crystals. 22:33 Erin: I see. I was really thinking of regardless grown in terms of what came above it. But of course grammatically in every other way it would refer to the quartz. The contentment. 22:44 Wes: Yeah, I mean I was thinking it could go either way. I was a little bit confused about that. But yeah, that's one possible reading is. Yeah. Contentment. Wherever it comes from, or whatever its grounds, you know, ground or air or oxygen, contentment is the outcome regardless of where it comes from. 22:59 Erin: Maybe quartz looking like ice, you know. So we could think of this as like an icy contentment, but it won't. But it's an ice that won't melt, it'll keep growing, you know, because contentment is such an odd word to use here because to be contented, you know, this is to be contented because you're dead and you don't care anymore, you know, which is not really contentment. So she's kind of using this in a slightly ironic and sort of sad way. So, yeah, thinking about that. Like an ice that doesn't melt, so it just stays or keeps growing and it's like this boxiness. The beauty of it is what I can't reckon with. So maybe it's this, you know, the iciness that we can make the connection to. Not quite beauty. 23:37 Wes: Yeah, I like this iciness. 23:39 Erin: Yeah. 23:40 Wes: I mean it's hard like a stone. It's crystalline. It's not entirely transparent, but it's not. So it's not entirely see through but of course it's not. Not completely opaque to light. But yeah, it conveys this sense of numbness has become hardness, but it's also contentment. She is a rock. She's an island. 24:05 Erin: Solitude. 24:06 Wes: Rock has no name. Is it? A rock has no name and an island never cries. 24:10 Erin: I don't know. 24:11 Wes: I mean, you can name your rock, right? I think they're wrong about that. 24:15 Erin: That's true. 24:16 Wes: Did the pet rock craze take off 24:17 Erin: right after that song? Little googly eyes on her piece of quartz. That's Emily. Yeah. No, then we get, you know, another thing I was thinking of just in terms of, you know, quartz and then stone and then lead. It seems like there's a progression happening there towards more and more bleakness. It seems like the growing, you know, which might be the quartz itself growing. I love that idea. The growing is sort of into more and more hardness and kind of. I mean, lead gets a bad rap. Lead is actually quite beautiful in its unmanipulated state. Right. In its more natural state. But the. 24:53 Wes: As long as it's not in your paint, then you're. It's great. 25:00 Erin: But it seems that there's a growing heaviness and also a growing portent in the progression from quartz to stone to lead. Words are kind of growing in the direction of the increasingly shut down, heavy, deathlike state. 25:19 Wes: Yeah. I mean we go from formality and nerves that are like tombs to a marionette which at least can still move. Right. It's a replica of a human being and it. In this wooden way. So we get these wood images and then suddenly it's stone or quartz, which is. It's not quite rock. But then suddenly we're at lead and then. Yeah. So we're making a descent here. 25:48 Erin: I like that. And tombs too. You know, I think of stone, obviously, but hollow. There's a middle cutout. But then we just get stone through and through. So there's almost like a merging of the body and the space inside the tomb with the quality of being dead itself. The whole thing becomes solid. It becomes. 26:07 Wes: Yeah. Lead is not crystalline. It's. Right. It doesn't have this replicated structure inside unless you go down to the atomic level or molecular level. And it's not transparent at all, obviously. And it's very dense and very heavy. So this is the hour of lead remembered if outlived. 26:26 Erin: I love that one. 26:27 Wes: Wow. As freezing persons recollect the snow from first chill, then stupor, then letting go. So suddenly someone's freezing to death. Do I have this right? 26:36 Erin: Yes. Yes. 26:37 Wes: And that's the image. Someone's freezing. 26:39 Erin: And I looked it up. These are, in fact, the stages of hypothermia. 26:41 Wes: Right. 26:42 Erin: So smart. Yeah. I love the remembered. If outlived. I love the conditional. If you even survive this, then here's what happens. Wow. So. So good. I love that line. And then these last two lines are probably my two favorite lines in Dickinson. I don't think anybody has written two better lines than these. Ha, ha. Anyway, I have goosebumps. 27:03 Wes: And that is true. They do say you at a certain point, don't. Supposedly you get some sort of euphoria right. Before you. Yes. 27:11 Erin: Before you die. 27:12 Wes: When you're freezing to death, or you just don't care. 27:14 Erin: Yeah. And you get really warm. Right. Because you take off everything because you get so warm after a while. That, too, I thought of not as anything like a primary or even a secondary reading, the letting go, the divesting oneself of clothes as a reaction to the cold, which is this incredibly amazing paradoxical phenomenon that happens. So I was just gonna say, isn't it, that when they find people who have died from freezing, they sometimes find them undressed? Am I making this up? 27:44 Wes: I mean. Yeah, I've heard this too. No, I think I've heard the same thing. Yeah. So she's comparing. So it's odd, right, because she's comparing. She wants to say that the hour of lead is, if you live beyond it, remembered as freezing persons. Remember the snow. But then she describes freezing persons actually dying. So, you know, I suppose if you were revived. Right. If you got to the point where you let go as a freezing person and then were revived, and then you said, tell me about how you recollect the snow freezing person, 28:21 Erin: and they would 28:22 Wes: say, oh, it's just like the hour of lead going backwards through. Right. Yeah. So what is she saying here? 28:30 Erin: Yeah, the letting go could be read as the thing that actually restores you. So this is. If you do outlive it somehow by letting go, you live through it. Right. Because that's actually the description of the being restored to life. There has to be in the parallel, there has to be the outliving. So the letting go somehow means at once restored to life and letting go of life. 28:58 Wes: Yeah. So it's another image of mourning, right? This letting go. 29:02 Erin: Yeah, but it's like the final mourning, because that you've gone through the mourning process and now you let go, even of the grief. 29:09 Wes: Mm. 29:10 Erin: I don't know. 29:14 Wes: Yeah, no, it's. It's really interesting because it. Yeah. It implies that. That outliving this hour of lead or outliving terrible pain and loss involves something analogous to the moment where you surrender to your impending death. Let's put it that way. 29:32 Erin: That's great. 29:33 Wes: Is this the five stages of grief? Is that what she's talking about? First you die in the snow, and then you. 29:40 Erin: Yeah. In your outside reading, did you see her little pamphlet, Grief and Hypothermia? A guide? 29:50 Wes: Right. This should be what they give you. Yeah. If you're going to Alaska. One of the pamphlets is how to Avoid Hypothermia. The other is Grief and Hypothermia. This is what you can make of it metaphorically. 30:07 Erin: The chapters are Chill, Stupor, and Letting Go. If you experience stupor, don't be disoriented. I'm preparing you for it. 30:19 Wes: So the way beyond the hour of lead is to let go. 30:23 Erin: But we haven't even talked about the craziest part of these two lines. As freezing persons recollect the snow, then why are they freezing? Are they freezing right now, remembering the thing that they're in right now? 30:36 Wes: Yeah. This is part of my confusion. 30:38 Erin: Did you already say this? 30:40 Wes: No, not exactly. Because it's not. It's not freezing persons ultimately. Right. First chill, then stupor. Stupor. And then letting go. It's as people who have frozen to death recollect the snow. That's the parallel. 30:53 Erin: Yes. You did say that, right? 30:55 Wes: Yeah. 30:56 Erin: The person who survived that, or their 30:58 Wes: person who almost froze to death. Yeah. And then you wake them up, but either way. 31:03 Erin: And then they're somehow still frozen. They're still freezing. This is. You know, the parallel to me now is I think I've even talked about this on the podcast before because, you know, I'm obsessed with people who get shipwrecked and have to survive on the ocean and they have to eat each other and et cetera, et cetera. When you go through that period of extreme starvation, you're hungry, like, for the rest of your life. 31:27 Wes: Oh, wow. 31:27 Erin: You can never. Yeah. This is a phenomenon that if you starve long enough, and they have recorded cases of this, that people were stockpiling food after these experiences for the rest of their lives, no matter how much they ate, they could never get hungry. It was like the body just got used to this starvation. If it's long enough, I think the body learns that you might at any moment be subject to this again, that it actually, like, burns. You know, you eat and eat and eat. And they never got fat from it, and they were always, always hungry. And so there's something. I wonder if there's something about this here where, like, okay, it's a person who survived almost freezing to death, and that makes them freezing for the rest of their lives. They've seen something. They've been almost on the other side or, you know, and now their permanent state is kind of being freezing. 32:16 Wes: Well, yeah, if the freezing is permanent. Right. That seems kind of a bleak end to this, because in a way, this is all about being frozen in the wake of pain. But a more optimistic reading is that one can get beyond the point of freezing by letting go. 32:33 Erin: How does recollection work, then? Because, you know, we could put pressure on each one of these words. So interesting. Does the recollection cause the freezing? So if we've let go, is recollection possible, or is it, at the very least, dangerous? And can the danger of recollection result in the freezing? There's almost cart before the horse in the line here because they're recollecting the snow, they're back to freezing again. So it's like a circularity that. You know what I'm saying? Because you've let it go, it should be out of you. But then if you recollect it, you get freezing again, and you have to go through the cycle of letting it go. 33:10 Wes: Okay, so here's the way I'm reading it. So suppose you did almost freeze to death and you had that experience of letting go and getting naked. I'm so warm. I feel amazing just doing snow angels right as you're about to die, and then they find you naked in a snow angel, which is really embarrassing. I don't know. How you would ever live beyond that? Frankly, I'd kill myself. Supposing you got over the embarrassment, then how would you remember the snow from that memory? What would you think of when you thought of the snow? Would you think of, oh, oh yeah, I don't ever want to be around snow again because that was freezing. Or would you think of the euphoric moment or the moment of letting go? Would you think of it? Would you associate snow with giving in to that moment of death and accepting it and no longer fearing it? If it's the second, then that's the way. I suppose the more optimistic reading of this is that this is the way once you get through the hour of lead, which almost, almost kills you, but if you can get through it without it killing you, then you will no longer be numb, you will no longer be frozen. What you will remember about it is that you gave. In some sense, you gave in, you gave up to the possibility of it destroying you. But it didn't. And I mean, you remember almost being destroyed, but the significance of it is not, oh, I had a near death experience, it's I accepted the possibility of death and now I have that as a memory. 34:42 Erin: Huh, I like that. I think too about this may be a stupid connection. You know, how relatively easy it is. I'm putting this in air quotes. Give up an addiction to a substance that you don't need to live on. But how difficult it is, for instance, to overcome addictions to food, which you do need. You can't give up food cold turkey to get over an addiction. Right? Well, if you live in New England, you can't really give up snow cold turkey, can you? So there's something about, there's something about death and the cyclical nature. Things like this are going to happen to you again and again. That seems to be important. The cycle, the cyclical part. In terms of the year, it's the winter when it'll snow again and you'll get triggered remembering the time that you were found in a snow angel. But also people will keep dying. It's going to keep happening. You know what I'm saying? So the confrontation is repeatable. It's repeated. 35:34 Wes: Yeah. This isn't the only loss or moment of great pain you're going to experience in life. It's going to happen again. 35:39 Erin: Is that what yes. 35:40 Wes: You're saying? And when it comes to you. Yeah. This memory that you've had of it almost killing you, but not. And the acceptance of that becomes a new. That's, you know, you can look at future moments of pain, of great pain through that lens, or it informs the way you experience future moments of great pain. Maybe. 36:02 Erin: Yeah. And I like the idea that it's such a, you know, almost freezing to death. That's such an exceptional experience. So I like the fact that there's this. It gets at the exceptional nature of any great pain, which feels as though it is this thing that only happens to one in millions of people. That they would be on the brink of that kind of death and be saved from it somehow is an exceptional experience. And yet it's talking about something in a language of snow. We all understand hypothermia, even if we haven't experienced it. And most of us have seen snow. And we're all reading this poem, understanding something about this pain in our own. You know what I mean? It gets at that sense in which grief makes you feel exceptional, in that nobody has ever experienced this, and yet it's intensely common. It's what it means to be a human. 36:54 Wes: I live in Boston, so I have to let go every time I leave the apartment. Yep, it's freezing. I'm gonna die. It's cost of doing business. No, but yeah. Yeah, I like that. 37:07 Erin: Okay, so I think we'll end part two there. We're gonna do two more episodes on Dickinson. Maybe more if we really get addicted. 37:15 Wes: One more recording. Two more parts. 37:16 Erin: Two more parts. That's right. In part three, we're gonna cover number 320. There's a certain slant of light speaking of snow in Boston and affliction. And then we will, in part four, cover number 477. He fumbles at your soul. I think a good way to end with a crazy sonnet. All right, thank you, Wes. 37:37 Wes: Thank you. 37:40 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook, subtextpodcast, and on Twitter enjoysubtext.