“Where the Meanings Are” – Four Poems by Emily Dickinson – Part 3

Erin & Wes 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. Upcoming Episodes: “Rosemary’s Baby,” Yeats (“Sailing to Byzantium” and “Leda and the Swan”). 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: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Okay, welcome to part three of our four part discussion of the poems of Emily Dickinson. In parts one and two, we discussed I felt a funeral in my brain, and after great pain a formal feeling comes respectively. And today we're doing number 320. There's a certain slant of light. All right, I'll read it. Let's dive right in. 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 seal despair, an imperial affliction sent us of the air when it comes, the landscape listens. Shadows hold their breath when it goes. Tis like the distance on the look of death. Well, none may teach it any sort of. So I guess we'll never really know what this is, but I'm feeling like this is the wrong poem to be covering today because it is March 25th. In Salt Lake City. We had a snowstorm last week. Today it is 72 degrees and sunny and gorgeous. 1:50 Wes: Oh, wow. 1:51 Erin: So I'm going to have to activate my mind of winter to bring in another poet to try and get in the mood for this here. But I do think this is describing a very specific New England phenomenon here. This particular slant of light or maybe, maybe the whole northeast. I don't know. I don't want to. I don't want to limit it geographically, but I do think in the north, that particular slant of light that she's talking about on those days where it's so too cold to snow. Right. That expression. I don't know if you're familiar with this. 2:22 Wes: It's not happening in Cancun. 2:24 Erin: Exactly. Exactly. 2:26 Wes: So, yeah, so the sun is. It's winter. So the sun is lower in the sky and obviously not up for as long. And it's that, you know. I know, exactly. It's hard to describe, but it's, you know, you kind of know exactly what she's talking about. It's that quality of winter light in Boston, you know, it's the slant of light that goes straight into your eye. 2:46 Erin: Yes. 2:46 Wes: When you're walking down the street in winter, it's just like the glare because the sun is so low in the sky. 2:51 Erin: This is exactly I think what I wrote in here, what I want to talk about, the idea that it is blinding because of that particular angle. We don't get it here in Salt Lake. It's. You know, this is really. Despite the copious amounts of snow in the winter, this is still high desert. So we get a really nice, much fuller sunshine. So I do think it's peculiar to the Northeast in the US Maybe other places in the world, but I don't know. And maybe like the Great Plains. 3:20 Wes: I bought polarized sunglasses just because of that. Like driving south in Boston because the. The sun is arcing in the southern sky and low in the sky. It's brutal. 3:31 Erin: It is. 3:32 Wes: She doesn't mention the sunglasses, but that might help. 3:36 Erin: That's 321. There's a certain slant of light for which I bought polarized lenses. That sounds like a beginning of a. 3:44 Wes: Off of zenny.com. yeah, she's frugal. I sort of think of the slant of the shaft of light that comes into a room as well, that you sort of see in the dust. Right. As it slants in through a window. That's the other association I make. So it's interesting because light should be warm, obviously, but it's almost like a icicle or something winterly that the light is doing. 4:11 Erin: I'm thinking of quartz contentment that we talked about last time. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. That's the peculiar thing. I think about this light on days when it's cloudy in winter in New England, it's usually not as cold as those days where it's clear and there is sunshine. But it's that kind of incredibly. I don't know, maybe the clouds are insulating the. The landscape or something. At least they are in my imagination. And when it's clear and the light comes in, it really is. It's like this beam of freezing cold. It's very strange. But I like what you point out about being blinded, because this is exactly what I thought of and I thought the light that oppresses like the heft of cathedral tunes. I'm thinking of something that obliterates the self. We're blinded, so we kind of can't see. And in that same way the cathedral tunes A cathedral in Salt Lake. I don't know why I'm bringing back so many things to personal experience. I'm sorry to the listeners, but we have this really big, famous organ in the cathedral and we have very frequent organ recitals at my parish here. And when it's playing really, really loudly, it's this transcendent experience where you feel. Yeah. You can't move or think. It's just crowding everything else out. So that connection that she makes to me is really, really true and related to this idea that it is at that angle that blinds you and makes it so that you can. We can't really function outside. 5:39 Wes: Right. So she gives us a nice paradoxical image of light not only weighing something, but having a heft. A heft that's oppressive, that weighs down on us. Right. So light should be warm, but it's cold, in a sense. Even though she doesn't say that it should be. Light should be. Light should not be heavy. But it's. But it's heavy. And then we get the association to. Or the comparison to cathedral tunes. So now we're on a spiritual jag, maybe. No religious jag. And it. You know, one might think that light as something intangible and something associated with the divine. Right. And there have been various associations with the divine, is something that might uplift you and warm you and put you in touch with the divine. But here it's a. It's oppressive. We're getting a bit of a critique, it sounds like, of religion as well. 6:32 Erin: Yeah. Both the tunes and the light are sent us of the air. 6:37 Wes: Right. 6:37 Erin: As she says in the third stanza. So there's this strange heft, this strange weight, which she's associating with the Light and the Cathedral tunes, which I think is related to what she would describe as this oppression of religion, this faith being this thing that has no. By definition, it has no real substance. You have to believe in something that you can't see. In this instance, there are sound waves and there are. It's visible. So it's more than. I guess, more than faith. But it's. Yeah. As the representatives or the ways in which faith is typically portrayed in, say, painting of a beam of light coming and hitting, you know, the head of a saint or something like that, is what I think of. It's described as oppressive. What's maybe interesting or slightly more complicated about that is the fact that. That Dickinson so often writes in common meter. And common meter is the meter of pretty much any hymn. Most of the religious tunes that you would hear in a church at that time would be in common meter. And so she is herself writing in the tune that you would hear in a cathedral. It changes. We get the typical 4, 3, 4, 3 stanza in the first and fourth stanzas, but the middle two, they're shorter, they're a little truncated. So we Get a three, three in the middle. But I wonder about that. I wonder if this is a bit of a self critique as well, or a slight wink to us. 8:03 Wes: Interesting. So a heavenly hurt. Yeah. What is that about? 8:07 Erin: Yeah, I read this as being. I don't know if there's another way to read this. The stigmata. I'm thinking about the stigmata for people that don't know. I feel like probably everybody does. But the wounds of Christ, particularly on his hands, the nail wounds, and sometimes on the feet, and sometimes in the form of wounds that the crown of thorns might have created on the, on the scalp or in the forehead, have sometimes appeared on people. Several saints in the Catholic Church received the stigmata. But receiving the stigmata does not itself guarantee any kind of canonization. And in fact there have been instances of this that have been faked and things like that. So the church is actually quite wary of it, I think. But Saint Faustina, Saint Catherine of Siena, famously Saint Francis, you could see in the Giotto frescoes his stigmata. And in the 20th century, someone like Padre Pio received the stigmata. And that's associated usually with ecstasy and with this idea of truly joining with the suffering of Christ. So the evident, sometimes actually they get. I've heard of invisible stigmatas in the past, but for the most part they are evident. And the scar, if you will, is right there. Sometimes it bleeds actively, sometimes it doesn't. I know in certain miraculous occasions, I mean, it is itself. If it's legitimate, of course, according to the church, then the church sees it as a miracle. But sometimes it smells sweetly, sometimes it'll smell of flowers, but yeah, a visible sign that these pious people are really participating in a very literal and active way in the suffering of Christ's passion. This is sort of an inside out stigmata, it seems to me. It's interior, so we could find no evidence of it on the outside, but it creates an internal difference. And rather than increasing faith or having a redemptive function, this just brings despair. So it's almost a satanic stigmata, if you like, and natural and related to New England winters. 10:17 Wes: So, yeah, so light comes in, bypasses the polarized sunglasses, penetrates us, I guess. It doesn't have to be the eyes that it penetrates. And of course the stigmata points us to the hands. But anyway, so it penetrates us, but it doesn't leave a scar. And I suppose a scar would be an indication of atonement in a way, a sign of atonement. What do stigmata represent? Christ's sacrifice his atonement for our sins. It's the aftermath, of course, of an act of suffering. But, yeah. Do you have anything more to say about that? 10:55 Erin: So this is related to the idea in Catholicism that suffering is actually transformative and that you can also offer your suffering up because everyone is part of the body of Christ. You could actually offer your suffering up for someone else to help alleviate their suffering. So you don't have to have a stigmata to do this. The idea is, I don't know, if you're Wes and you're recording a podcast with Erin, and you could say, oh, God, this is gonna be such suffering. I'm gonna offer this up today for the sake of, you know, the soul's in purgatory or for the sake of my friend who is going through a hard time or something like that, because this is, you know, true suffering. So. And the idea is that this can be. This could be redemptive in this way. It also can purify you, the suffering, if you. So I don't know if that answers your question, but that's the. It's not just supposed to be like, oh, I'm like a Pharisee, you know, publicly performing a lot of, you know, the point isn't that you're wearing the hair shirt and going around going, oh, my God, I have this, you know, this stigmata. In fact, most people, you know, they have. They cover it up. They. They don't display it so that everybody knows how sort of pious they are. Right. Yeah. So it's not so much about this visibility per se, though it is also usually visible in this really obvious way. Padre Pio wore gloves to try and cover it, but you can see it in certain pictures because it was actively bleeding. So sometimes you see bandages on his hands with. Yeah, like. Like a bleeding through that he had to keep changing. 12:25 Wes: So normally I. I suppose. Here's the way I think about it. Leaving aside the divine, we feel the sting of conscience. We do something wrong or sinful, you might call it, and if we are hurt by that, then it, you know, it could be the sting of conscience. It could be sanctioned from the community. And then I suppose if there's atonement, right, it might lead to some kind of change. Ideally, the herd is going to lead to some sort of change. As you. I think you pointed out in the case of the divine and Christ in particular, the wrongs are too great. We can't atone for them on our own. Christ has to do it for us. And I suppose so the weight of guilt is too heavy or human nature is such that there's no full atonement to be made. I'm not sure. But, yeah, I guess I'm trying to puzzle out this idea that the normal narratives. We do bad things and then heaven helps us out. 13:19 Erin: Yes. 13:20 Wes: Alleviates some of our guilt, but in this case, heaven is hurting us. And so I'm trying to figure out what that means. And so the slant of light might be like the slant of conscience, the light that exposes the thing that we've done and then hurts us. And if we can't find a scar, it sounds like we're not finding any permanent change that might come from atonement until we get to the next two lines, which are a bit cryptic. Right. We get internal difference where the meanings are, which I'm sure postmodernists and post structuralists have loved these two lines and made lots of them. Right. The post structuralist idea that meaning just is difference. So, yeah, we can get into what internal differences. So if there's any redemption here, it's in this internal difference where the meanings are. But, yeah. Do you see what I'm saying? 14:14 Erin: Yes. Yeah. And this is why I think I immediately go to the stigmata. Because what she does is locates God or the heavens as the origin of both good and evil here and. And the heavenly hurt. So the stigmata is something that it's typically. I think. I'm sorry, but like, real theologians who are gonna be listening to this, I'm probably getting some of this stuff wrong, but I believe that it has to be asked for on the part of the stigmata bearer. It's not usually given. You know, it's this really crazy niche form of suffering. 14:51 Wes: Right. 14:51 Erin: And I also hesitate to. I mean, she's obviously referencing the stigmata here, but she's also not a Catholic. How this would line up with the faith tradition in which she was steeped as a child is unclear to me. Of course she would know about the stigmata. But the idea is just what is maybe a bit sacrilegious or a critique about this is she's saying that these things come from God that locates evil and good with God in a way that is not applicable to the stigmata, where she's using this image to make a larger point about the fact that God is this, at best, this vengeful God who gives us these afflictions to test us or to purify us or whatever you want to say. And at worst, he's both God and the Devil. 15:38 Wes: Right. 15:39 Erin: Like torturing us. And I mean, there isn't even an alternative here. There isn't anything good. I don't think that comes. That comes from God in this poem, because it's just about this land of light. 15:48 Wes: Yeah. So one might accuse religion of. Of making us guilty, as Nietzsche would put it, giving us bad conscience. That religion inflicts that on us and inflicts a certain kind of pathological value system on us. A certain version of morality that's not good for us, which would again, line up the slant of light with the sting of conscience. But if we think we need a conscience, which I think we do. So one can read this as saying, well, well, heaven is this origin of the norms that have normative authority that will lead us to have something to feel guilty about if we violate those norms. It could be something very straightforward like that. Or it could be this critique where. In other words, one could give a reading of this where it's neutral to the role of religion and it just describes something almost metaphysical or structural. It needs to happen if there are to be norms and how guilt is related to norms and things like that and involves some relation to the divine. Or one might read this and say, okay, this is a critique of religion as inducing in us bad conscience. I mean, the upside here is what do we make of internal difference where the meanings are. Internal difference does. Well, it could suggest that it just produces internal conflict, and maybe that's guilt. But one might also think of internal difference as kind of the dialectical driver of change. And then where the meanings are. Seems to be positive. 17:21 Erin: That's true. I didn't think about the positive valence of this. I mean, I suppose any injury which then results in a scar would be, on the one hand, negative because of the fact that there's been an injury that's harmed our wholeness in some way. On the other hand, scar is indicative of something that was survived and also of something that's been healed. 17:46 Wes: Right. 17:46 Erin: It's not an open wound. I didn't think about this because I just think about her critique of religion. Really? 17:51 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think we. So we find no scar because it's not. It's on the inside. It's spiritual rather than physical light. Right. The light goes right into us. But then the other part of this is scar tissue is sort of. Of static and it's grown over. Right. And it's still somewhat painful. Whereas internal difference, where the meanings are, sounds a little bit more dynamic and alive. Whether or not we give this a You know, a darker reading or a lighter. 18:22 Erin: Sure. 18:22 Wes: You know, I don't know whether to interpret this as positive or negative or both, but. Right, yeah. Internal difference could just be guilt and internal conflict. And then in that case, where the meanings are. Well, yeah. What do we make of them? Here's one way to think about it. It's just that we think about it psychologically. So again, going to Nietzsche here, conscience just is the thing, the reason why we can't get rid of it. It is just the thing that gives us a soul, or this is the thing that gives us a psyche because it carves out that terrain. If we simply discharge all of our instincts, our impulses, and do violent or sexual things or whatever, discharge it into the environment, then we don't. Nothing gets turned inward. And therefore the domain of the soul is not carved out of that rock. We really have to have our impulses turned back on ourselves in order to produce not just conscience but consciousness, humanness. So to be human as we know it would require this sort of dynamic of conscience, which would explain why that's the place where the meanings are. So one reading of this is just that this is what's required to even have a soul, this sort of relationship to the divine. And even Nietzsche acknowledges this. It's not like we can go back and say, oh, we're going to get rid of conscience. We can't do that. 19:42 Erin: I was thinking of this in terms of the fact that she seems to be investing this light with this meaning. Right. She's projecting something onto the landscape which she's sort of saying isn't really there. Right. If we're interpreting this light as, say, a divine messenger, she's sort of at the same time toying with this idea and saying, well, it's only we who invest that light with that kind of metaphoric significance, and therefore the only meaning is within us, really. I don't know if that's related somehow ultimately to this idea of conscience and the idea that we're simply interpreting. I mean, this is nature versus maybe like conscience more involves or more regularly involves things we do to other people who themselves have their own inner meanings. But, yeah, something about how it's only in the self is the reality or the subjectivity which is then cast on the landscape and interpreting, so projected. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 20:40 Wes: If one were an error theorist or nihilist about morality and there are no objectives, external moral norms, then that would be what one might say. Right. Is that the idea? There's a nihilistic possibility here. So we Create these meanings and we create normative meanings, but it doesn't map on anything. 21:00 Erin: Right. Well, in this word projection, you know, one sees the light kind of from within us going outwards. You know, it seems like actually the inverse of the slant of light coming in into us. You know, we're the ones who are casting the light of meaning onto the landscape. 21:14 Wes: Yeah. So we fantasize the divine and if we're giving it a religious reading, we can give it a lot of different readings. A religious reading. I think of the light as like a laser that penetrates us. And I was associating it to the sting of conscience. And that's, you know, it's a very specific way of looking at this. There are other ways, I think, but. And yet you could see that as the divine being the source of the normative on one level. But then she might be challenging that very notion, as you point out. And you reverse that and you say, well, the divine is our invention and we do this to ourselves and it's just a way of giving ourselves a metaphysical source for the guilt, Creating the problem and then solving it in the same stroke. This is again another Nietzsche. Right. We create the problem of guilt and then with the divine and then. And use the divine also to solve that problem. 22:06 Erin: Ah, how clever of us. 22:10 Wes: And I think, yeah, you know, conscience. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, but concepts of empathy are very. We're doing this on the Partially Examined Life right now. Empathy is a very difficult concept to understand. We have this access to other people's mental life and we can sympathize with it, commiserate or rejoice in their joy. But that doesn't mean that we are simply taking on their feelings or simulating someone else's feelings. We preserve the independence of the other. There's something essentially non egoistic about our involvement with other people. So if we care about someone, it doesn't reduce to egoism. It's not like if you're in pain and I'm concerned about that, it's me. Right. It's reducible to my pain. Oh, I'm in pain because you're in pain. And then all I'm ever reacting to is my own pain. Phenomenologists like the German philosopher Max Scheler, very convincing, who's by the way, a Christian as well. 23:06 Erin: They all became eventually all the phenomenologists. 23:09 Wes: Right. Edith Stein, she was Jewish and then Christian. Yeah. So very convincing arguments that there's this, there's something that's irreducible. The simple egoism in us, where we have access to other people's pain, suffering and pleasure, joy, and we can care about it without it being reducible to our own egoism. And the same thing with conscience, where so we don't not do bad things because we're afraid of the sting of conscience. Ooh, I'm going to feel pain afterwards. Because we wouldn't feel that sting of conscience if the norm didn't have authority in the first place. The authoritativeness of the norm cannot be reduced to psychology. Psychology follows on the authoritative norm of the norm. So if I ought not to harm someone, then the sting of conscience and the guilt that follows only follows if I comprehend that norm as authoritative. It doesn't explain the authoritativeness of the norm. It doesn't explain what's right or wrong. Anyway, I'm leading us a little bit off the beaten path here. 24:13 Erin: No, I love it. 24:13 Wes: Yeah, it's salient in the sense that it seems like the question that she might be getting at is how it is that we source the normative and whether it's coming in as a slant of light or if that's just a kind of myth, are we going to be nihilists about this? In other words, are we going to accept some non nihilistic explanation, whether that's religion or something else? 24:37 Erin: Well, does then the third stanza settle the question? Is despair the result of this? Is that something that can come from within us or is that a. You know, so we have this idea of the imperial affliction and despair seems to me to be. Well, actually maybe this does play into your point. The sacrilegious part of this is the idea that despair, or sort of turning one's back on God is a thing that can be sent from God himself. Perhaps this is a further teasing out of what you're describing, which is this idea that something about the oppression with which we incept ourselves or something, or our projection of God then causes us to turn away almost the inside out idea of the Nietzsche thing like we have the guilt and then also the way to alleviate the guilt. Here we have the God who's supposed to be the merciful God, but also the despair, the turning away from that mercy. Is that right? 25:35 Wes: Yeah, I mean, that's possible. Let me just think out loud about this a little bit, uncle here. Right now, none may teach it anything. Okay, so which means it can't be changed. There's no teaching that will get us away from this hurt, this heavenly hurt. And this is true, right? We could be moral nihilists if we want to, at a theoretical level. But most people are possessed by the normative, by morality in a way that. That is involuntary. It's not going to be simply the case that they stop thinking, thinking things are right and wrong. Or let's just put it more ordinarily. Good luck getting rid of your conscience and your guilt, right? If you have that, even if you go to therapy for 100 years, it's not going to turn you into a sociopath. Hopefully you get rid of some of the excess guilt that you shouldn't, you know, that you're carrying around. But we're all, unless we're sociopaths, we're all, as socialized beings, going to have that. So none may teach it anything. Some level of guilt is ineradicable. And then that's. So that's what I take to be the imperial affliction. The divine is. What's. This is part of her reversal, right? The divine is what's responsible for guilt. The happier picture is that the divine is what can alleviate our guilt because it gets displaced onto Christ. God takes on the punishment in a way, because there's nothing that we could ever do to atonement, atone. It's too big a burden for us to atone for. We need the divine figure himself to atone for this type of burden. So, you know, we are. We're in God's image. We're quasi divine. We have the power to earn judgment, but not to atone for it. So anyways, so yeah, that's what I take the imperial affliction to be. And the seal, despair, I guess the seal is supposed to be, right. It's stamped on permanently. Despair is stamped on us permanently, despite the fact that it's sent us of the air. So again, we get this nice contrast between the light and the airy and the intangible and the very, very concrete thing that it does to us. And again, we can say the same thing of conscience as something that's product of the social right. And this is where you might think of difference again, as the difference of the other and the community of others come together, right? In a way, if one is going to be a sociologist about it, norms arise out of that. So I guess when I'm just trying to reinforce the point that there's something very intangible about the whole idea of norms, good and bad, morality, conscience, all of those things, they. They are untouchable, but at the level of human character, right, they're still intangible technically, but there's or let's just think about it in terms of our own suffering and our own inner lives. Maybe, let's put it that way. We feel them very acutely. Right. They weigh on us, they have a heft. The norms are intangible, but what they do to us are very real and concrete from our own subjective perspective. 28:43 Erin: I love all of this, but I'm really struggling to keep up because none of this occurred to me as I moved. You know, I have a very different reading of this. 28:50 Wes: Yeah, no, and I. I should say, yeah, this is me doing my very. Once I get focused on an idea, I can't stop. And then everything. I just look at it through the lens of that idea. So. 29:00 Erin: Well, no, I love it. It's far more interesting. 29:02 Wes: The listeners should take everything I say with a huge grain of salt. 29:07 Erin: It's far more interesting than what I. The reading I had, which is of the stanza, which is just the kind of within the universe of the things we were already talking about in the previous parts. So, you know, none may teach it any. This idea that the. Of the instructive connected back to. Was it he that bore in after great pain? Right. The idea that the oppressions of ritual are actually somehow anti. Instructive that it's turned in on itself. Because I think we talked about the fact that with pain there's the obliteration of the answer, the ability to take a lesson from it. So what should be instructive? The pain that should be instructive, that should unite us to Christ is actually causing the. The inverse of that is actually obliterating the consciousness in some crucial way. And then I had this really, what I thought was this really sophisticated, far out reading of this stanza, which is nowhere near as sophisticated as yours. And now I'm a little embarrassed of it. I thought, you know, the seal, I was teasing this out. The seal that brands us, the stigmata like quality of that sealing the coffin. And then, you know, I'm just free associating. And then I thought the seal sent us of the air. I was like, oh, does this have to do with mail? And I wanted to get back to, you know, I was like, oh, this is the Civil War angle. This is the Civil War reading. 30:23 Wes: Oh, I thought you were going to say like seals with like the flippers. 30:27 Erin: Yes, loose seals. Yeah, the seal. 30:31 Wes: That's right. 30:32 Erin: The seal sent us of the air is when we. 30:34 Wes: I had a pet seal named Despair. 30:37 Erin: When we play the. Oh, gosh, what is it called? The grabby game. That's the seal Sent us of the air that we get for army. Oh, for marksmanship. Anyway, an affliction sent us of the air like mail, like news of the dead and the Civil War. This is really bad. I'm sorry. 30:56 Wes: Well, is that. No, I mean, this is. 30:58 Erin: Because then you get news that somebody in your family's been killed and it's the Civil War. It's like airmail seal, the seal of the government, saying, anyway, I hate myself. Okay. 31:14 Wes: No, no, this is interesting. Well, before we get to the fourth stanza, I'll just say one more thing about Imperial Affliction. And just thinking of it psychoanalytically often our. And again, just kind of still riding this guilt horse interpretation I'm doing. When we are particularly guilty in attacking ourselves, it represents an attachment, according to Freud, to an ideal other and a perfect other. And what we do is we're in denial. We maintain our connection to the ideal by being in denial of its imperfections and flaws. And then we identify with the bad and then attack ourselves as if we were the bad. So in other words, we feel guilty because God is disappointing. What we really want to do is accuse God like Job and say, why are you making me suffer so much? But instead we just inflict more suffering on ourselves and tell ourselves that we deserve it, beat ourselves up. So for people who are depressed, for instance, there's often a kind of grandiose layer underneath the self attack. There's an attachment to an idea of self and other which are more perfect. And so one might accuse religion of being in this domain of a grandiose, perfect relationship between this perfect divine parent who has done no wrong, and me, the one who can be perfected through forgiveness from this divine figure and purified by that. But in the meantime, the way I maintain that connection is to do this very opposite thing, which is to treat myself as. As evil and attack myself and feel guilty and. And all that. So I thought the phrase imperial Affliction captures that very nicely. Of course, she's talking about, right, the ray of light that comes from God in a way. And that's why it's the Imperial Affliction. And that's the way I would unfold that. 33:13 Erin: Or it could be news from the US Government, sent by mail. No, I think actually this perfectly leads into my reading of the fourth stanza. I hope I'm going to try and think on my feet and make this connection. But we have in the fourth stanza a sort of recapitulation of the whole life cycle, of the light which was with us for the first three stanzas, and then we have the. When it comes and then when it goes, whereas the previous are describing when it's here. But the shadows hold their breath. I thought of. I think it's number 407. One need not be a chamber to be haunted, which is one of the poems in which she describes an assassin. And the assassin hid in our apartment. And so there's a scary moment of being locked in with the assassin, or the idea of hiding from an assassin, which I think is related to this. The landscape, listens, the shadow, hold their breath. You know, the slant of light is this killer that's coming in to get us. And everybody's sort of frozen or playing dead or hiding or something. And what happens in that poem, as I said, is that it turns out the assassin is some part of us. Because the thing that the assassin is inside is the body or the mind. And I think this is actually. This is then related to this whole idea of conscience and the idea of the call coming from inside the house. Right. I'm trying to make the connection. I'm doing a bad job. But I think if that's the way we want to read this, it's related to what you're talking about, if I'm not mistaken. 34:40 Wes: Yeah. I think this is one way of reading. I mean, you could, you know, not knowing anything about Dickinson's relationship with religion, you can read it in the nihilistic or religiously skeptical way, or you can read this in a way that's consistent with being religious. Right. Am I too optimistic about that? 34:58 Erin: I think you're too optimistic about her religion. 35:03 Wes: You know, this stanza reminded me of Genesis a little bit for some reason. And the idea of God arriving on the scene, and Adam and Eve realize they're naked. They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze. And the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. I think I make the association because it's almost as if God is the breeze. And there's something. Something about. I think here it's like God is such a presence. And believe me, this is just completely free association. I'm not making any solid claims, but my own personal, free associations to the stanza. It's the idea that when God does come to Earth, in whatever form he comes, whether that's literally. If he's literally coming down to talk to Adam and Eve, or if it's just conscience, or if it's inspiration or something to do with faith. How? However you want to think about it. His presence is so potent that the landscape is personified. It becomes animated. Right. Shadows hold their breath. The landscape listens. It's as if the earth now is so alive because God's presence is so potent, even the rocks are scared. Something like that. So if we want to give this a reading in terms of conscience again, when conscience arrives, there's nothing that can escape. It almost gets to us at a physical level. It's there in the body. Even the body listens to it. Shadows hold their breath. Wow, that's a great line. 36:35 Erin: Yeah. 36:35 Wes: Because the shadow of the thing is not even the thing. Right. Maybe. Am I so guilty? Do I feel so guilty that even my shadow feels guilty? 36:45 Erin: Is that how bad it is? 36:48 Wes: That kind of thing, you know? 36:51 Erin: Do we take this to mean, literally speaking, do we take this to mean that the shadows, how are they holding their breath? I mean, is this describing a lengthening? Or is it describing the fact that the shadows, when they hold their breath, they disappear for a second, in which case they're gone. They don't exist. They hold their breath and they destroy themselves momentarily. They black out. 37:13 Wes: Yeah. 37:14 Erin: Except they white out. They don't, you know, there's no shadow. 37:19 Wes: Yeah. It's light that casts a shadow. Right. So the light hits us. The shadow should be there. And in this case. Well, if the beam of light is just penetrating into us and becoming the imperial affliction, then why wouldn't the shadows go away? Of course, maybe all the light goes into us and there's no extra. Right, the shadow. The shadow depends on the light being present in some places and then not in others. But in a way, we humans might be a lightning, kind of lightning rod that attracts all the light, in a sense, in which case the shadows would vanish entirely. 37:53 Erin: The coming of the light, I'm imagining at the moment that it happens, the shadows are lengthening on the ground. Right. If we imagine, say, the clouds parting for a second and the light coming in and the shadows suddenly grow. To me, that's taking a breath. No, I mean, you can picture this multiple different ways. I love the idea of the shadows holding their breath. It's brilliant. And I think that implies kind of like standing still, as I'm describing with the assassin thing. 38:22 Wes: Yep. I like that. Yeah. So we have different readings. In one of them, the shadows are personified and they're having an emotional response. In another, they're just disappearing. Maybe because. Right. All of the light goes into its object and there's none to serve as A foreground or, you know, and then in this last one, they stop moving, Right? Yeah. With time, it's like time stops, time stands still. 38:50 Erin: Yeah. And then when it. When it goes to, like the distance on the look of death, I thought of the. Again, this is. That's why I was reading some Civil War stuff back into. Into stanza three, because I thought of the light going out of the eyes of the. Of someone on the battlefield. Soldier on the battlefield. So the light gone out of the eyes means it's now elsewhere, distant or something. So the corpse or the person itself is now distant from us. Whatever was inside that person is now elsewhere. So there's a distance between us now and the thing, the corpse that used to be a person or something, because it's also the look of death. So we could see that the look of death is only visible to us insofar as it actually occupies a face. Right. It in itself is abstract. It needs to be. It needs a human to attach to so that we could see the look of death. Because I don't think she's talking about, you know, the Grim Reaper, which is, you know, he is himself, I think, faceless. Right. He's just a hood with a. With black. Right. So there is no, practically speaking, in that particular image, there is no look of death, or there is of the body, but not the face, you know, so the distance on the look of death, to me, visually, when I picture it, it has to be applied to a face, someone's face, to be active. And I wonder if that's related to some of the things that we've been talking about prior to this. The idea that the landscape has to be animated with our own projection onto it somehow. Yeah. Just like we can be the slant of light going out, I guess we are also the look of death or something, you know. 40:30 Wes: So the distance on the look of death, if you think about the eyes of a person who has died and they have that kind of distant stare. Right. Obviously, we can tell they're no longer functioning and no longer looking at anything, no longer focused on anything. That's what I take to be this distance on the look of death. Sort of eyes that are looking into nowhere. And so it's an image for soullessness or for the departure of the spirit. Right. The body is no longer animated and there's no longer a soul or a spirit or however you want to put it. And in a way that that look, it captures that. Right. Somehow. And of course, at that point, that's precisely when there is no more Right. The internal difference where the meanings are there is that place is gone now because I take that place to be the soul. Right. And that's what happens when the. That's the downside of the slant of light leaving. It's a seal of despair. It's an imperial affliction. But when it goes, look at what we're left with, it sounds like it's indispensable. Or has it just damaged us so much that, you know, again, one is giving a critique of religion or morality. Perhaps if we weren't so damaged by, by those such things, then this would not be the aftermath. But as it is, we've been so shaped by it, we can't live without it, even though it is such an affliction. 41:54 Erin: I love that. 41:55 Wes: But the other way to read this is just that, right? This, this is part of you reading this religiously. This is part of the burden of freedom and free will. And we being human and being conscious and having a soul is that we, we can do right and wrong and we will do wrong and we will suffer for it. And the alternative is to not be alive. 42:14 Erin: Well, that's fun. 42:18 Wes: Either way, it's a win win. 42:23 Erin: The life giving slant of despair and affliction. This hadn't even occurred to me that it is. Yeah, I like this. This, I like both readings, but I like what you said, that it's. That it is indispensable without pain. What are we 42:39 Wes: for the next part we'll be reading Dickinson's poem, no pain, no gain. It's about her personal fitness trainer. 42:54 Erin: The slant of light that follows her around the yard. She has to outrun it. Yeah, good. Well, all right, let's leave off there and then in our final part, part four, we will discuss number 315. He fumbles at your soul. 43:09 Wes: Thank you, thank you. 43:14 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. 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