Birthday Lessons

   First lesson first: If you are in your 40s you are not in your fourth decade.  If you are in your 30s, you are not in your third decade.  Birth to 9 is your first decade.  Thus the fifth decade encloses your 40s, the fourth decade houses your 30s.  And so on.  Rudimentary, yes. 

   You cannot fudge on Father time.  We are all older than we think or admit.  A day older and a day wiser?  Perhaps.  A day older and closer to death?  Indubitably. 

    I’m trying to decide whether I’m as young as I feel or as old as I look.  If you feel “young” yet are in fact as old as you look, you simply need a more thorough medical examination. Age is not “only a number.”  It’s a measure of the accumulating maladies of mortality that will kill you eventually. Everyone dies of something.

                                          

 

   I have had, or will have soon, another birthday. (One of those in which you can switch the cake candles and create a number, which, though false, is felicitous.) Although I am not uncertain of the date, others are, due perhaps to my preference for withholding that specific annual information from social media's memory.  The cloaking has been successful; I even have a family member who does not remember the date of my birth.

   Do any adults welcome the passage of time?  A lack of enthusiasm may be equally present at most stages of adult life.  If our fear of the tick-tock marking of birth and death dates is other-directed, our animus will startle over how old those from our past have become.  Former students of mine might well muse--"Isn't he dead yet?"  And their teachers in turn query, "That little geeky kid--is 35 now?"

   If you’re old and your birthday has the bad-taste-irony to fall on a date in spring (as mine does), when all kinds of rebirthing is occurring--emergence, new life breaking through the topsoil to swallow sunlight, all flora and fauna ravenous for revivification--if you’re in your eighth decade of life, and find your dreams dead, your mind a malingering mess, your body decrepit, decaying, dissolute, a doyen of desuetude . . . then join me in this litany of truisms turned to truths by flipping them upside down.     

   We’re the dogs that won’t hunt, we’re the tongues the cat got, we’re the expectations that are mocked, we’re the flames that ain’t eternal, we’re the stars never reached for, the problem never solved, the savage beast never calmed, the love that never got to Rose.  We know the wind beneath your wings will fill you with hot air; or, you'll soar too close to the sun and, like Icarus, melt the feather-wax that keeps you aloft.  Crash and burn, sooner or later, one way or another.

                            

  
   So let's eschew birthdays, and celebrate the days of our dying, which are all the days of our living, the markers of our "long fool's errand to the grave."  Let's acknowledge the wisdom of placing the aged on the ice floe pushed out to sea.  Death is the ideal caesura that enjambs our passage from this vale of tears to the vision of the other world, beauteous and beatific.  Now that's not such a bad trip, is it?  Ready to have your ticket punched?    

Seeing and Seeking in the Dark with Emily D

   

     I suppose the occasion of a full family dinner for St Patrick’s Day was not the ideal time to inform everyone about my affair.  But I could no longer abide a clandestine assignation.  It was time for candor and a heartfelt reveal.   I told them the affair kept me up late, almost nightly, into the early morning hours, in the corner room of our house where I met with her and we pursued our passions.  “I seek the Dark/Till I am thorough fit.”

     My wife feigned shock.  My daughters, not entirely clear what I was talking about, flung questions. “Are you serious?”  “Who is this hussy?”  Filled with shame but not regret, I fished the laminated Topps Heritage card from my shirt pocket and passed it round the table.

                                     

     There was palpable relief.  Just another one of Dad’s cornball literary jokes.  And hey, if this lady writes poems so good they sweep you away, what’s she doing on an old –timey baseball card?  Answer: because she is an American national treasure, as you both well know.

 

     Truth be told—reading and re-reading Emily Dickinson’s poems in blissful solitude; the quiet hours after midnight, my corner room suffused by moonlight through the blinds; her life laid out in letters and many biographies; her writing glossed by the lit crit thought-leaders, earnestly attempting to explicate the ineffable;—this rendezvous was more thrilling and transporting than any physical affair I could have imagined or experienced.

 

     Thrilling and oddly transgressive.  Her work, produced in the haven of her parents’ home, eschewed the thunderous conflicts of the time (e.g., the Civil War, the apostasy of Darwin, the famine fleeing Celts).  One  commentator’s book, My Emily Dickinson, declares in its title a possessive intimacy which many of us feel when we hear her poems or learn about her life.  It’s not unusual to think, “I know what she means by that” even if others do not.  And then there’s the recluse rap.  I am one who rejects that category.  Emily Dickinson was not a recluse but she was reclusive, and her withdrawal from social concourse was intentional in the latter third of her life.  A recluse does not enjoy friends while growing up, does not write over 400 letters, and does not fashion many “fascicles” of her poems which she sent to relatives and acquaintances who were readers of sense and sensibility.  Emily also sustained an important literary friendship with Thomas Higginson.  Admittedly it was contact mainly through correspondence but she sought him out, with that famous and touching request to tell her if her poems “lived.”

Most importantly she herself was “the soul [who] selects her own society.” And in that solitude resides an important key to understanding what makes Emily Dickinson not only a major poet, but the best female poet to be found in the western canon.  Harold Bloom asserts this ranking, and praises her powerful “cognitive originality.”  By that he means Emily Dickinson “thought everything through for herself.”

Her achievement was enabled by courage and confidence.  She knew she had the mind and the vision to be a poet whose work would matter.  She also knew that giving voice to her Muse required all of her concentration and energy. She could not spend herself on unnecessary direct personal contact with others. I love that about her.  Most people we are in touch with we don’t need and they do us little good.  Emily had the resolve to “shut[s] the Door— . . . Then—close the Valves of her attention—/Like Stone—“.  Had she not done so, she would not have heard “a Fly buzz—when I died—“and immortalized the moment:

With Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—

Between the light—and me—

And then the Windows failed—and then

I could not see to see.

Read her poems alone.  Hang a “Do not Disturb” sign on the door.  Read them aloud.  When your voice catches, when you find a line that makes you flush, when you smile or even tear up a bit, you’re side by side with Emily, seeking and seeing in the dark.