Dickinson - I died for beauty but was Scarce - Emily Dickinson #
Socrates and Plato extolled the virtue of aesthetic beauty as transcendent – inspiring people to aspire towards godliness, while ugliness was descendent, dragging people down towards evil and Hell.
Most Philosophers and artists assume that all art aspires towards the beautiful. It is through the celebration of beauty that we can escape the tawdry, the banality of ordinary pedestrian life.
Philistines are not concerned with collective beauty; just a quick buck will do. Tear down a beautiful old building built to last forever, and replace it with a modern one destined to last no more than fifty years.
Yet we must distinguish between physical and spiritual beauty. Many physically beautiful people may have ugly spirits while not so good looking people have beautiful dispositions. Susan Sontag suggests:
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art, like physical beauty in a person, is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or un-timeliness.
Schiller: ‘If a man is ever to solve the problems of politics in practice, he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom,’
Nicky Gemmell urges us to protect beauty from the ugliness of human greed. They need to protect the Great Barrier Reef, Federation Square from the ravages of an Apple Store, The Sydney Opera House from becoming a vulgar Billboard.
“The Landscape of Ugly is all around us. We need the solace of beauty.”
Dickinson was fascinated by John Keats so it is very likely she was influenced by his Ode to a Grecian Urn – a celebration of beauty and our desperate attempts to pursue it.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
The engraving on the urn depicts a stripling athlete pursuing a beautiful nude maiden – an example of impossible dreams – the youth has been chasing her for thousands of year without success. Yet it is the striving after beauty that makes us better human beings.
The Poem: #
I died for beauty but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.
He questioned softly why I failed?
“For beauty,” I replied.
“And I for truth,–the two are one;
We brethren are,” he said.
And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.
The poet fantasises about death; laid out in a tomb – a mausoleum with separate rooms – even in death she envisions isolation. Archetypically, tombs can represent feminine or concave images like wombs, ponds, wells….receptive enclosures promising nurturing and security.
Dickinson acknowledges that those who strive for goodness or crusade for righteous causes generally are defeated by death – the good die young.
Those who attempt to right the wrongs of society like Robin Hood, gunmen of the wild west, or private eyes, tend to become maverick loners rarely accepted by mainstream people.
Leaders who care for the common man like Julius Caesar, Jesus Christ, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King or Gough Whitlam are generally crucified literally or figuratively for their efforts.
Recently, Freya Newman, a 21-year-old communications student from the University of Technology, Sydney, faced up to two years’ jail after being charged over computer hacking that led to student records about a $60,000 scholarship granted to Tony Abbott’s daughter, Frances, being leaked to the online magazine New Matilda.
Those who stand up for truth – die young.
Throughout the ages, people have suffered for telling the truth. In many corporate and institutional workplaces the culture of “hear no evil, see no evil” exists and if you transgress you become a “Whistleblower” and your career will suffer. Standards have corroded and we now live in a time of “truth decay”.
Post Modernism #
Post Modernismundermined most of the traditional verities of Christian redemption, Economic utopianism and absolute or core values..
Michiku Katutari blames it for a downturn in clear critical thinking, clear ethics and the clouding our sense of reality.
Hannah Arendt writes:
“the distinction between fact and fiction – reality of experience – and the distinction between right and wrong, true and false, no longer exist”.
The Philosopher John Gray feels Post modernism perhaps created the most radical disillusionment in history of the world. In postulating that all values are relative, it advocates an extreme form of nihilism, subverting all core values. This gives today’s authorities the licence to act without compunction. Regardless of how evil Shakespeare’s characters are, most of them have remorse, affecting their conscience. Modern leaders feel at liberty to ignore morality and act unconscionably, resulting in people’s disenchantment.
Albert Einstein distinguished between “what is true and what is real”;
Truth is subjective and abstract while reality is objective and concrete. In the Real World and the World of Tabloid Journalism or some court rooms, truth is malleable and can be manipulated, distorted, selective and sacrificed for ulterior motives.
Politicians other authorities today seem to believe they can lie with impunity and when confronted, double down, deny and take refuge in sheer audacity (Tacitus).
The habit of lying is not nearly so extraordinary as people’s readiness to believe them. It is indeed because of human credulity that lies flourish. Evidence in some courts does not have to be credible for it to be believed.
Hannah Arendt urges us to call “lies” – Lies; not any other euphemisms as they can soften or suggest a lack of intent. When people knowingly and deliberately tell an untruth it is a LIE.
As in “a narrow fellow in the grass” Dickinson assumes a masculine voice or persona indicated in “brethren”, and “kinsmen”.
In her dream they talk – communicate – an attempt to fill a void but then the dream turns into a nightmare where she realises the only living thing in the poem – the moss reaches their lips and covers their names.
This is her ultimate fear – that she will lose her ability to communicate and her legacy will be forgotten. Her life will have been for nothing and her name obliterated.
References to death #
Death is a prominent pre-occupation with Dickinson that many feel makes her poetry repellently morbid.
“Called back” and “At home” were the two phrases carved on her tombstone. We today are sheltered and cosseted from death. Not many have even seen a corpse, as the dead are immediately covered up by a blanket or a body bag and transported to a morgue or funeral parlour. Few funerals have open caskets.
Dickinson would have experienced much more exposure to death, especially during and after the carnage of the Civil War (1860 – 63) when best practice had two thousand soldiers on either side march towards each other and when commanded take position and begin shooting at each other. The side with the last standing soldier was declared the winner.
The later years of Dickinson’s life were primarily spent in mourning because of several deaths within the time frame of a few years.
Emily’s father died in 1874, Samuel Bowles died in 1878, J.G. Holland died in 1881, her nephew Gilbert died in 1883, and both Charles Wadsworth and Emily’s mother died in 1882.
Over those few years, many of the most influential and precious friendships of Emily’s passed away, and that gave way to the more concentrated obsession with death in her poetry.
On June 14, 1884 Emily’s obsessions and poetic speculations started to come to a stop when she suffered the first attack of her terminal illness. Throughout the year of 1885, Emily was confined to bed in her family’s house where she had lived her entire life, and on May 15, 1886 Emily took her last breath at the age of 56. Lyndall Gordon
Dickinson appears to long for death as a release.
As in “This is my letter to the world”, Dickinson has a need for posterity to recognise her achievement.