brittle selves
shattering performative patronage discourse identities
A screenshot of a post bounced around on Threads. Some dude recoiled against reading anything in first person. Amongst the responses some woman (or fem-posing bot) slut-shamed sexually active first-person narrators like Bridgit freaking Jones. River Selby (they/them) (read her stuff) commented. I responded that these responses betrayed extreme emotional fragility and psychological brittleness. Selby replied that would make for a good essay. And, so. It might. I wasn’t really thinking about writing it. Then I read this poem (550 in Franklin’s numbering). Dickinson poems often sneak up on me; recently, I read them to resist doom-scrolling. Poems about lightning, volcanoes, dogs, bees, and, of course the ones that superficially look traditionally religious. They look out into a world of becoming, evanescence, and differential repetition. Spiritually struck down, isolated, and forced to endure separation from love in plain sight, Dickinson promulgated an alternative revelation that always presupposes the weakness of a mostly male system of identification that men have tried to make work since, oh, Descartes, as a rough estimation.
Dickinson’s work includes, oh, maybe a couple of hundred poems, involving the effort of piecing a self back together after shattering, transporting encounters with “Truth” break the customary imprisoning structures we are “shut up” in (F 445, 658). She writes her self severed, flopping around like an earthworm in a storm on a sidewalk. Some of these—the following long one included—are amongst the ‘greatest hits’ poems that many people know. Reading those, at least for me, can be dangerous, because too often it’s not really reading them so much as it is re-reading a set of experiences instead of working through Dickinson’s framing and processing of her experiences and insights: using the poetry to reinforce my first-person instead using the reading to adopt, however temporarily and inadequately, her ways of being.
Reading it reminds me that Hester Prynne developed a counseling ministry based on her recognition of shame, suffering, and love in The Scarlet Letter. This ministry contains, Hawthorne insists, the alternative understanding of self-worth and community that worked better than the church and made people tell stories about Hester.1
Here it is:
I measure every Grief I meet With narrow, probing, eyes – I wonder if It weighs like Mine – Or has an Easier size - I wonder if They bore it long – Or did it just begin – I could not tell the Date of Mine – It feels so old a pain – I wonder if it hurts to live – And if They have to try – And whether – could They choose between – It would not be – to die – I note that Some – gone patient long – At length, renew their smile – An imitation of a Light That has so little Oil – I wonder if when Years have piled – Some Thousands – on the Harm – That hurt them early – such a lapse Could give them any Balm – Or would they go on aching still Through Centuries of Nerve – Enlightened to a larger Pain – In Contrast with the Love – The Grieved – are many – I am told – There is the various Cause – Death – is but one – and comes but once – And only nails the eyes – There’s Grief of Want – and grief of Cold – A sort they call “Despair” – There’s Banishment from native Eyes – In sight of Native Air – And though I may not guess the kind – Correctly – yet to me A piercing Comfort it affords In passing Calvary – To note the fashions – of the Cross – And how they’re mostly worn – Still fascinated to presume That Some – are like my own – (F 550)
This poem relies on the first-person: this is an I I-ing in puzzlement and wonder at how grief shapes experience—through and beyond ‘time.’ “The grieved are many.” While Dickinson measures and categorizes and speculates, she does not judge.
Instead, she questions how we should use our eyes. How move from seeing to understanding and attending to, acting on what we notice? Up until the volta-esque turn in line 25 in which someone else’s voice enters (“I am told”), seeing—specifically, seeing through “wonder” guides how we perceive others. Despite being “told” how to classify grief’s “Cause,” eyes remain central: Death “nails” them (but whose?), but only once. “Banishment from native eyes -/ In sight of Native Air -” persists, perhaps showing Dickinson’s early response to Margaret Maher’s immigrant experience. Whose eyes? Is the ambiguity the point, that it’s a both/and or “all of the above” situation: grief whether acknowledged or denied, constrains how we see? Could it be that we have learned to deal with, or even deny that externally-imposed grieving existentially shapes how we ‘measure’ ourselves and others? “Calvary” is a scene of judicially-inflicted torture, that seems to apply to everyone.
Hester Prynne’s apparent growth from shame to wonder at “the electric thrill” she feels when some people—usually women—look at her embroidered badge (SL 86) mirror this process, especially in its questioning of “Calvary.” In the weeks and months after her transfiguring revelation to Boston in the first four chapters of The Scarlet Letter, the magistrates try to shatter her by shaping how the town “measures” her grief. Some, for reasons that seem obvious enough, are unable to constrain this measuring—and veer into “wonder” and “fascination,” to use Dickinson’s terms: “She shuddered to believe, yet could not help believing, that it gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts. She was terror-stricken by the revelations that were thus made” (86). Years later, having left behind the “sin” framing, the “electric thrill” drives her ministry, and gives her place “as a rightful inmate, into the household that was darkened by trouble . . . There glimmered the embroidered letter, with comfort in its unearthly ray” (SL 161).
These connections form new circuits and alternative connections based on the “electric thrill” and its wonder. Perhaps their social isolation—and its corresponding insulation from institutional discourse’s coercive normalization—comprises the most powerful link between Hester Prynne and Emily Dickinson. Isolation and insulation allow personal insights to grow, which enables them, as Hawthorne writes of Hester in “Another View of Hester,” to move beyond “man’s laws” (SL 161). Silence and blank spaces enable them to maintain and develop their “identity” and “self.” As much as we might want to emulate Dickinson and live with plants and animals as our closest companions—this was not purely by her choice, nor, need it be if we could form powerful connections.
Isolation is not enough, and not strictly true, especially for Dickinson, who replaced Standing Order discursive norms with strong emotional attachments to a small group of humans, and a large society of living beings to whom she extended agency, intelligence, mystery, sentience, majesty, and grandeur. Bees, Robins, Rats, Spiders, once or twice, Dogs, Roses, Trees: attachments rooted in New England mutabilitie—what’s true in “white” winter seems implausible in Summer’s “green.” Time and historicity flow from this alternating current:
"What shall I do when the Summer troubles - What, when the Rose is ripe - What when the Eggs fly off in Music From the Maple Keep? (F 915)
Like many others, this recognition of the love we attach to fleeting, impermanent beings reads like a poem rooted in the grief of the impossibility of loving Sue:
"How can I bear their jocund Faces Thou from Here, so far? 'Twouldn't afflict a Robin - All His Goods have Wings - I - do not fly, so Wherefore My Perennial Things?" (F 915)
Is that a precursor to “My Favorite Things”? At least in Dickinson’s system of identity there are a few “days when Birds come back” (F 122), “days when skies resume/ The old - old sophistries of June -/ A blue and gold mistake” (F 122). Sited in alternating time and circuitous seasons, her identity resists “sophistries” of stasis. What then, of identities sutured to meanings pre-fabricated, retailed, and subjectified within a the business matrices of global capital? “Nothing personal.” Except, Roberta Sassatelli’s defense of agency-enabling consumption aside, if you become your Spotify podcast list and playlists; your affiliations on ‘social’ media, your prompt-history on sycophant gpt, you have outsourced the attachment strategies for identity-building at the same time and to the same extent that you surrender agency to those who influence. It—it seems to me—is a powerful way to dehumanize people: a powerful way to make Orcs. They’ve long surrounded us. They make up the crowds at lynchings, etc. It can look like they have taken over.
Simultaneously, the pose and the persona has never been so fragile: it cannot survive with a minimum awareness & recognition of the sentience of other people, other beings, or the viability of other ways of being. It must exterminate everything that challenges it, then claim that Orcness is the reality of human existence. Imagine sensitive, probing sentences recreating and diagnosing the grief these people carry to make them so fragile, such brittle homogenous identities. Make sure you can for the rare cases, but prepare for the desperate clinging, the hateful persistent grasping at shards, stabbing you even as they get cut . . . The identity—or, rather, all the reinforcement—in podcasts, mega-churches, media-slop, brand-premium upselling, etc. matters more, follows a stronger circuit than your/our words and interactions. Until they are abandoned.
Shouldn’t we ‘measure’ their grief? Show some ‘grace’ for their ‘journey’? Grief is not rage. Hawthorne might be correct; love & hate might come from the same ‘affect.’ They do not result in the same attitudes, techniques, behaviors, and humanities. Before ‘measuring,’ ascertain what’s on the scale: grief or metastasized anger? Jason Compson’s narrative in Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury bleats the deliberately manipulative denials and refusals to recognize other people’s suffering as anything else than the stuff of exploitation. Jason is Faulkner’s most accurate character. He is the incipient mega-church, maga-hero blaming his own inadequacy on others. [Still, Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit is better than anything Faulkner wrote, because she wrote the truth instead of dancing around it.]
Maybe some of that anger & rage might be reconnected to the losses and griefs that produced (and continue to—manipulated by those skilled in representing torture and social control as love). What then? The approved ‘self’ has long been based on “winning": it’s exclusionary, 0-sum, focused on external goals, & continually vulnerable to what a leader demands. Even concepts like ‘resilience,’ kitsugi, and ‘growth mindset’ exist to convert gried and loss into attitudes and habits useful to the machine: grief must be displaced, transformed. Suffering should only exist whilst ‘grinding’ to ‘crush’ a goal, win something, triumph over others. The evangelical need to triumph over sins (socially-constructed), achieve (largely impossible) victories over temptation, over reality. For ‘dominion’- dominance. The script dictates claiming that god gets all the glory whilst the speaker hogs the spotlight.
The framing is so powerful that you can read Dickinson from it. But, given all of her works, and given all of the lightning and revelation poems that suggest her struggle to develop a different self after a traumatic experience liberated her from the evangelical Standing Order attitudes she had been raised within, I think she asks us to recognize, appreciate, understand, and celebrate each other’s diverse experiences of grief as central to the human experience.
The Hollows round His eager Eyes Were pages where to read Pathetic Histories - although Himself had not complained. Biography to all who passed Of unobtrusive Pain Except for the italic Face Endured, unhelped - unknown - (F 1073).
Italic? Italian? His? Does everyone else see, process, then ignore and evade a pain that’s unobtrusive to them? When do we move from judging and shunning to measuring and helping? If it’s too much to imagine (ala Marilyn Nelson, look it up) Emily Dickinson “dressed for action” under “all the gray old lady clothes” (“Emily Dickinson’s Defunct”) she does swing away from “a Dominion,” the loss of which was amongst her earliest memories and identifications (F 1072):
I find Myself still softly searching For my Delinquent Palaces - And a Suspicion, like a Finger Touches my Forehead now and then That I am looking oppositely For the Site of the Kingdom of Heaven (F 1072)
Did she actually write these 2 poems in sequence? I conclude as if she had—linking the growing concern with the “italic face” of other people to questioning the pose of “bemoaning a Dominion . . . the only Prince cast out” (F 1072). Reading pathetic histories can lead—as any good male critic of gothic, sensationalist fiction would be glad to tell you, can lead to being concerned with the wrong sort of people, like, say, unrepentant adulterous single-mother artists. Interested, even: not to exploit, manipulate, exclude, judge, profit, or shun, but to witness and perhaps accept that grief might be constitutional and as essential as joy and that recognizing it helps. Would things improve if we shared our griefs, if we wondered at them, worked to name them—and where possible remove their causes and form alternative kinships and families and identities?
How we do that, as adrienne maree brown insists, is a work of art (emergent strategy 197). We are not alone in it. Even if we happen to be solitary:
Forever - is composed of Nows - 'Tis not a different time - (F 690)
Beware of, attend to, question, assert agency over that passive-voice construction: compose how & why we “experienced Here” with wonder and fascination (F 690). Perhaps the praxis is not so much emergent as squashed and denied.
So, one more poem:
We never know how high we are Till we are asked to rise And then if we are true to plan Our statures reach the skies - The Heroism we recite Would be a normal thing Did not ourselves the Cubits warp For fear to be a King (F 1197)
if this is new to you, dive in to the mysterious package