The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [91]
At the moment when the new heaven and earth are revealed to John, Christ speaks from a great throne: “ ‘Behold, I make all things new.’ Then he said, ‘Write these words down’ ” (21:5). Hearing this in the monk’s choir, I gasped. No wonder this chapter is Dickinson’s favorite. Christ’s commission may well have helped her define her calling, her vocation as a poet (and I would claim, one of the great biblical interpreters of the nineteenth century). I gasped again, as a phrase entered my mind: “Ezra Pound thundered, ‘make it new,’ and Jesus said, ‘I will.’ ”
I had just experienced a healing, a joining together of what had been pulled apart in me for many years, when I thought I had to choose between literature and religion. It was my encounter with the Benedictines, after I had apprenticed as a writer for many years, that taught me otherwise. Much to my surprise, their daily liturgy and lectio profoundly intensified my sense of metaphor as essential to our capacity to hope, and to dream (not to mention to transcend the banalities of the Barney song). And it was free for the asking.
Dragons within, dragons without. Evil so pervasive that only the poetry of apocalypse can imagine its defeat. And to do that it takes us to the limits of metaphor, of human sense, the limits of imagining and understanding. It pushes us against all our boundaries and suggests that the end of our control—our ideologies, our plans, our competence, our expertise, our professionalism, our power—is the beginning of God’s reign. It asks us to believe that only the good remains, at the end, and directs us toward carefully tending it here and now. We will sing a new song. Singing and praise will be all that remains. As a poet, that’s a vision, and a promise, I can live with.
May 15
EMILY DICKINSON
“Called back,” carried, as she had requested, out the back door and through the garden to the cemetery, past her beloved flowers in high bloom. A believer in synchronicity, one who reveled in its glorious irony, she’d taken the title of a ghost story she was reading and made it the text of her last letter: “Little Cousins, Called back. Emily.” Her brother had “Called Back” carved on her tombstone, along with the dates of her birth, December 10, 1830, and her death, May 15, 1886.
“You think my gait ‘spasmodic,” she wrote to Higginson at the Atlantic Monthly. “I am in danger—Sir—You think me ‘uncontrolled’—I have no Tribunal.” “Perhaps you smile at me,” she wrote. “I could not stop for that. My Business is Circumference.” To friends she had refused to see, she wrote, “In all the circumference of Expression, those guileless words of Adam and Eve never were surpassed, ‘I was ashamed and hid myself.’ ”
Like Hildegard of Bingen, Emily Dickinson is one of those pivotal, original poets who emerge from time to time in literary history; steeped in one tradition, they come to transcend it, acting as a bridge between the poetry of the past and that which is to come. Both are poets who emerged from a culture in which the words of scripture were read aloud daily, left to resonate in the poet’s ear. Both come from a tradition in which biblical allusion is a commonplace; both stood the traditional mode of expressing such allusions on its head.
Both women were well-educated by the standards of their time, but as they were less grounded in logic and rhetoric than their male counterparts, they were not immersed in a learned culture so much as an oral one, and I suspect that this contributed greatly to their astonishing freedom to engage in serious play with the words of scripture. Both women, for example, freely assume the identity of biblical characters, male and female. Jacob was a favorite of Dickinson’s; the idea of wrestling with God appealed to her. Both women boldly lay claim to a prophetic voice, Hildegard couching the story of her calling in the language of Ezekiel and Jeremiah, Emily Dickinson appropriating