Emily Dickinson, "Experience is the Angled Road" (910)
Many have used poetry to generate lingering, meditative essays, but Dickinson is in rare form with "Experience is the Angled Road."
Tonight (6/27) there's a Presidential debate. I don't really want to watch it. If you don't know who these people are by now–if you're one of the 17% of voters who think Biden himself ended Roe–there's not a lot that can be done.
Of more interest to me is how Trump shapes what is and is not acceptable. I'm wondering about his recent endorsement of a migrant fighting league. How he calls migrants "tough," credits them with the resilience needed to make the journey, and then says it would be a great idea to have them fight in a UFC-style competition. I know I don't have to say this is absolutely disgusting. What I'm reflecting on is why it should lose him some support. If people have been hearing non-stop about how they should be afraid of an invasion–if right-wing media and its fellow travelers have been constantly hyping the threat of the most vulnerable–how does Trump not taking that paranoia seriously feel?
What I have to realize is that I'm a fool for believing that there was ever any logic to "I have a right to panic so much that others have to experience consequences." Naomi Klein in Doppelganger talks about an enormously popular Nazi cartoon where Jews were depicted as both taking all the money and being a Communist threat. Seeing migrants as a threat has nothing to do with the actual issue. There are lots of people who want to say they're special because they have a big wall. The line on the map is a claim to inherent goodness.
Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Longform Podcast
I listened to this and I will listen to it again. The line that hit the hardest was about how journalism requires diversity because it's so hard to be sensitive to details which your reader needs. Coates talks about visiting Israel/Palestine and seeing segregated highways. Yes, you read that right.
There's a lot here about being creative, evolving with the public eye upon you, and knowing how you can be of help. It feels like advice alien to many of us–I'm certainly not going to win a Pulitzer any time soon–but I can safely say it's not actually that remote. The big questions are What are you doing? & How do you think you're seen? The funny thing is we're seen more than we believe we are, but it isn't anything we can count on until it is just that.
You need to read this interview with a librarian who got fired for fighting a book ban
I don't think people realize how hard some people genuinely fight for the future. For other people's kids, not just their own. Take a look at this section of the interview with Suzette Baker:
You told me you’re working 45-50 hours a week at a hardware store now to pay the bills. And you’re still taking care of your adult disabled son. Is working at another library just not a possibility?
There’s only the Llano County public library. And then there’s the Burnet public library, which is in the county next door. And they’re not going to hire me. … I don’t wanna leave here. But [I] might end up having to, because I’m not going to find a decent job here. But I’m trying to fight it out as long as I can.
I've got nothing more to say. Her story speaks for itself.
Emily Dickinson, "Experience is the Angled Road" (910)
Many have used poetry to generate lingering, meditative essays, but Dickinson is in rare form with "Experience is the Angled Road." For me, what sets her lyric apart is the gravity and enormity of the issue it illustrates: How is it possible to achieve anything? Dickinson points to this question most explicitly in the first two lines of her second stanza: "Quite Opposite – How complicate / The Discipline of Man."
Experience is the Angled Road (910) Emily Dickinson Experience is the Angled Road Preferred against the Mind By - Paradox - the Mind itself - Presuming it to lead Quite Opposite - How complicate The Discipline of Man - Compelling Him to choose Himself His Preappointed Pain
"Discipline," you would think, is simple. Recent internet drama featured a Texas high school football coach. This gentleman declared on Facebook, to the parents and the public, that he didn't want to hear about water breaks for the kids in this heat. In his words, he's about "work," not "woke," and he has shiny trophies in a case to prove it. Obviously this guy shouldn't be coaching anything, but this is, unfortunately, what we associate with discipline. Do the work, experience the pain, learn the lesson, produce a good. Of course, to use a line I've been saying too much recently, nothing works this way. "Discipline" isn't simple. It attempts to answer the question of how we know we have done anything. That is too large to be anything but complicated.
It is "The Discipline of Man[kind]." Without going into too much detail, I see that Dickinson has resurrected a classical problem, one more apparent when you're wondering if nobility is real and whether there is a hierarchy of goods. Someone who believes a fraudster who profits and a scientist who discovers new species are equally legitimate and intelligent isn't welcome to the conversation. To be precise, the classical problem is this: if you truly are good at thinking, if you really know, why do you need to do anything? What good is experience? You can see this question operative in the life of Socrates but also in figures like Epicurus or Diogenes. If you have the truth, what is left?
Dickinson brings forth this problem with a distinctly American aspect. "Experience is the Angled Road / Preferred against the Mind:" why is "Experience" an "Angled Road?" Assuming the dominance of Puritanical platitudes helps here. I can imagine someone, not a MAGA-spouting psycho, extolling the virtues of hard work, believing in both self-reliance and obedience, and finding ways to be skeptical of books while considering themselves smart. The contradictions come from valuing whatever degree of independence one has. The contradictions come from overvaluing experience, treating it like knowledge, not quite realizing it cannot directly teach because it is an indirect, angled path to anything else. Our self-reliant, independent minds prefer, as Dickinson says, experience to lead.
Classical authors ultimately do not undervalue experience. Plenty of documents exist criticizing overeager young men who lust for power, as they have barely done anything. But the same authors don't overvalue experience, either. They did not have history or science in our sense, but they appreciated how powerful a reliable body of knowledge could be. They understood how necessary it was against a number of terrible opinions supposedly grounded in experience.
How does this relate to Dickinson's complaint? Whether she relies on experience or her mind, "The Discipline of Man / [Compels] Him to choose Himself / His Preappointed Pain." No matter what, she says, there's pain. This is true, but I'm thinking about something Ursula K. Le Guin said about craft. She talked about how the Brontë sisters didn't have much of what we would call life experience but accessed the richness of their inner lives, spinning whole worlds out of humble cloth. Of course, the irony of my saying this to Emily Dickinson is not lost on me.