Emily Dickenson's Very Important Fucking Dashes

Here follows a very cynical view of what's going on in the humanities right now.

An interesting thought occured to me whilst wasting my time in the summer class I have. The Gypsy was talking about how Emily Dickenson may have had really bad eyesight, and that's why she may have run her words all the way to the end of the page. This may not seem like anything monumental, but it at least got me to daydreaming about it instead of being bored to tears by whatever was happening in class that day.

See, Emily Dickenson is a weird and understudied (although you wouldn't know it in this class!) member of the American Renaissance. She was supposedly very deliberate in her work: all of her poems were sewn up in little packets in a specific order that was immediately violated by the person who first got hold of them, so we'll never know what order, etc. her poems were supposed to be in. Supposedly she even incorporated the kind of paper she was using into the poem. So if she writes the word "abscond" or something in blue ink on a brown toothy weaved piece of scrap paper, that means things that are really complex. So the story goes. She also used a lot of strange punctuation, and people like to work themselves up over why she put a dash here or a comma there, and how you're supposed to read her poems out loud. She even has an "upward" dash versus a "regular" dash. Does that mean you're supposed to read that phrase with a certain upward lilt? Do you hang silently while you're reading for a second or two over a dash? Treat them as separate thought clusters? Get a beer and have a chuckle? Who knows. She's certainly a lot more interesting than a lot of the other poets at the time.

But what if all of these upward dashes, words falling off the edge of a piece of paper, and words wrapped around symbols embossed on the paper were just the result of her crappy eyesight? What if scholars have been basing decades of "scholarly" work on myopia? It would certainly be a "score one" for students who claim we "read too much into things." Sometimes, even though it's a fun exercise, I wonder why we strain to make sense, for instance, of Arthur Rimbaud's The Drunken Boat when the man was clearly rotting through from the effects of Absynthe (which I tried once--tastes like alcoholic mouthwash). If that drunken ramble is poetry, then so is Ozzy's Crazy Train.

Sometimes we strain very hard to make meaning from things--probably to make us feel better about the value of our jobs. We don't build bridges or discover vaccines to treat diseases or create manufacturing jobs for people to feed their families or broker political agreements. We fight over the meaning of Emily Dickenson's Fucking Dashes. Clearly, the pinnacle of higher thought.

-- Virgil