the emily dickinson poem that lives in my head
welcome to A Teetering Vulture! a newsletter about various science stuff as well as the life happenings of its author, Taylor.
A Dew sufficed itself –
And satisfied a Leaf
And felt “how vast a destiny” –
“How trivial is Life!”
The Sun went out to work –
The Day went out to play
And not again that Dew be seen
By Physiognomy
Whether by Day Abducted
Or emptied by the Sun
Into the Sea in passing
Eternally unknown
Attested to this Day
That awful Tragedy
By Transport’s instability
And Doom’s celerity.
Emily Dickinson was a reclusive poet and scholar (and geologist, botanist, astronomer, philosopher, Darwinist, and baker) from Amherst, Massachusetts who wrote unceasingly during her life, and only in death did she and her written words rise into the Western literary canon. I love and admire Emily Dickinson’s poetry and life, her unremitting devotion to thinking and scholarship. I also love the comedy-drama series Dickinson, in which Hailee Steinfeld plays a blatantly queer Emily Dickinson who romps through 19th century Amherst to the 21st century pop, hip-hop, and indie tunes of singers ranging from Mitski to Maggie Rogers to Billie Eilish.
Comforted by the version of Emily Dickinson that thus lives parasocially in my head—an indubitably historically inaccurate cool, queer recluse—I keep a book of all of her 1900 poems near my bed at all times.
This particular poem I discovered during a bout of health anxiety several years ago, at a time when death was often a topic my mind was painfully adhered to and obsessed with. That’s another thing about Emily—she was almost always thinking about and writing about death. This was and is very exciting to me. I could read people’s contemplations on death all day. They are very compelling to me.
I don’t know for sure what this poem means to other people. Like with Emily, there is a version of this poem that lives in my head. It is, due to my lack of knowledge of its true context, merely what I think it to be about—which is really something you could say about almost everything I’ve ever talked about. One thing about me: I don’t know anything about anything except what I do know and think about some things. Except science things—I have to assert for the purposes of maintaining this newsletter’s legitimacy that I do know real and true things about science things. But everything else, well, I truthfully know basically nothing about everything else (except what I think I know about everything else).
…
This poem came to mind recently while I was in the middle of acquiring yet another new hobby. Last Sunday, I spent my evening working at my desk until around midnight. I had a few lights turned on—a lamp on my desk, one overhead, the flashlight on my phone, which was aimed at the spine of a book. Or, not quite a book. An incipient book—a hopeful book in the early stages of being born. Folded stacks of paper I’d stitched carefully together with waxed polyester thread.
One of my windows was open—the air drifting inside was almost cool and it mingled with the air in my room that smelled of PVA glue, which smells roughly like an elementary school classroom.
So I am learning how to bind books, apparently. And while I was in the middle of this learning experience I was thinking about how I am nothing but a drop of dew, destined to satisfy a leaf.
I was thinking: equate me with the dew, equate me with the leaf, equate me with the tree, the grass, the piece of paper in front of me, it doesn’t matter. I’m a big fan of feeling like I am a part of this planet, no more or less in worth than any constituent of it. As the science writer Ferris Jabr said in his book Becoming Earth, a book about the biological processes that have created the planet as we currently know it and how that planet is currently imperiled by humans, “organisms do not simply reside on Earth—they are literal extensions of Earth. Organisms and their environments are inextricably bonded.” I am part of the “vast interconnected living system” of my planet, and so I depend on all the other parts of that system; I rely on them and they on me. We are all, in a way, part of the same life.
Currently, I exist as a collection of atoms that is conscious of all of this. Which is exciting. I should be savoring this while I can, because one day it will end. A vast destiny, to be part of this wonderful rotating heap of matter and contributing to it as a human. And simultaneously I believe my life is terrifyingly trivial. I am a speck, a dot, a drop of dew. My path is unstable, wobbly, not fully in my control, and doom is fast-approaching. Everyone and everything I know will one day slide irreversibly into obsolescence and oblivion.
I was also thinking, while I had a paintbrush in hand, while I was dipping it into a white puddle of glue and running it along the spine of my first ever bookbinding project, that surely this activity is a waste of time, as it is not profitable nor particularly useful to anyone except for me. My plan was—is, as at the time of this writing I am still in the process of creating this book—to bind together several stories I wrote, for no one but me to have preserved in this way, in the end.
And so there I also was, feeling like a guilty, frustrated, selfish drop of dew. Knowing, yet not knowing, yet knowing, yet not knowing, that I was wrong for feeling that way. That surely it is worth it to be a human constructing with my own hands a physical book, full of stories that I created with my mind, out of love.
But maybe, really, couldn’t my time have been spent on something more productive?
If only I could say I have the mental tenacity to resist or avoid this oppressive, useless conundrum! If only things were so unfailingly calm and controlled in the quagmire of my brain. Alas, they are not.
It is true that I don’t really know what I’m doing—don’t really know what I should be doing or what will lead me to a place where I feel satisfied, safe, and happy in life. It feels like I’m searching for some kind of gap to sneak through, though, that will lead me there. Like I’m waiting and watching, somewhat desperately, at this point, for some opening that will emerge somewhere briefly, finally—I can only hope—that will fit me perfectly. I just never really know what will get me closer to that opening or move me farther away, is the problem.
I am not under the impression that this struggle is anything especially unique to me. What I’m saying, in essence, is that I contend with my clumsy scrambling around on the terrain of life by reminding myself, sometimes via Emily Dickinson, that I am, no matter what I do, destined to be picked up by the sun one day and emptied somewhere no one will know me. That what awaits me is an awful tragedy—death is a tragedy, and I know no matter when it comes for me and for everyone I love it will be too soon.
But how amazing it is to be enough to satisfy the leaf. To be a small drop of dew making the leaf happy, whether the leaf is someone else or myself, or, ideally, both. In my limited time existing as this particular arrangement of living cells, I’d like to exist conscious of and mindful of the fact that I am both nothing and everything at once—that we all are. Not just humans, but every living thing. And so my attention should go, as often as possible, towards things that propogate kindness and love towards all of those things that have tragedy in their future, towards things that arise from careful consideration of what is good for Earth. What’s most important is not how much money I can make or that I meet certain arbitrary milestones of success in my often harmful and extractive society, but that I make others happy and work at things that are constructive to my vision of my own vast destiny, in my own trivial little life.
And that certainly includes, on late weekend evenings, working at learning a craft that could come in handy for me at any point down the road, that also makes me feel happy and creative and hardworking now, and that I’ve begun to learn so that I can preserve some stories that once upon a time made several people on the internet happy, as well.