Interval 6

We come to interval six, and it means that we're on an interface, but not a disjunctive interface, but an exchange. An interval in this sense is an exchange of forms, but in such a way that one form does not dominate the other. And so a set of forms in an exchange equanimity register as openness. It's a curious fact of the cosmos, but it registers as openness. For this interval, as we have done for other intervals. The exchange. Openness sets aside our procedure of using pairs of books to style a motion for us so that we can have an education that goes somewhere, and we use a single book as a touchstone, not as a referent, but as a touchstone, or, to use the old alchemical term, as a lodestone from which to magnetize our openness to. If I can speak poetically, to magnetize our silence into audibility, that one can hear silence as a curious thing. And if you've ever been in a crowd, and suddenly it is cut off, the silence becomes palpable. This is an interval, and Uh, we're looking at today as a lodestone, as a touchstone, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, who is one of the most remarkable figures in world literature, who is a poet almost as if she were like a New England haiku poet, like Basho. Emily Dickinson is on the level of Basho, and slowly now he is coming into her own as one of the greatest figures in world poetry. Coming into her own. Because in her lifetime, just a couple of poems were published anonymously in newspapers. A couple more in a magazine. And it wasn't until years after her death that her brother's mistress put together a collection of her poems and published them for the first time, and anyone new on the scale of larger than just a handful of people that she existed and existed in such an exquisite way that she's one of the great, sublime voices of palpable silence in world literature. In her own time. Towards the end of her life, the last 30 years of her life, she was known in the little Massachusetts town that she lived as the myth and people in the town who had respected her father, who had been the treasurer of Amherst College for 37 years. She lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, and then her brother, a year older than her, became the treasurer, and he was the town lawyer and a very distinguished man. A graduate of Harvard in a town of 2600 people. And, of course, he was the dominant stag male in the town, the biggest practice. Everybody knew him. And so no one spoke badly of his reclusive sister. And so she was known as the myth, because she did not interchange with anyone for the last 15 years of her life, except 1 or 2 people her younger sister Vinnie, and occasionally her bedridden mother and her energetic brother Austin. She wore white dresses all the time and never went out of the house, hardly went out of her room. And all of this because of a curious dysfunction of the conscious dimension, expanding itself into a six dimensional artistic conscious time, space, and when that kind of six dimensional capacity of humanity comes into play, it comes into play in a structural way which is difficult to appreciate. Consciousness in ancient times was very often called in the West magic because it was a whole realm beyond nature. It was supernatural or supernatural. And what happens with consciousness is that it comes into play where nature played, but where nature in its play makes existence stay. Consciousness as magic brings into play transform, which ups the play exponentially, so that instead of existence you get exponential play, you get a kaleidoscope effect of possibility, which is a staggering if you're not ready for it, which is terrifying if you're not used to it. But if you add to that fifth dimension, that quintessential supernatural quality of consciousness, if you add another dimension, which is art. Art brings into form, into personal spiritual form what nature brings into existence. And just as consciousness comes to occupy nature's place, art comes to occupy the place of existentials. And so art forms become in their kaleidoscopic, expanded possibilities of conscious dimensioning become what is extant. What is existential? And this produces if you're not ready for it, if you're not in a culture that makes room for this, if you're not in an expanded intercultural civilization that works art in so that it becomes part of the way in which a human being matures, then the scariness of sudden consciousness becomes the terror of that openness, achieving forms which haunt you. And this is what happened to Emily Dickinson in a very interesting way. This is one of the last poems that she ever wrote. She died in 1886. Of glory. Not a beam is left. But her eternal house, the Asterix. Is for the dead. The living. For the stars. Now you can go into. Literary symbolism and say. Well, an asterix is like a printed page star. But that beggars by reductiveness the incredible sophistication of a woman who had been writing alone in a six dimensional space in a three dimensional world. The town that she grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, 2600 people, when she was a girl. I think by the time she died in 1886. 55 years after she was born in 1830. I think the town had become Semi-industrialized and had about 8000 people, but it had Amherst College, which her grandfather helped found. And Amherst College brought a note of civilized gentility to what was largely a rural section of Massachusetts, not the Massachusetts of Boston or the Plymouth Colony or Harvard over on the coast. But Amherst is in the middle of the state, towards the west. If you went further, you would come to the Berkshires, the mountains separating Massachusetts from Vermont. Amherst was not connected to the rest of Massachusetts, and the rest of the US until the railroad line, about 20 miles, was put in when she was already a grown girl. It had that peculiar haunted quality that a many of early American communities used to have, even in the early 19th century, those communities were there. There were not many little houses in Amherst. There were a lot of big houses separated by big yards, and there were just a few main streets. And one section of it was about a mile over called the East Village. And the Dickinson homestead was on Main Street that connected downtown Amherst with about 30 buildings, with the East Village that had about 5 or 6 buildings. And when she grew in this. This was the very last poem that she wrote again, as short as a haiku. The immortality she gave we borrowed at her grave for just one plaudit famishing the might of human love. This quality of poetic language form being refined to just a haiku like sliver of expressivity, is something that she worked on individually from the 1850s. She, like any normal young girl, had her friends Had her sister and brother and her family. She had her schooling. Almost everyone in the family joined the local Congregational church. She never did. She would say occasionally in her letters that my family has found a way to fit into a religious community. I'm still out there. And this quality of being a loner, a loner in her own life. She writes in 1852, the beginning of one of her longer poems. Sic transit, Gloria mundi. The Latin phrase for how utterly passing is this world. Sic transit, Gloria mundi. How doth the busy bee dum? Vivamus vivamus. I stay mine, enemy. O veni, vidi, vici. O caput cap. A pie and O memento mori. When I am far from thee. Hurrah for Peter! Parley! Hurrah for Daniel Boone! Three cheers, sir, for the gentleman who first observed the moon. Peter put up the sunshine. Patty arranged the stars. Tell Luna tea is waiting. And call your brother Mars. Put down the apple, Adam, and come away with me. Thou shalt have a pippin from off my father's tree. This quality of incisive poetry that began to stir in her. She was 21 years old when she wrote that poem. She would not tell anyone that she was a poetess, and towards the end of the 1850s, when everyone else was getting their community of friends, their community of religious ties, their sociability, getting married, having their children, having their beaus. At 27, Emily Dickinson began recopying her best poems onto folded quires of paper, and she would take needle and string and stitch them together, and she would make little volumes. She would publish herself in volumes of one printings of one a single unique copy. Scholars have called these Fascicles, and she put her poems together for the rest of her life in a series of these self-published fascicle booklets, and they were all published about 20 years ago by Harvard University Press in facsimile. She lived long enough to make 40 books. She published 40 books in an edition of one in her lifetime, and no one knew they were found after her death, not found intact, but they'd been scattered. Some of them went to her own family, the Dickinsons. Her younger sister, Vinnie had some. Her husband's mistress, uh, Mabel Loomis. Todd had some, and some of them were hidden, and some of them were lost. And even so, recently, as just a few years ago, more than several hundred Dickinson poems were found that were never known had never been published, had never been read since she wrote them in the 1860s or 1870s. So she has suffered enormously from what Stravinsky called the sin of our time. Non acknowledgement. But this quality is an inherent concomitant of the dimensions of pioneers in six dimensional form, who are right on the verge of going into an ocean of process that has an even larger dimensionality called history. And so we're looking at Emily Dickinson as an example of a great artist who, though terrified by the incisive, expansive quality of her consciousness and who was phobic imprisoned by the power of a six dimensional art form capacity. She was reluctant to even begin participating in a seven dimensional phantasmagoria known as history. The closest thing to Emily Dickinson are the Chinese poets of the early 20th century. And I want to give you an example. The founder of the Crescent School of 20th century Chinese poetry, Xu Zhimo, wrote this poem in 1925 when he was in student exile in Europe. He was in Exeter, England, and roaming like a ghost, like a phantom at night. He wrote this poem. It's called Before Exeter Church. And here's another example. This is how a very sophisticated, multi conscious being finds themselves garroted by the threshold of a plunge into an even deeper unknown. This is the Shema. This is my own shadow tonight. Printed here in the courtyard. Before a church in a faraway land. An imposing shrine. So cold and solemn. And a shadow so slender and alone. I asked the statue in front of the church. Who is responsible for this strange course of man's life. The weathered statue stares at me, looking surprised. He seems to wonder why this odd question. I turn to ask the chilly star that rises from the back of the building, but it only responds with a sarcastic blinking of its eyes, leaving me to face my puzzle under its pale light. There is a quality to individual lyric poetry, which is a spiritual form which is likened always to a jewel, so that its thereness is not in its existential quality of being. It's not there in the deeper structure of symbolic meaning, but it's in an elusive beyond where transformation has come into play in such a way that it's expansion of possibilities has gone off the map, so that an art form, like lyric poetry, has the ability to awaken us to a differential form, which presumes. The conscious time space into an indefinite, not an infinite, but an indefinite range of an array of possibility So that we become stymied if we try to take objectivity based on existence or on mental symbols. If we try to move in a five dimensional universe by the three dimensions of existence or the four dimensions of symbols, we cannot do so. We find ourselves garroted and we find ourselves increasingly seduced to regress just so we can live, so that there is a very peculiar kind of courage that's required of consciousness. When you look at the range of critical books written on the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Here's a sample of some of the titles that you can begin to hear. This is seven volumes, so that here's a set of seven volumes on Emily Dickinson's poetry. Just the titles, so that you begin to get the sense of the expansion and the incredible nuance that has come into play. The first is called Emily Dickinson and the Language of Life Emily Dickinson and the Modern Consciousness, lyric contingencies, nimble, believing Dickinson and the unknown lunacy of light. Emily Dickinson and the Experience of metaphor. The Dickinson sublime. The landscape of absence. So that there is a Expansion on all levels in all ways. But what is so difficult is that the transform. That consciousness has brought into play that blossoms as the flower of art. Has at its very root a curious exchange. Consciousness exchanges with the mystery of nature in such a way that time. No longer registers as the spinal cord of the organization of life. That existence is no longer the arbiter of what is real, that the arbiter of what is real is possibility and not polarity. And when consciousness comes into play in this exchange, it exchanges with time. What goes out of play is the organizing substrate that allows for synthesis and integration to happen in the first place. And that is time. Because without time as the first dimension, space then is freed from its temporal sequencing necessity and literally floats free so that all mystics and all artists, as Aldous Huxley once said, the mystic learns to swim in the very water that the mad man drowns in the water of suspension, where one is now outside the pull of gravity. One is floating, but it's not outside the gravity of Earth, but you're outside of the pull of gravity, of time and this experience of space and a timelessness to someone who is convinced that the cultural, the national, the social exigencies are the arbiters of what is real, you feel that you have gone crazy. D.t. Suzuki, the great 20th century Zen master, once. And it was in his late 90s in response to a question about consciousness. And he said, when one has one's first experience, he uses the term satori, when one has one's first experience of satori. It usually comes at an extremity of life. And he said many suicides who have jumped off the bridge realized on the way down that this wasn't necessary. It's this quality of going beyond the world, but not going beyond the world in any kind of sentimental or prosaic way. You have gone beyond the substrate of the synthesizing structure of space and time. You have become suspended, but not suspended as a metaphor for oblivion, but suspended in the sense that now space can be reconfigured out of time. And what reconfigures it is consciousness. And as consciousness reconfigures space without time, what comes into play is a capacity known traditionally as memory and memory when it takes the place of time because it exchanges, it can't take the place of time in nature. Consciousness is already done that so that what memory takes the place of is the next process, the next function that comes after nature. Now existence, ritual, action as an existential is not really a process. It's an objectivity so that the next process from nature is myth, mythic, the mythic horizon, the level of feeling, the phase of language that phase where experience occurs. And so memory comes into play, where experience occurs, where language occurs, where feeling occurs. And as memory comes into play in that place, in that position, as it were, the function that was there exchanges with memory and comes into play where memory was. And so that's how memory gets into experience and transforms myth into a completely different thing from what it was before. In fact, it makes of it a kaleidoscopic jewel. So the experience in in art forms can be something completely beyond the Ken, or even beyond the imagining of some of people who are earthbound, as it were. The metaphor is that the worm never understands the butterfly, and doesn't ever believe when told that it will be a butterfly itself. Um. Chuang Tzu once had, in one of his beautiful Daoist musings about 2300 years ago, he had this statement where he said, there is a bird in the North so large that when it flaps its wings, once it flies 100,000 li about three li in a mile, and says that all the little birds and all the bushes say to itself, this is just fictional. It's fantasy. All of us have been flying all our lives, and we know everyone. That every bird we know we can barely get from one bush to another. How could there be such a thing thousand years after Zhuangzi? Remembering that said of himself as this great Daoist bird, he said, I have been flying south long enough. I will now fly north that there is an exchange where one goes not to an opposite. We talked about this last week, but one goes to a diagonal. One goes to a diagonal. The mnemonic image that blinks into meditation is that of a lightning bolt, that the diagonal is so illuminate and sudden that the lightning bolt becomes the image of that and it becomes an image that occurs naturally from feeling and re-occurs in that realm where memory having exchanged with imagination. Now that memory operates in myth, imagination operates in art. And this is how creativity happens. There would be without this no creativity in the universe. It wouldn't happen. In the entire integral core of the universe, there is not one chance ever for creativity. Not only can it never happen, it does not happen because structurally it cannot happen because it is a expanded function of conscious transform and doesn't occur in existence. Existentials are not interested in creativity. Tradition is not interested in creativity, and the mind in its nature is not interested in creativity at all. It has to be educated and taught this. It's an acquired taste and this is why poetry is indispensable. One of the other great early 20th century Chinese poets, Wen e2, from his, translated a little volume of his called Red candle from the poem The Death of Li Po expresses it this way. A pair of dragon candles are burnt down to the sticks. They reborrow the remaining wax from the thick tears already shed. A wasted flame reluctantly flickers on and off, panting in the night. Trembling uselessly, wine cups and plates strew the table. The wine jars have fallen down in sleep. The drunken guests have scattered like crows returning to their nest. Only the very drunk, drunk like mud Li-Po, as if his whole body had put itself out of joint, sprawls in a crooked heap on a chair in the garden, muttering and murmuring. Whatever it is, he says, the sound is inaudible. His lips move ceaselessly. Suddenly, those eyeballs held by red spiders webs. They each seem like a miniature drunken man stare Dare for a long time at a timid candle flame. Just like a hungry lion discovering a small animal soundlessly. Its two eyes fixed themselves on it. Then, gently and softly, it lifts a front foot like lightning. Anticipating awareness suddenly springs. So the candlesticks at the other corners of the table are pulled to the floor by this drunkard. You can't get more Daoist esoteric than that. Let's take a break. So we're taking a look for the first time at how history comes into play. In reality History is super supernatural. History is an asymptotic expansion of consciousness. It is an infinite transform of transformation. So that as memory exchanges with the imagination and they play in each other's roles, imagination becomes creative and a memory changes myth into history. So that experience begins to remember and language begins to register itself, not in mythic modes, but in historical modes, and feeling, which was a tone of the integral cycle of ecology, is transformed into an exploratory quality like a poetic. So that you stop telling myths and you start exploring poetically. Now it became fashionable 30 years ago to find a new myth, to live by your myths. Only tribal people ever live by their myths. You can stay tribal, but this is a very dangerous universe for that, at least on this planet. So whenever civilization has come to a juncture of massive transform. The intelligent men and women have always known this and have made some kind of an attempt to understand. Where have we got to? What is happening? What is going on? One of the earliest records that we have of this happening is very early in the Han dynasty in China, about 130 BC. By our kind of chronology, there was a prince who could have been emperor if he played his cards right, but was uninterested. He was philosophical and the Prince of Huainan, and he brought together a conference of the best mystical artists of his day, and they put together their discussions and it's preserved in a Chinese classic called the Huainanzi. Because of his royal place, it was decided that he would not be punished by having this individual thing that instead, about 50 years later, there was a conference held and actually in 79 A.D. and it's translated into English a long time ago called the Comprehensive discussions in the White Tiger Hall was held about the time that Pompeii was destroyed by Mount Vesuvius. And in the juntong, the comprehensive discussions in the White Tiger Hall. The standard understanding of the Chinese classics, and why there are Chinese classics, and why it is that civilization is founded on this sort of expressiveness is expressed in this way. The classics were not just ancient books containing descriptions of the past. They were king. They were canons, literally the. And the word is warped, like in warp and woof in a weave. They literally the warp which provided the standards for man to arrange his life, to comb, to order, to structure his life. The study of these canons was not for the sake of historical knowledge alone. This knowledge should teach the student how to behave, how to order his actions so as to be in harmony with the sacred rules of antiquity. We reject the idea that Confucius deliberately adopted the works he found to make of them Ching, to make of them elements of a canon. Yet the books which in the Han dynasty were assigned official teachers were no longer ordinary documents, but sacred writings containing messages from the past to be respectively preserved and guarded against adulteration, and to be understood in a spirit of pious reverence. The difficult and often obscure wording of the text, however, required expert guidance in the study of them. Eager students tried to enter the service of famous masters in order to be taught and disciplined by them, and later to be able to continue the line and transmit the doctrine to generations to come. Uninterrupted transmission was considered the indispensable asset of a scholar. Individual scholarship had no value. And he who is seeking to justify his teaching dared to invent some non-existing connection with a master, ran the risk of being exposed and despised. So when one gets into the problems of history, the problems are really deep, and they so far on this planet have been intractable. The problems have not been solved. No civilization has solved the problems that history poses by its seven dimensional occurrence. There have been individuals who have solved it, who have resolved, and who have given us indications, but they, up until our time, have been very few. Now there's an enormous population who have moved beyond history into science. But 90% of people earning their livings in science don't know any science. They only know the rituals of a bureaucratic application of funding. And this is a very severe problem. For example, the world standard scientific journal, the time Magazine of Science, is called nature. Here's the June 14th, 2001 issue. The big article on electronics in a spin. Because electronics not only have polarity of positive and minus, they have spin left handed and right handed. They have chirality. And only when you work with a four capacity logic of energy do you have any kind of an approach to existential wholeness. In fact, if you work only with positive and negative, as in electronics, you're working with a truncated reactivity that introduces a myopia and astigmatism into the entire ecology of understanding. Spintronics is at least as extensive as electronics, but the factoring of those two together to make a different way of looking at Existentiality and all of its developments, how logic in the mind comes out of that kind of existentiality within about 20 years, we'll have computers that work with qubits, not with bits with four faceted moments of decision. This quality has been explored, but has been explored in such a way that it is almost ineffable. When someone comes to try and express in a cultural situation, in a cultural tradition which cannot hear, which cannot see, which will not acknowledge what is being expressed and said, the standard reply is that's not true. And the concomitant is that that's not new. It's not new and it's not true. And furthermore, it doesn't exist. It's confusing. Some. 600 years after the discussions in the White Tiger Hall, when the Han dynasty had completely fallen and many hundreds of years of Chinese history had intervened, the next really great dynastic reformation of China was the Tang, redone by Tang Taizong. In Alexander the Great type genius. All of these pre Tang and early Tang dynasty materials on art especially on Chinese painting, have been collected together and published in Leiden, Holland. And here the number one document even placed in the introduction to these volumes is the famous delineation by Hsiao Ho of the way in which art unfolds according to six principles. Delineation says ho. Delineation is the foundation of painting, and coloring is the final stage of painting. The word for both these, taken together, becomes the Chinese word for painting. Delineation and color. When in ancient times, Chiang Kai Chia created pictograms. Chinese. When. When in ancient times. Pictograms. The foundations of Chinese characters were first created, and logograms say there were six kinds. One of them was called bird script. In it, the ends of the strokes resembled bird's heads. Though this belongs to a category of painting, it still bore the label of writing and had not yet received the name of painting. When Shihuang originated the charts, they still represented objects in summary fashion referential existentiality as confirmations of symbolic objectivity, and only when you originated embroidery were the shapes of things represented with completeness, and indeed the methods of present day painting arose in an age of redoubted splendor. It penetrates the divine and phantoms. The recondite in its application is very wide. The discovery of expanded dimensionality in art is always the way in which a civilization exfoliates itself in the sense of flowering, not just as a flower, but in the whole process of how flowers occur in the first place, so that there is a tremendous deep insight to realize that the primate species of beings on this planet emerged Evolutionary about the time that flowering plants emerged. Primates and flowers emerged about 70 million years ago, the same echelon of evolution. So it's no fortuitous accident that the Buddha uses a lotus or Western wisdom uses a rose to express this quality, that the interpenetrated togetherness does not produce a reconciliation, but generates an infinity. And the first process that comes out of that expansion, though its seat is in consciousness, the first process is history. So history is an extremely difficult medium. It is a medium like experience, like mythic experience, but it transcends the entire ecology of sensation, feeling, thinking and intuition altogether. That famous Quaternary typology, incidentally made famous by Jung and his psychology of types, actually owes its origin to Schiller. If you read Jung, he was saying there, this comes originally from Schiller, but that quaternary of types sensation, feeling, thinking, intuition, ritual, myth, symbol, vision, those four together as the square of attention, as the frame of reference, as that focus by which we then can trust that we're in a process of reality, not identifying things, but appreciating the fullness of their occurrence, that they do not occur just as they are, but they have a whole life cycle of occurring. One can't appreciate the flower unless you appreciate the root, the seeds, the stem, the bud, the flower, the petals that fall, the seeds that come back. The entire ecology of something is what it is, not its existential snap photograph at any particular stage. Calculus is based upon being able to compute the infinite differences in the entire ecology of something's actuality. In between 0 and 1 is an infinity, which can be understood to any degree of specificity The difficulty is to understand in our education, and it has never been made clear in any kind of formal education in history. It's always been esoteric to understand that when memory comes into play, it exchanges with imagination, and that creative imagination engenders a process known as history. So that history is personally creative in a spiritual mode and is not at all the dead past. To think that history is the dead past is to think that the blank staccato of rap music is better than Mozart. Here's Emily Dickinson in a poem written in 1863. She would have been 33 years old. Remorse Is memory awake. Her party's all astir a presence of departed acts at window and at door. Its past set down before the soul and lighted with a match. Perusal. To facilitate and help. Belief to stretch. Remorse is cureless the disease. Not even God can heal. For tis his institution and the adequate of hell. She's expressing here how in the dynamic of consciousness there is an added energy that comes into play when personal histories begin to occur, and that if that is not given its freedom to occur in a way which is real to it, it automatically reduces, reverts, and not in some recursive way to go back and reweave, but to fall back in a regressive way. And what does it fall back to? It falls back to the last objectivity that it could trust to be certain. For most people, it doesn't fall back to the objectivity of symbols, because they haven't had strong enough minds to have symbols that really hold. If you have a good, strong ideology, then it falls back to the mind and then you believe in that ideology till death do us part. But for most people, it falls back to ritual, to the objectivity of the body, and the body becomes God Almighty, arbiter of what is true. But for someone like an Emily Dickinson who experiences a crisis of doubt, she can't fall back to either the mind or the body's objectivity. And so she falls back into the mystery of nature that has no objectivity. It's just an infinite process of change. And she fell into that in early 1861. And she conveys in a letter. A letter to a man named Higginson. He was a literature. He was an editor for The Atlantic Monthly in Boston, who eventually visited her a couple of times, and she writes to him Your kindness claimed earlier gratitude. But I was ill. And write today from my pillow. Thank you for the surgery. His comments on her poetry. It was not so painful as I supposed. I bring you others as you ask, though they might not differ. While my thought is undressed, I can make the distinction. But when I put them in the gown, they look alike and numb. You ask how old I was. I make no verse, but 1 or 2. Until this winter, sir, I had a terror. Since September I could tell to none. And so I sing as the boy does by the burying ground. Because I am afraid. You inquire my books for poets. I have Keats and the Brownings for prose. Mr. Ruskin, sir Thomas Browne and the revelations. I went to school, but in your manner of the phrase, had no education. When a little girl I had a friend who taught me immortality, but venturing too near himself, he never returned. Soon after, my tutor died, and for several years my lexicon was my only companion. Then I found one more. But he was not contented. I be his scholar, and so left the land. You ask of my companion hills, sir. My companions are hills and the sun down, and a dog as large as myself. She had become very timid by the time she was 20, and her father, in order to give her a hitch up on her increasing physical timidity, bought her a huge dog, a Newfoundland, which she named Carlo, and for 15 years Carlo was her constant companion. He lived in her room. When she went out for walks, he went with her. Carlo lived for 15 years and he was constantly Newfoundlands are usually white. After 1861. She began to not only be timid, but to be in existential jeopardy of falling through the mesh of the world. It is not just a fear of heights. It's a fear that existence is not strong enough to catch you, because the depths that are there constitute an abyss. This kind of equality manifested in her in such a way that she became like a pre Homo sapiens species of being. She went back to before our kind became the dominant form on the planet. She went back to a kind of a situation where our primordial ancestor species were not afraid of predators so much as they were afraid of seeing their image in still water. The mirror was a very ancient form of terror for our predecessors. So she never allowed anyone to take a photograph of her except once in her life before this happened. She never allowed anyone to sketch her or to paint her. Only one photograph of her very young when she was in college exists, and all the other portraits of her that are paraded for a century are all doctored. Aspects of this photograph, they put frilled lace things on there. They rearrange her hair to make her look nicer. She was a very plain Jane. She writes in her poetry again, 1863, about a year after writing this letter to Higginson. This way renunciation is a piercing virtue, the letting go, a presence for an expectation. Not now, the putting out of eyes. Just sunrise, last day, days. Great progenitor lb v renunciation is the choosing against itself. Itself to justify unto itself when a larger function make that appear. Smaller that covered vision. Here it's almost an acrobatic pyrotechnic. Trapeze artist with language trying to express at the same time as making sure that one doesn't express existentially or mentally. Because both those objects are the predators. And so she is trying to live without being objective, either physically or mentally, but purely artistically is a very, very difficult. Here's a letter. Two months after the woman who became her de facto literary executor, 1882, to her mother, the woman writes, I must tell you about the character of Amherst. It is a lady whom the people called the myth. She is a sister of Mr. Dickinson, and it seems to be the climax of the family oddity. She has not been outside of her house in 15 years, except once to see a new church. When she crept out at night and viewed it by moonlight. No one who calls upon her mother and sister ever see her, but she allows little children. Once in a great while and one at a time to come in when she gives them a cake or candy or some nicety. Curiously enough, the woman writing this became the mistress of Emily Dickinson's older brother. She was in and out of the house all the time. She played piano. She never saw Emily Dickinson in person. In all the years. A few months later, she wrote to her mother again about the myth. She always wears white and has her hair arranged as it was the fashion. 15 years ago, when she went into retirement, she wanted me to come and sing to her, but she would not see me. She has frequently sent me flowers and poems, and we have a very pleasant friendship in that way. So last Sunday I went over there with Mr. Dickinson, Miss Viney, the other sister, who occasionally go out and told me if I had been otherwise in a very agreeable person, she should. Have been dreadfully tired of my name even. And then she goes on to say. No one has seen her in all those years except her own family. She is very brilliant and strong, but became disgusted with society and declared she would leave it while she was still quite young. Not disgusted, she fell through the holding mash of mind and body, and could only continue to live as long as she flew in what used to be called the ethereal air of art. She only existed as a poet. She was no longer in the body or the mind. She was just a pure spirit. It was an extraordinary thing. This ability is interesting for us. Because it is one of the purest opportunities that we have of appreciating that if we do not mature into history, even though we achieve spiritual objectivity, we will fade like a phantom because it takes body and mind also, along with spirit, to constitute the real. I have to weave together. That's why the responsibility for civilization lies in education. Not in politics, not in religion, but in education. To convey that to restore that and to maintain that and to explore that. A final poem about the same time, 1863, from Emily Dickinson. Remembering Chuang tzu. The birds reported from the South. A News express to me. A spicy charge, my little posts. But I am deaf today. The flowers appealed. A timid throng. I reinforced the door. Go, blossom to the bees, I said, and trouble me no more. The summer grace for notice strove remote her best array. The heart to stimulate the eye refused to utterly. At length a mourner like myself. She drew away. Austere her frosts to ponder. Then it was I recollected her. She suffered me, for I had mourned. I offered her no word. My witness was the crape I bore. Her witness was her dead. Thenceforward we together dwelt. She never questioned me, nor I herself. Our contact a wiser sympathy. Into history. Next week