Miserable? Feel like you are falling out of a plane? I know I am. The parachute is empathy. Let’s take a moment and feel for Emily Dickinson, who was weeping long before you were born. This was written around 1862. She was about 32.
I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing,
Eyes –
I wonder if It weighs like
Mine –
Or has an Easier size.
I wonder if They bore it
long –
Or did it just
begin –
I could not tell the Date of
Mine –
It feels so old a
pain –
I wonder if it hurts to
live –
And if They have to
try –
And whether – could
They choose between –
It would not
be – to die –
She wonders for a few stanzas whether time ever cures anyone,
or if even with a thousand years, only a bit of a smile would return to the sad
faces she sees. Then she makes
sure that we know that grief is a complicated word. It always means, first and foremost, the harrowing trauma of
the death of a loved one. All
other meanings seem to be metaphor.
But all other meanings of the word grief are not metaphor. The reason there are so many awful people is that grief fills them from some real loss, but because it is not the loss of a loved one, no one tells them they have the right to grieve, so they don’t. The grief stays in them, in their bodies, and it calcifies, it stops growth, it causes pain. Dickinson uses her thrilling language to mean many things at once: loneliness, disappointment, rejection, human and profound. Here’s how she puts it:
The Grieved – are
many – I am told –
There is the various
Cause –
Death – is but
one – and comes but once –
And only nails the
eyes –
A sort they call
“Despair” –
There’s Banishment from
native Eyes –
In Sight of Native
Air –
We don’t just feel bad, we can see feeling okay, right over there. We are just banished from it. Dickinson closes the poem thinking of the death of Jesus and how each of us has to drag our cross around, and how for her there is a “piercing comfort” available.
And though I may not guess
the kind –
Correctly – yet to
me
A piercing Comfort it affords
In passing
Calvary –
To note the
fashions – of the Cross –
And how they're mostly
worn –
Still fascinated to presume
That Some – are
like My Own –
The piercing comfort is in
seeing other people, and seeing their grief. The comfort is in noting how people bear their load, how
they wear their burden. What is
more, the speaker of this poem, dead-hearted through previous stanzas, now
finds fascination. She doesn’t
know anything about anyone else’s grief, but it fascinates her to presume, to
guess with expectation of being right, that some of the grief she sees is like
the most mysterious thing she has ever encountered: her own grief. Empathy is the hook back in. Why
can’t you try to measure every grief you meet, and even speak to it? It isn’t normal, but it is a lot better
than being miserable alone.
Here is a fun quick interview at Neuronarrative (sorry I just fixed this link).
Also this is very nice. So why can't I choose between the proposals I've written and commit and sell one finally? It's freaking difficult to make choices sometimes. Too much pressure maybe. No money, terrible economy. Anyway, this link has nothing to do with that, I just felt like confessing.
-- JMH
