Emily Dickinson Conference

There is an upcoming conference on Emily Dickinson being hosted at Oxford University, by The Emily Dickinson International Society (EDIS).  It will be hosted on August 6-8 this year.  I wish I could go, partly because I would love to be able to go to England, but also because I really do enjoy the work of Emily Dickinson.  Of all the poets, Emily Dickinson makes me feel poetic.  Her verse makes me feel like poetry is going to spill out of the world.

Anyway, the topic for the conference is "’were I Britain born’: Dickinson’s Transatlantic Connections.”  Since it is held by the EDIS it makes sense that it is about Emily Dickinson's poetry in an international sense.

The Topics Include:

Session 1:
British Connections I: Dickinson, Shakespeare, and Milton
British Connections II: Keats
British Connections III: Dickinson and the Brontës

Session 2:
Global Connections I: Dickinson in and out of Japan, Russia, and France
Dickinson, Nature, and God
British Connections IV: Dickinson and Emily Brontë

Session 3:
Dickinson and Class
Global Connections II: Dickinson in German and Polish Authors
Dickinson, Gender, and the Woman Writer

Session 4:
British Connections V: George Eliot Vol. I
Dickinson’s Isolation and Dissemination
Manuscripts I: Dickinson’s Manuscript Books
Traveling Feet: Dickinson’s Meter and the Lyric

Session 5:
Dickinson and the Arts I: "Imagination's Muse: Emily Dickinson as Creative Inspiration"
British Connections VII: Dickinson’s Imagery
British Connections VI: Solitude and Suffering
Archival Resources: “’Over the fence – I could climb’: Primary Sources for Dickinson Scholarship”

Session 6:
Dickinson and the Arts II: “Dickinson on Stage: A Roundtable Discussion”
Dickinson and the Self
British Connections VIII: George Eliot Vol. II.

Session 7:
Drama in Dickinson
Manuscripts II: “Dickinson in Pieces”
Dickinson in New England

Session 8:
British Connections IX: Dickinson’s Imagination and Words
British Connections X: Romantic and Religious Visions
Dickinson’s Signature: Questions of (Poetic) Identity

Session 9:
Dickinson’s Ethics and Poetics
Dickinson and the Question of Fame
British Connections XI: Dickinson and the Brownings

So Overall, it looks like a very full conference.  You can find a copy of the program here.

Andrew Morris

Religion and the Sublime

In the movie Contact religion features prominently.  In the movie, Ellie, the main character meets Palmer who is a religious man.  She as a scientist cannot understand his perspective on God.  His claim to have had an experience that he cannot verify aggravates her as her scientific discipline wants everything to be verifiable and quantifiable.
Later in the movie, she to has an experience that is beyond her comprehension and which changes her when she goes through the device that has been built to contact aliens (sorry for the bulgarian subtitles):



This is what we might call her conversion experience.  As a part of the film there is no proof that this journey occurred, the transition is instantaneous even though she has experienced hours. She is in the position of defending an experience for which she has no proof, just like Palmer was in before:



By exploring this issue, Contact comes very close to the issue of the sublime.  The sublime is by its very nature not possible to describe, only to feel.  One who has felt a particular aspect of the sublime may speak with someone else who has also and be understood more clearly, but it not always possible to convey our experience.  This ties in very well with religion, religion is often about the very personal element of our experience, without the proof to show to someone else.  So perhaps the better word to describe this aspect of the sublime is faith.

Emily Dickinson also examined some of the conflicts of religion.  To say that Emily Dickinson was not religious would be false, but she did not necessarily respect institutionalized religion:


"Some keep the Sabbath going to Church —
I keep it, staying at Home —
With a Bobolink for a Chorister —
And an Orchard, for a Dome —

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice —
I just wear my Wings —
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton — sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman —
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last —
I'm going, all along."

In this poem Emily Dickinson "actually divinizes the earth," according to an entry by Susan Rieke in An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia.  This is much like in Contact, where the experience of the conversion moment is deeply involved with the idea of beauty in nature.  Religion in this sense loses to structure and formal institutions because they do not offer the power that nature offers.  This idea of direct communion to God through the world is in contrast to not only the religious institutions of Emily Dickinson's life, but also the scientific discipline of Ellie.

Andrew Morris

This article is part of a continuing theme on Emily Dickinson, modern media, and the sublime, if you would like to know more read here.

Sickness, Zombies, and the Sublime

And as pale sickness does invade, Your frailer part, the breaches made, In that fair lodging still more clear, Make the bright guest, your soul, appear.
--Edmund Waller


I had the opportunity to be sick recently.  I know that that is an odd turn of phrase, but let me suffice to say that I am to some degree a sensualist, and while I may not enjoy all the things that happen to me I do try to understand them in context.  In my family, my father is often incapacitated with migraines.  He has had surgery on his sinuses, tried numerous medications, participated in a clinical trial, and more to try to get rid of them.  In my family, being able to massage others has become a life skill, simply because at various times we need to care for on of us who under the weather, sometimes we are all under the weather.  I and two of my brothers have also inherited the lovely sinus problems and migraines that are a part of our family legacy.  We all live here in Utah.  My brother John has had a migraine everyday for the last week and a half, a byproduct of the summer storms.  My brother Scott and I both acquired migraines within hours of each other as a summer storm rolled through on the weekend.  We both love spring and summer storm season, in fact I have very fond memories of living Tucson and watching storms during monsoon season, but it hurts sometimes.  Hurting and sickness are simply part of the human condition.

Since sickness is such a universal condition, it makes sense that we explore it literature and entertainment.  In fact in modern times, with the possibility of disease being engineered, or acquiring some new mutation, it becomes a force unto itself.  In the nature of humankind, we take something and make it larger than life in order to understand it, we make it sublime.

This connection is particularly apparent in zombie movies.  In many zombie movies, first of all, zombies are caused by some illness.  And furthermore, they exhibit disease-like behavior, spreading the infection intentionally.  In fact if you go look up zombies, you may go to a website like this one: http://www.zombiehub.com/zombie-virus.html.  It is an article which discusses the possibility of a virus that actually causes zombies and uses rabies as an example of a disease that causes behavior.  The Ebola virus does something similar, when the host is dying it causes them to flail around in order to spread the disease.  However, even though a virus like Ebola has an extremely high mortality rate, it usually kills itself off simply because it is too effective.  Truly well adapted viruses behave more like the common cold, rarely killing anyone, but always coming back.  Zombies are an exaggeration, the embodiment of our fear of disease, for when we suffer from disease we are reminded of our own mortality and that instead of recovering we might have slipped over the edge.  So you get videos like 28 days later, and this youtube clip (turn down your volume, because it is loud):



In Emily Dickinson's poetry you can also see sickness being elevated.  For an example see:

As One does Sickness over
In convalescent Mind,
His scrutiny of Chances
By blessed Health obscured—

As One rewalks a Precipice
And whittles at the Twig
That held Him from Perdition
Sown sidewise in the Crag

A Custom of the Soul
Far after suffering
Identity to question
For evidence't has been—

In this poem, Dickinson examines sickness after having recovered.  The sickness becomes a testing ground for the mind.  It is a precipice that you can examine and say what if?  It is an edge into death because you can always ask, how close was I, and as in the poem "whittles at the Twig | That held Him from Perdition."  Sickness is sublime, not just because we lose control of our bodies, reminding us how very fragile we are, but also because they embody the human condition.  And the human condition is constantly attempting to forget that we are as a person who has fallen over a cliff and is holding on by the barest thread, wondering when we will fall into the sublime arms of death (whatever that may turn out to mean).  As my father likes to say: There is one human constant, no one gets out alive.

Andrew Morris

This article is part of a continuing theme on Emily Dickinson, modern media and the sublime, if you would like to know more read here.

Trying to Catagorize the Sublime

Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful.
--Victor Hugo


Since I am attempting to form a (somewhat) cohesive work I feel obliged to begin to encapsulate it and summarize it on one page or post as much as possible.  Though I first want to mention that attempting to categorize the sublime, both within my posts and within this central organizational structure may be considered counter-sublime.  As I am now introducing you to my main subject, we should probably move on to that.

The Definition of the Sublime

The sublime.  If you are reasonably well read, or have another reason to have a large vocabulary, you probably already know its standard definition, which is where we will start.  It is (from the Oxford Dictionary):

sublime
• adjective (sublimer, sublimest)
1 of such excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe.
2 extreme or unparalleled: sublime confidence.

There is also a definition from chemistry:

  • verb Chemistry (with reference to a solid substance) change directly into vapour when heated, typically forming a solid deposit again on cooling.

— ORIGIN Latin sublimis, from sub- ‘up to’ + a second element perhaps related to limen ‘threshold’ or limus ‘oblique’.

The sublime is usually considered to evoke positive emotions and connotations in these definitions (except in chemistry, then it's just a process).  That is something that you lose when you go into the literary definition.  The sublime certainly can be positive, but it can also be negative.  For the sake of literature, the sublime can be considered any experience that transcends any attempt to describe it.

How the Sublime Pertains to Our Discussion

My project involves using examples of the poetry of Emily Dickinson and comparing it to media (in particular video).  In each example I am highlighting a particular element of the sublime.  My true main argument is perhaps a little more general.  The fact that we can find the sublime both in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and in movies, which are often public venues of entertainment, suggests that they are an essential part of the human experience.  That is why this project matters.  Even if you don't care for Emily Dickinson, or popular media, you still know what it is to be human, and the sublime is part of your existence.

Where our discussion has lead us so far: 

So far I have discussed a number of topics, they are in order of discussion:

First I have had some posts that were purely formative, in which I was discussing the process of research (though research never really stops), they are:


Literally a Literature Blog, Figuratively Speaking

Emily Dickinson Research Trends

Getting better all the ti-i-ime...

The Form of our Blog Projects

Then I begin to dig a little more deeply into my subject matter:


Emily Dickinson as the Precursor to the Dark Sublime
-In this post I discuss the Dark Sublime as it relates to another piece of literature, Heart of Darkness By Conrad, and a poem of Emily Dickinson's. I also examining the fact that Emily Dickinson is ariving at the Dark Sublime years before anyone else.

The Circular Sublime-This post discusses the opening scene of the movie Contact in context of an Emily Dickinson poem.  This particular example of the sublime focuses on cyclical nature, space, and humanities place in the universe.


Avatar Party - Avatar as a Sublime Experience?
-I don't have a specific Emily Dickinson poem that this post refers to, but I examine a few of the themes that you can find in the movie Avatar.


Sickness, Zombies, and the Sublime
-Sickness as a sublime experience, and also zombies as a manifestation on the modern fear of zombies.  I also bring this into an example of poetry from Emily Dickinson.

Religion and the Sublime

-A return to the movie Contact, this time exploring the issue of religion, faith, and sublime.  Then I examine Emily Dickinson's perspective on structured religion.

Emily Dickinson Conference-Not actually about a specific subject and the sublime.  There is an upcoming conference at Oxford University hosted by EDIS (Emily Dickinson International Society).  I just give a brief look at the subjects that they will be exploring.

Terror and Awe - A Return to the Early Sublime  - A return to some of the early historical aspects of the sublime as described by Edmund Burke.  Nature, disaster movies, and awe and terror.

Cohesion in Purpose - An attempt to make my blog a little more cohesive by pointing out what the value of the blogs that I have written is.

Reaching Out - Brief discussion of the sublimity of language.  Also my attempts to contact other people to comment and or discuss the ideas of this blog.



The Future? 

Here are a few elements that could be discussed in the future:




 -More specific Avatar examples in the context of Emily Dickinson.

 -Movie Criticism and the Sublime (I am currently reading through some books on Movie/Cinema Criticism so I am not sure if this will yet apply.)

 -Themes I find Emily Dickinson poems that are especially obvious to me, like the solitary/internal self, self vs society, nature,  gardening and flowers (I am sure I can make a sublime out of this somehow), Death, love, etc...  as long as I can find proper media examples.

-The movie What Dreams May Come as an example of sublime imagery.  It is also about love, heaven (particularly the psychology), internal landscapes, hell, madness, and grief and loss.  It is also a fantastic example of a movie that begins In medias res, or in the middle of things, as we skip back across his life to see his interactions with his children and wife, as we experience his story.

-Anything that people tell me I should discuss in more detail or cite as an example.  (So post comments people)

Andrew Morris

Added 06/17/2010:

I have been told a number of times that my definition of the sublime is still not clear enough.  While I am now tempted to steer them towards my blog on the sublimity of language, I feel I should attempt to do the subject greater justice.

I believe that my concept of the sublime is fairly simple.  It is any experience, feeling, or object that a person undergoes that raises emotions beyond the complete comprehension of that person.  A good definition comes from Edmund Burke, "In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it."  I should make it clear, however, that I do not subscribe to Burke's idea of the sublime as only being from terror and pain, and I consider any emotion that is heightened sufficiently can become overwhelming and become sublime.  I also do not limit it to emotional sublime.  It is possible for us as human beings to encounter experiences and objects that we cannot comprehend.  They may well have emotional overtones, but the stars in the sky and realization of that infinity, which I have had a few times is overpowering by itself.

I hope this makes things a little clearer, if not let me know and I will try again.

Avatar Party - Avatar as a Sublime Experience?

I knew that I would most likely not have time to write in my blog on Friday, between going class and the Avatar party later my day was fairly full. I had intended to write Saturday, but my day was taken over by my friend Laura (not that that is a bad thing) and we made Julia Child's Beef Bourguignon, which we had been putting off for a while. Not surprising considering it involved more money and utensils then we probably should have paid for. Sunday is a day of worship and it just didn't feel right to write the blog on Sunday, not to mention helping my brother brainstorm for a new novel. And Memorial day was taken up by more of the novel activity, some housework I had put off, and of course, some getting together with friends and family.
So now its Tuesday and I'm finally getting back to my blog. Nothing like life to get in the way of everything else.

So we had the Avatar party last Friday on the 28th. We had Indian food for dinner and also watched some movie scenes from India. I am tempted to say Bollywood, but these videos were actually from southern India which lead to a few cultural difference that Professor Burton pointed out to us. Avatar is in many ways about the difference between cultures and some culture shock. I think that was echoed fairly well with my classmates as we watched the movies from India. There was an element that felt off, a part of our perceptions that said that this should not be this way, that should be different, etc... And while it is not the main thing that I want to talk about in regards to Avatar, it occurred to me that being exposed to cultures which strike you in this way could be a form of sublime. I think it is a lesser sublime, but for a time your mind is expecting a different action and consequence than it gets. Culture is a way of seeing the world, and expose to a new culture is a new way of thinking that is at first beyond your comprehension. And what could be more sublime than that which the mind is not yet ready to comprehend?

Avatar is not just a single sublime experience. Like any good book or movie it may have a central argument but that is not its only one.  It is a sublime of the power and glory of nature, as well as natures raw beauty.  It is about the war within mankind that has been going on since the beginning, not only of good and evil but also of moving forward or moving back, and mankind's simultaneous fear and acceptance of the new.  It is about religion and God's interplay with nature.  It is as I had mentioned also about the conflict between points of view and separate cultures.  It is also about identity and about the self verses or between two societies (more than that really, we have the scientists who form another separate culture).  It is also very much a love story, and it may be questioned whether the main character, Jake Sully can be considered to be truly one of the Na'vi because of their ideals or because he was in love with Neytiri (though his later experiences are very like a conversion story in which he becomes converted to the nature religion of the Na'vi).  It is about military and civilian, and how those modes of thought differ, though it is fortunate that it does not make the mistake of saying one or the other is evil.  It is about how money can be an end in itself, and when it becomes the most important thing everything else can be sacrificed for that.  There is also the question of honorable war, and what it is and is not worth going to war for.

There are more that I could go into.  I think what I really wanted to demonstrate is that the sublime is part of the human experience.  Most humans go through love at some point, but who really understands all that it means to love?  Love as a matter of fact is one of the perfect examples of the sublime, because it is supposed to be about giving yourself over to something larger than yourself, without necessarily knowing why.  The sublime with it state of being that which we do not understand because it is bigger than the human experience can hold, is however, still very much a part of what it means to be human.  So it really should not surprise us that we find it across art.  The issues may change, the very sublimes that we encounter may change their image, but the sublime is as much a part of our culture now as has always been.

The Circular Sublime

I had mentioned previously that Emily Dickinson has a tendency to contradict her own portrayals of the sublime.  This is not unexpected.  The sublime is by its very nature supposed to be something that is incomprehensible and by writing (or using any other art) about it we attempt to capture what cannot be captured.  Perhaps the most astonishing thing is how often artists like Dickinson succeed.

I wanted to continue my exploration of the sublime in Dickinson's Poetry and in modern media by comparing it to the movie Contact, one of the few movies that I might argue is better than its book.  The opening sequence of the movie starts looking at the Earth with, what was at the time of the movies production, modern music.  Then the scene leaves the Earth behind going out through the solar system past the planets and then shows the Oort cloud and then Alpha Centauri, finally heading out of the Milky Way, and then many many galaxies, all the while going backwards in time through radio messages until it becomes silence.  Then all of that becomes a reflection in the eye of the main character as a girl.

I probably wouldn't even have thought about the importance of the soundtrack, other than for their value as a chronological marker if I hadn't currently been reading Aesthetics of Film as part of my research for this topic.  One of the subjects that it mentioned is most overlooked when doing an analysis of film is sound, so I decided to pay special attention to it.  At this point it is probably best to let you see the clip, if you want to do your own on-the-fly examination of how it makes you feel, feel free.




The overall impression that this clip portrays is one of the vastness of space and how small the world is in it.  Long before you leave even our solar system, Earth has vanished from view, and the sun in all of its glory fades away.  To match this, the remaining human element of our radio signals fades away into silence, again showing all that is human has no place out in space.  But then, after all has become just space, a hint of sound starts up again and the scene becomes a reflection in an eye.  By doing this it returns us solidly to the realm of Earth and earthly care, and in fact in the movie we become swept away in the affairs of the characters immediately after.  This also forms a cycle, it leaves earth and then returns.  And by returning so directly to the eye of a human being, it reminds us that we are watching a human construction, and perhaps, even argues that all the grand creation that we have seen up to this point has no meaning without mankind.

To illustrate a similar point in one of Emily Dickinson's poetry you can read:

The Life we have is very great.
The Life that we shall see
Surpasses it, we know, because
It is Infinity.
But when all Space has been beheld
And all Dominion shown
The smallest Human Heart's extent
Reduces it to none.

Notice that the sublimes of the human, life/time, and space are all expressed quickly in this piece.  The sublime which is supposed to be incomprehensibly large is compared to other sublime and one is subjugated to the other.  She not only has a counter-sublime in her matter of fact description of the sublime, but also in making the sublime have a size to compare.  Dickinson, like the scene from Contact, is argues that all of space and life only has meaning in the context of how it is human.

I had intended to say more about a later scene in Contact, but this article is getting a bit long, so I'll save it for later.

Feel free to comment or offer suggestions.

Andrew Morris

Emily Dickinson as the Precursor to the Dark Sublime

I was just reading from Emily Dickinson and the Modern Consciousness which was saying that Emily Dickinson saw the abyss and horror that preoccupy modern thought and indeed was the first one.  Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a classic later example of something that explicitly explores this subject as it explores the how far human beings are capable of going into the darkness.  The savagery in the minds of the British after they have succumbed to the savagery of Africa is presented as worst than the original darkness.  (The Heart of Darkness may indeed be something that was once light and has become dark.)  This idea of society overall falling into darkness, or at least having something missing is a classic idea in modern thought, but was not explicitly discussed in the time of Emily Dickinson.  Emily Dickinson writes about this in poems like this one:


We learned the Whole of Love—
The Alphabet—the Words—
A Chapter—then the mighty Book—
Then—Revelation closed—

But in Each Other's eyes
An Ignorance beheld—
Diviner than the Childhood's—
And each to each, a Child—

Attempted to expound
What Neither—understood—
Alas, that Wisdom is so large—
And Truth—so manifold!

Where religion has given way to some new way of looking at the world after "Revelation closed."

While it is not clearly mentioned in the book, this is also a form of the sublime.  The sublime in this case is something so empty or dark that it cannot be described.  In this poem that emptiness is mentioned in the ignorance in their eyes.