Finite Infinity

Emily Dickinson rarely left her room or her father's home. Some have speculated that she suffered from Meniere's Disease, an affliction of the inner ear that causes bouts of vertigo and deafness. Some have speculated that I suffer from Meniere's Disease. I'm not so sure about either diagnosis. What drives a person to become a recluse? Is it a disease? I don't believe it is.

The mind and body are linked in such intricate and complicated ways that when a sensitive mind like Dickinson's (and I like to think my own as well) meets the stimuli of day-to-day life, it becomes overwhelmed, which in turn overwhelms the body. The mind is the master of the body. It distracts itself from input with out put. Meeting a stranger fills it with panic and it deflects this feeling by sending pain signals to the back, or interrupting the inner ears symphony of balancing orders. Or it makes the hand reach up to scratch an ear, again and again. Or it makes the whole body turn and run.

The beauty of light through leaves, the pungent stink of a man's cologne, scratch of a shirt tag; it's all too much to process. The everyday is more than some of us can bear, to say nothing of what floods in when a loved one dies. We shrink external stimuli down until it's bearable. Is this a disease? Only when our world becomes so disproportionate to that of other people, the ones called normal.

Dickinson had a rich and full life, in her writing. The written word has a way of filtering and organizing sensation and human interaction. It moves at a comfortable pace for the mind. For this reason, I prefer e-mail or texting to a phone call. Then I know the person has time to respond. I don't need to fret about interrupting them, or filling the awkward silences with my voice. I can craft the note, review it, rearrange it, until it says what I want it to say. On the phone or in person, there is too much to think about. How to get into the conversation. How to get out. Where to look. What to say. When to listen. Maybe direct human contact was more than Dickinson could bear. Is this a disease? I suppose so if it makes the person's life unbearable. But I'm not so sure all people were born for large worlds. Some of us need to stay small. If not for us, then who would notice the details? Who will explore the immensity of the nearby?

Here is Emily Dickinson's poem #1695 of her nearly 1,800 poems.

There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
The polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself--
Finite infinity.

I heard a Fly buzz--when I died--

I met Emily Dickinson's poetry as a freshman in college in my first English class. There was a guy in the class who never wore shoes and liked to prop his bare feet up on a chair in front of him.  We sat in a loose circle and he usually angled the soles of his feet in my direct line of sight. I tried to pay attention to the teacher, but  concentrated most on not staring at his feet, his dirty calloused snaggily toe-nailed feet. On the day we studied Dickinson, the contrast between the grotesqueness of my view and the spare and clean beauty of her poetry was palpable. Of course we read the poem with the first line:

I heard a Fly buzz--when I died--

It's a freshman English class staple.

 About a week or two into the quarter, the guy asked if he could cook dinner for me. To this day I don't know what signal I sent out that made him notice me.

To this day, I don't really understand Dickinson's poems. I read them sparingly, but always enjoy them. They are like a strange fruit for me. Like a Kiwi.

After the quarter ended, I may not have understood either the poem or the barefoot Casanova, but I knew which of the two with whom I preferred to spend any more time.