I love driving. Not commuting or running errands or city driving. I love the open road. I love the transition from suburbs to farm and fields, traveling the faces of land familiar or fresh. I know this is not a good thing in light of global warming and politics and living green, and the driving I do now is strictly destination focused. I’m headed somewhere.
I love driving by myself, and not only driving, but flying or riding in a train. About an hour in to this type of trip, after we’ve reached a cruising altitude and the rest of the passengers are settled, or after I’ve secured my window seat and established who it is I’m sitting near on the train, my books and journal organized, or after I’ve listened through the first CD in the car and my own city limits lie well behind, something happens to my attention. It feels like a mental cog shifting. An awareness, an anticipation, a certain receptivity to my environment whether interior or exterior, sets in. Some creative door opens. Maybe it’s that way for most writers. You’re comfortable but awake and lodged in an in-between place with few distractions. The mind, freed, settles where it will. That’s what happens with me, anyway, lines arrive, whether fully formed or as some intuition waiting.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, I’m now in Nevada City for the Fourth (yes, I drove). fyi, it’s very smoky up here in the Sierra foothills though no fires are near, and doors remain closed to keep the drifty smoke outside.
Since I’d found ED’s “Nature is a Haunted House,” quote, also included yesterday, I brought along The Letters of Emily Dickinson to read more. Wow. So many quotable comments pop out of her prose, including the title for this entry.
Another thing that struck me was how Thomas Higginson not only failed to recognize Dickinson’s talent (not so remarkable given the styles of the day) but also, as her best advisor, so often simply misunderstood her. It was another woman poet, Helen Hunt Jackson, who finally encouraged Dickinson to submit a piece, anonymously, to the Masque of Poets. The poem was published in this collection of other anonymous poems and widely attributed by reviewers to be the work of Emerson! The title of the piece? “Success is counted sweetest.” Argh! At last, fuel for my clerihew:
Emily Dickinson
wrote to Thomas Higginson.
What would Emerson have said
if she’d written to him instead?
Well who knows, indeed. But Emerson’s boost to Whitman’s poetic career can’t be underestimated. O, Realms unratified!
-Sally Ashton