Emily Dickinson and E. Lenore Brown at Their Best

Emily wrote a letter about her nephew Gilbert to his mother just after he died which I think is a masterpiece. He was eight years old when he died of typhoid fever. He had lived next door to her in Amherst, Massachusetts, and she appreciated him, and his mother, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, to whom she wrote:

Dear Sue -

The Vision of Immortal Life has been fulfilled -

How simply at the last the Fathom comes! The Passenger and not the Sea, we find surprises us -

Gilbert rejoiced in secrets -

His life was panting with them – With what menace of Light he cried “Don’t tell, Aunt Emily”! Now my ascended Playmate must instruct me. Show us, prattling Preceptor, but the way to thee!

He knew no niggard moment – His Life was full of boon – The playthings of the Dervish were not so wild as his -

No crescent was this Creature – He traveled from the Full -

Such soar never set -

I see him in the Star, and meet his sweet velocity in everything that flies – His Life was like the Bugle, which winds itself away, his Elegy an echo – His Requiem ecstasy -

Dawn and Meridian in one.

Wherefore would he wait, wronged only of Night, which he left for us -

Without a speculation, our little Ajax spans the whole -

Pass to thy Rendevous of Light,

Pangless except for us -

Who slowly ford the Mystery

Which thou hast leaped across!

Emily

This letter has been in my mind for forty years and has given me endless confirmation. She sees what I see, and articulates it. She writes a little more about him to his mother in a later letter:

...”Open the Door, open the Door, they are waiting for me,” was Gilbert’s sweet command in delirium. Who were waiting for him, all we possess we would give to know – Anguish at last opened it, and he ran to the little Grave at his Grandparents’ feet – All this and more, though is there more? More than Love and Death? Then tell me its name!”

I extract those words from Johnson’s 1986 book, Emily Dickinson Selected Letters.

There is a poem from an even more remote source which brings Emily’s letter to Gilbert’s mother into more light. I find it in Poems by E. Lenore Brown, published in 1971 by Highway Bookshop, Cobalt, Ontario, but I can find no information online or anywhere else about E. Lenore Brown. She writes about the recent death of her fifteen year old son:

GRAVE ON THE HILLSIDE

There’s a little grave on the green hillside,

Where lies my little son.

There I climbed to-day, with an aching heart,

When the work for the day was done.

While lingering there as the twilight fell,

It seemed I could hear him ask,

“who helps you mother since I am gone?

Who is doing each small task?”

This mother than writes seven stanzas which I omit here in which she expresses ways in which she misses her boy, ending with the tenth stanza as follows:

“Dear boy, no one can ever fill your place

At home, at school, at play.

We miss you more and more each day

Than when you went away.”

Modern professional literary criticism might look down on this kind of thing. But I have some acquaintance with Cobalt and of how hard life was there for a mother during that era.

I was going to contrast the tone of this with Emily’s, but no. Both are beyond all that.

The Last Kingdom of the Heart

Robert Penn Warren:

 “...in the heart’s last kingdom, only the old are young.”   

                                 

Those words of Robert Penn Warren have often run through my mind during the last year or so of the public discussion of the age of USA presidential candidates.

My conclusion is that, in the end, after all the considerations about some young people being fresh and open, and some old people being destroyed and insane, Warren got it wonderfully right.

I’m eighty-two now, and I look back to when I was only seventy-two, and realize how much I’ve grown since then, how much more I see now, how much more peace and perspective I have now than then.

I applied to take a program in elementary school teacher training in Ontario when I was sixty-two, twenty years ago, with the idea that I would like to teach elementary school in rural Ontario. My references were good, I had over ten years of teaching at the college level, some experience in secondary school teaching, and had experience in many other ways of life, and was acceptable. But I was told that I would be allowed to teach for only two years after I graduated from the program, the age limit then being sixty-five. Such an age restriction seems almost incredible now.

My grandmother, who was highly qualified in history, English, music, Latin, and German language, had to quit teaching in secondary school in Massachusetts in 1912 because she got married. That now seems inconceivable but it was then a widely-accepted, societal, unassailable belief.

Society itself can improve with age!

At The Great River

 

I am now at the Great River, the Saint Lawrence River, and can see across to the other side to Canada.

This place has extraordinary beauty. It’s called North Country New York.

The big thing about it during the late summer has been the abundance of wild flowers beside the roads and in the fields, especially the Queen Anne’s Lace and the Blue Cornflower, but the varieties are infinite.

But now the big thing now, early autumn, is the sky. The Great River, Canada, the sun, the city and still the wildflowers though a bit wilted – blues, whites, gold – in inconceivable abundance – beyond what one can see – fields beyond what one can see or imagine.

Recent Glimpse: Charles Drayton Thomas

 We get glimpses of the possibility that it works out far better than we ever could have imagined.

One of those glimpses recently for me has been "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." I have never even heard of anyone actually saying it, believing it, recommending it, or even understanding it. Yet it has been right there in front of us for thousands of years, stunningly beautiful and true.

It's not easy insight for bullies.

The latest glimpse that I got was while reading Charles Drayton Thomas' book. "Life beyond Death with Evidence," (1928).

Charles Drayton Thomas 1867-1953

The following passage is from  p. 184 of that book, and is part of one spiritual conversation of many that he had with his father and sister, who had "died" twenty years earlier.

CBT:  "I gather, from what you have told me, that it will be possible some day to re-enact all the brightest and best scenes from one's earthly life."

Father: "Yes, and also those which one has missed on earth; all that which was possible, but which did not come to fruition. When you come here you will find that which is difficult for me to express. You will realize the good of what you have done, and the happiness which you have had, and beyond that, also, the happiness which you might have had, and which, just because you might have had it, is still yours. This will include the things which were apparently taken from you, but which you let go willingly and not grudgingly; for those things you have made doubly, nay trebly, your own."

CDT: That sounds very beautiful.

Father:  On coming here you will find it is a fact. That which is given up willingly, or which you see taken from you, yet you do not waste time in repining over, you have made yours. Whereas, things which men pursue, are the things they lose.

On The Destruction of Kindness

 

Sometimes I am surprized to find the most helpful bits of wisdom at expected places and times, and which stick with me, transforming my life forever.

There is one problem which is never far from my mind and which always astonishes me when ever I encounter it. I work through it and arrive at a solution, but have never found any confirmation from outside viewpoints which I might read or hear or see in order to hang on to it better than I do.

That problem is how it is possible that genuine kindness is so often hated. My experience is that people pick up on kindness immediately, sense it quicker than animals, and usually try to destroy it.

So I was very heartened to discover the following magnificent passage from “Voices from The afterlife: A Guide to Healing from The Spirit World, “ 1998, by Lily Fairchilde. She is a psychic medium and these words are spoken to her by an Angel, p. 136:

This need to destroy comes from a wounded heart filled with despair. They have rejected love and contracted into a space of fear so deep and overwhelming that they no longer remember who they really are.  These demonic beings are jealous of and bent upon destroying that which they have forgotten that they themselves have. When they see someone who is filled with innocence and light, who would serve the good of the whole, it then becomes their sole intent to annihilate that goodness. If they can not find an opening within the energy field of a light-filled human, they search out someone close by who possesses certain vulnerabilities. They then manipulate that vulnerable human to create discomfort and pain for the person of light, in the hopes that these challenges will cause them to turn away from their Divine source. They feel that if they can destroy all Love in the universe, then they will no longer be reminded of that which they believe is lost to them forever, and their endless pain will cease.

These are, without any doubt, the deepest, most sincere and most helpful words I have read or heard about the problem.

A Caution for The Kindly, Particularly the Elderly

You may have noticed recently that a tenant decapitated an older gentleman, a nice guy, in Hartford, Connecticut, who was renting a room to him, and wanted to evict the tenant because he was not paying his rent.

                                                Victor King - Beheaded by Tenant

    The victim’s cousin Jim Banks told the Hartford Courant King “was one of the good guys. One that would never hurt a soul. One that would always reach out and help others. He was pleasant as can be. Always seemed to be happy. He was just a joy to be around.” - Buzzfeed News

I had a similar experience last month, only I wasn’t actually decapitated, just figuratively. I allowed a young couple, with two five-year-old boys, to stay in my home, because they said they were new to the city, had no place to live, and needed a couple weeks to get on their feet, get jobs, and a place to stay. It was a long story, with virtue-signaling and expectations of government windfall payments, etc., - all of it fantasies, as I look back on it.

They stayed here three weeks, then called the cops on me when I asked them to leave and said “We have rights” - their exact words.

I was outraged because I had done everything I could to help these young people and their two children – I’d given them a place to say, encouragement, trust, money, rides to the market and such, and was shocked to discover that they would take over my house, refuse to leave, and much more, even bring in a Pit-bull dog to stay.

I asked one of the cops who came if she had ever heard of such a thing – an elderly person allowing a young family to stay in his house, doing every single thing he could to help them in their hour of need, and then having them turn on him, making him a captive in his own house, and refusing to leave.

Her answer was - “It happens all the time” - said with a scowl, and obvious pain.

That’s why I have written this post. “It happens all the time,” so there are other elderly (I am 79) people out there who could be prevented from making the same mistake I made. A caution is timely, being that there are to be more homeless people around in the coming months, due to the ending of certain unemployment benefits, the ending of the moratorium on evictions, and the economic decline.

Yes, I didn’t get decapitated, but I went through hell, because I wasn’t aware of certain realities, some of which are as follows:

1. There are a lot of poor, desperate people around who are living on the edge and who will do desperate things.

2. We have had about two generations now of young people being born into the acceptance of Gingrich-Reagan-Ayn Rand-Milton Friedman-Alan Greenspan-Super Rich CEO's -Greed is Good “Republicans” and their goers-along and enablers. The young couple who took over my home did so because it was perfectly in line with all that. There were no scruples whatever, no shame, nothing like that – just sheer pursuit of one’s own advantage. I was elderly, vulnerable, helpful to others, decent - and their attitude wasn’t even “sorry about that.” Their attitude was nothing even close to “Sorry about that.” It was contempt and murderous hatred. They also thought that I was rich because I have a home, even though I actually am at about zero on the bottom line.

3. To the pure-in-heart, all things are pure. But in fact, one of every three people you see around you in the USA is a Trumpist. They are unshakably convinced that his malice and insanity are good. If you are decent, vulnerable and kind, it calls out a response in such people who are not like you that is, basically, murderous.

4. Finally – although I hope you can add more realities in the comments – There are many well-meaning Democrats who incautiously or naively advocate rent strikes and moratoria on evictions without due consideration for those of us who actually take in the desperate homeless.

Worse than The Plague

One of the things I like most about dreams of the night is that they do not back off from reality. If they see that something is wrong, they say it, acknowledge it, and keep after us, repeating the message constantly from different angles, until we admit the truth.

The backing off from the truth has always seemed to me to be like having other gods before us, a violation of the very first commandment, or a form of the first of the seven deadly sins, Pride. I immediately think of C. S. Lewis’s statement that there are those who say to God “Thy will be done” and there are those to whom God says, “OK, we’ll do it your way.”

It may be, however, that dreams stop speaking if there is absolutely no chance that we will ever admit what they are trying to tell us. But I don’t know this as a fact. Dreams do seem to be economical despite a common view that they are senseless, purposeless epiphenomena.

Another aspect of dreams which particularly fascinates me is their connection to the paranormal things like telepathy, remote viewing, foresight, healing, communication with people who have “died” and other spiritual forms such as angels.

I simply can not imagine life without honoring dreams as the most important truth-speakers in my life – I can’t even imagine not paying any attention to my dreams – and yet I know, despite all those who have written about them, that I have personally not met more than three people during my whole seventy-eight years who have the remotest clue of what they are missing. They are simply scornful if you bring up the subject.

I consider this to be a far worse loss for us all than the current Coronavirus plague.