Mark and Remark

A correction: last night's woodpecker was really a common merganser I was informed by a wise and perceptive neighbor, who saw the photo I took of the bird. It was a very uncommon bird for me, in an uncommon location, my backyard instead of the river. I think it recovered and flew away, a flight of desperation.

In the midst of writing this "remark" I heard some banging on the back glass door. I found a baby, a large baby pileated woodpecker in the back yard. I opened the fence door, so it could get out, since it doesn't appear to be able to fly. I don't know how it got here. I haven't noticed a large nest in the trees, though my google search seems to indicate that the nest is a hole in a tree. My cats are staring out the back door at it.

Richard Sewall, in his The Life of Emily Dickinson, summarized the poet as follows: "...she is the poet of the passing insight, the moment of vision, the unitary experience." Wouldn't it be nice to be a painter of the passing insight, the moment of vision, the unitary experience.

The...concentration of the "critical" moment [the "Now"] is a crucial element in Emily Dickinson's poetry...It finds expression, first iconically, in the epigrammatic shortness of her poems, second thematically, in the numerous descriptions of unstable phenomena in nature such as the rising and setting of the sun or its precarious poise at the meridian hour of noon, the changing of the seasons at the solstices and certain fleeting effects of light in general. It can further be observed in the elliptical and often ambiguous syntax (including the hyphen), and finally in the use of polysemantic and often precariously unstable words and expressions. The world's drama is enacted before her eyes as a process or, to use her own words, as "God's Experiment"... The reversal from being into nothingness (and vice-versa) takes place anew at every moment, as "a gun...that touched 'goes off'". This eminently dialectic principle foredooms every attempt to pursue the romantic quest by means of analogy or metaphor. The poet experiences each instant of life and, even more so, that of death as a "critical" turning point or crisis:

Crisis is a Hair

Toward which forces creep

Past which forces retrograde

The nature of a turning point is such that it simply eludes all our attempts to grasp it...

If indeed existence proves to be a continuous crisis, we begin to understand why the poet preferably portrays moments of precarious poise between "advance" and "retrograde."