Just a Sea - with a Stem -

Just a Sea – with a Stem –

She stands in the boxed recess of a window, her body leaning forward and slightly to the left, perhaps in order to train her gaze fractionally to the right, so that the view she sees out of it is framed differently from how we see it. She can see more than we can to the right of the tall mast which runs not quite parallel to the edge of the open shutter. The mast rises above a haze of distant trees – probably poplars – is bisected by the frame of the open shutter, and re-emerges in the bottom right-hand corner of the four-paned, unopenable window above it. The entirety of this upper window looks out upon a sky touched with wisps of cloud. We cannot see the rest of the ship, but she probably can. We call it a “ship”, with a “mast” and “yards”, because it orientates us comfortably if we do so, although as it is, it is little more than three compositional lines. In the moments while we are interpreting the image, we gradually apprehend its significance and construct in our minds a simple narrative: Caspar David Friedrich’s wife is gazing out from the window of their Dresden apartment over a body of water where ships are anchored, their sails taken in. The upright of the mast and the angles drawn by its yards suggest the shape of the conifer which perhaps supplied its wood.

Friedrich’s unnamed wife stands on bare floorboards, her skirt casting a rounded shadow over her feet. Her dress, like the panelled walls and frames around her, is a dull green. We can see none of the furnishings in the room, except for the wide windowsill on which she leans, and the two stoppered bottles which sit on it to her right. The sky through the window is pale blue. Friedrich is painting her in 1822. These things define her: she is the painter’s wife. She is boxed in, her head at the centre. The ships come from and go to places she will probably never see. She is the Object.

Friedrich, who enjoyed painting people from behind, is better known for a painting completed four years earlier, ‘Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog’: a painting so vaunted it scarcely requires description, since it encapsulates the very essence of the Romantic sublime. The mop-haired, velvet-jacketed, well-booted, walking-sticked male adventurer also has his head at the centre of the composition, but there is no window frame. He stands, one leg thrust forward, atop one of the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, gazing out across other crags half obscured by a cloud-inversion. He’s on top, and he’s going places. He is the Subject.

We see easily how to signify all of these things. We simply deploy our nouns: wife, window, ships, masts, man, mountains, clouds. Earth. Sky. Sea – used metaphorically.

*

Dickinson, even though her view is framed, refuses these seemingly inevitable significations.

“By my Window have I for Scenery
Just a Sea – with a Stem –
If the Bird and the Farmer – deem it a “Pine”
The Opinion will do – for them –”

When Dickinson looks out through her window, all of our frames of reference are thrown into question. Is it Scenery in the sense of Picturesque landscape, or does the window frame provide the borders for a stage on which our supposed realities are enacted? Is the tree itself the Sea, and its trunk the Stem, or is the tree an extension of the land, and its branches and leaves peninsulas jutting out into the Sky-Sea? The verb enables the Farmer to convince himself that he is taking linguistic possession of the object Dickinson observes through the window; his O-pine-ion is that it is a “Pine”. It is doubtless something quite different in the Bird’s language, whose view of Dickinson inside her house is framed by leaves and branches.

“It has no Port, nor a “Line” – but the Jays –
That split their route to the Sky –
Or a Squirrel, whose giddy Peninsula
May be easier reached – this way –”

Dickinson negates the attempt to describe or delineate the Pine through analogy or metaphor; the idea that this object is a Sea instantly refuses to fit the categories which nineteenth century human beings will instantly want to impose on it, but being human, and having nothing else at our disposal, we must try to do so anyway. In this Pine, there are none of the shipping Lines that so fascinated Dickinson as she read of distant adventurers’ horrifying disappearances in search of the Northwest Passage; instead, there are Jays, which do not migrate, resorting to the evergreen in the winter, launching out in voyages across the sky, and Squirrels which sometimes take the shorter route by leaping from branch to branch, as if rowing across a bay or fjord.

“For Inlands – the Earth is the under side –
And the upper side – is the Sun –”

If you are feeling disorientated, you are meant to be. The metaphor isn’t intended to be working, and Dickinson is not quite describing an undistorted reality in any case, since the tree is viewed through handmade glass which refracts light and twists objects. But as an analogy, it is still not quite exhausted.

“And it’s Commerce – if Commerce it have –
Of Spice – I infer from the Odors borne –”

The smell of the Pine’s resin is on the air, and we are in the age of the East India Companies. The Sea-Pine is the conduit of travel, transfer and trade; its branches, twigs and leaves and the spaces between them carry currents of exchange. The sounds which surround the Pine also help us with our deeming:

“Of it’s Voice – to affirm – when the Wind is within –
Can the Dumb – define the Divine?”

We need to watch our verbs. A way to get a grip on the object was to “deem” it a Pine. The smell of its resin helps us to “infer” that it is not a Maple or an Oak. The sound of the Wind within its leaves and branches helps us to “affirm” its identity, and keeps us secure in our frames of reference – our need to compare nature with human constructions – because trade by ship depends on Wind. We are on our way to “defining” this object, but there are two problems: first, the object itself is “Dumb” since it is the Wind that makes the noise, and second, we too are effectively also “Dumb” because our language is only capable of denoting “Pine”, not of actually being it. Perhaps the essence of Pine – the thing which we try to deem, infer, affirm and define by that word, but which slithers through our fingers as we try – is the thing which is Divine.

“The Definition of Melody – is –
That Definition is none –

It – suggests to our Faith –
They – suggest to our Sight –
When the latter – is put away
I shall meet with Conviction I somewhere met

Was the Pine at my Window a “Fellow
Of the Royal” Infinity?

The less definite we become about how to name or signify this object, the closer we come to “Conviction”. We should remind ourselves at this point that in addition to the meanings which we ascribe to that word, Dickinson’s Puritan upbringing meant that for her, it bristled with connotations. “Conviction” is the moment when “Faith” becomes certitude, and it is preceded, in Protestant theology, by conviction of sin and the consciousness of the necessity of salvation. We know we have “Conviction” when we can put away our Sight and still have Faith.

But we also know from her letters, and several of her poems, that try as she might to achieve this state, Dickinson remained unconvicted in the Christian sense. Perhaps that is why her syntax breaks down – or, at least, ambiguity breaks in – as her poem refuses to conclude itself. Is the phrase beginning “Was the Pine…” a new sentence, or does it flow directly as one question from the previous line: “Conviction I somewhere met was the Pine”? Is the Pine itself, in its own self-possession, the thing which gives Dickinson Conviction, with all of its connotations? Does it affirm her consciousness of an object of Faith precisely because it physically is, even though no human language can properly signify it, and no human metaphor is truly adequate for it?

If we are going to be good, obedient readers (does Dickinson even want our obedience?) we must follow instead the sense of the question: “Was the Pine at my Window a ‘Fellow of the Royal’ Infinity?” Repeat those words, “Fellow of the Royal”, to any middle or upper class person in the nineteenth century, and they would know instantly how to complete it: “Fellow of the Royal Society”: the greatest of scientific honours – proof that you are in the vanguard of the advancement and improvement of “Natural Knowledge”. A Fellow of the Royal Society would know, deem, infer, affirm, define the pine empirically: it is a Gymnosperm: a vascular plant whose seeds are not contained within an ovary, cone-bearing, with needles instead of leaves – and because it is not a Larch, it is evergreen. Nouns and adjectives denote and signify it effectively enough to categorise it with other pines. But this Pine, seen as Dickinson sees it, is a Fellow of the Royal Infinity. It is at once concrete object and liminal space.

“Apprehensions – are God’s introductions –
To be hallowed – accordingly –”

“Apprehensions” has multiple meanings. To feel apprehension is to be filled with awe, anxiety or fear – to experience the abject which lurks within our experience of the sublime. But the Latin root word means “to seize”: to “apprehend” is to put under arrest, to grasp, to understand. If a poet is to truly “apprehend” the Pine, she must do more than name its parts, call it “Pine” or find suitable metaphors and analogies to make it real for us. She must experience apprehension – awe. She must hallow the object in front of her in a way that refuses to objectify it. She must know, deem, infer, affirm, define, apprehend the Pine by acknowledging – as beautifully as she possibly can – her incapability of doing any of these things. For the object to be hallowed, the subject, denoted by the second word of the poem, “my”, must be humbled. She must admit that her power of naming does not put her in control. That way lies true ecstasy.

That is why I find more emotional truth in Friedrich’s painting of his wife in front of a window than I do in his painting of a man triumphant on a mountain-top. The Romantic sensibility, which still governs much of modern thinking, trains us to seek vastness, to adopt commanding postures, to view the vista, take up our paintbrush or our pen, and apprehend it – put it under arrest. This is, of course, impossible, but we can manage a fair impression of it. Dickinson offers the artist and the poet a very different project: start with your own apprehension. The window frame helps you to contain your apprehension within reasonable limits. When you stand behind the frame, you admit from the outset that your view is limited – that you are not the be-all and end-all of perception.

What is the word for what remains: the thing which lingers in the Pine after you admit that “Pine” cannot encompass it, and that your perspective is no more valid than the Jay’s or the Squirrel’s, who call it no such thing? What is the word for this thing which refuses to be object, and cannot be apprehended by the subject without an act of radical humility: an admission of linguistic incompetence? What is the word for this thing which eludes every metaphor and yet irresistibly requires them, no matter how inadequate - this thing which means that we are never quite in control of our own sentence?

Dickinson uses the word surprisingly rarely for a poet who wrestles constantly with Faith and naturally favours doubt, but this poem is an exception. She calls it: “God”. Seeing, smelling, hearing the Pine on its own terms, and then admitting that you have comprehended precisely nothing, is your “introduction”. You might need to lean on the windowsill for a while, to stop your knees from buckling under you, as signs and words drop out of your universe altogether.