The Zeroes—taught us—Phosphorous—
We learned to like the Fire
By playing Glaciers—when a Boy—
And Tinder—guessed—by power
Of Opposite—to balance Odd—
If White—a Red—must be!
Paralysis—our Primer—dumb—
Unto Vitality! (#689)
Have you ever found yourself devoting hours to a single 8-line poem, returning to it several days apart, and finding something new in it every time? For me, Emily Dickinson is one of the best poets of such inexhaustible mysteries. Her poems can suggest so many meanings that I find relevant to my own life, while still remaining mysterious. Take, for example, the dynamic phosphorescent sinuosity of the poem that starts:
The Zeroes—taught us—Phosphorous—
We learned to like the Fire
By playing Glaciers—
There is a detached, even scientific tone here, as she speaks in the plural past-tense about the learning process by linking zeroes to glaciers and phosphorous to fire. At the time Dickinson wrote this poem, phosphorous matches were a cutting-edge state of the art technology. The volatile white phosphorous matches were first sold in the late 1820s (barely preceding Dickinson’s birth), and the less poisonous red safety matches were introduced in 1855. In this sense, we may take it as an ode to human ingenuity and scientific progress made possible by the Arabic invention—or discovery—of the “zero.” But such a materialist reading is not very helpful and overemphasizes the vehicle at the expense of the tenor¹.
Yet, despite, or perhaps because of, this seemingly cold, detached tone, there is an implied sense of an emotional state prior to the occasion of the poem: a time when we didn’t like (and maybe even feared) the fire and tried to escape its intensity. Even the most rational scientific ways of describing the characteristics of phosphorous are rife with anthropomorphisms or the pathetic fallacy of its volatility: “it’s essential for life, but because it is highly reactive, phosphorous is never found as a free element on earth” (Wikipedia). Poetically, phosphorous, as light-bearer, is associated with both Venus and Lucifer. Is the moral here: Excessive cold makes us appreciate the fire we ran away from, come to terms with it, maybe temper it?
Susan Kornfeld reads it as “we learn to love warm personalities after having been around their opposite.²” But these Zeroes can also suggest, as Brenda Hillman points out, “a spiritual state of nothingness,” or emptiness: in this sense this poem, like so many of Dickinson’s, can be seen as a defense, and enactment, of a via negativa, an apophatic kenosis, but not necessarily for the sake of renunciation or rejection per se, but a sense that excessive coldness (absolute zero) can become its own self-regulating cop.
The phrase “playing glaciers” sounds like the speaker(s) is(are) in control here, faking the cold, playing dead, feigning indifference, perhaps, like it’s a game, as if some formula or method can manage the madness of the fire (of extreme emotions). In this sense, it could be read as an ode to the necessity of (at the very least) a temporary repression, or a more Taoist acceptance of the natural complementarity of fire/ice, as Hillman also says: “fire and ice are presented not as dueling forces, but as figures for a process of experiential learning.” It seems fairly straightforward so far, but the poem gets stranger in the next 3 lines:
By playing Glaciers—when a Boy—
And Tinder—guessed—by power
Of Opposite—to balance Odd— (3-5)
The rebellious or stuttering punctuation, diacritical long-strokes, and use of enjambment, create a tension between the line, the sentence, and the phrase that reveal and challenge how the meaning-making function wants to insert imagined periods and commas. Rife with push and pull, fragmenting, overlapping and underlapping, this poem almost demands simultaneous interpretations. We could read a full stop, a period after the word “Boy” which would complete the idea implied that “Playing glaciers” is a childhood game, by paraphrasing “when” as “when we were boys,” but since the speaker had been plural before, wouldn’t this “boy” really be “boys?”
Connotations of gender becomes important here; Hillman interprets the “Boy” as a representation of Dickinson’s animus, but I wonder if Dickinson’s saying that we, women (in the very patriarchal 19th century), have to pretend to think like a boy, and thus be cold as, say, the glacier of reason, which had been the tone the poem seemed to be speaking in in the first 3 lines. One may feel a need to be, or play, or harmonize, both.
We could also read the long stroke between “Glaciers” and “when a boy” as a comma or even a period. In this reading, there’s a contrast between the “we” learning by playing Glaciers and the boy guessing, trying to figure us out: We (the girls) were playing glaciers, when suddenly a boy, and tinder…”³
Furthermore, she also breaks the word “And” into at least two possible functions. We may wonder whether “Tinder” is the subject of line 4, starting a new idea and doing the guessing, or is the “boy—and tinder” together the dual, albeit enjambed, subject who is doing the guessing through opposites. Or is she using the passive voice (which seems plausible in a poem celebrating paralysis), and the “power / of opposite” is the subject that is guessing the existence of “tinder” and “the boy.”
“We can guess at the ‘tinder’ that started and initially fueled the fire by how it subsequently burns,” Susan Kornfeld writes in her paraphrase of lines 4 and 5. In this reading, the tinder is the imagined first cause we’re deducing from the fiery effect. But the tinder, by itself, can’t cause a fire: it needs a complement or an opposite. In the third line, the antithesis of fire was glaciers, but here, the antithesis of tinder then seems to be a boy. I imagine him striking a match or rubbing two sticks together, say the stick of thesis and antithesis, in an attempt to ignite the transformative fire of synthesis! Yet “balance Odd” disrupts this, adding a hint of a frustration and/or satire to the language of scientific logic that she had been employing.
This “boy” is trying to explain the mystery away through some simple ethical formula, but neither are a “boy” and “tinder” exactly opposite, nor does this process achieve any easeful evening but a “balance odd.” I believe Dickinson either wants us to feel lost here or is at least letting us know it is okay, as if she wants to paralyze reason, the prose-like interpretive urge, to the very limits of languaging, in order to free a deeper (poetic) vitality.
If White—a Red—must be!
Paralysis—our Primer—dumb—
Unto Vitality!
The sixth line, “If White—a Red—must be!” is perhaps the most childlike exclamation in the poem; its self-conscious reduction of the contrast between glacier and fire, and zero and phosphorous, makes me laugh. It could also continue the gendered theme: the white as “virginal” femininity and the red, the scarlet letter of lust. Yet, the fact that immediately after this line, the word “paralysis” appears, suggests that such a conclusion, though it may work on the level of science and dialectics, is insufficient in accounting for the emotional or psychic life. It is as if such thinking itself, in leaving no space for the mystery, can lead one to the ice of paralysis. If synthesis, it may stitch the heavens shut, like a funeral treading, treading, until a plank of reason, breaks (to paraphrase a few other poems).
Though the word “paralysis” echoes the earlier “glaciers,” there’s a sense of gravitas here, that she is no longer playing, that this paralysis has overtaken the (plural) speaker (the boy—and the fire—has finally disappeared)—like the “hour of lead” in her poem, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” I read the diacritical mark here as forcing us to slow down and feel the paralysis as a discrete unit before the poem again gives us a shred of hope by suggesting that no matter how horrific such a feeling of paralysis can be, it can also be a teacher. The use of the bookish metaphor here also suggests that this poem could be read as (about) the process of reading—the way we may lose ourselves, our desires, our fears, and ability to speak, in the absorptive & disorienting process of reading.
While most readers read an implied “is” between “Paralysis” and “our primer,” there is nothing to preclude her saying “Paralysis! Our primer, dumb—.” The speechlessness here is important, that Dickinson is writing about what can’t really be written about, but in retrospect, as the “hour of lead” is “remembered, if outlived” in “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.”
Part of what I love about this, in contrast, say, to Whitman, whose Song of Myself was published not long before this, is that she celebrates the conservative (in the sense of conservational) tendency (that could be termed the yin) that tends to get drowned out in Whitman’s celebrations of the “procreative urge…always sex” etc. Hillman points out that the etymological roots of meaning involve “intention” and “opinion,” while the etymological roots of “mystery” involve “silent” and “small.” In this sense, Dickinson’s silent and small mystery here is a fitting antidote to a world glutting on the procreative fire of “meaning.” And besides, the fire has been here all along, in between—the phrases—of the cold, detached language that may, on the level of words, and meaning, feel like paralysis, if shut up into prose without her radical punctuation and use of enjambment that is more multi-dimensional than any emoticon. ☺
I’d be remiss if I also didn’t consider the possible double meaning of the word “unto,” which could mean “until” (as in marriage “unto death do us part”) but also “to” (as in “do unto others”), the first meaning moving in time, the second meaning moving between people. I read her as saying “until” at first. In this reading, the paralysis teaches us to light the fire of vitality by overdosing on its opposite, an excess of repression (or what Rumi might call “the close contracted mind”). But if we consider “unto” as “to,” she could be saying “we are speechless when confronted with another’s vitality, another’s fire.” And in this, it can also be taken as the give and take of relationships, of conversation, or at least reading and writing (including—perhaps—reading—oneself—). Ultimately for Dickinson, “this world is not conclusion,” as she writes elsewhere, rather it is an open-ended field of clashing interpretations.
¹ Brenda Hillman sent me this poem on the equinox, as a birthday present, along with various notes from an unpublished lecture, including:
“Women workers in match factories were some of the most vulnerable workers in the 19th century. Handling the phosphorous caused loss of bone and crippling disability. Annie Besant, my favorite theosophist, advocated for the match girls at the end of the century.”
² http://bloggingdickinson.blogspot.com/2012/07/zeroes-taught-us-phosphorous.html
³ Hillman, too, recognizes that “the sentence divides” here and that “tinder” can go grammatically either with the previous line, or ‘to balance Odd.’”