A cleaving in my mind
I’ve claimed for years to be absolutely tone-deaf regarding poetry. I suspect I’ve even said something about this in a blog post. It’s not at all unusual for my wife (who loves poetry) to come to me, excited to read a poem that she’s just discovered, hoping that it will finally inspire the poetry-appreciating brain cells lying dormant in my brain. So far, not so much.
But I recently heard and then read a poem by Emily Dickenson that has had an impact on me. It’s called “I felt a cleaving in my mind,” and it goes like this:
I felt a cleaving in my mind
As if my brain had split;
I tried to match it, seam by seam,
But could not make them fit.The thought behind I strove to join
Unto the thought before,
But sequence ravelled out of reach
Like balls upon a floor.
Perhaps you stumbled on the verb “ravelled.” I did. I would have expected “unraveled,” though I use that more often in its adjectival form. But here’s this from etymonline:
Ravel – 1580s, “to entangle, become entwined confusedly,” also “to untangle, disentangle, unwind” (originally with out), from Dutch ravelen “to tangle, fray,” rafelen “to unweave,” from rafel “frayed thread,” which is of uncertain origin. The seemingly contradictory senses of this word (ravel and unravel are both synonyms and antonyms) might be reconciled by its roots in weaving and sewing: as threads become unwoven, they get tangled. The “entangling” meaning is the “more original” sense according to OED. From 1590s in the figurative sense of “make plain or clear;” 1610s as “make a minute and careful investigation.” The intransitive sense, of fabric, “become untwisted or disjointed thread from thread” is by 1610s.
Isn’t language great?
But the poem captures so well how I feel sometimes when I’m trying to write. The feeling comes most often when I sit down at the computer thinking I’ll write out a thought — or even a blog post — that occurred to me sometime when I was away from the computer. So often, a thought or post that seemed so clear in my mind basically evaporates as I sit down at the keyboard. I try to put the thoughts back together, but they’ve “ravelled out of reach.”
But obviously (I think) the thoughts must not have been as clear as you thought they were. It’s not that they’ve disappeared. Rather, it’s that the attempt to write exposes a lack of clarity that was there all along. Perhaps. But I wish I had some way of saving the actual contents of my mind efficiently while I’m away from the computer. (Some will say the obvious — I should carry a small notebook with me. Alas, I have some sort of inherited nerve condition that makes it impossible for me to write by hand — the hand simply doesn’t obey the commands sent from my brain. There’s some sort of cleaving there as well.)
An aside in closing — I happened to hear this poem recited in a podcast discussion of the em dash. Perhaps you’ve heard that many would say that the use of an em dash in a piece of writing is a clear indication that the writing was done by artificial intelligence rather than by a human. Apparently Dickenson used dashes rather often and enthusiastically. I’m here to say that I’ve been using the em dash for decades, and one of the things I really like about emacs is that I can input one very easily merely by hitting the hyphen key three times in quick succession. (I suspect, though I don’t know, that something like this is possible in other editors as well.) In any case, despite the cleaving in my mind, I can at least do that.
