So, now we have Emily Dickinson's poem 556, "The Brain, Within its Groove". It's a very difficult poem; we're going to spend a lot of time with it. So, I want us to do a close reading together. So, Max, you have "The Brain", all right? Amerise, you have "Groove," Okay, Molly "runs evenly and true." So you have that whole line there. All right. And, Anna, would you help her with that? All right. Allie, you and Dave have this very difficult idea of the Splinter swerving. And, Emily, you have this whole thing about the Current, the Flood, all that stuff. Very very difficult stuff. And you also have the turnpike, you have all that stuff. Okay. Amerise, you have the word "Trodden". And, Max, we'll be back to you for "Mills". Okay. Okay. All right. "The Brain, Within Its Groove". Max, tell us about The Brain. The brain is the seat of all of our thought and maybe also our consciousness, but I guess that would be debatable. It's typically thought of in opposition to the heart. Okay, so, thinking. With a slight connotation of passionless that is it's intellection. Intellection. Yes it's rational. We think of it as rational. Okay. And you don't really know which connotation works here because we haven't really been through the poem. But your guess as to what she means here? Which connotation of the brain? Yeah. You've only given us a couple. Can you give us a couple more connotations of The Brain? Anna, will help you. Anna, what's another context for The Brain, if I ever use the word brain what do I mean? Well, you could talk about Brain or Brains vs. Brawn it's kind of like, "The Brain"... Another version of the brain-heart. Completely different context, anybody? Brain. The physical thing that's residing in the head. Why, Max, THE Brain? Why "THE Brain" as opposed to "Brains" or "A Brain"? She's talking about the brain in general, I guess. The human brains. It's funny how the article "the", if put in front of something that could be thought of as, I don't want to say abstract but, generalizable, becomes more general. A brain. So, this brain or the particular brain, the brain that is in your head, Max, is specific. "A brain" is a little more general and then "The Brain" can be, "Folks, we're now today going to talk about the brain," says the anatomy teacher. Okay. Which do you think it is. It's probably the latter, huh? Yeah. The Brain. The brain generally "within its groove runs evenly and true." I believe it's Amerise who has Groove? Are you groovy? I'm groovy. Oh yeah? Is that a connotation that's relevant here? No, not at all. In fact.... Amerie's brain is not groovy. ...quite the opposite. This has much more of a linear connotation. I have an image in my head of the brain being cradled within this normal or natural line of reasoning, following its tendencies. So, it's not a reference to the physical brain in the cranium that's in a groove, although my brain in the head is in the groove of my neck and collarbone, that's true. It sits there on top of the spine. She's not referring to that. What's she referring to? Thought process. Thought process. So, it's not the brain as a physical object. It's the brain that creates thought. And thought in a groove is like what? Well, if you're following the image it could be... If you're following her conceit, the metaphor she's getting to? Let's not go there yet. Okay. I would say following assumptions, prejudices--anything that the brain is sort of surrounded by or armed with to attack an unknown issue. Stuck in, if you wanted to go there. Stuck in. If my brain is in a groove it's either a positive connotation, I'm doing well thinking on a train of thought; "A" train of thought, right? Groove. What's the negative connotation? Well, if you're stuck in one particular line of thinking it could close you off to other... So, a synonym for groove in that sense would be "rut". It would be "rut", yeah. Okay, we don't know yet if this Dickinson poem is going to create a negative connotation for the brain in its groove; we don't know yet. But that seems to... Anything to add to that Amerise? The Brain, Within its Groove. So it's definitely not groove as in Michael Jackson when he's just hit that song and, who knows how he pulled that off? Or another Michael, Michael Jordan, when he's figured out how to improvise his way around four guys who are taller than he is and he... I don't know how he does that. They say he's playing "out of his head"? Is that what we say, or? Out of his mind. Out of his mind. That is, the thought has been supplanted by something else. That's kind of groovy, but that's not what is meant here, apparently, okay. "The brain with its groove runs evenly and true." Is that Molly? It is. And I think of True as being very, very straight, and Evenly as being sort of this very smooth, regular tempo. So it's just this very circular... Can you think of something in our lives that runs evenly, using that idiom, "runs evenly"? Some type of machine, I guess, or a wheel. A machine. Sure. When an engine we say the engine in the car runs evenly and when it runs not evenly, what's wrong? Well, your car is breaking down. You need to go get it repaired. And the guy or gal at the fix-it station, or whatever we call them these days, is going to say, "Well, we need your car to run evenly because you don't want it to run unevenly." And Evenly refers probably to the pistons and the mechanisms; the armature of the motion. You don't want it to be shaking. Okay, the word True is loaded. When Emily Dickinson uses the word True or Truth, you're supposed to underline it or highlight it in yellow or something. So it's not just true as you mentioned it. Give us the larger sense of True. Well, not false. I mean, true in the sense of being factual, being real and being right. So, if Amerise is hinting at a negative connotation for Groove, "rut", and Anna, the use of True is going to be a real challenge because that would mean that being in a Groove is false, is negative. So, she's really loading up the problem here. "The Brain within its Groove runs evenly and true." There seems to be a 19th century metaphor about something that goes down a groove. And it's not an automobile, which wouldn't have existed when this poem was written. Something is running evenly down a groove. Any idea? Trains. A train. And train works very nicely because the poem seems to be about the train of thought. So, a train has no choice but to run down the groove. So, when the brain is running like a train, it seems to say, something is True. Does anybody have a bicycle? Dave, what is true in a bike? This is the last remnant connotation of this word in our language. It's what you do with a wheel to make sure it runs completely evenly, it's not off to the side. In fact, when you when you fix a bike wheel you actually use the verb True: I've "trued" this wheel. It's also an adjective to describe the wheel. So, this is probably a wheel. It's running evenly and true. "But". I didn't assign "But", but Allie will you take the word But? "The brain, within is Groove runs evenly and true. But." What is she signaling, logically? Well, she is kind of saying, "But wait, hold up." "But wait." So, really, Amerise's intuition that we were going to ironize this brain running evenly is right. When you see "but" you know something else is going to change. Alright. Now, who's got the Splinter swerve? This is really hard. I think the two of you. Okay, Allie, give us a start on this. "But let a Splinter swerve." What's going on? First of all, the metaphor is now inconsistent. 'Cause there is no splinter swerving on a train, I don't think. Well, I mean there could be because train tracks are partly wood often and, you know, wood is the material that splinters. Yeah. If you put a giant splinter on a train track the train will go off the track, although I'm not sure "swerve" would ever be the word we'd use because trains can't swerve. But I respect the point. And we're also dealing with someone who likes to slightly shift the metaphor once she gets comfortable with it. Okay, go ahead. Is there anything else you wanted to say about this? Character swerve? Not really. Okay, Dave. Is it as if she's splintering the metaphor, making it go off on a different track? So you're doing a metapoetic reading. Well, all Dickenson poems have to be read metapoetically at some point. Allie. Well, also a splinter is an accident. It's unexpected. It's kind of a nuisance, like kind of unpleasant at the point of impact. Good. So, we have something that's interrupting the train of thought. That's really what it is, right? And Amerise, just personally, in your own personal experience: when you have to do A you've been assigned to do A, you've got to get an A-plus in A, you've set aside three hours to do A, you sit down to do A, you've been thinking about A, you're getting good at thinking about A, and B shows up... It's extremely unsettling. It's very unsettling. And what do you think Emily is saying about B. It's a good thing. It's a good thing. Yeah. The unpredictable is. And A is sort of boring without B. Exactly. She's really wanting to move around. And so far she's allowing this metaphor never to quite settle. She wants to move around in that way, too. All right, Emily, before we take a break you tell us what we're going to do with this next metaphor, which seems not to be about trains anymore. What is it? What's going on? "Let a Splinter swerve. 'Twere easier for You-- To put a Current back." Current. Like a circuit? A Current. "When floods have slit the Hills." What's going on? Well, first she had been in two previous conceits, which fits in with the whole idea that thought is sort of irrepressible and uncontrollable. By the way, why would anybody start a poem this short and then abandon already, two conceits in the first four lines? What's wrong with her? Say that again. If it complemented her content somehow, it's making a point. So, form and content for Emily Dickenson. Actually, yeah. But it's just so interesting that she does this because if we think about where we just were with Emily, which is, you know, she's got people closed off, she's in her, like, impregnable house... "I Dwell in Possibility." 'Dwelling in possibility.' You know it's almost hard to kind of like reconcile these two poems because the first one is about how you need to have a certain mentality or ability to dwell with possibility. But then this one is kind of all about like letting your mind just take you where your mind is going to go. Well, this poem seems to be an instantiation of the everlasting roof; the sky's the limit. So in a way, in that well-built house, you've got this limitlessness, and this seems to be playing that out. But you're also right. Okay, we'll have to come back to that. You're also right in suggesting that this is probably a higher level Dickinson poem than the other one. The other is a real intro poem where things are relatively consistent by conceit. And this one, as Emily is reminding us, is a situation where the thing must move in order for its A-ness to be complemented by its B-ness. In the example we were talking about. So it's going to get to a C and a D. Alright, so what is the metaphor now that seems to be emerging? A current? Floods? What's happening there? Well, the metaphor is about water that is sort of uncontrollable. Floods in general. Waters, incredibly, like, irresistible force. It's hard to control once it is out of control. We have natural disasters to teach us that. So, we're watching this current explode and sort of do an incredible amount of destruction. The idea is that it can't really be brought back to the same types of controlled structure it was in before. So, we've gone from a technology that sends the Brain, as a metaphor, down a certain path. There is no way for the train to find any other route to the station. We've gone from that to something getting in its way, a splinter, which is from a whole nother vocabulary. Not typically, although Allie reminded us that there is a way in which the wooden nature of a train track can cause us to imagine a diversion. But really Splinter comes from somewhere else. Then we've got a Swerve, which is not train-like. And now we have a body of water, probably a river. We've got Current and we've got floods. So, how is Groovy doing now? Well, there is no groove that's visible anymore. I need, actually, to disagree, unfortunately, with Anna. You're disagreeing? Wow, okay. I am. I would say that we're now flooded with possibility. So all those windows and perspectives that Emily was talking about in "I Dwell in Possibility" are now available to both herself and us, the readers. And she isn't, I don't think, shutting anyone out. It's rather a self-enclosure for protection from the eye that would judge or place us back within that group of prejudice. And this is a situation, this is a better poem in my opinion, or at least a more complicated one. Because the form must follow its own course like the Water and like the Brain, whereas in the other poem you really have to get all the way to the end to the narrow hands, the little Dickensonian modest hands gathering Paradise in, which is enormous as you get this paradox of small, small, wee housebound me gathering in enormity. Whereas here you're all over the place. You're all over the place.
