See Emily Dismay

All right, who died and made Emily Dickinson warden of my conscience? At first I thought maybe it was the Dylan folks getting me back for yesterday's gaffe of mistaking the title of Bob's new Christmas album Christmas In The Heart. I had written it was Christmas From The Heart (to be honest, I'd rather have my seasonal carols from the heart, rather than in the heart, beloved Bob's or anybody's).

But no, I detect something more cosmic than a rock star's aide-de-camps has its hand in confounding me like I've been confounded ever since I read the following quote from Ms. Dickinson nearly twenty-four hours ago: "To be worthy of what we lose is the supreme Aim--" (yes, even in her letters, one to T. W. Higginson, summer 1882, from which this atomic bomb comes from, Emily had to get her precious dashes in). What does she mean? Should I supremely aim to be worthy of my thick thatch of glowing red hair that I started losing twenty-five years ago (though at least I'm still losing it, or what thin, unglowing wisps do remain)? Worthy of that tooth? That phone number? That bet I had on Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes?

Okay, piddly stuff. Certainly Emily (who obviously knew a thing or two about saudade even if she didn't know the word), who because she did not stop for death, it kindly stopped for her, and who didn't mean a snake when she wrote about the narrow fellow in the grass, had more important ideas on her mind when writing of "what we lose." But what, loved ones, long-gone opportunities, the physical or emotional courage that we might lose over the years? What? Am I supposed to live my life supremely aiming to be worthy of these lost things? What would that be like, to devote your life so intently on proving yourself worthy of such a lost thing or person?

Of course, with Emily and that "supreme," one does think along religious lines. And maybe that "we" is not so individual but collective: Are we to live so as to be worthy of what "we" lost in the Garden of Eden, that intimate, unconditional, and undemanding love of God?

Now there's a blog project worth something grand, if not a book deal and a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep: publicly inventory your life's losses, and publicly chronicle your attempt to "be worthy" of those losses. Well, publicly, I'll stick to made-up words and UFOs abducting cows, but privately, this one might be hard to shake. Pound for pound, in the psychic quandary category, I'll put my money on the demure Belle of Amherst up against anybody this side of Immanuel Kant (and as far as that side of Immanuel Kant goes, well, as the lavatory attendant in Hell says, "don't go there").

The Roches-Losing True

Percy Mayfield-Lost Love

And because Youtube won't let me "embed" this clip, you have to go directly (t)here to see Elvis singing "The Yellow Rose of Texas."