Yesterday I stumbled upon (as one is forever "stumbling upon" YouTube things) the odd little video below: a short animation by Maureen Selwood paired with a reading by Blair Brown of Dickinson's poem "I started Early - Took my Dog."
I would recommend reading the poem first. It's one of my favorites. And please, watch out for that third line; it might trip you up.
* * *
I started Early - Took my Dog -
And visited the Sea -
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me -
And Frigates - in the Upper Floor
Extended Hempen Hands -
Presuming Me to be a Mouse -
Aground - opon the Sands -
But no Man moved Me - till the Tide
Went past my simple Show -
And past my Apron - and my Belt
And past my Boddice - too -
And made as He would eat me up -
As wholly as a Dew
Opon a Dandelion's Sleeve -
And then - I started - too - And He -
He followed - close behind -
I felt His Silver Heel Opon my Ancle -
Then my Shoes
Would overflow with Pearl -
Until We met the Solid Town -
No One He seemed to know -
And bowing - with a Mighty look -
At me - The Sea withdrew -
* * *
This kind of video - a classic poem coupled with a commissioned animation - has wonderful potential. When I think of the many layers of meaning that might emerge from the interplay of spoken word and moving image, the cultural critic in me goes all tingly. He's like, "Technology really does open up new possibilities for art!"
But ultimately Selwood's animation doesn't do much for me. Perhaps it's too straightforward. We hear about a dog and the ocean, we see a dog on a beach; we hear about shoes filling with pearls, we see a bunch of pearls falling toward a pair of shoes. This literality has a deadening effect. Dickinson's words are so alive, so well tuned, so definitive, that any re-presentation of them is bound to seem inferior.
More to the point, though - and at the risk of stating the obvious - the images of "I started Early - Took my Dog" aren't meant to be seen. The poem's power lies in the fraught space between reading the text and visualizing what it describes.
Mischievously, Dickinson begins with a quotidian scene: taking the dog for a morning walk by the sea. Then, with no warning, not even an introductory clause, she hits us with "Mermaids" in a "Basement" and "Frigates" with "Hempen Hands." The sea morphs into a multi-story house, then into a ravenous man. The dog vanishes, apparently.
As the proceedings grow more and more surreal, as the narrative departs from the shore of the everyday, we realize this isn't a poem about a walk. It isn't about a leisurely, sun-dappled, Wordsworthian encounter with nature. No, it's more like an allegory - an allegory for... what? Death? Orgasm? Gender violence? Spiritual terror?
Dickinsonianly, the poem never settles. It resists our impulse to determine and delimit meaning, to tell a story, to paint a picture. And yet it haunts us, calls us back, tempts us to understand.
I mean, what happened to that damn dog?
Often, when a film adaptation of a beloved book comes out, readers say they would prefer to continue "imagining," as opposed to "knowing," what certain settings and characters "look like." This type of complaint has always bugged me, and now I know why: when I read, I rarely visualize things with any precision or permanence. From reading to rereading, the images shift, become new. A film adaptation, then, merely provides an alternate, equally nondefinitive set of possibilities.
So I suppose that part of the pleasure I take in reading literature (can it be called "pleasure" when it's a mixture of frustration, fascination, and compulsion?) inheres in the maddening, ever-fruitful absence of certainty.
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