Cool.
Great.
Thanks, Hannah.
Thanks a lot Hannah and Tyler and everyone here and Joshua
and for everyone who is skipping the basketball game tonight.
I'm going to give a lecture.
It'll be about an hour.
And, you know, it's very rough, so we'll
have some time for questions and answers afterward.
And you really-- if you're perplexed,
let me know at any point.
The lecture is titled "Like a Very Strange Likeness and Pink."
It's in three parts.
It'll take about an hour.
One, The Like.
Let's kick things off with a little psychiatric evaluation.
If I'm going to lecture on likeness for the next hour
or so, I'd like to know what sort of people
I'm dealing with.
So make yourselves comfortable, please.
I'm going to show you an image.
Take your time.
You all have your little hymnals with you, right?
I know you all have pens but take your time
and write down what it looks like to you.
I'm not a trained mental health professional.
Don't worry.
[LAUGHTER]
OK.
Ready?
The Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach
developed his famous inkblot test
during the flowering of psychoanalysis
in early 20th-century Europe.
As a child, Rorschach's classmates
called him "Klecks," or inkblot, for his hobby
of dripping ink onto a piece of paper, folding it in half,
and opening the page to reveal the fanciful mirror
images inside.
Reading Freud on dream interpretation years later,
the impossibly handsome Klecks began
to wonder why people saw so many different likenesses--
a butterfly, a monster, a volcano--
in the same inkblots.
He began to show inkblots to schoolchildren--
analyzing the responses in what would become
Psychodiagnostik, the book that introduced the Rorschach
test to the world.
Psychologists ask their patients to look
at inkblots as a projective test of personality.
It's called a projective assessment because the subject,
viewing an amorphous object--
an inkblot, a cloud formation, a Swiss psychiatrist's
hairstyle--
projects her unconscious conflicts or motivations
onto the form.
[LAUGHTER]
It took me like hours to do this.
I, for one, can't help seeing a crashing tsunami
in Klecks's hyperkinetic mane.
But maybe that's just me.
I'm an avoidant neurotic with low order anxieties
about male pattern baldness and catastrophic weather events.
Did you, by any chance, happen to see a spaceship
in our original inkblot?
Oh, well, I guess my--
if you see it, you'll see it.
In this respect, you're not unlike
my six-year-old daughter.
You see the spaceship there?
Yeah, right there in the middle?
Yeah.
You're not unlike my six-year-old daughter,
a Napoleonic introvert with a
Mars Needs Moms complex--
[LAUGHTER]
who insists that it's a rocket ship coming out of hot lava
trying to kiss someone with little, little commas
everywhere.
Or maybe you saw a pair of dancers
clasping hands in this phenomenological gray area
instead?
Then you have something in common
with Hermann Goering, the man who brought us the gestapo, who
thoroughly enjoyed perusing the inkblots presented
to him by prison psychiatrists at Nuremberg.
This is from his transcript from his psychiatric evaluation
in Nuremberg.
Those are two dancing figures--
very clear, shoulder here and face there-- clapping hands.
Top red is head and hat.
Face is partly white.
Maybe I'll go back to them.
Now that you know what it looked like to Goering,
you might feel a little uneasy about seeing those dancers
in the inkblot.
Don't worry.
My wife saw them too, and she assures me almost daily
that she's not a Nazi.
Though it's hardly foolproof as a psychiatric assessment,
Rorschach's test sheds light on what I would call "our folk
psychology of likeness."
For reasons beyond us, we sense that we're
like others who perceive the same resemblances that we do--
an ineluctable inkling of difference
from those who don't recognize the likenesses that we project
onto the inkblot of the real.
Poets trade in resemblances between things in the world
and between themselves and others
whenever they compose a simile.
Is the news like squirrels?
Am I the only person out there who
thinks that the news resembles squirrels?
Will others see the likeness like me?
Emily Dickinson, who once observed
how the news, like squirrels, ran,
worried over these questions like nobody else
in modern American poetry.
Probably, it has something to do with this poet's sense
that she was utterly unlike the people around her.
In a letter to her literary pen pal Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
the reclusive Dickinson once described herself
as "the only kangaroo among the beauty."
In number 736-- her poems are known
by numbers-- in number 736, she makes art of this anxiety.
And I think you have this poem in your handout.
Is this legi--?
Can you read this anyway?
OK.
Have any like myself investigating
March, new houses on the hill descried,
and possibly a church that were not, we are sure, as
lately as the snow and are today, if we exist,
though how may this be so?
Have any like myself conjectured,
who may be the occupants of these abodes,
so easy to the sky?
It would seem that God should be the nearest neighbor to,
and heaven, a convenient grace for show or company.
Have any like myself preserved the charm
secure by shunning carefully the place all seasons of the year.
Excepting March, 'tis then my villages be seen,
and possibly a steeple, not afterward by men.
Dickinson's uncertainty, "Have any like myself,"
lurks under the surface of every original symbol.
Have any like myself thought that the news
runs like squirrels?
Sometimes, alas, the answer is no.
I, for one, have no idea what this poet
sees on her investigations into March in this poem.
Clouds, my best guess, appear easy to the sky
all through the year, not only in spring.
Is that community on the hill real or a hallucination?
What doctrine do they preach in it's possible church?
Venturing beyond the boundaries of her historical community,
Dickinson spies a spectral society that no one else sees,
like a solitary anthropologist conducting fieldwork
on a vanishing tribe in the hills of rural New England.
It's a lonely poem--
making the question of social likeness,
"Have any like myself, " into an unanswerable refrain.
Maybe to see like this poet, you have to resemble a kangaroo.
The hyphenated prosody of number 736 allows for the possibility
that collective life is but a dream.
You can see this in the line, "If we exist,
though how may this be so?"
Though she's often read as a metaphorical poet,
studying Dickinson's similes can help
us to map our imagined communities of resemblance.
One of her most widely anthologized poems, number 258,
begins with a classic simile of American literature.
There's a certain slant of light, winter afternoons,
that oppresses like the heft of cathedral tunes.
Whenever I teach this poem, all of my students
agree there is a particular angle
of bleak winter light that weighs
on the soul like church music.
Rhetorically speaking, Dickinson leaves
us little room for dissent.
There is no "I" in this poem--
only the unanimous "us" and "we."
Heavenly hurt it gives us, we can
find no scar but internal difference
where the meanings are.
But what if, heaven forbid, you're
one of those benighted souls who happens to like sacred music?
People who feel exalted by cathedral tunes
might feel that Dickinson's first person plural, "we,"
oppresses them.
Though it looks universal at first,
this simile selectively addresses itself
to a secret society of like-minded agnostics
who only pretend to sing along during church
services in Dickinson's 19th-century congregationalist
community.
Fans of sacred music may crash the simile,
but they don't really belong to the poem's inner circle.
Every likeness is a social occasion.
Now might be a good time to review a few basic principles
from Simile 101.
Feel free to take notes.
There'll be a quiz.
Every simile, The Princeton Encyclopedia
of Poetry and Poetics tells us, is composed
of a tenor and a vehicle.
The tenor is the thing itself--
an inkblot, Hermann Rorschach's hair, a certain slant of light.
The vehicle is what you the poet bring to the table--
dancing imps, an approaching tsunami,
the heft of cathedral tunes.
Put them together in a wavy equation and you have a simile.
But there's a paradox hidden inside any literary comparison.
To liken one thing to another, your vehicle
has to be different from its tenor.
Imagine what would happen if Dickinson's poem began
something like this.
"There's a certain slant of light winter afternoons
that oppresses like the heft of a certain slant of light winter
afternoons."
This vehicle doesn't travel very far, does it?
To get any mileage out of her simile,
Dickinson must liken "winter's light" to something unlike it.
This internal difference, at the heart of every simile,
is where the meanings are.
We'll return to the question of difference a little later
in this talk.
For now, here's my advice to freshmen poets.
A good vehicle transports the reader
as far as possible from its neighboring tenor,
but sometimes a vehicle can spin out of control.
Though she ultimately refused to travel beyond her father's
gate, Dickinson tricks out some of the most outlandish vehicles
in the English language.
She's like a gear freak at the auto show of resemblance.
Let's look at a few examples.
Take out your pencils and see if you
can supply these Dickinsonian vehicles with suitable tenors
of your own.
Print clearly.
No talking.
Extra credit for good prosody.