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Emily Dickinson: The Theoretical Physics of Consciousness

Explicating the origin, function, and limits of cognition in 3 stanzas.

A master of poetic precision and concision, Emily Dickinson was not merely devoted to words, she perceived them as transcendent entities and used them to elucidate eternal truths lying well beyond their dictionary definitions. Her armamentarium: her beloved “Lexicon” an 1844 reprint of Noah Webster’s unabridged 1841 American Dictionary of the English Language, a volume she often dipped into for sheer pleasure and inevitably consulted when searching for the perfect word.

The education of Emily Dickinson: Honing a prodigious intellect

After completing her schooling at the Amherst Academy, at age 16 Emily Dickinson was enrolled in the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, located a short distance from her home, and attended from 1847 to 1848. Founded by Mary Lyon, a chemist by training, the school offered a curriculum based on a college course of study and was considered one of the most rigorous academic institutions a young woman could attend at that time. Courses included botany, natural history, astronomy, English grammar, Latin, music, algebra, philosophy, and logic, and its innovative curriculum emphasized “individual discovery through laboratory science” as well as regular physical exercise. To quote from an insightful (unattributed) article on Emily Dickinson’s education posted on the Emily Dickinson Museum website, “Mount Holyoke, the seminary, and its formidable leader Mary Lyon, left the poet with an enduring legacy: the belief that women were capable of and entitled to a life of the mind.” Like most of her classmates, Emily Dickinson dropped out of Mount Holyoke after only one year, but its influence on her life and work was profound.

Based on a combination of academic courses and extensive personal study, Emily Dickinson was an accomplished botanist, but never earned any credentials as a trained physicist, mathematician, or philosopher. However, in addition to her prodigious poetical skills, she had a exceptional intellect, an innate mastery for analytical thinking, and a “scientific mindset” that complemented her profound spiritual intuition.  Despite the revivalist era in which she came of age, and the blandishments of those around her, she never accepted Jesus Christ as her personal savior, but she saw the natural world, which was her abiding passion, as a representation or embodiment of God, the unmanifest, un-nameable eternal. Many of her poems express the wonderment and joy of being present and conscious, the perils of inattention, and the process of attaining true knowledge and understanding. She often used ironic detachment and sarcasm to spice her arguments and goad the reader out of complacency, but she always came from a place of heartfelt emotion based on her personal experiences in the real world. Indeed, that is what makes her poetry so compelling and accessible, and why virtually all her work bears the unmistakable stamp of authenticity.

Examples of Emily Dickenson’s thought process

“Success is counted sweetest, By those who ne’er succeed” (No. 112) suggests that a true visceral understanding (of anything) can only be attained by experiencing its opposite. The only one who truly understands “victory” is,”…he defeated—dying—On whose forbidden ear, The distant strains of triumph, Burst agonized and clear!”

“I dwell in Possibility— (No. 466) concludes that the poet’s occupation is “The spreading wide my narrow Hands, to gather Paradise,” an artist’s insuperable but essential task, but also one that’s incumbent upon anyone who wishes to experience life to the fullest.

“A Cloud withdrew from the Sky, Superior Glory be” (No. 895) is a poem that delineates the concepts of “presence” and one’s duty to “pay attention.” While seemingly unimportant, “that Cloud and its Auxiliaries,” (a sly way of including all phenomena presented to consciousness!) Are forever lost to me.” Ergo, I have learned my lesson, henceforth “Never to pass the Angel” (God’s messenger) “With a glance and a Bow (in a perfunctory manner), Till I am firm in Heaven, Is my intention now.” Note that “intention” is essential even though perfection may never be attained.

Finally for sheer concise perfection, Emily Dickinson really nailed it with this early c. 1858 gem, poem No. 20, which adroitly and fecetiously captures the irony of living as a human on planet earth:

“We lose—because we win—

Gamblers—recollecting which

Toss their dice again!”

Emily Dickinson: Philosopher, Physicist, and Spiritual Adept

Among the most profound examples of Emily Dickenson’s uncanny ability to express the essence of the human experience and how it manifests in a dynamic and elusive universe is poem No. 936, dated c.1863. Emphatically stated in three independent but interrelated stanzas in the form of axioms or propositions, it constitutes nothing less than a theory of the origin, manifestations, functions, and limitations of human consciousness in the universe. In a constantly changing cosmos marked by uncertainty, unpredictability, and discontinuity, all our perceptions are contextual and “reality” itself is an amorphous concept determined by the inconstant nature of both the observer and the observed. What Dickinson delineates in these three spare stanzas goes well beyond the relativity of time-space originally proposed by Einstein in 1905; it postulates the relativity of human consciousness itself, a far more radical and far-reaching concept.

No. 936 c.1863

This Dust, and its Feature—
Accredited—Today—
Will in a second Future—
Cease to identify—

This Mind, and its measure—
A too minute Area
For its enlarged inspection’s
Comparison—appear—

This World, and its species
A too concluded show
For its absorbed Attention’s
Remotest scrutiny—

Explicating Emily Dickinson’s No. 936: An Exultant Hypothesis

The first verse sets forth, in poetic form, a dynamic and elusive universe in which “facts” are contextual and perception itself is relative and inherently unpredictable. It foreshadows many aspects of the universe envisioned in the theoretical physicists of the 20th century as set forth by such giant figures as Max Planck, Albert Einstein, and Werner Heisenberg. It is the equivalent of a verbal, conceptual, and existential thermonuclear explosion. 

In the cosmic context of the entire poem, “This Dust, and its Feature—” can be paraphrased as “this stuff (before me) and its characteristics and properties.” In medieval times, even up to the renaissance, “dust,” not atoms, was thought to be the fundamental “stuff” of which everything animate and inanimate was composed. And the word “dust” inevitably calls forth images of mortality (“Dust thou art to dust returneth.”)  

Emily Dickinson, whose poetry explores the subject of death prismatically and with uncommon insight, wrote poignantly and wistfully about dust and mortality in the following 8-line, 2-stanza masterpiece:

 No. 813 c.1864.

This quiet Dust was Gentleman and Ladies
And Lads and Girls —
Was laughter and ability and Sighing
And Frocks and Curls.

This Passive Place a Summer’s nimble mansion
Where Bloom and Bees
Exists an Oriental Circuit
Then cease, like these —

The second line of the first verse of No. 936 is quite literally pivotal because the marvelously apt word “accredited” (officially recognized as valid, meeting essential stated requirements) is immediately qualified (after a pregnant long dash pause) by the word “Today,” which restricts the validity of the observation to a short time frame. The third line, “Will in a second Future—” moves us forward in time to “a second Future—” a simple but profound phrase that implies a discontinuity (gap, lacuna, singularity) in the time-space continuum that prevents us from extrapolating infinitely into a seamless unitary future based on present conditions, perceptions, and normative assumptions. The inevitable outcome of this process, starkly enunciated in the last line of this cataclysmic stanza, “Cease to identify—” proclaims that our initial perceptions are not merely invalid, but irrelevant—no longer identified or identifiable because both the observer and the observed now exist in a totally transformed and indeterminate world. All that remains is (human) consciousness itself, and it proceeds to do all that it can, inspecting, comparing, and exploring the vastness of the microcosm and macrocosm in search of something tangible to latch onto!

This Mind, and its measure—
A too minute Area
For its enlarged inspection’s
Comparison—appear—

In my judgment the second verse of poem No. 936 (shown directly above) delineates the limitations of “Mind,” the cognitive faculty, and its “measure” (capacity, characteristics, system of measurement) in apprehending ultimate “truth” or “reality” at high magnification—the microcosm. Beyond a certain degree of magnification (e.g. examination under a high- powered microscope) the area covered “appears” to be “too minute” for the cognitive consciousness to execute its primary (binary) functions, inspecting and comparing. As a result, beyond a certain degree of enlargement the information obtained by such observation will be incomplete at best. In 1925, roughly 60 years after Emily Dickinson penned this poetic and prophetic “proposition,” Werner Heisenberg published his Nobel Prizewinning thesis in theoretical physics proving mathematically that it is impossible to calculate both the position and velocity of a subatomic particle with a high degree of certainty, and furthermore, that the greater degree of precision one attains in calculating one of these variables, the lower the degree of precision will be in determining the other! This is known colloquially as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and so far, it has stood the test of time. Emily Dickinson arrived at a similar (albeit non-quantifiable) conclusion by intuition and thoughtful analysis without the benefit of a physics degree, scientific instruments or advanced mathematics—a colossal achievement.

This World, and its species
A too concluded show
For its absorbed Attention’s
Remotest scrutiny—

Third and final stanza of poem No. 936 presents a picture of the cognitive consciousness attempting to observe the big picture—the entire universe or macrocosm—at once, presumably to gain an understanding of its nature and characteristics. But paradoxically it has no place to stand outside it (ek-stasis) to be able to assess it in its totality, because it is, by its very nature, it is of it and in it! The word “species” is especially significant because it is known that Emily Dickenson read Asa Gray’s highly influential and favorable review of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species published in the Atlantic in 1860, she was a vigorous proponent of evolution, and embraced many Darwinian ideas in her poetry (e.g. This World in not Conclusion No. 373). 

“A too concluded show” cannot possibly refer to evolution, which is, by definition, an open-ended ongoing process, so it may be a wry observation on the futility of trying to assess the entire cosmos, namely that by the time consciousness (in its observational capacity) approaches the outer reaches of the cosmos and tries, metaphorically, to “look back,” the “show” is over, “too concluded!” for its “Remotest scrutiny”(most distant observation). All its  “attention” has been taken up  (“absorbed” by) the hopeless process of striving to attain the unattainable. In other words, “ultimate reality” remains elusive in an inherently dynamic, unpredictable, ineluctable universe, and perfect knowledge can never be attained at either the microcosmic or macrocosmic levels due to inherent limitations in our ability to observe and differentiate. We are, in the immortal words of Bob Dylan’s classic ballad of 1966, “Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,”

Finally, it’s noteworthy that the opening lines of all three stanzas of No. 936, “This Dust, and its Feature—,” “This Mind, and its measure—,” and “This World, and its species,” are correlates that highlight the origin, function, and limitations of the cognitive consciousness, and its endless quest for meaning in a universe in constant flux, and in which uncertainty and indeterminacy reign supreme. It is a remarkably prescient “21st century world view” to have been penned by a diligent 33-year-old woman sitting at her little desk in a bright, pleasant room on the second floor of a lovely house in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1863, and it is an enduring testament to her transcendent brilliance, both as a poet and as a prophetic polymath.

About a week after completing this explication de texte of Emily Dickinson’s 1863 masterpiece, I recalled that in my mid 20s, I had also composed a poem exploring the origin, function, and limitations of human consciousness in the universe, albeit without the consummate precision, acuity, and elegance of the Bard of Amherst. I hope you find it worthy of your attention, but please don’t ask me what it portends—I am merely the poet who recorded his musings, and I don’t have a clue.

Out of Matter—Consciousness—

Does it so Inhere—

Or hath Sublime proximity

Infixed Perception there?

To explicate the Mystery,

Follow folds within—

Ravel down toward Zero

In sight of Origin—

But One approaches Nothing—

And nearly at the End,

Being expands to fill a Space

Too Infinite—Again—