Dazzle Gradually

A short post this week, but one I plan to return to as it’s something I’ve been thinking of plenty this last year. It’s to do with our relationship to mystery, which has been entirely altered by our relationship to knowledge. Most lately, AI has changed things, before that the algorithm of the Google search engine. And, a long time before that, but not unrelatedly, the Enlightenment: the toppling of religious authority by science and reason. I like knowing things, but I have also always like the bit before: the mystery that precedes the knowing, and this is the part that our optimised existence seeks to truncate.

Mystery, whether in my relationships to the people around me or simply in the plot of a new novel, is a kind of glue through which I feel bound to the things and people I am surrounded by. Mystery catches attention, holds it, opens up time in which to really get to know people, know stories, places, things. I don’t want the mystery to be solved right away, because then the bond is broken: I’ve seen the spoilers, I’ve read the Wikipedia page, I don’t need to stay out the rest of the episode. And in an optimised world this doesn’t just apply to television, I believe, but to human relationships and our relationships with nature, our environments, with knowledge. Increasingly, I’m finding I’m becoming all too used to instant demystification, I have less capacity, less endurance and less patience where mystery is involved. This makes me sad, in fact, it makes me depressed, because that bond is so much the thing that makes me feel really genuinely connected, that I am rooted in the world and that there are things here for me to discover and really, intimately know — gradually, in time, unravel.

But there is one thing, for me, that will always be a source of mystification, because it is always shape-shifting reforming itself around the world — and that thing is language, which seems always to deaden if it’s overused, repeated, and which will always slip into a new form when we need it. So, because I want to write something short today, and because I want to share a little burst of that feeling without digging into it or unpicking it, I want to share a poem with you by Emily Dickinson, master of playfulness, of ellipses and mystery, who herself once wrote: “The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind —”.

Here is one of her most beautiful poems, which has always filled me with wonder. I hope it gives you a little joy and, better yet, a little mystery on a winter Sunday.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers

By Emily Dickinson

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet - never - in Extremity,

It asked a crumb - of me.

Love, Rosie xxx