Room In Brooklyn by Edward Hopper

Why does a person write, paint or compose music? Why does she design buildings, make films or carve statues? We can ask the same question in a different way: Why does someone create?

Creative effort is an act of living. Creative expression is the fulfillment of a need as well as a means of intrepreting life. The ‘creator’ closes herself until she is isolated enough to go into the depths of her creative self. A ‘creator’ is always lonely, and art comes from within.

But has art turned into an activity abstracted from everyday life? Has it become a specialized performance that alienates the ‘creator’ ?

Long ago, it was an integral part of community life. People made music and danced together. Storytelling was an indispensable activity within daily life and tradition. People recited poetry as part of everyday conversation without attributing intellectual or even marginal meanings to it. Yet, nowadays only few write, recite or listen to poetry.

Today, the artist is an individual looking for meaning in life. Has art become the denial of the art of living by drawing away from the center of everyday life?

Or have societies overglorified and commercialized art at the same time, causing it to lose its character as a natural, primal human need?

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A Prolific Poet and a Strange Woman

Emily Dickinson’s life has always aroused my curiosity. She was one of the most original 19th century American poets. She had her own unconventional broken rhyming meter. She used dashes and capitalization in a way that was unusual at the time. She was a prolific poet and wrote almost eight hundred poems. Yet, not more than a dozen were published during her lifetime. She corresponded with famous journalists, writers and editors of the time, yet she refused to see visitors as she grew older. Whenever anyone came to visit her, she would talk to them from behind a door or shout to them from upstairs.

Family and Childhood

Emily Dickinson came from a successful and influential family in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her grandfather Samuel Dickinson was the founder of Amherst College. The family lived in a big mansion on the Main Street where Emily spent most of her life. Emily’s father Edward Dickinson was the treasurer of Amherst College for almost forty years. He also represented the Hampshire District in the United States Congress. Emily had the same name with her mother Emily Norcross, and she had two siblings named William Austin and Lavinia.

As a child, Emily was well-behaved. She didn’t cause any trouble for her parents. She played the piano. She was a hard-working student. Her father Edward Dickinson was ambitious about the education of his children. Each time he arrived at home, he wanted them to tell him one by one all the new things they learned that day. Later in her correspondences, Emily described her father as a good, warm man although in a letter she wrote after he died, she said he had a pure but terrible heart. However, she described her mother from the beginning as an ‘awful mother’ who was aloof and cold. She also implied in a letter she wrote later that her mother favored and loved Austin more than her other kids.

Emily’s Youth

As years past by, Emily turned into an introvert and a melancholic girl. She often became sick and couldn’t go to school.  When Sophie Holland, her cousin and close friend, died because of typhus, she was crushed. She started becoming obsessed with the idea of death and thought she could die anytime, too. She became so depressed that her family had to send her away to Boston with the hope that she would pull herself together in a different environment. The change of atmosphere helped her recuperate. Upon her return, she was feeling much better. She returned to Amherst College to continue her studies.

A religious revival swept Amherst in 1845, and Emily, like many of her peers, was affected. However, it did not last long, and she stopped going to church after a few years. After graduating from Amherst Academy, she went to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for ten months, but then, returned home to Amherst.

Years in Seclusion

Emily Dickinson spent the rest of her life in Amherst. She corresponded with many friends including Leonard Humphrey and Susan Gilbert. She and Susan exchanged hundreds of  letters. Susan had a great influence on Emily, to the point of manipulating her, but she also upset the poet quite often with her haughty and harsh manners. Later, she married Emily’s brother.

Leonard, on the other hand, was a friend from her Amherst College days, and his untimely death at the age of twenty-five shook Emily once again, causing her to become even more obsessed with the idea of death. When her mother became sick and bedridden in the 1850s, Emily had to take over the domestic chores, and she gradually withdrew herself from the outside world.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

The rest of Emily Dickinson’s life can be summarized by saying that it was a series of unfortunate events. Thinking about it really breaks my heart. Such a talented woman, who was so capable of loving and being loved and of creating and nourishing, had to submit to her fate and suffer in silence. She must have felt so much pain. There must have been times when she wanted to end it all.

First, her father had a stroke and died. Emily couldn’t bring herself to attend the funeral. Soon after, her mother suffered a stroke that worsened her condition. After that, Phillips Lord, Emily’s friend and perhaps late-life romance, as well as her good old friend Charles Wadsworth, passed away. Her brother Austin fell in love with another woman,  left his wife Susan and distanced himself from his family. Before soon, Emily’s mother died. The next year, Gilbert, who was Austin and Susan’s youngest child and Emily’s favorite nephew, lost his life because of typhoid fever.

External Ghost, That Whiter Host

Emily tried to cope with her painful life through writing, baking, gardening, and herbology. In her last years she didn’t step out of the house at all. She wore white from head to toe. She turned into a white ghost who was doomed to a life in the same empty rooms filled with apparitions. She developed agoraphobia and anxiety disorder.

Her life was merely a shade of death, and she knew well that one could not avoid passing through ‘the invisible door’ and walking through the corridors of death. Her fear of evil, which she often mentioned in her poems, probably reflected her fear of losing control in the course of a life woven with grief and never-ending trouble.

Did she put those strange dashes and unusual capital letters in her poems each time the spirits of sorrow clamped her heart? Was she wearing white because she was desperately trying to bring some light into her life and to get rid of the funeral blues?

Home Is So Far From Home

In many families, one person ends up being the victim. Emily seems to be the victim in the Dickinson family, and she fulfilled that role obediently. Like many victims, she remained silent. She didn’t fight back. She didn’t revolt openly. Instead, she screamed through her poetry, which she tried to keep under cover. Her sister Lavinia found Emily’s hundreds of poems and shared them with the world. Why did she do that? Did she share her deceased sister’s feelings? Did she find some solace for herself and for Emily’s soul by bringing out the amazingly crafted silent anguish of the woman in white?

Emily Dickinson died at the age of fifty-five. She was laid in a white coffin decorated with heliotropes, orchids and violets. Her funeral was short and simple. Upon her request in her death bed,  her coffin wasn’t driven but carried through fields of buttercups before she was buried in the family plot at West Cemetery.

Her Subtle Poems and the Ghost of Her Smile

Dickinson’s poetry was influenced by her Puritan upbringing, the Book of Revelation and the metaphysical poets of 17th century England. She especially admired Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and John Keats. She used metaphors in the most creative manner and applied an innovative style in her poems that reflected her background and spirituality. She refrained from adopting the romantic style of her time. Her poetic voice was bold, witty, concise, and sometimes sardonic.

I cannot help but think that Emily Dickinson lived in the wrong place at the wrong time. I hope that her poetry, which still captivates and impresses masses, gives her soul the peace she couldn’t find as a mortal being.

She was right when she wrote one doesn’t need to be a house to be haunted. Sometimes being human alone and devoid of love is enough to feel haunted because you carry your own haunted chamber within you. She thought it was safer to see a ghost than to confront the ghosts in her mind. Gazing into herself terrified her for she couldn’t stand facing the darker things in her mind.

Here, I dedicate this song to her memory:

HAUNTED

Interesting Links:

Emily Dickinson’s Complete Poetry

Today in Literature: Emily Dickinson

Literature Network: Emily Dickinson

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My name is Ipsum, Lorem Ipsum

by C. A. Kobu on November 22, 2009

in Design,Graphic Arts,Language,Publishing

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.”

Read it like a poem, and it will sound poetic. Say it like a prayer, and it will have another effect. But it is what it is: A dummy text!

What is a dummy text?

Anyone who has something to do with website design, graphic arts or publishing knows the famous Lorem Ipsum well. A dummy text is a replacement text that helps designers do the layout work without using the real content, which is usually incomplete or unavailable at the time of visual design.  Other names used for describing a dummy text are ‘blind text’, ‘greeked text’, ‘placeholder text’, ‘mock content’, and ‘filler text’.

Designers can play with their design, make changes, run tests, and Lorem Ipsum will sit there silently and obey all orders without minding being pushed around or tucked into columns. After the design is complete, the designer will get rid of Lorem Ipsum despite its (or should I say ‘her’) loyalty and devotion, and replace it with the real content.

The Lorem Ipsum text looks real enough on a brochure, website or book design and demonstrates the graphic elements of a document or other presentation. The client, then, has a clear idea about the font, typography and layout before giving his approval.

What does Lorem Ipsum mean?

After a short research, I found out that Lorem Ipsum was taken from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of Cicero’s de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (The Extremes of Good and Evil or The Purposes of Good and Evil) dated to 45BC. Cicero’s work was about the theory of ethics, and it was very popular during the Renaissance.

The original passage began: “Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit.” It means: “Neither is there anyone who loves grief itself since it is grief and thus wants to obtain it.”

The History

Lorem Ipsum has been used by typesetters, printers and publishers since 1500. It’s amazing how this dummy text, taken from an ancient treatise in Latin, survived many centuries and even reached the age of electronic typesetting.

In 1914, H. Rackham translated it into English. It was used in Letraset catalogs in the 1970s. However, today’s popular version of Lorem Ipsum was first created in mid 1980s for Aldus Corporation’s first desktop publishing program PageMaker for the Apple Macintosh.

Today, there are even online Lorem Ipsum Text Generator tools that allow you to create the exact amount of Lorem Ipsum text you require for your design.

Various software can generate random Lorem Ipsum texts. Apple’s Pages software, Joomla! and Microsoft Word 2007 also have Lorem Ipsum features.

Interesting Links:

Lorem Ipsum

The Strange History of Lorem Ipsum

Blind Text Generator

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WHAT’S IN A SYMBOL: spider

November 15, 2009 Art History

SPIDER The spider,  a skillful creature that artfully weaves webs and takes the central position, is a symbolic animal with varying meanings in different cultures. The spider was associated with the goddess Neith in Ancient Egypt. Neith was the weaver of fate, and later this personification continued in Babylon through Ishtar. In India, the spider [...]

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WHAT’S IN A WORD: cornucopia

November 2, 2009 Language

CORNUCOPIA WORD CLASS: noun MEANING: a classical motif in the form of a goat’s horn, out of which spill flowers and fruit; symbol of abundance and fertility ETYMOLOGY: from Latin Cornu Copiae DESCRIPTION: The cornucopia dates back to the 5th century BC. It is also referred to as the horn of plenty, harvest cone and [...]

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Henry isn’t dying… He’s a deconstruction song sung by a fat lady in the parking lot

October 27, 2009 Interviews

INTERVIEW WITH PHOTOGRAPHER HENRY AVIGNON Is Henry Avignon your real name or is it a pseudonym? It reminds one of Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. I woke up in April of 2008, locked up at Strong Memorial Hospital, from what was intended to be my last wine and cocaine binge. It was a drug overdose, [...]

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Who do you think Allen Stewart Konigsberg is?

October 21, 2009 Cinema

Famous sitcom character George Costanza was originally intended to be a caricature of him. He has been chosen as one of the 100 sexiest film stars ever. Rumor says that Frank Sinatra offered to have his legs broken. Since he was a young boy, he was charmed with magic tricks. He was suspended from the [...]

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A Room in New York or Rooms by the Sea?

October 13, 2009 Art History

A True New Yorker Edward Hopper was a true New Yorker. His home and studio were in the heart of the city, and every day, he woke up to an urban scene of desolate streets, rented rooms, cheap hotels, offices, movie theaters, cafes, and gloomy diners. I wonder if he was happy about living in [...]

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WHAT’S IN A WORD: tautology

October 11, 2009 Language

TAUTOLOGY WORD CLASS: noun MEANING: (rhetoric) unnecessary repetition of meaning, using dissimilar words to say the same thing twice without adding to the clarity of the definition as in ‘new innovation’, ‘ATM machine,’ ‘widow woman,’ ‘unsolved mystery,’ ‘salsa sauce,’ ‘free gift,’ or ‘lying politician’ ETYMOLOGY: Late Latin tautologia, from Greek tautologos DESCRIPTION: It is not [...]

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Bridges are not for burning

October 9, 2009 Music

And bridges are meant for burnin’ When the people and memories they join aren’t the same This is what Jim Croce says in Lover’s Cross, but clearly, not all bridges are for burning. I like Croce’s song, but I’d rather go along with Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water: All your dreams are on [...]

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