Reading Dickinson in the Bare All Age
A major point of debate at present among the trend watchers is the rising tendency to bare it all. The long existed fencing which respected the division between private and the public has been punched into a sieve. A sieve which permits uninhibited flow two ways. The flow has unproblematised the two categories which we have always attempted to keep apart: the private and the public. With the advent of the so christened social media, the life inside had begun to take a beating. With a decade of social media behind us, the beating it took has totally deshaped the private space. With result that not only has the private shrunk to the real inside of the mind, with the physical and lived part of the life has become public. When the expansionist agenda of the public pushes mercilessly forward, aided by the unashamedly openness seeking social media, the outcome can't be otherwise.
It hardly matters what Emily Dickinson thought. Keeping aside the age in which she wrote, keeping aside the personal peculiarities of the author, I would like to read the poem in the whatsappish present. 'I'm nobody. Who are you?'. The poem starts. Since the theme of self hood has been celebrated for centuries in the realms of literature and art, not to make a mention of philosophers, it could easily be taken as one such in which a writer expresses her angst. It is. The line which follows, in hush hush manner enquires the reader wether s/he too is thus. Are you – Nobody – too? Then there’s a pair of us!' If so, the poet suggests, to keep it to oneself since if the word gets around 'they would advertise', it warns. The word advertise which was used in the days of the poet, though not without its denotative demerits then, has amplified itself to take in the negativity which the social media has brought in for the selfie culture. The themes of celebrating oneself, drumming up the approval of the others around for oneself, irrespective of whether the event, incident, pose, pic is worthy of destroying the element of privacy, has become the annoyingly consistent theme of the day.
Advertisement was an act which was meant to publicise a product so that the potential clientele, customers, will be made ware of its existence. Etymology of the word traces it to the 12 century Latin root 'advertere' which means ' to turn toward'. It has also passed through 'advertir' which was meant to 'warn'. By early 15 century it meant 'to take notice of'. But by late 15 century the sense of the word shifted to 'give notice to others', 'warn'. The call-attention-to function which is today overdone by the tech-driven generation who savvy the self presence could very well be the target of the poem.
The term underwent lots of chases in function ever since. When the media stalwarts and the politicos started using devises and techniques borrowed from marketing for personal gains, advertising began to acquire the prototype from of the current selfism. The term selfie is not used here to refer to the habit of the shooting oneself by a hand held device. It is meant to encompass the wider, more damaging practise of uploading and sharing the 'moments' of ones life so that others would like it and by extension, 'like' them too. The rampant urge to let others know, and to do it so that others would know, and, then move to the extremes of doing it just for the sake of letting others know that you have done it, has made the word 'advertise' barge into the private and keep the doors too open. Though 'share' is what it is called, the word is a misnomer because though sharing has a community ring to it, what is shared often is what community may have no need to know, in the common sense of the term.
This is what the poet refers to with her exclamation in the second half of the poem, 'How dreary – to be – Somebody!' The poet is weary of being a 'somebody' and warns listener to be cautious. Form the prefix 'no' to the 'some', there is the road from home to public media. The 'somebody' of Dickinson is a self into which the public has barged in and has opened the doors of the self for exhibitionism. Though it is a fact that the stretches of the private and the limits of the public vary among individuals, increased instances of violation could easily be spotted. Hence is why the Dickinson poem talks of the dreariness of the 'somebodiness'. The amount of loathing such an exposure of the private is contained in her line, ' How public – like a Frog'. If we can conveniently turn away from the problematics of the anti-veterinary perspective, the traditional intensity of the frog metaphor can amply reflect the itch to be under the gaze. Being a frog of the social media and web space, showing oneself off when one can wait for the other to find the significant things for themselves, one demeans one self. The animal like self- absence, the animal like openness, the animalistic yet contrived self unconsciousness comes with a tag of voluptuous revelation. The poet's whisper in the ears of the reader is a push to pull oneself from the brink of frogship.
The 'frog' and the 'bog' of the poem work steady along. But the conventional idea the poet would like work out is the implicit comparison between the bog and the society on the one side and frog and the individual on the other. All the unpleasant associations of the bog are meant to be dragged in into the poem which advocates fixing civilised walls of privacy, without giving into the Bogdom of strippedness. 'To tell ones name' is to blow ones trumpet- the drums of 'sharing' and trumpets of purchasing 'likes' in the age of the bare it all! Be a nobody.
Under the constant gaze of the surveillance, where everybody is turned into somebody, the poem can still soar differently, higher and lighter still!
The poem :
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
- Emily Dickinson
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