Last night, on my way home from work, I was listening in my car to a radio program dedicated to new book releases. I usually catch that program every Thursday at that time, with interesting topics, and the authors of the books often come to the radio studio as guests. Yesterday, about the day before World Poetry Day, which is today March 21, they presented a book by Jesús Marchamalo García, Dickinson y las violetas (Dickinson and the Violets). It is a short biography of the famous poetess, Emily Dickinson with illustrations. Since on the radio we can only listen, of course, everything I heard was enough for me to be glued to what they were talking about in the radio program. I didn't know much about Emily Dickinson, except that she was a poetess from the United States.
To start with, I didn't know that she was a lover of science and plants, that she was attentive to flowers and every insect that passed by them. I liked everything that I heard so much, and also it made me think about one question that I wanted to share here and invite you to do the same.
As for the plants, as a child, she already made a herbarium of more than 400 plants, and she didn't just collect, organize, and classify them by their names. She also made little collages and scenes with those dried plants. Her imagination was already awake. Well, this phrase doesn't make much sense because maybe you can't "awaken" it. Maybe you have to be born with it, with that ability and preserve it. To the extent you want to preserve this ability, you will nourish it.
I also didn't know this very important fact, which at first came as a shock to me: she shut herself away in her house for many years. If I heard correctly, she hadn't left her house for the last 25 years of her life, until her death. She preferred to stay at home, without going out. Maybe she had a flower garden and could enjoy the plants. But as time passed, she shut herself away even more; she didn't even leave her room in the end. For us right now, this may seem very, very strange and harsh. A poetess who wrote so many letters and poems, full of life, actually lived locked away in her solitude and within the walls.
The question the guest in the radio studio, Jesús Marchamalo García mentioned went something like this: Life is to live or to create?
Sometimes, with the pace of life and all the things you experience, things that fill your day and night, you don't have the time, or let's say the need, to create another world, to create art or poetry. On the other hand, if you dedicate yourself to creating, you may no longer have the time or desire to live the sometimes not-so-perfect reality; you give everything to creation. But how is it possible, then, to create experiences if you don't live them? I am sure that is where the imagination comes in, which cannot be separated from our existence. They are so connected, (imagination and real-life experiences) and they influence each other so much that it is impossible to draw a straight, strong line that defines the difference.
The thing is that Emily closed herself off from the world, into her home, and from there wrote numerous poems that many would envy. She dedicated her whole existence to writing, however, the reality is that during her lifetime, only a couple of poems were published and nothing else. The author says that perhaps her language wasn't accepted or understood at that time. Just because she lived a solitary life didn't mean she didn't have friends or a close person with whom she had a love relationship through letters and poems. She had an enormous amount of correspondence (she ordered her sister to burn all the letters she received from others, probably for a good reason). But her letters and many poems, which her younger sister found after Emily's death, survived. They were published later, after her death.
The question that made me reflect, whether life is to live it or to create is open to you too, if you want to add your opinion on this topic. Does one need to live an experience to write it down or it can be written down from the imagination and that way it comes to life? Can it be separated at all one from another? I think Emily had it both, but in her own, peculiar way. Happy World Poetry Day to everyone who writes and lives, who lives and writes, and also may we all have a beautiful spring, which starts in the Northern Hemisphere. 🌸🌼
