Gem Tactics: Why We Practice

Friday's poem by Emily Dickinson, and next week's meditation link to Zoom

Friday Morning Meditations at MIAU on Zoom
Our meditations are for everyone: please feel free to join us in the fall and spring semesters Fridays at 9am EST.

We sit for a half hour with some guided support, and I give a little talk around the poem intermittently. Please keep your microphone off to respect the silence for others.

Dear friends,

Thank you to everyone who joined our sit last Friday. Our next session will be this Friday, March 28, at 9 am EST. If you are attending for the first time, please leave your mics muted but feel free (if you like) to turn your cameras on to join the group.

Last week, our poem on the flavor of a loving, playful heart was Emily Dickinson’s #320 “We play at Paste.” If you didn’t attend the sit, you can find a recording of it here:

#320
By Emily Dickinson

We play at Paste—
Till qualified, for Pearl—
Then, drop the Paste—
And deem ourself a fool—

The Shapes—though—were similar—
And our new Hands
Learned Gem-Tactics
Practicing Sands—

When, in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Marco Polo is asked by Kublai Khan why he never speaks of Venice, Marco Polo replies, “What else do you believe I’ve been talking to you about?...Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.” That’s just how I feel about Emily Dickinson. Though I have only engaged with her poetry one other instance in these now seventy sessions together, every time I speak of poetry, I am saying something about Emily Dickinson. She is my Venice. She is my poetic home.

Dickinson wrote “#320” in 1862, one year into the Civil War. Even far removed in Amherst, the death that pervaded American life had shifted her awareness, her vocabulary, and we see in so many of the poems of that period the language of grief, trauma, soldiery, and funerals, spattered through otherwise pastoral images of bees and snakes and grasses. The war affected her deeply. Yet here, amid the hardship and sadness, comes a poem about the unrecognized nobility of play. Continuing from last week’s “Nudging a Poem” by Robert Bly, which asks if, in a dark time, all this poetry practice isn’t silliness, Dickinson’s poem barges forth saying, our play is our “gem tactics” for the so-called real world. Our play at “sands,” the glass jewelry or “paste” as she calls it here, is as crucial to the health of our world as any professional success, any personal goal we may accomplish, any breakthrough we achieve.

The first stanza of the poem holds three operative words: “Paste,” “qualified,” and “ourself.” By “paste” Dickinson refers to fake jewelry, made from high-silica glass. We play with our fake jewelry until we’re qualified for the real thing. We play until qualified: the word of advancement and employment; an adult, Latinate, evaluative word. It is the language of resumés and job descriptions. Once qualified for “pearls,” we look back with disdain on jewelry made from paste (which like “sands”—also a term referring to glass—are tools for children’s play, as in the paste we use in art class or the castles we build on the beach). She writes, “we deem ourself a fool.” The word ourself, an archaic word reserved for monarchs who speak of themselves in the plural, seems ironic. It is the language of Polonius, the blowhard counselor of Hamlet. Even “deem” seems to take itself so seriously. So by the end of the first stanza, we know she is criticizing our adult perspective of childhood play.

The operative words of the second stanza are these: “gem tactics” and “practicing.” Gem tactics is a wonderful phrase. When we sit together, we engage in gem tactics. We practice at sands, so to speak, because we step back from the day-to-day in order to compassionately engage with and prepare for and more fully love the wounded world, no matter what its moments offer. We remove ourselves from the hubub like a child going off somewhere to dance alone. Here, gem tactics—the practice we do—is a reminder that deep within our serious, stressful activities, there is still that role-playing child behind every pair of eyes we see. Our practice of sitting, non-attachment, and non-identifying with roles are an acceptance, too, that all of this is paste. All of this is sand. It all goes away. It is an awareness of impermanence we can practice now, with our hearts fully open.

Playing at Paste: Apples and Oranges

Nearly twenty years ago, one of the first teachings the city of Washington offered me was transmitted as I was rising to the top of the escalator at Dupont Circle, about to exit the metro. For some reason I glanced back down to the bottom, where I caught a glimpse of two people just stepping onto the treads. One of them, clearly the younger of the two, held a bag of groceries. Faltering, she lost her balance and the bag tipped—pouring about a dozen oranges onto the rising stairway, which began to bounce back down toward them and behind them. The two were kind of hopping backwards as the oranges bounded here and there and for a moment I had to laugh, watching these glowing lotto balls flinging all around, the bright oranges confounding their every effort, and the seriousness with which they tried to subdue and stuff the oranges back into the bag. But as I stood there smiling, I heard the other, the older of the two, cry out, “Oh Christina, you ruin everything!”

Then how quickly the moment turned dark, and how fast I realized that I—standing at my distance, feeling the comedy of it all—had misread the situation, that this was an old conversation between Christina and the other woman, that a great wound that had just opened up and these were no longer oranges but some awful proof at last about Christina’s flaws and shortcomings, which had now poured out of the bag for everyone to see. The moment the older woman said, “Christina, you ruin everything,” the play of life, the surprise, the present moment fell away. What remained was “always” or “never” or “not supposed to be.”

Rising away from them, from my view at the top of the escalator, an old delight had come back to me. It was the arrangement of shapes, the strangeness of the world’s raffle, as poet Charles Simic once called it. There were no old stories there. I saw them as a child would see them, as if laughing and reaching and joining the reverie. That’s beginner’s mind.

There was cunning in our play as children. I played, I remember, not because I shirked responsibility, or lacked empathy for the pain in our house, or because I was a silly, underdeveloped being, but quite the opposite: I played because I could keenly perceive the workings of the adult world as mysterious performances. Their interactions were like games with very high stakes, locking them into characters I wanted to understand through imitation. I was aware that I was not the roles I was performing. I remember knowing that.

As children, we played enemies, but afterwards, and even while still in the game, we loved our enemies. Childhood was not the cause of our embarrassment. The adult world taught us that. By the end of childhood, we were expert embarrassers, and we were the embarrassed; we knew all about what should and should not be. By the end of it, we’d turned the oranges into apples, the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.

Tools for Meditation

Can we stand at the top of the stairway and see the world as play, unvelcro-ing ourselves from our roles which we deem so crucial? At the same time, can we also be down there with Christina, feeling compassion for the foibles and the huge losses and the strange turns, never forgetting the suffering of other beings?

When we shut down our sense of play and bliss, even if it’s done out of respect for the suffering all around us, we cut ourselves off from the oxygen supply, punishing life, punishing ourselves. As children, we knew both wings were possible. Not just possible: vital. We could love close-up and at great distance. We could stand on both ends of the escalator. On our best days, we could pour our empathy out into a dying flower, and we could dance the choreography of the crossing guard. My niece invented a beautiful dance in which she was a lawn sprinkler. She called it, “The sprinkler.” And another in which she was a rug. (Called: “The rug.”) These are still a couple of my favorite dances. She aimed to play at all the roles. It seemed there was no hierarchy. The world was far out. In childhood’s beginner’s mind, all play was something very spiritual without our knowing it. All the roles were one role, were God in the beautiful costumes of things, quick-changing the brilliant disguises.

Friday Morning Meditations at MIAU on Zoom

Our meditations are for everyone: they are free and this Substack is free to subscribe to. If you choose a paid subscription as a way of offering dana or support for the project, you can upgrade on this site. From 9 am (EST) every Friday in the semester we sit on Zoom for a half hour with some guided support from me, and I give a little talk around the poem intermittently. When you arrive in the room, please keep your microphone off to respect the silence for others. An archive of all our past meditations is available on YouTube and at my website.

With love,

David