I’M NOBODY by Emily Dickinson

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!

********************

It is very challenging to be the “Nobody” that Emily Dickinson presents to us in this poem.  Becoming a “nobody” is one of life’s greatest challenges, hardwired from birth on-ward to find our place in the world we are driven to finding our place in this mysterious world in which we find ourselves, and the desire to be “some”-body.

ves, an urge which always includes a grandioseour ego to driving us toward signficance, often more significance than any human can merit! desire to be “Somebody,” even if only vicariously through a cultural or political leader who vicariously satisfies that need of ours.

Dickinson knew that pursuit of prominence means prostituting ourselves to that “admiring bog,” those people “out there” who we early-on learned we must compare ourselves to. Rene Girard and James Alison have powerfully offered us the notion of “mimetic engulfment” in which humans are taught to be a slave to “sameness” and therefore the need to fit in, and eventually succeedf i the effort…… And “fitting-in” is part of being human but not when it is pursued so much that we completely forgo any impulse to find a vestige of autonomy as we participate in a social body.  It is the absence of personal autonomy that can turn a social body into a tyranny, an organized madness which will always find itself a voice to articulate its rage.

Notice that Dickinson described those masses whose attention we often seek to an “admiring bog,” before we often spend our life croaking like a frog. I’ve listened to movie stars and other famous people lament their realization that their loving and admiring fans often see them only as puppets of some sort, on the stage only to sing, dance, and perform for their mindless amusement.

Human existence demands only for us “to be” which T. S. Eliot described, “a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.” This always entails what Christian tradition terms “a self-emptying” (kenosis, in the Greek. But this “self-emptying” is very challenging to ego which is horrified at this death. The Christian story of the Cross, an image of an excruciating pain, a death experience which alone can offer Resurrection. Until this “resurrection” takes place we will only be a shell of a human being, an “humanoid” often demonstrated in “card-board christian performance art.” This “performance art” of “christian” is one stage of becoming a follower of the teachings of Jesus, but at some point “the flesh” must be crucified and only then can we meekly, humbly follow in the steps of Jesus.

Having been born and raised in Christian culture, most of my life has been an expression of this “performance art.” If I’d have continued on that path, I well could have become “somebody” in Christian culture and even climbed to upper echelons of Christian ministry. But that have cost me my very soul even as I presented myself to my little world as a “SOUL winner for Jesus.”

J