~*~
This is what happens when I have a terrible cold. Enjoy a silly fever dream:
The eerie aptness of Emily Dickinson’s poem to modern times is rather startling, isn’t it? For when we wander into carefully curated virtual realities and breathe in the shiny aether of social media, we risk becoming an altogether different creature—
Really, anybody but ourselves. Banished from our own brains by addictive algorithms that completely sussed us out in the end . . .
In this sense, to be “nobody” is rather nice. Your narrative is yet your own. The arc of your life still rests firmly in your own hands!
Many have noted how this playful poem is searingly pertinent today. There are even lesson plans to discuss the topic with students, like Laura Randazzo’s “Would Emily Dickinson want to be TikTok famous?” For a more in-depth examination of the private joys of Nobodyhood, I recommend Arup K. Chatterjee’s excellent analysis of the poem.)
In my comic, I thought I’d have a bit of fun and spangle Dickinson’s syllables over a wild futurescape filled with question mark fronds.
Oh, and a pretty bog festering with unflinching gazers—admiring, calculating, or ambivalent? Your guess is as good as mine.
Nothing is ever as simple as it seems, least of all the whimsical words of a long-gone poetess who lived and died in the 19th century.
I wrote a poem about the personal wrestle with identity many years ago, and I think its message still holds true the older I get.
Origami Girl
How many ways
Can I know change?
Folded, twisted, pinched
And pulled—
These changeling
Transformations
Over-shape me.
Lotus and frog,
Gem in the wad,
Paper possibilities
Flexible as fate
I am undone, reborn.
Am again
Myself.
~*~
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