When I was a first year student in college I wrote a paper on Emily Dickinson. I referred to several books when doing research for the paper. One epithet used to describe Miss Dickinson that captured my imagination was "mystic". Back then and even now to some extent, certain words move me by their sounds and the meaning the sounds themselves evoke in my mind. For example, in high school, I was captivated by the sound and possibilities suggested by the word "quintessential".
Let me return now to Emily Dickinson and the term "mystic" (applied to her by at least one biographer of the several I consulted for my paper) . I was probed for a definition of "mystic" by my professor after he read my paper. I can only assume that I must have used the word with abandon when referring to Emily Dickinson in my paper. In any case at the time I was truly stumped for an explanation. Her poems were understandable to me. I liked them because they expressed a viewpoint which was transparent to me. I did not find her work remarkable - I found her poems reassuring, comforting. It was a viewpoint that seemed understandable to me. Her poems served to comfort me in a time when much of what I read was incomprehensible.
Just as a child learns to associate "mom" with the friendly reassuring female that nurtures and feeds it, I associated the word "mystic" with Emily Dickinson. Mystic didn't mean anything special to me. Instead it was as normal as rain falling from the sky. Being the way she was (at least as far as I could make out from reading her biographies and reading her poems) was just being normal and everyday. When I was pressed as a freshman for a definition of 'mystic" I was very confused. Was this a trick question? How would you define "mom"?
I thought of the term "mystic" as a given, a primitive as in mathematics proofs. In math when we start a proof we have some given information. We don't question this given information. This information is primitive. Similarly, the term "mystic" was a primitive for me and I happily applied it to Emily Dickinson since it seemed to fit. I was inchoate and unable to explain how I understood the word apart from the evidence of her poems. "Mystic" is just being and living and looking and experiencing. Since Emily Dickinson's biographers used the term "mystic" in reference to her, I just blindly accepted it without really digging too deeply to discover their definitions of "mystic". It was a simple case of getting a word for a concept I had developed by reading Emily Dickinson's poems. It was not yet abstracted away from living simpliciter.
As a college freshman "mystic" just meant "everyday", "normal". Now I know better. Mystic is not a word one can apply to everybody. It is not an everyday aspect of existence for everybody. As a freshman, I understood "mystic" the way I might understand "boy", "girl", "woman", "man". I didn't really see what distinguished a "mystic" from others. Just as there are all sorts of manifestations of girls, similarly I interpolated there are all sorts of manifestations of mystics. Mystics may be female or male. Mystics may be kings or paupers. But not everyone is a mystic. A mystic is someone who is able to see reality. A mystic is someone who, at least for a little while, can enjoy and exult in the beauty of existence. And insofar as Emily Dickinson (or whoever wrote the poems attributed to her) was able to do this for a minute or an hour or a second or a season, she is a mystic.
