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!
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It is very challenging to be a “Nobody” as the Emily Dickinson poem shares with us. Becoming a “nobody” is one of life’s greatest challenges as we are hardwired from birth on to find our place in the world though that doesn’t eliminated our 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 this goal means prostituting ourselves to that “admiring bog,” those people “out there” who we early-on learned we must be likened unto. 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 “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.