A Loaded Gun: The Real Emily Dickinson

[ish mailian]

 Excellent. Just getting round to this, so thanks.

On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 5:13 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
>
>                                                 "... Emily Dickinson, never
> far away ..." (Gravity's Rainbow, p. 28)
>
>> ... Suppose the keys weren’t missing at all, but were part of some
>> private, internal structure. And suppose her definition of poetry was
>> different from ours, and she was a very different kind of poet, more like an
>> explorer and discoverer, who meant to subjugate her Lexicon, rather than
>> juggle words. She would share some of her discoveries in her letter-poems,
>> sing a verse or two to a favorite cousin, but she shared her hand-sewn
>> fascicles with no one; these were very private catalogues, complete in
>> themselves, meant for her own consumption; and the variants to a particular
>> word that she wrote in the margins were like magical flowers, not meant to
>> cancel one another, but to create a cluster, or bouquet. That “omitted
>> center” was less a mask than the sign of her modernity. For those critics
>> who swear she was feminizing a male-dominated culture of language
>> constructions, I would say that there’s something strange about the
>> femininity of her attack. Camille Paglia best describes the force and
>> “riddling ellipsis” of Dickinson’s style. “Protestant hymn-measure is warped
>> and deformed by a stupefying energy. Words are rammed into lines with such
>> force that syntax shatters and collapses into itself. . . . The brutality of
>> this belle of Amherst would stop a truck.”
>
> ...
>
> She played the role of little girl that nineteenth-century women were meant
> to play. But she was far from a little girl, even if she told Higginson, “I
> have a little shape—it would not crowd your Desk—nor make much Racket as the
> Mouse, that dents your Galleries—” [Letter 265] It was one more act of
> seduction. She must have sensed her own monstrous powers—this Vesuvius at
> Home. The Brain, she would write, is wider than the Sky.
>
> The Brain is just the weight of God—
> For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
> And they will differ—if they do—
> As Syllable from Sound— [Fr598]
>
> She may have sent her letter-poems to favorite friends like little bombs of
> love, but I don’t believe she ever meant to share her own “experiments” with
> anyone else. Higginson was reluctant to unclasp her Portfolio—poems plucked
> up from the roots of her mind. But she wasn’t boasting when she
> said—twice—that he had saved her life, not because he had much to say about
> her poems. He didn’t. But he cared for his half-cracked poetess, must have
> sniffed her greatness and her suffering. He wasn’t a fool. He just couldn’t
> read the future very well, couldn’t have seen that the twentieth century
> would soon explode into slant rhymes that would render him obsolete. Yet
> Dickinson desperately needed him. He was her lifeline—not to the literary
> culture of Boston; she wasn’t much interested in that. But she could
> practice her own intelligence—and her craft—on him. And so much of what we
> will ever know about her comes from her letters to Higginson; with him, she
> could wear the mask of a poet.
>
> If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm
> me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were
> taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there
> any other way. [Letter 342a, Higginson to his wife]
>
> Not as far as Dickinson’s poetry is concerned. And that’s why we pay homage
> to this outlaw. She wasn’t one more madwoman in the attic. She was the
> mistress of her own interior time and space, where she delivered “Dirks of
> Melody” that could delight and stun. She was the blonde Assassin who could
> dance with “the man of noon” and walk away at will—in her poetry.
>
> “I cannot dance opon my Toes—/No Man instructed me—” she declared in one of
> her most striking poems. But she needed no instruction. Dickinson was
> dancing all the time. Few people in Amherst ever caught that dance, not even
> Sue. She danced right past her father’s eyes, made herself invisible in her
> white dress. And Allen Tate, one of a handful of poets and critics who
> rediscovered Emily Dickinson in the twentieth century, paid her the highest
> sort of compliment when he said: “Cotton Mather would have burned her for a
> witch.”
>
> ...
>
> Benfey agrees with W. H. Auden “that language finds certain people and lives
> through them, almost the way a virus lives by finding a host, I think
> language lives by finding hosts. . . . It found a way to live in
> Shakespeare. Infested him. Got all it could out of Shakespeare and then
> moved on.”
>
> “It didn’t disappear,” I say. “It went into the ground—”
>
> “For a long time, and found Emily Dickinson.”
>
> And then the virus moved on. “You listen to those early songs of Bob Dylan,
> and you think, Whoa, how could he have written them? But he doesn’t know.
> Just as Dickinson wouldn’t have been able to say, ‘Well, I first thought of
> the loaded gun image when I was sitting in my father’s room and there was a
> gun in the corner and I thought, I’m like that gun.’ We have no idea.”
>
> And the letters she wrote were as puzzling as that loaded gun.
>
> “We still don’t know how to read them,” Benfey says. “We assume the
> difficulty of the poems. And we assume the availability and relative
> intelligibility of the letters. It’s gotta be the opposite, because with the
> poems, we have some idea what rhyme and meter are. But with the letters, we
> have no fucking clue what the rules for reading and writing letters are. The
> ‘Master Letters’ have gotten a ton of attention, but it’s the other letters
> . . .”
>
> We talk about the cunning and the craft of her letters to Higginson. “She
> doesn’t need him as a mentor,” I say, and Benfey agrees.
>
> “That’s where we get the sense of her as a performance artist. She walks
> downstairs to see Higginson, carrying the two day lilies, and says, ‘These
> are my introduction’ in a breathy voice, and it was the most amazing sort of
> ballet imaginable. You know. The white dress . . .”
>
> Higginson served as “a mirror, a conduit, a messenger—a publicist. Somehow
> she identifies both [her] publicists, Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd. And
> damned if they don’t pair up and sell her to the world.
>
> “She performs for both of them. She gives them just the amount they need;
> she withholds access in just the right way.” She tantalizes Mabel, never
> reveals herself. “‘You may see me when I’m in my ultimate box, in my coffin.
> That’s when you’ll see me for the first time, in my box.’”
>
> She “micromanaged” her own funeral, like another ballet, “with the Irish
> Catholic men carrying her out through the open barn—and put her in another
> box, the tomb, another box on top of it. The whole thing was orchestrated
> beyond belief.”
>
> Yet I’m not convinced that her final performance was to have a pair of
> messengers, Mabel and Higginson, entomb her poems in yet another box and
> publish them. The “phosphorescence” of her poems was from a very private
> glow. She spelled the way she wanted to spell, constructed her poems like
> hieroglyphics with all the weird minuscules and majuscules of her own hand,
> until you could no longer tell the difference between them; it was the
> deepest sort of play.
>
> My Basket holds—just—Firmaments—
> Those—dangle easy—on my arm,
> But smaller bundles—Cram. [Fr358]
>
> She had no time for those “smaller bundles” of recognition and career. It’s
> not that she disregarded her own worth as a poet, but she saw that worth in
> a messianic way.
>
> The Poets light but Lamps—
> Themselves—go out—
> The Wicks they stimulate
> If vital Light
>
> Inhere as do the Suns—
> Each Age a Lens
> Disseminating their
> Circumference— [Fr930]
>
> And she was out “opon Circumference,” where she wasn’t hindered by
> custodians of culture, and could explore as she pleased. “Finite— to fail,
> but infinite—to Venture—” [Fr952] She tore language from its roots, created
> an internal Teletype that is still difficult for us to comprehend. None of
> us knows her motives. We have to pry, like clumsy surgeons. We attach
> ourselves to whatever clues we can. And we try to listen, crawl into that
> hole in time where her creativity began.
>
> The Clock strikes One
> That just struck Two— [Fr1598D]
>
> ...
>
> For many critics, Dickinson has remained the madwoman entombed in her own
> little attic. Even Alfred Habegger, one of her most subtle biographers,
> believes that Dickinson’s “great genius is not to be distinguished from her
> madness.” And for Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Emily Dickinson may
> have posed as a madwoman to insulate herself, but became “truly a madwoman
> (a helpless agoraphobic, trapped in a room in her father’s house).” Whatever
> theories we may hold about madness and art, or about some great psychic
> wound Dickinson suffered—a relentless blow that Dickinson herself described—
>
> A Death blow— is a Life blow— to Some
> Who, till they died,
> Did not alive—become— [Fr966A]
>
> her letters and poems are not the work of a madwoman, or someone trying to
> cover up her own debilitating tremors and attacks. In a letter to Colonel
> Higginson, Sue wrote that Emily “hated her peculiarities, and shrank from
> any notice of them as a nerve from the knife.” Why don’t I believe her?
> Dickinson’s entire life was a singularity; she could have been one of
> Melville’s “isolatoes,” living in the interior continent of her own mind.
> How else could she have thrived? But Sue had a terrifying need to normalize
> her sister-in-law, turn her into one more village poet, scribbling about
> unrequited love. She couldn’t bear to look at Emily’s deep rage and urge to
> destroy. Dickinson never shrank from any knife—she loved knives. It was her
> task at Mount Holyoke to clean the knives and collect them, like some kind
> of knife thrower in the making. She could wound us all with “Dirks of
> Melody.” [Fr1450] Mutilation had become a central motif in her letters and
> poems. “Here is Festival,” she wrote to Sue in 1864, exiled in Cambridge for
> nearly eight months while a Boston ophthalmologist dealt with her irritated
> eyes. “Where my Hands are cut, Her fingers will be found inside—” [Letter
> 288]
>
> It’s one of Dickinson’s most disturbing images, as if Sue and Emily were
> sisters bound together by mutilation, but where had this mutilation come
> from? Had Emily cut herself, or had Sue crept inside her like some ghoul,
> with a dirk of her own? There’s a lot of bile and savagery in that image.
> And perhaps it might help us understand her own sudden, brutal remarks to
> Higginson about her mother, like Blackmur’s cat breaking into English.
> Dickinson wasn’t a madwoman, but she was maddened with rage—against a
> culture that had no place for a woman with her own fiercely independent mind
> and will. Yet that annihilation of Emily Sr. was also about something else.
> Dickinson had to reinvent herself, or be stifled and destroyed by all the
> rituals around her—she was the daughter of the town patriarch. Cody believes
> that Dickinson was doomed to become a spinster because she was “too
> uncertain of her attractiveness and too fearful of heterosexuality to
> consider marriage.” That hardly stopped most other women of her class, and
> it wouldn’t have stopped the Belle of Amherst. I suspect that what disturbed
> her more than giving in to the “man of noon” was the notion of having to
> give up the Dickinson name. She could only become “The Wife—without the
> Sign!” [Fr194A] Her brother was the adored one, the pampered one—he would
> perpetuate the Dickinson line. Emily and her sister were household pets.
> Edward would school the girls, send them both to a female seminary, but he
> never mapped much of a future for them. Born into a genteel caste, the two
> sisters “suffered the tormenting paralysis of women deadlocked by a culture
> that treated them as both servant and superior,” according to Susan Howe in
> My Emily Dickinson, a kind of love song from one poet to her
> nineteenth-century sister. And so we have the picture of Emily Dickinson as
> the perpetual child, a pose she often adopted with Higginson and others as
> one of her many masks. But that childish whisper of Emily’s wasn’t her
> natural voice—her own hoarse contralto wasn’t a whisper at all. She was, as
> Howe insists, a woman “with Promethean ambition.” She would remain a
> Dickinson, but parent herself, become a creature of both sexes, defiantly
> original and androgynous.
>
> A loss of something ever felt I—
> The first that I could recollect
> Bereft I was—of what I knew not
> Too young that any should suspect
>
> A Mourner walked among the children
> I notwithstanding went about
> As one bemoaning a Dominion
> Itself the only Prince cast out— [Fr1072]
>
> And it was as “the only Prince cast out” that she lived her life, searching
> for the “Delinquent Palaces” of her childhood—and her art. We can feel that
> streak of rebellion when she unconsciously sympathizes with a maverick
> student at Mount Holyoke. She had only been there a little longer than a
> month and was still homesick when she wrote to Austin:
>
> A young lady by the name of Beach, left here for home this morning. She
> could not get through her examinations & was very wild beside. [Letter 17,
> November 2, 1847]
>
> It was this wildness that frightened and attracted Emily, a wildness that
> would haunt the dreamscape of her poems. We never learn what happened to
> Miss Beach, whether she settled down with some “man of noon” or remained a
> maverick—another “Prince cast out.” But Dickinson had to rebel in a much
> more secret and convoluted way, as the village Prometheus, who stole
> whatever she could from her Lexicon and the local gods of Amherst, and
> manufactured her very own fire. <
>
>
> http://blog.longreads.com/2016/03/15/a-loaded-gun-the-real-emily-dickinson/
>
>
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