J O N T H O M P S O N
_____________________________________________________________TREASON OF WRITING : EMILY DICKINSON'S LETTERS
A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past—which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation à l'ordre du jour —and that day is Judgment Day.--
WALTER BENJAMIN, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”
§ Forging a new language in a world suspicious of heresy... how to live in, live with, a community of believers--accommodate oneself to it--and not believe? Or not believe as it does? How to forge a relationship in writing with that which lies beyond—without-- as well as with the strange territories within? How to forge a new self—new selves-- in a world distrustful of self-fashioning? Forging a new language accented by heresy: Dickinson 's poetry inhabits the chastened form of the hymn, but wills a wildness of language, a linguistic wilderness, into being. This is true too of her letters, which avail of the open space of the page, see the open space of the page as the field of the unsayable, the field of the unknowable, of the necessary-to-say…
§ In Dickinson's writing, there isn't the demonization of the wilderness (of nature, of writing) manifest in Puritan writing, but an openness to it, a serenity before its godlessness, a serenity before its godliness . Dickinson 's poetry and letters produce a wilderness of words within which there are only ghost-like paths. Stratagems of the dissident: allegory, riddle, gnomic utterance, compression, elision, entire scales of ambiguity...
§ Dickinson 's writing: treasonous in its independence, treasonous in its commitment to that which is not self-evident—enigma--and treasonous in its commitment to ecstasy:
The Treason of an accent
Might Ecstasy transfer
Of her effacing Fathom
Is no Recovery--[No. 450, 1876--to T.W. Higginson]
§ “You think me “uncontrolled”--I have no Tribunal.” [No. 265, 1862--to T.W. Higginson]
§ Dickinson's letters: a script intent upon making connections with the other (the self) as well as with the living and the dead; they are a reaching out (and a withholding), an expression of the desire to be in dialogue with the world (as well as “the self”), an expression of the need to be in dialogue with desire (as well as loss). Each letter is made up of other letters, fragments from other texts, echoes from other texts--always the resonance of another body . Each letter is a composition born out of the greeting it makes to the world, and the world of letters “behind” it. And each of Dickinson 's letters translates that written legacy anew...
§ Her letters employ a language that make a certain kind of being possible. As well as a certain kind of world : “I thought I would write again. I write you many letters with pens which are not seen. Do you receive them?” [No. 175, 1854--to Dr. and Mrs. J.G. Holland]
§ Letters as transforming, powerful, dangerous: -- “What a Hazard a Letter is”! [No. 1007, 1885--to T.W. Higginson]. Dangerous because of their power to unsettle all that appears fixed, permanent, settled. Writing: the formula of the real…
§ Most letters traduce the world by domesticating it, robbing it of its wonder. Dickinson's letters do not make the world less strange; rather, they create a medium through which the original strangeness of the world becomes evident: “ Susie--it is a little thing to say how lone it is--anyone can do it, but to wear the loneness next your heart for weeks, when you sleep, and when you wake, ever missing something, this , all cannot say, and it baffles me. I would paint a portrait which would bring the tears, had I canvass for it, and the scene should be-- solitude , and the figures--solitude--and the lights and shades, each a solitude. I could fill a chamber with landscapes so lone, men should pause and weep there; then haste grateful home, for a loved one left. Today has been a fair day, very still and blue. Tonight, the crimson children are playing in the West, and tomorrow will be colder. In all I number you. I want to think of you each hour in the day. What are you saying--doing--I want to walk with you, as seeing yet unseen.” [No. 176, 1854--to Susan Gilbert ( Dickinson )].
§ Seeing the world afresh, anew, in its original wonder, in itself stands as an act of defiance against settled orthodoxies, calcified traditions, habituated ways of being. Dickinson 's writing: a record of revolutionary seeing, ceaselessly revising itself...
§ The lure of the outsider, the outcast (no American literature without it): “Where do you think I've strayed, and from what new errand returned? I have come from “ to and fro , and walking up, and down” the same place that Satan hailed from, when God asked him where he'd been, but not to illustrate further I tell you I have been dreaming, dreaming a golden dream, with eyes all the while wide open, and I guess it's almost morning, and besides I have been at work, providing the “food that perisheth,” scaring the timorous dust, and being obedient and kind. I call it kind obedience in the books the Shadows write in, it may have another name.” [No. 37--1850, to Abiah Root]
§ American culture: a dream-work in which writers are cast as Satanic progeny (or else are ignored as hapless innocents)...
§ American myth idolizes the outcast, as well as the outsider, but in actuality, those who menace American goodness are demonized or exiled. Only a nation with an intense distrust of the threat posed by outsiders, by outsideness, would need to perform over and again, obsessively, the value of the outsider, the value of its own receptivity to difference...
§ Hence our mania to homogenize the world, to purge or assimilate “outsideness,” to render everything benign in a kingdom of sameness. By its mere mode of address, its fineness of distinctions, Dickinson 's writing defies this “imperial affliction”; it is too aware of the “internal difference, /Where the Meanings, are” (No. 258).
§ American fate: freedom signified only by heresy...in that environment, freedom--and its death-- is as palpable as darkness.
§ “[F]orgive the Gills that ask for Air--if it is harm--to breathe!” [No. 249, 1862--to Samuel Bowles]
§ A new Calvary : The transformation of the sacred--the religion of a tortured, unearthly god of love who dies for an unregenerate humanity--into something else, not secular but idiosyncratically sacred--a sacredness based upon a rewriting, a reinflection, a reworking of New England Puritanism. The transubstantiation of Christian language and iconography in Dickinson yields a new worshipfulness--and a new object of worship: writing as sacred ritual, as transgression, as spiritual performance, as erotic enactment; writing as a way of reverencing whatever the world may at that moment become …
§ “Thank the dear little snow flakes, because they fall today rather than some vain weekday , when the world and the cares of the world try so hard to keep me from my departed friend--and thank you, too, dear Susie, that you never weary of me, or never tell me so, and that when the world is cold, and the storm sighs e'er so piteously, I am sure of one sweet shelter, one covert from the storm! The bells are ringing, Susie, north, and east, and south, and your own village bell, and the people who love God, are expecting to go to the meeting; dont you go Susie, not to their meeting, but come with me this morning to the church within our hearts, where the bells are always ringing, and the preacher whose name is Love--shall intercede there for us!” [No. 77--1852, to Susan Gilbert ( Dickinson )].
§ And writing as doubt; the rich, swooning language of affirmation/despair that makes her writing possible: “Oh my darling one, how long you wander from me, how weary I grow of waiting and looking, and calling for you; sometimes I shut my eyes, and shut my heart towards you, and try hard to forget you because you grieve me so, but you'll never go away, Oh you never will--say, Susie, promise me again, and I will smile faintly--and take up my little cross again of sad-- sad separation. How vain it seems to write , when one knows how to feel--how much more near and dear to sit beside you, talk with you, hear the tones of your voice; so hard to “deny thyself, and take up thy cross, and follow me”--give me strength, Susie, write me of hope and love, and of hearts that endured , and great was their reward of “Our Father who in Heaven.” [...] Never be mournful, Susie--be happy and have cheer, for how many of the long days have gone away since I wrote you--and it is almost noon, and soon the night will come, and then there is one less day of the long pilgrimage.” [No. 73--1852, to Susan Gilbert ( Dickinson )]
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