§ Writing: for Dickinson , the attempt to recreate in language an intimacy that is elsewhere ...
§ And is this not the signature of much American literature--against the emptiness of American space, the attempt to use the written page, the book, to create a community of sympathy, however imaginary?
§ The Letters : one long apostrophe to death, but they work out an erotics of death in which morbidity figures as a form of pleasure, like writing…
§ Is there a national literature more ghostly? More violent--and more haunted? (Hence the Gothic--a genre suitable to a fallen nation, but one which can acknowledging its fallenness only allegorically). In her hauntedness , Dickinson shows a quintessentially American soul...
§ The scene of Dickinson 's writing: a circling back, a returning, to the question of fulfillment. Dickinson 's poetry dazzles with its ability to evoke uncanny states of being, uncanny paradises--even if they ultimately remain largely out of sight. A form of writing which prefigures or enacts or defers paradise (all at once). The immanence of death intensifies and threatens the writing of paradise. At nineteen: “Tis strange that a promise lives, and brightens, when the day that fashioned it, has mouldered, & stranger still, a promise looking to the day of Valentines for its fulfillment.” [No. 27, 1849--to William Cowper Dickinson] In May of 1866, at fifty-six, her last letter:
Little Cousins
Called back.
Emily.
§ Death as solitude, death as repose, as fulfillment, or promise of fulfillment--how many of Dickinson 's sentences drive toward that ending? The myth of the recluse obscures a more important withdrawal: the withdrawal not so much of the writer, but of her work . Solitude as necessity--and tactic. The solitude of the work (Blanchot). Solitude, not isolation. A solitude that finds withdrawal to be the most complete means of reporting upon the world as it is apprehended : “[...] yet the “Infinite Beauty”--of which you speak comes too near to seek” [No. 319, 1866--to T. W. Higginson]
§ Death: for Dickinson, the great Preceptor. Not life but death. Or life-as-death. Life is an “apparitional pleasure” [No. 316, 1866--to T. W. Higginson] made possible by the presence-in-absence that is language...one absence invoking the other...
§ The body: also “apparitional pleasure.”
§ Paradise : Dickinson 's writing strains to see it--to apprehend it--however fleetingly, in the here and now: “Bless God that we catch faint glimpses of his brighter Paradise from occasional Heaven here !” [No. 107, 1853--to Susan Gilbert ( Dickinson )]. This is not an outright disavowal of God; rather, He becomes recreated by her, and paradise becomes a state of being not simply reserved for the afterlife, but a state of being in which an ecstatic communion of souls is made possible in the invocation of language. Through this invocation-- inflected with passion, longing and power--absence is transubstantiated into presence, loss into gain--or the promise of it...
§ “Forgive me if I prize the Grace--superior to the Sign.” [No. 277, 1862--to Samuel Bowles]
§ The scene of Dickinson 's writing: American literary exile before the modernist invention of literary exile: “To escape enchantment, one must always flee.” [No. 319, 1866--to T.W. Higginson]. But like all great exilic consciousnesses, Dickinson 's remains fastened upon what it has separated itself from ...
§ ...as well as attending--with uncanny intensity--to the world to come; to the worlds that are at every instant in process of becoming...
§ The wonders of the visible world, no less than those of the invisible... “You say it is hot and dry. It is very dry here, tho' now for two or three days the air is fine and cool--Everything is so beautiful, it's a real Eden here; how happy we shall be roaming round it together! The trees are getting over the effect of the Canker worm, and we hope we may have some apples yet, tho' we cant tell now--but we feel very thankful that the leaves are not all gone, and there's a few green things which hav'nt been carried away--” [No. 131, 1853--to Austin Dickinson]
§ The death of the supernatural: “I was thinking, today, as I noticed, that the “Supernatural,” was only the Natural, disclosed.” [No. 280, 1863--to T.W. Higginson]
§ Everywhere the awareness of the “City of the dead.” Ultimately, that city is Dickinson 's audience. Only it can fully cipher her...
§ “Have you ever been to Mount Auburn ? If not you can form but slight conception--of the “City of the dead.” It seems nature had formed the spot with a distinct idea in view of its being a resting place for her children, where wearied and disappointed they might stretch themselves beneath the spreading cypress & close their eyes “calmly as to night's repose or flowers at set of sun.” [No. 13, 1846--to Abiah Root]
§ “Remember lonely one--tho, she come not to us, we shall return to her .” [No. 38, 1850--to Susan Gilbert ( Dickinson )]
§ “Life is death we're lengthy at, death the hinge to life.” [No. 281, 1863--to Louise and Frances Norcross]
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