§ In Puritan writing, the world is a sign: it needs to be deciphered in order to understand God's purpose. In Dickinson 's writing, the world does not require deciphering; it is her language which does...
§ “I hesitate which word to take, as I can take but few and each must be the chiefest, but recall that Earth's most graphic transaction is placed within a syllable, nay, even a gaze--” [No.873, 1883--to Mrs. J.G. Holland]
§ Poetry instead of prayer; “the opening of the future itself.” Poetry is also a kind of prayer, but prayer without an altar. How to have , be in, two worlds, two kingdoms? The double-consciousness of the would-be believer: the opportunity and the predicament of Dickinson 's writing. “But I feel that I have not yet made my peace with God. I am still a s [tran]ger--to the delightful emotions which fill your heart. I have perfect confidence in God & his promises & yet know not why, I feel the world holds a predominant place in my affections. I do not feel that I could give up all for Christ, were I called to die. Pray for me Dear A. that I may yet enter into the kingdom, that there may be room left for me in the shining courts above.” [No. 13, 1846--to Abiah Root]
§ Historical consciousness I: “The Pilgrim's Empire seems to stoop--I hope it will not fall-- [No. 721, 1881--to Mrs. J.G. Holland]
§ Historical consciousness II: “The past is not a package one can lay away.” [No. 830, 1883--to Maria Whitney]
§ Historical consciousness III: “But the world is sleeping in ignorance and error, sir, and we must be crowing cocks, and singing larks, and a rising sun to awake her; or else we'll pull society up to the roots, and plant it in a different place. We'll build Alms-houses, and transcendental State prisons, and scaffolds--we will blow out the sun, and the moon, and encourage invention. Alpha shall kiss Omega--we will ride up the hill of glory--Hallelujah, all hail!” [No. 34, 1850--to George H. Gould] A ludic language--but one that mocks the presumption behind correction. In it, too, the awareness of the paradoxes and limitations of revolutionary action, of revolutionary writing which would usher in a new world: “We'll build Alms-houses, and transcendental State prisons, and scaffolds.” Remaking the world in the image of a utopian dream may be emancipatory, but also not: it --inevitably--repeats the mistakes of the past. Dickinson was never simply beguiled by her own revolution in style and form: her writing always announces its own power-- and its limitations.
§ Pain: the master emotion in Dickinson 's writing. The starkness and purity of her openness to it (The willingness to give herself over to it. Submission to it as the price of intimacy. “May I change places, Austin ? I dont care how sharp the pain is, not if it dart like arrows, or pierce bone and bone like the envenomed barb, I should be twice, thrice happy to bear it in your place.” [No. 66, 1851--to Austin Dickinson]. Through pain comes knowledge of dispossession, knowledge of the pain and isolation of the dispossessed. Withdrawal: the strategy by which worldly pain can be gradually explored, entered into, as a determined explorer embarks upon the exploration of a forbidding new continent...
§ “open me carefully” [No. 94, 1852--to Susan Gilbert ( Dickinson )]: the body as text. In Dickinson 's writing, the body is not explicitly referenced; at most, there are only synecdoches for it. Through an intense act of the will, the body is translated into abstraction, pure textuality--but a textuality that is shaped and possessed by the absent language of the body...
§ “MANUSCRIPT: Hooker. Ink. Outside edges torn away .” [Thomas H. Johnson's editorial note to letter No. 249] [Italics mine] Openings of the word: openings to the world...
§ The proximity of pain and ecstasy in Dickinson 's writing: each bleeds into the other. Pain: the portal of ecstasy; if nothing else, it takes one beyond the self, beyond its complacent fictions of totality...
§ Writing: A struggle, but a blissful one, indeed a blessed one:'” Audacity of Bliss, said Jacob to the Angel “I will not let thee go except I bless thee--”' [No.1042, 1886--ED's last letter to T. W Higginson]
§ Blake: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
§ The exquisite attention to pain in Dickinson enables the finest apprehension of the strains in social existence; no nuance of relationship escapes detection. Though little in her writing commends itself to us as overtly social, “the social” registers itself in part as the pain of relationship...
§ Home: for Dickinson , a utopian space which, despite its shortcomings, is made to symbolize a redemptive social life based upon mutuality (but a mutuality based upon a nineteenth-century world of domestic assistance): “Home is a holy thing--nothing of doubt or distrust can enter its blessed portals. I feel it more and more as the great world goes on, and one and another forsake, in whom you place your trust--here seems indeed to be a bit of Eden, which not the sin of any can utterly destroy--smaller it is indeed, and it may be less fair, but fairer and brighter than all the world beside.” [No. 59, 1851--to Austin Dickinson] An exile without physical displacement; a going away without going away...
§ Yet home too is recognized as an ephemeral place--a temporary refuge--but one that is, over time, never the same, however much the longing for sameness; it is always seen as a place that is passing away. The real home--the only homeland Dickinson finds with conviction--is writing itself, poised as it is between a boundary-less heaven and no-heaven, the now and the infinite, disappointment and hoped-for fulfillment. Writing for Dickinson becomes an “imaginary homeland,” the one true place a placeless place, a place of symbols running across the page...
§ Houses: In Dickinson 's letters, house increasingly assumes metaphorical meanings, as if to underline the ephemerally of the physical structure and the substantiality of the imagined one: “My earliest friend wrote me the week before he died “If I live, I will go to Amherst --if I die, I certainly will.”
Is your House deeper off?” [No. 457, 1876--to T.W. Higginson]
§ The pain of separation in Dickinson 's letters invariably opens up an agony of anticipation: a passion for an indivisible being that borders on the violent. Dickinson's voice speaks out of the desolation of a final abandonment, in a fever of pain and hoped-for ecstasy: “I need you more and more, and the great world grows wider, and dear ones fewer and fewer, every day that you stay away--I miss my biggest heart; my own goes wandering round and calls for Susie--Friends are too dear to sunder, Oh they are far too few, and how soon will they go away to where you and I cannot find them, dont let us forget these things, for their remembrance now will save us many an anguish when it is too late to love them! Susie, forgive me Darling, for every word I say--my heart is full of you, none other than you in my thoughts, yet when I seek to say to you something not for the world, words fail me. If you were here--and Oh that you were, my Susie, we need not talk at all, our eyes would whisper for us, and your hand held fast in mine, we would not ask for language--I try to bring you nearer, I chase the weeks away till they are quite departed, and fancy you have come, and I am on my way through the green lane to meet you, and my heart goes scampering so, that I have much ado to bring it back again, and learn it to be patient, til that dear Susie comes.” [No. 94, 1852--to Susan Gilbert ( Dickinson )] The longing here, as elsewhere, is for a communion of such intensity that language becomes superannuated, shed in favor of the more primal--and satisfying--physical language of touch and sight.
§ Language as necessity: only it can make present, through symbol, what is absent, missed. To summon into being through a willfully rich and idiosyncratic language, that which is missed, that which is absent, that which is not there and will not be there, the elusive ideal that always escapes embodiment, that always escapes historical form--this is the American fate Dickinson shares with her predecessors and successors alike...
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