A Spider sewed at Night
Without a Light
Opon an Arc of White—[Fr1163A]
That Arc of White was a danger zone, where none but the poet herself could thrive. She often had to dance at the very edge of madness, a Prima of her own design. That daring design could rip and plunge her into nothingness, as she danced opon a thread.
The Spider holds a Silver Ball
In unperceived Hands—
And dancing softly to Himself . . .
He plies from nought to nought—[Fr513]
There was always that danger of disappearing into her own web of words, and never climbing out. It was “Illocality” [Fr824] that frightened her, the loss of logic, where she could not place herself in any landscape, and everything shrank around her in that spider’s design.
The Earth has seemed to me a Drum,
Pursued of little Boys[Fr1095]
She had no equal as a poet, has no equal now. No one took the same risks. No one could build so suddenly and then disrobe and plunge into disrepair. She was a celestial knife thrower, hurling her blades at our heads. One of her favorite weapons was the oxymoron, for want of a better word—a compact ripple of contradictions that twisted language with a metallurgical skill: “Dirks of Melody,” “a Maelstrom, with a notch,” “A Battlement—of Straw,” “An Everywhere of Silver,” “An Overcoat of Clay,” and “the sweet Assault,” almost always with a combative tone, as the Pugilist and Poet struggled “Like a Panther in the Glove—” [Fr242].
There was a price to pay, as if all the sewing of silver had left her with little else, and she began to disappear within her own texts. I can only think of one other nineteenth-century writer who suffered from the same sickness—Gustave Flaubert, an alchemist of his own; the spaces between his sentences in L’Education sentimentale almost serve like Dickinson’s dashes, creating enormous white holes in the text, bald islands that allow every single sentence to drift as a tiny, disjointed novel. Voyaging across these bald islands is like living in Emily Dickinson’s universe, where we have an immediate sense of vertigo, and might disappear at any moment.
I stepped from Plank to Plank . . .
I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch—[Fr926]
Flaubert’s novel seems to be about Frédéric Moreau, a young law student from the provinces who goes to Paris and falls in love with an older woman, Madame Arnoux. But Frédéric has no real persona; he wanders into the middle of a revolution and wanders right out; nothing ever happens to Frédéric, nothing touches him. He unravels right in front of our eyes, until he plunges into that white expanse of space and we’re left with a walking ghost.
Henry James, who despised the novel, wrote in a little chapter on Flaubert in French Poets and Novelists (1904) that “the book is in a single word a dead one,” and that reading L’Education sentimentale was like “masticating ashes and sawdust.” The entire novel, he said, was “elaborately and massively dreary.” James, our Master, the great modernist, didn’t understand a word of Flaubert, who wove his own tale of dissolution in L’Education sentimentale, and was the same artist-spider as Emily Dickinson.
French critics were even less kind to Flaubert, the hermit of Croisset, who invented the modern novel from within the walls of his country estate. He was another celestial knife thrower, who wielded language like a scalpel—the son of a surgeon, Flaubert watched his father perform operations as a boy; he removed all the “excess fat” from his prose, until Frédéric Moreau inhabited a land without primitive psychology and all decorative detail.
He traveled.
Chilly awakenings under canvas; dreary mail-packets; the dizzy kaleidoscope of landscapes and ruins; the bitter taste of friendships nipped in the bud: such was the pattern of his life.
He came home . . .
We step from Plank to Plank with Frédéric—and Flaubert—and as readers, we unravel like a Silver Ball. There’s no place to hide. We’re left with a kind of dread. And we feel the same with that ultimate Spider, Miss Emily. We risk our lives—and our sanity—as we read her. She takes us deep within our psyches, a world of terror and wounds, and reminds the timid not to go there.
There is no second War
In that Campaign inscrutable
Of the Interior.[Fr1230]
And still we go.
EIGHT
Nothing
1
THE ARCHIVIST DELIVERS A BOX TO YOUR TABLE. It’s not one of Cornell’s, with the shadow of some nineteenth-century dancer trapped within a wall of glass; this box has a hint of beige, like the portfolio you once had as a high school student, with its worn wraparound string that protected your entire oeuvre, drawings you did from the age of five. You’re a bit distracted. You open the box. There’s a strange, frazzled treasure trove inside, and you soon discover that the archivist has brought you a perverse portfolio, a “warehouse” containing the near-perfect facsimiles of Dickinson’s envelope-poems with their transcriptions printed in blue, plus a visual index, and other material by Marta Werner and artist Jen Bervin, who, like a pair of postmodern sorceresses, have found a way into the labyrinth of Dickinson’s deeply puzzling “word paintings” with a puzzle all their own. None of us can match Dickinson’s “synesthesia of sight and sound,” but Werner and Bervin have come as close as they can, and we realize soon enough that this is the most radical rendering of Dickinson we have ever seen, because it tries to replicate the visual dynamics of her work without intruding upon the mysteries of creation.
There are only sixty such boxes, all designed by Jen Bervin; the box at my library table has come from within the bowels of the Dickinson archives at Amherst College, where I had been looking at the pencil marks of her letter-poems with both devilment and delight, as if these marks were the lashings of some strange music that I might decode one day and keep for myself. But it’s only a delusion. None of us will ever get near enough to Emily.
Marta Werner’s own initiation into this project may have begun at Amherst, when one of Dickinson’s envelope-poems fell—or rose—out of its acid-free envelope by pure chance and she discovered the curious construction of a halved envelope that mimics the velocity and disturbance of flight itself, an envelope with its own hinged wings and wing texts that seem to stir the atmosphere. As Werner tells us, the right and left wing may once have been folded, “perhaps even pinned close; at rest, the manuscript has yet to be transformed into a fully living figure.”
On the right wing, slanting west, are the lines “Afternoon and / the West and / the gorgeous nothings / which /compose / the sunset / keep,” written upside down. [A 821] And on the left wing, slanting east, and with much more space between every word, are the lines “Clogged / only with/ Music, like / the Wheels of Birds.” [A 821a] Werner believes that this envelope-poem remains unborn until we ourselves “launch” it and mimic the act of flight.
That first act of flight just before migration is painful, almost unbearable, for a bird, as ornithologist W. H. Hudson—author of Green Mansions—once noted: Nothing can rid the bird of such pain but the rapid flight of its wings. And this is what Dickinson’s envelope-poems are about—“the isolate, piercing notes of a bird” as it is about to take flight. But we cannot remain passive observers; we must help this bird-poem take flight with our very own hands. As we rotate the fragment, point by point, we seem to put into motion “a whir of words.” And for a second or two we’ve become the poet’s accomplice, as if Werner and Bervin have conspired with the Devil to bring us a bit closer to Dickinson’s art with a boxful of fragments.
Suddenly we have to deal with texture as well as song, with the perversity of addresses and postage stamps, the ragged borders of a telegram, the art of folding and cutting an envelope, so that we can feel the shiver of a bird in the pinning and unpinning of some fragment with lines penciled along its crease. We have to think of such fragments as Dickinson’s own “small fabric,” according to Jen Bervin.
Excuse Emily and her Ato
ms—The “North Star” is of small fabric, but it denotes much—[Letter 774 to Susan Dickinson, October 1882]
“When we say small, we often mean less,” Bervin reminds us. “When Dickinson says small, she means fabric, Atoms, the North Star.” And Dickinson’s most artful fabric was an envelope of every sort: the pocket of her white wrapper where she kept her pencil stubs and scraps of paper; the letter she folded into thirds and pinned together into a “pocket,” with a pencil stub enclosed inside, as a reminder to Mr. and Mrs. Sam Bowles that they ought to write to their Emily; and the envelope scraps she coveted like some great hoarder. “These envelopes have been opened well beyond the point needed to merely extract a letter; they have been torn, cut, and opened out completely flat, rendered into new shapes,” so that they breathe and fly and whisper as much as the words scribbled on their flaps and seals.
Dickinson’s entire life seemed to whirl around envelopes, as if each contained a ghostly marking. “What a Hazard a Letter is!” she wrote to Colonel Higginson in 1885. [Letter 1007] This is perhaps the central theme of The Gorgeous Nothings—the risk that the poet took with every scratch of her pencil. “A message enclosed in an envelope,” Werner tells us, “a poem inscribed upon it and prepared for sending over miles or years is not a bit or byte of information but an archive of longings.” That was her telos, if she ever had one—to inscribe in fire, as if the envelope were her own skin, and language some kind of infernal tattoo. We know little about her except this archive of longings. Her own life was reportless, a word she invented and that no one else ever used.
In many and reportless places
We feel a Joy . . .
It comes, without a consternation—
Dissolves—the same—
But leaves a sumptuous Destitution—
Without a Name—[Fr1404]
That “sumptuous Destitution” was her own craft—solid and invisible at the same time, a language and a Lexicon she could never share. No matter where these envelopes might fly, they always encased an archive of longings; this had little to do with her love for Sister Sue or Condor Kate, or some mysterious Master; she may have been “Jumbo” to Judge Lord, and Higginson’s perfect Gnome, but none of them could parse the strings of her intellect: Dickinson was all alone.
“The envelope is the repository of damages it cannot heal or even contain; slit open, it functions not as a soothing bandage, but rather, as a second and almost simultaneous site of rupture,” the site of an ever-deepening wound. There is no suture in the art of Emily Dickinson, and very few sentimental journeys. And her last writings have their own rough texture, their own mournful music. “The inaudible whirring of the envelopes is part of the message they are sending. Slit open, unfolded, written across, and handed over to chance, they reject the asylum offered by the lyric to probe the last privacies of our existence,” Marta Werner writes, as if she were willing to share that endless isolation of the cosmos with Emily Dickinson.
2
“MY FATHER FIRST READ HER POEMS TO ME when I was very young,” Marta told me in June of 2013. “I’m not sure why he did this. He was an extraordinary man, but not a man intensely drawn to literature. He loved nature and science. I learned about the layers of the Earth and the lives of the stars from him. I’m not sure what it was in Dickinson that drew him. But I think it might have had something to do with [her] stark questions about origins and ends.”
Perhaps there was also another reason. Marta’s father was a kind of itinerant teacher in love with anthropology. “He taught everywhere—elementary school, high school, and college,” where he was always an adjunct. He remained at the periphery, like Emily Dickinson, had his own ragged edge.
“It was summertime when he read her poems to me, and we were in a remote place in the mountains of New Hampshire. It was something we did alone, without my sisters or brother.” And a year before her father died, “he suddenly proposed that we read Dickinson together again. He would send me a letter with nothing but numbers”—the numbers of Dickinson’s poems in the Thomas. H. Johnson edition—“and I would send a letter back—also just a list of numbers—no explanations. The lists were records of Dickinson poems we loved, but they were also a kind of code of love we had for each other. . . . My father followed my work on Dickinson until he died. I was writing an essay on ‘In many and reportless places’ when he took the fall that would lead to his death, and I’ve been looking for him in those reportless places ever since.”
But those “reportless places” are also Dickinson’s private hunting grounds, and that’s why it’s so hard to find her and equally hard to let go. No matter where Marta turns, no matter what writer she seizes upon, she always comes back to Emily, as if Dickinson’s ghost were imbedded in everything she writes.
Marta also had another mentor.
“The poet Susan Howe was my teacher, and I could not have had a greater guide to Dickinson. . . . It’s impossible to describe the power of her lectures. I once read of the poet Anna Akhmatova that she was always alert and watchful because she was always waiting for words. Susan Howe strikes one as similarly vigilant. At times, Howe seemed almost to fall into a trance herself. . . . She was in contact with language in a very profound way. She taught me that language has a life of its own, and that words carry their histories—their desires and disappointments—with them.” And their shadows, I wanted to say, because Dickinson was constantly shifting shadows in her very own box, or Lexicon.
Marta attributes much of her own work on The Gorgeous Nothings to Susan Howe, whose own “shadow” was deep within the Dickinson archives, with Marta and Jen Bervin, helping them sift the documents and deal with that great puzzler, Emily Dickinson.
“We came from different worlds,” Marta said about herself and Bervin, “she from an art world, and I from the world of textual scholarship—and we met on the margins of Dickinson’s poetry. But we were both drawn to the problem of how best to represent the conditions of Dickinson’s late works . . . and we were both committed to finding a form for her fragments that might gather and scatter them at once.
“The best textual home for the late work seemed to us to be a temporary, perhaps even makeshift, shelter, where Dickinson’s works might momentarily gather before dispersing again. Thus the contents of The Gorgeous Nothings arrive not between two covers but in an archival box, and they must be unpacked, unfolded, and slowly sifted,” making each one of us an archivist, an explorer entering territories where only Dickinson herself had gone.
And when we sift any one of those unbound color facsimiles with our own hands, we’re transported to a very private place, where the facsimiles assume their own luminous fabric and “also seem to dilate before our very eyes. The painstaking erasure of every bit of shadow from around the edges of the images allow the facsimiles to float on the paper—to appear as if they are suspended in air. In a perpetual paradox, they flicker between presence and absence and appear very close and very far away at once. For as we hope to suggest, the manuscript is the text’s ‘other scene,’ the record, only partly discursive, of a vision that cannot ever be completely decoded or encoded.”
3
THERE’S A KIND OF RAPTURE AS WE SIFT through The Gorgeous Nothings, boxes within a box, and that sense of serious play does remind me of Cornell, but Cornell’s parchments and bird cages and barren walls are all entombed in glass and wood, and we are passive participants in the drama, voyeurs of a sort, safe in our admiration and despair of never finding Emily Dickinson within these walls; she’s flown to her “Blue Peninsula” and left us in the lurch.
While alive, Cornell was the only active player in the drama. He could unscrew the lid, find other escape routes for Dickinson, and we might even escape with her to some “reportless land”—in our voyeuristic dreams. But there are no escape routes within The Gorgeous Nothings—an open box is also an open wound.
As I unpack the portfolio, sift through all these Nothings—the language and the material of the letter-poems, the differ
ent pencil strokes and scraps, I also feel a little spooked, as if I’ve come a bit too near the village Prometheus with the mirroring techniques of the twenty-first century and might get scorched.
We
talked with
each other
about each
other
Though neither
of us spoke—
We were + too
engrossed with
the Seconds Races
And the Hoofs of
The Clock—
Pausing in front
of our + Sentenced
Faces
Time’s Decision
shook—
Arks of Reprieve[Fr1506; manuscript “A 514”]
I have no “Arks of Reprieve.” I marvel at what Marta Werner and Jen Bervin have done; they’ve captured the violence of Emily Dickinson, that scratch of sound, that profusion of indecipherable scrapings—the floating plus signs and flying crosses and question marks—and sculpted Dickinson’s “gorgeous nothings” into an astounding visual field; but even after The Gorgeous Nothings was taken out of its archival box and published between covers in 2013, with a preface by Susan Howe, I began to fear that we may all be caught up in a Swiftian satire, where textual scholars battle readers bound to the contours of the printed page. I myself still cling to Thomas H. Johnson’s old, worn version of Dickinson’s poems, that musty antique with all its errors, where the Promethean poet might be ripped right out of her alchemist’s shop, but where I can still relish in the constant syncopations, and read the poems as a relentless series of jagged lines that shatter like bombs on the page, though much of this syncopation, I admit, comes from Johnson’s own artifice as an editor.
A Loaded Gun Page 17