A Loaded Gun

by Jerome Charyn

  Forced to become Amherst’s first secret agent, she hid herself in that white dress, masked her bisexuality, while her language molted like feathers and could make her words liquefy. She was an enchantress, whose intellect and imagination had utterly isolated her. She could serenade Susan, share some of her poems, but never her tradecraft. She shared that with no one. She may have scribbled poems in the pantry, recited them to her little cousin Loo, but she really wrote in stealth at her lozengelike desk upstairs. She was her own prisoner of war, who pulled lightning from the chaos in her head, danced on her toes, broke down syntax like bits of crockery, and then reassembled the broken bits in a way no one had ever done before.

  2

  “TALENT HITS A TARGET NO ONE ELSE CAN HIT; genius hits a target no one else can see,” said Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher of doomed desires. And how can we ever explain the riddle of Emily Dickinson’s genius?

  I kept probing Christopher Benfey while I was with him at Mount Holyoke, on Dickinson’s grounds. Benfey believes he has found some clues in the idiot savant twins that British-American author and neurologist Oliver Sacks describes in his book of essays, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), about the poetic world of patients with neurological disorders. The twins savored numbers in much the same manner that Dickinson savored words, according to Benfey. “Every number has a kind of taste and a character and a face.”

  Like clouds, I said, that could shift their shape in Hamlet’s mind as he taunts Polonius, one more of his adversaries, real or imagined.

  HAMLET: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?

  POLONIUS: By th’mass, and ’tis like a camel indeed.

  HAMLET: Methinks it is like a weasel.

  POLONIUS: It is backed like a weasel.

  HAMLET: Or like a whale.

  POLONIUS: Very like a whale.

  “And for Dickinson,” Benfey says, “every word looks like a weasel or it looks like an ocean or it looks like death, or you go inside it and it smells a certain way. It may be that certain poets—Shakespeare, Rimbaud, Dickinson—had that kind of gift. So Rimbaud has to go to North Africa to get away . . .”

  “From words, like one of Oliver Sacks’ idiot savants,” I said.

  Sacks had worked with those twins for eighteen years, and in all that time he could never unravel their mystery—diagnosed as autistic and retarded, they could still document “the tiniest visual details of their own experience . . . as if they were unrolling or scrutinizing an inner landscape, a mental calendar.” John and Michael had their own kind of “absolute pitch” for numbers, “could hold in their minds . . . an immense mnemonic tapestry.” Numbers had become their harmony, their musical scales. Sacks wondered if “the need to find or feel some ultimate harmony or order is universal of the mind,” and the twins were only the rarest example of this need. “Numbers for them are holy,” and also friends—“perhaps the only friends they have known in their isolated, autistic lives.”

  They live in their own heaven of numbers the way Dickinson lived in a heaven—and hell—of words. And the neural pattern of words in her mind may have been as limitless as the patterning of numbers was to the twins. I suspect that’s why she seemed so strange. She was always somewhere else, in her own “thought-scape,” like the twins. But she wasn’t an idiot savant locked away in an asylum. She was born in a college town with its own religious fervor and little else. So where did her genius come from? She didn’t ride out of some cradle of creativity. Her maternal grandfather was reckless and melancholic and died in disgrace. Her father was a failed congressman who had no intellectual pursuits. He would buy his poet daughter novels and forbid her to read them. And Austin, her beloved brother, did his best to mutilate her legacy, as he scissored Sue, his embattled wife, out of whatever fragments and letters he could lay his hands on. And yet Dickinson thrived with that cosmic sense of hers, in some hot cauldron at the edge of chaos.

  I think of something John Updike said when he was a young man, about to begin his career as a novelist, poet, and satirist. “There is no danger of my eking out an existence in a garret”—and Emily’s room was like the garret of a privileged prisoner. “If all I have is talent, industry and intelligence, I should be able to please enough people to make money at it.”

  But he was much more ambitious than that. “We do not need men like Proust and Joyce; men like that are a luxury, an added fillip that an abundant culture can produce only after the more basic literary need has been filled,” he wrote to his parents in 1951, while a freshman at Harvard who would become editor of the Lampoon, the college’s mythic humor magazine, and would graduate ninth in his class. “We need great artists who are willing to accept restrictions, and who love their environments with such vitality that they can produce an epic out of the Protestant ethic. . . . Whatever the failings of my work, let it stand as a manifesto of my love for the time in which I was born.”

  He would produce such an epic in his Rabbit Angstrom novels, with their melodious and tactile verve, but I can’t imagine Dickinson with the same lucid drive or vision of her place on the planet; she was little more than a patrician chattel a hundred years earlier, in 1851; even then she was an outlaw, who had defied Mary Lyon at Mount Holyoke, and couldn’t have been in love with the time she was born in, a bisexual woman in a town where most other belles had to take part in that passive hunt for husbands, or be maligned as old maids.

  And what an old maid she was, on her own sexual prowl, and perhaps she was a pointillist of her own time, talking about her apocalyptic rage as a woman in a culture that didn’t permit female lust and female power. And so she smashed the pillars of that Protestant ethos, like some Samson in a white dress, and she went through the looking glass in a way that would have frightened Updike and most other men, and dealt in dreams and hallucinations, with all the tradecraft of a witch.

  3

  I ALWAYS FELT LIKE A DETECTIVE in regard to Emily Dickinson, that I could map her genius somehow. I was convinced she was left-handed, and that her brain had its own unusual nodes, as left-handers sometimes do, that she was wired in a different way. Yet there’s no evidence that Dickinson was left-handed, alas, or even a crypto-lefty trained to scratch around with her right hand—not a word in her chatty letters to Abiah Root, her childhood friend, not a word from Vinnie, the sister who sometimes slept at her side, and nothing at all in the remembrances and mythic lies of Martha Dickinson Bianchi about her mysterious aunt; the white housedress we have at the Dickinson museum tells us nothing, and the two daguerreotypes with their mirror images show her favoring her right hand, but suppose Dickinson was a righty with the crossed wires of a left-hander. Her brain had to have had extra plugs. Her poems read like Shakespeare’s soliloquies crammed into one polyphonic voice, like a great rush of wind that leaves us breathless, the blood beating in our brains. How did she compose? “Letters are scrawls, turnabouts, astonishments, strokes, cuts, masks,” writes Susan Howe in The Birth-mark. Deaf to rules of composition, as Howe suggests, she invents her own rules. “Spaces between letters, dashes, apostrophes, commas, crosses form networks of signs”—like synapses in the brain—“and discontinuities. . . . Who knows what needs she has?”

  Certainly they weren’t about recognition, and some meteoric rise to fame, or she would have ridden on Higginson’s back to wherever she had to go. How did she survive as long as she did, a woman with perfect pitch, like those autistic twins, who lived in a world of the deaf, where no one but they themselves had the music of numbers in their ears? And so they dueled with themselves, caught in a colossal word of infinities. And that, I think, is how Dickinson survived, within the dueling hemispheres of her brain. What other project could she have had but to please herself—and stun herself at the same time. It was play so serious that she risked her own sanity.

  And yet she played. And perhaps she did falter, did break down. And she reported her mental state like some cosmologist of the soul. At a time “So terrible,”
she tells her soul to sing, but the strings have “snapt,” and her brain begins to laugh, “keeps giggling—still.”

  Could it be Madness—this?[Fr423]

  There’s nothing quite like that intensity of hers, as if she’s burning from within. And it’s curious how modern her lament is, how it even fits in with the Marine Corps and its latest advertisement campaign, attracting young men and women to dance deftly “Toward the Sound of Chaos.” That could be Dickinson’s very own dream song—and war cry.

  Yet Oliver Sacks’ idiot savants, with their wealth of numbers and mysterious inner lyricism, tell us more about creativity than all the miracles of brain research in the twenty-first century. “The Brain is just the weight of God—” [Fr598], Dickinson noted 150 years ago, like some neurologist in advance of her time. It’s the most intricate creature in the universe, with synapses far more complex than the solar system.

  Neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen suggests that during the act of creating, “the brain begins by disorganizing, making links between shadowy forms of objects or symbols or words or remembered experiences that have not previously been linked.” When this happens, “associative links run wild,” and the poet drifts into a dreamlike mental state, where “words, images, and ideas collide.” It would be the witch’s hour, where Dickinson danced closer and closer to the sound of chaos in her brain.

  And so her isolation was essential, that “Scarlet prison” of hers upstairs [Fr411], where she was a female Jekyll and Hyde—she didn’t garden or bake in her Scarlet prison, may not even have worn her white dress; she dreamt of blood, roaming in the “Sovreign Woods” of her mind, hunting, trapping words, while she searched for some infinity of her own, perhaps at the end of a carriage ride with the Angel of Death. She never really had to leave her room, since, as she told her Tutor, Colonel Higginson:

  It is solemn to remember that Vastness—is but the Shadow of the Brain which casts it—

  All things swept sole away

  This—is immensity—[Fr1548]

  And she longed to live in that immensity—she reached for the infinite whenever she scribbled a line. And she would have felt at home among modern philosophers and physicists, who believe more and more that there’s no one implacable infinity. Instead, there’s a grab bag of infinities, for mathematicians, cosmologists, theologians. There are flat infinities, hunchback infinities, etc. Recent studies of “the cosmic microwave afterglow of the Big Bang,” where the universe began 13.7 billion years ago, suggest that our universe is just a tiny patch “embedded in a greater universal fabric that is, in a profound sense, infinite.” Either it’s a “monoverse,” or “an infinite bubble bath of infinitely budding and inflating multiverses.”

  The implications have startled a number of modern physicists. If we have an infinite universe, where we can sample finite physical systems in an infinite way, we will get duplicates of everything, says Anthony Aquirre, an associate professor of physics at the University of California, Vera Cruz, whose field is theoretical cosmology.

  “If I ask, will there be a planet like Earth with a person in Santa Cruz sitting at this colored desk, with every atom, every wave function exactly the same, if the universe is infinite the answer has to be yes.”

  This wouldn’t have stunned Emily Dickinson, who would have stared out her window overlooking the Dickinson meadow and waited for her doppelgänger to arrive. There may be variants as well, an idiot savant who can play Bach like Glenn Gould, an Oliver Sacks who has become his own patient, or an Emily Dickinson who married a church warden, had five daughters, and never wrote a line in her life.

  As science writer Natalie Angier reminds us, “The finite is nested within the infinite, and somewhere across the glittering, howling universal sample space of Buddha Field or Babel, your doppelgänger is hard at the keyboard, playing a Bach toccata.”

  We’re almost back in Joyce Carol Oates’ world of EDickinson-RepliLuxe, of variants and replicants, of a doll with a suede vagina and a relentless human heart. And if Dickinson’s immensity is still out there, and we inhabit one finite speck of that “infinite bubble bath,” then the poet may still be at her desk. And how shall we imagine her, writing poems that we still puzzle over, and she the greatest puzzle of all: an apprentice who was a master of her art. She had no vanity, no smallness of mind.

  I’m tempted to compare her with van Gogh, who may have his doppelgänger in the heavens with the same missing ear. Like Dickinson, he was a master and a student at the same time. But he had a much shorter apprenticeship, and painted most of his masterpieces in the last year and a half of his life, often while he was locked away in the madhouse at Saint-Rémy.

  He’d gone to Arles in 1888 to paint in the sun. He invited Gauguin to stay with him in the Yellow House, which he’d rented in hope of forming a little fraternity of painters. They quarreled, and in a drunken stupor, Vincent cut off his own ear. That wouldn’t have seemed strange to Emily Dickinson, who often wrote about acts of self-mutilation, in order to sculpt herself as a man.

  After his confinement at Saint-Rémy, he packed up and moved to a humdrum hotel, the Auberge Ravoux, in Auvers-sur-Oise, outside Paris. I went on a pilgrimage to Auvers-sur-Oise several years ago. The humdrum hotel is still there, much more pretentious now, and one can eat in the same café where Vincent ate, perhaps even sit at his table in the back. And for the price of a few euros, collected by a ticket taker at a little kiosk in the rear yard, I climbed upstairs and visited van Gogh’s room. It was barren, with a tiny skylight and a cane-back chair; the walls were full of crust, the floor was made of barren boards, and I couldn’t stop crying. I imagined him alone in that room, his mind whirling with colors, and his psychic space as primitive and forlorn as a lunatic’s world. He might as well have remained in Saint-Rémy. He’d written to his sister Willemien while he was still in the madhouse. He mentioned his lost years, and his isolation, as hard to bear as exile—he was always alone.

  And yet he completed seventy paintings in the seventy days he was in Auvers-sur-Oise. And the paintings he did in the fields beyond his tiny room and at the madhouse have an illumination, a wild rush of color, we had never seen before. They’re like visual songs that could accompany Dickinson’s lyrics on the page.

  Adam Gopnik sees a kind of lesson in van Gogh’s fate. “It is the moral luck of making something that no one wants in the belief that someone someday will.” It is a long shot in a society of sure things. But this “moral luck” of van Gogh remains at odds with our own liberal civilization “that always, and usually intelligently, prefers compromise to courage.”

  And isn’t it also the lesson of Emily Dickinson, that she was the longest of long shots, a poet who was thrust out of obscurity in spite of herself? Would we love her as much, revere her, if we hadn’t encountered her first as the reclusive waif in the white dress, with tales of renunciation and unrequited romance, with butchered, bowdlerized versions of her poems that transformed her into an asexual nymph? We cannot dislodge or dislimn her from her own history, or the history of her poems, how they arrived, when they arrived, with all their accompanying myths. Perhaps we wouldn’t summon her up in the same way without all those accoutrements that few other creators have. Van Gogh had his missing ear, the madhouse in Saint-Rémy, his claustrophobic room upstairs at the auberge in Auvers-sur-Oise, his brother Theo, who lies next to him in a little boneyard beside the fields where Vincent’s colors ran rampant, while the limbs of his suffering stick to us like Stations of the Cross.

  And the Queen of Calvary? We have the Scarlet prison where she worked, now a shrine that’s the main attraction of a museum devoted to her memory, but isn’t it just as terrifying as Vincent’s room, barren in its own way, with its bureau and sleigh bed? It was here, alone, in the turbulence of her own mind, she created poems and pictograms that are works of art, like some cave dweller of the nineteenth century with her own hieroglyphics. However unstable she might have been, moment by moment, she was fearless in her own work, or investigat
ions, as we might call them, since she was as much an explorer as a poet, delving into landscapes where no one else had gone. And it’s futile to define Dickinson in terms of gender or social station, or the topography of her own time. She was male and female, as we all are, at least in our dreams and acts of creation, and that’s why her poems resonate with such force. She will continue to fuel our hunger and to baffle us, no matter how many portraits of her we uncover, or how many interpretations we have of every image. She’s still out there “opon Circumference,” where she’ll always be hard to find.

  CODA

  Sam Carlo

  I’D BEEN TRYING TO TRACK DOWN SAM CARLO for the past several years, but I didn’t have Dickinson’s Yellow Eye or her Loaded Gun, and of course I failed. I wanted to know more about the second daguerreotype, how Sam Carlo had happened upon it. At least I could smile at the very mask of his name: Sam obviously stood for Sam Bowles, and what Carlo could he have had in mind other than Dickinson’s dog? I liked his playful bent, but that didn’t get me any closer to Sam.

  Then, in January 2015, I wrote to Mimi Dakin, archivist at Amherst College, asking her permission to reproduce several items in the Dickinson collection for A Loaded Gun. Since a copy of the second dag was also housed in the same collection, I asked Mimi if she could put me in touch with Sam, the owner of the daguerreotype. I wanted to interview him. Mimi tried. The answer came back swiftly, like some damaging angel. Sam said no to my request, and his answer was irrevocable—he wanted nothing to do with me or my book. I wondered why. I e-mailed Mimi, saying that the second dag was critical to my argument about Dickinson’s apocalyptic powers as a poet, that I coveted the second dag, and looked favorably upon Sam. Mimi passed my message on to him. He sent a message back that he might be willing to talk. And thus our elliptical dialogue began, with its own staccato rhythm.