a darker spirit will not disown its child
Monday 28 August 2006 | I like a cookie
We thought that for its inaugural week, lunedi literary links would kick off with a tribute to the much-misunderstood Masochist of Amherst, Emily Dickinson. We begin with an envisioning of how the Norton Anthology list of first lines might look, had SSRIs been available to the poet (courtesy of Drink at Work):
• I think I’ll have chicken tonight
• That cloud looks like a cotton ball
• Kittens make me smile
• Oh, the ice cubes are melting
• My tea needs sugar
• I wonder if it’s noon yet
• That’s a pretty big sandwich
• This calls for a soup spoon
• It’s nice to get mail
• Today’s a good day for stuff
Next up, a pair of cartoons; one by your blogger, from bygone days of yore:
And someone else’s, of which we tauntingly reproduce only part, so that you will hie you hither to visit the place where it lives and is brilliant, along with more literary graphic enlivenings, Chautauquaesque, by the same artist.
Was there a suicide in Amherst? This guy seems to think so, and offers various shreds of flimsy evidence to support his unqualifiedly dodgy thesis (seems like a pretty blatant bid for a non-junior-college job to me, but never mind). Then of course there’s Kay Redfield Jamison, busily colonizing all those defenseless dead writers for bipolar disorder; while a nice poetry-reading psychiatrist argues that she was seasonally affective—and strangely, what with him being a doctor and all, his mostly thoughtful exploration of actual poems offers perhaps the strongest evidence of all such (admittedly ludicrous from the get-go) retroactive diagnoses.
(Her tight-bound twine-sealed shoeboxes, rooms without doors, windburnt, rained-on, radically inflected with the wheel of the year: an ominous autumnal dread, the oppression of winter like the heft of cathedral tunes, spring’s rush of relief and the flagrant prodigality of summer, her drop of India.)
As we gratefully turn toward less speculative realms, here exists probably the best Dickinson collection available online, mostly reproducing her idiosyncratic punctuation and capitalization rules; and for the true fan, Dickinson in italiano (”Notte folle! Notte folle! / Con io per te…”). All the good stuff in the Dickinson Online Archives remains disappointingly mostly closed to hoi polloi, unless you, like, are Martha Nell Smith’s postdoc or something.
For those who can’t stomach either the miserable gabby one-woman stand-up travesty or Susan Glaspell’s disappointing Alison’s House (”a poetic romance”—but not between Emily and Sue, heaven forfend), there’s a recent documentary about her called Loaded Gun: Life, Death and Dickinson, the tagline for which is, “And she thought she’d be safe in her Alabaster chamber…”
Billy Collins wrote a racy little number about getting all Barry White on Emily’s ass, though we’ve never quite decided how we feel about it, since it first came out in Poetry and we cut it out and pinned it on the bulletin board and stared at it a long time—is it disrespectful? Is it careerist? Or is Billy Collins just a perverted motherfucker?
Al Filreis, a professor at UPenn, has for years and years now maintained an alarmingly thorough site, which includes an excerpt from Susan Howe’s take-off-the-top-of-your-head, balls-out book, My Emily Dickinson, which we accidentally discovered in the stacks whilst dissertation-spodding years ago. It’s not literary criticism, it’s not poetry, it’s not a love letter, it’s not a linguistics treatist, and it’s all this and more—as well as being, incidentally, pretty good on Melville and James Fenimore Cooper.
Maybe it’s best to close by letting Ms. D, speak for herself, in a startlingly savage and self-dramatizing letter to her sister “a hedge away.” The editors of Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson somehow reckon this document (circa 1855) references a religious quarrel; to which we can only say in disbelief, did you never have a girlfriend in your lives?! All the letters from Sue to Emily, and a good number of Emily’s to Sue, were burnt by Dickinson’s “sister in the house,” Lavinia, after Emily died. Dickinson’s isolation, her grasping at dignity, her childishness and characteristic self-pity are all on flagrant display, along with a trope only glimpsed in the poetry, but full-throttle here: watch her deliberately lay bare the vein of sarcasm to splatter unabashed all over the page; and don’t miss the Golgatha reference at the end.
Sue - you can go or stay - There is but one alternative - We differ often lately, and this must be the last.
You need not fear to leave me lest I should be alone, for I often part with things I fancy I have loved, - sometimes to the grave, and sometimes to
an oblivion rather bitterer than death - thus my heart bleeds so frequently that I shant mind the hemorrhage, and I only add an agony to several previous ones, and at the end of the day remark - a bubble burst!
Such incidents would grieve me when I was but a child, and perhaps I could have wept when little feet hard by mine, stood still in the coffin, but eyes grow dry sometimes, and hearts get crisp and cinder, and had as lief burn.
Sue - I have lived by this.
It is the lingering emblem of the Heaven I once dreamed, and though if this is taken, I shall remain alone, and though in that last day, the Jesus Christ you love, remark he does not know me - there is a darker spirit will not disown it’s child.
Few have been given me, and if I love them so, that for idolatry, they are removed from me, I simply murmur gone, and the billow dies away into the boundless blue, and no one knows but me, that one went down today. We have walked very pleasantly - Perhaps this is the point at which our paths diverge - then pass on singing Sue, and up the distant hill I journey on.
post your glowing encomium (or bitter philippic) »
Follow this heated, lively discussion through its very own feed; also, you can pingback or trackback from your own doubtlessly much more interesting site.
