J.S. Porter

Emily Dickinson: Melody for Bone

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry." Emily Dickinson

In the Dickinson canon "I" accosts the reader like a summer's fly. But hers is a very different "I" from Whitman's, more wounded, more interior, but also perhaps, more honest, less delusional. While Whitman's "I" strides the cosmos cockily, historically, narcissistically and credulously, Dickinson's periscopes privately, skeptically, woundedly, outside of history and geography. He trods the world; she remains inside the brain's "Haunted House." Whitman the astronomer of distant stars and Dickinson the cartographer of mind: its fragility, its dreads, its looming fractures and fissures, its defenselessness. Her achievement, leaning back to Orpheus, is to have found a melody for mental pain and apprehension, a melody for "Zero at the Bone."

Although Dickinson liked to. keep up the fiction that the "I" was merely a persona, there are good reasons for thinking otherwise. The masks of the "I" too consistently probe the slipperiness and instability of the mind for artifice, and her words seem too honest and true for subterfuge. When she says "I like a look of Agony/Because I know it's true/Men do not sham Convulsion/Nor stimulate a Throe," you believe her. Her selfscrolled epithets, "Empress of Calvary" and "Queen of Calvary," seem in tune with a good portion of her verse.

The "I" of course manifests itself in manifold ways, and links to other words of self hood. There are approximately 23 poems in which the brain is featured, 77 on the mind, 3 8 on the head, 1 14 on the heart and 126 on the soul. The brain and mind poems in particular - "I felt a Funeral, in my brain" (280) and "I felt a Cleaving in my Mind" (935) - are among her strongest. Clearly, the working order of her own internal sentient organs held an on-going fascination for her. Her apparent world-mapping - raids into Greek mythology or the Bible or Shakespeare - disguises the true nature of her enterprise: mind-mapping.

The "I" in Dickinson relives the loss of feeling or reason in poems that seem almost dress-rehearsals for an imagined suicide. And yet, despite differences in moods and posture - her blackness as opposed to Whitman's rosiness - her "I" links to his in its definiteness, its lack of hesitancy, its confidencein subduing chaos. Neither Whit mannor Dickinson had much time for qualification. Qualifiers such as "maybe" or "sometimes" do not creep very often into their work. Both are poets of the absolute who say to the reader: here is reality. The "realities" of course differ markedly in each poet.

Dickinson makes, in William Styron's phrase, "darkness visible." She is the poet of inner soul as Whitman is the poet of the outer soul. How she was able to live and record the mental snarls and snares, the "darkness," at the same time may remain a puzzle to all but the most creative, but Styron casts some light in his essay on depression called Darkness Visible:

 A phenomenon that a number of people
 have noted while in deep depression is
 the sense of being accompanied by a
 second self - a wraith like observer
 who, not sharing the dementia of his
 double, is able to watch with
 dispassionate curiosity as his
 companion struggles against the
 oncoming disaster, or decides to
 embrace it.

Dickinson's identification with a "boy" in some of her poems, which some have taken to be her muse or an indication of her repressed feminism, may be Styron's "wraith like observer." At any rate, she seemed to develop a capacity, whether by will or compulsion, to examine herself as if she weren't in her body suffering - in psychiatric terms, to dissociate and depersonalize, and in artistic terms, to alchemize and allegorize.

Makinq poems was Dickinson's vocation, her passion, her life. She took the making of poems, which in part has to do with finding the right words to make the desired sounds and images, as a matter of life and death. Words had duties: they must never lie. Words had consequences: they could extend life. This is the way she puts it in poem 1261:

 A Word dropped careless on a Page
 May stimulate an eye
 When folded in perpetual seam
 The Wrinkled Maker lie 

 Infection in the sentence breeds
 We may inhale Despair
 At distances of Centuries
 From the Malaria -

A careless word spreads "infection," "despair" and "disease." Even allowing for poetic licence and hyperbole, the claim is an extraordinary one. Dickinson wanted to get the words right, and what she wanted from them was absolute accuracy and truth-telling.

When you listen to Dickinson carefully you see in her sounds the image of Edvard Munch's "The Scream." Even words usually representing benign forces, such as "light" in "There's a certain slant of light" and "sun" in "Doom is the House without the Door -/'Tis entered from the Sun," take on a malevolent cast in Dickinson. She seems more comfortable with pain than pleasure, or more accustomed to it. In poem 252 she defiantly proclaims: "I can wade Grief/Whole pools of it/I'm used to that"/But the least push of joy/Breaks up my feet/And I tip - drunken." In its anatomy of pain, her work looks forward to Robinson Jeffer@, Sylvia Plath and the science fiction writer, Harlan Ellison.

Styron, who quotes liberally from Dickinson in Darkness Visible, uses words Dickinson might have used to sum up her own work: "...my brain, in thrall to its outlaw hormones, had become less an organ of thought than an instrument registering, minute by minute, varying degrees of its own suffering." She was, in her own phrasing, a "Troubled Top" with "a snarl in the brain" who knew "Something's odd - within -."

Dickinson takes you down the stairway of pain to what you perceive to be the bottom, takes away all the remaining floor boards, and then drops you one step more. She enacts the experience of being buried alive in poem 280, "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain," of splitting and coming apart in poem 937, "I felt a Cleaving in my mind," and of feeling emotionally dead while being alive in poem 341, "I heard a Fly buzz - when I died." Here too Styron is a useful guide. He writes:

 In depression this faith in deliverance,
 in ultimate restoration, is absent. The
 pain is unrelenting, and what makes the
 condition intolerable is the
 foreknowledge that no remedy will come
 - not in a day, an hour, a month, or a
 minute... It is hopelessness even more
 than pain that crushes the soul.

As a person Dickinson seems to have had inadequate or damaged psychic equipment to manage the inner volcanoes and lightning bolts, and the ever present "Loaded Gun." But as a poet she powerfully enfleshes the necessary metaphors to externalize and universalize her own private horror. Private pain turns to public medicine.

T.H. Johnson, the editor of Dickinson's three volumes of poetry (1,775 poems) and three volumes of letters (with dozens of additional poems), makes ajust claim in his Introduction to the one volume Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson that nineteenth century America hosts three very significant visitations, (with apologies to Thoreau, Melville and Twain): Emerson's lecturein 1837 on "The American Scholar;" Whitman's hand printed 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass; and Emily Dickinson's letter to T.W. Higginson, April 15, 1862 - the year of her great poetic outpouring of 366 poems in which she seemed literally to be writing for her sanity and her life - where she enclosed four of her poems. She wanted to know if they "breathed" or not. The poems were beyond Higginson's capability for judgment, like nothing he had ever read before. They didn't fit traditional metres or patterns so he wasn't sure if they were alive or dead.

But Dickinson carried on anyway, without praise, understanding or encouragement, through debilitating depression and grief, through loss and disappointment, with a fierce stubbornness. She did not know what to call her illness; "affliction" is generally her word of choice. It seems clear from the biographical work done on her, whether by psychiatrist John Cody in After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson or literary critic Richard B. Sewall in The Life of Emily Dickinson, that she suffered from acute depression. Of course, some might prefer the older term of severe "melancholia," some nervous breakdown or mental breakdown, and some the catch-all word of psychosis. Styron calls the unlikable gloom "insidious meltdown."

In letter 261, April 25, 1862, to Higginson she writes: "I had a terror since September - I could tell to none - and so I sing, as the Boy does by the burying Ground - because I am afraid -." Towards the end of her life, late 1883, in a letter to Mrs. J.G. Holland (873) she is still unsure of what to call her affliction: The Physician says l have 'Nervous prostration.' Possibly I have - I do not know the Names of Sickness. The Crisis of the sorrow of so many years is all that tires me..." Whatever the precise name for her dread, Dickinson's work circles within the cosmos of "d-words," the letter in English that forewarns disintegration according to Walter Kaufmann in Life At The Limits. Disappointment, dread, disillusionment, despair, disquiet, depression, destitution, distress, danger and death all stamp their letters on Dickinson's forehead.

Dickinson may not have known the medical term for what assaulted her but she knew mental pain, anguish and paralysis, and delineated the steps and stages with Swiss precision. "One Crucifixion is recorded only - /How many be/Is not affirmed of Mathematics - /Or History ," she records in poem 553, "And - yet -/There's newer - nearer Crucifixion/Than That -." The last two lines smack of Dickinsonian understatement; her whole life seemed to her, and to us looking back on it, slow torture, an agonizing unrelieved crucifixion. In poem 501 she concludes "Narcotics cannot still the Tooth/Tbat nibbles at the soul -," and in 650 she begins "Pain - has an Element of Blank -/It cannot recollect/ When it begun - or if there were/A time when it was not."

The critics for the most part, like Higginson, have still not caught up with her, though she is featured in recent grab-bags like Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae and Harold Bloom's Westem Canon. She has the stature of a modern Sappho. She has given birth to as many poets in America as the long-breathed, loping, Whitman. Poets as different as Sylvia Plath and Robert Frost are equally inconceivable without her. There is no bullshit in Emily Dickinson, none whatsoever, no dross, nothing fake or feigned in her truncated short-breathed cryptic puzzles and riddles, every utterance either starting or finishing with "Zero at the Bone."

The poets, as I say, have done better by her. Adrienne Rich, for example, has a splendid essay entitled "Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson" in which she considers Dickinson's exploration of "states of psychic extremity." In poems reflecting or exploring such states, lightning and volcanoes are favorite Dickinson metaphors: both phenomena strike unexpectedly and devastatingly. In talking about the "outside" forces she is of course talking about the volcanoes and lightning within the mind, the inner loaded gun that can go off at any time without warning.

Just as her poems are ahistorical so they are non-geographic. There are few poems of an outer geography in Dickinson; most of her poetic geography is internal, using outer forms to describe inner states. There are eighteen "lightning" poems in the Dickinson canon and nine "volcanic" ones. The placid "sky" and the still "earth" (Dickinson's head and feet) can rupture violently, and she can "lose" her head or her footing with terrifying consequences.

When such a loss in grounding occurs in Dickinson's poetry, destruction results: be it the destruction of a secure perch or solid ground, or destruction of a mood, a feeling, a hope, a mind or a life. The reader is as rocked by the tremors and bolts as the speaker of the poems. When Dickinson writes of a thunderbolt scalping a head, it's hard to maintain distance, detachment and disinterest, and hard to keep up the safety barrier that separates art from life. Shock waves go out to readers. Says Rich: "The poetry of extreme states, the poetry of danger, can allow its readers to go further in our awareness, take risks we might not have dared; it says, at least: Someone has been here before."'

I'd like to look closely now at a single Dickinson poem which illustrates a state of "psychic extremity." Poem 870 has a wider than usual circumference for Dickinson. It combines the compression of Basho with the sweep of Shakespeare; its energy is centrifugally charged in contrast to her usually centripetally charged verse. The metaphor of Jason and the search for the Golden Fleece takes Dickinson outside herself for a moment, into an analogy, even an allegory, of the human mind:

 Finding is the first Act
 The second, loss,
 Third, Expedition for
 The "Golden Fleece"
 Fourth, no Discovery-
 Fifth. no Crew-
 Finally, no Golden Fleece-
 Jason - sham - too. 

The poem is clearly about a mind's journey or a life's journey, quite independent of Greek mythology. The poem enacts a five act tragedy, with a sleight of hand at the end which obliterates the play and the author.

"The degrees of metaphor," Wallace Stevens says. There are many "degrees" in Dickinson. Sometimes, she'll turn the object slightly, intensify it, show its hidden side, but more frequently she'll turn the object into something else; she'll invert, convert or allegorize. The mind or the moods of the mind (the object) become something else. Life becomes a loaded gun; fame becomes a bee; self-confident identity becomes a frog; the mind in poem 870 becomes Jason on a quest.

In this poem, as in "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" (280), "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" (341) and "The Heart asks Pleasure - first" (536), Dickinson calibrates the mind's descent into hell: "First - Chill then Stupor - then the letting go" (341). She erects the mind's idols and deceptions, then dismembers them one by one. A colloquial paraphrase of the poem might go like this: you find something, you lose it, you set out for something else, you can't find it, you have no help, there's nothing there to find anyway, and you're nothing too.

In this poem Jason can't find the Fleece because it's not there to be found, and if it did exist, he wouldn't exist to find it. '[be poem is all about attempted subterfuge and sham, but Dickinson will not permit herself a "merciful Mirage" (859). The poem ends in a kind of numbness paralleling an earlier poem "From Blank to Blank," (761), where Dickinson also draws on Greek mythology: the story of Ariadne's giving Theseus thread to guide him out of the Minotaurean maze. In the Dickinsonian maze the way is "Threadless," and her poem does not end in Theseus's escape nor in his marriage to Ariadne. There are few happy endings in Dickinson. What doesn't kill you, numbs you.

The two "Greek" poems involve a great deal of motion, the mind leaping from pain through storytelling, lurching for a way out and not being able to locate it, and finally falling back into itself. Richard Chase in his monograph on Dickinson calls this process of projecting out of pain and then plummeting back into it, Dickinson's "kinaesthetic imagery." He writes: "At its deeper levels her typical experience is of motion-involving pain or terror-cessation, and an ensuing state of rest..." But the rest he speaks of is surely the "rest" of stasis, of numbness, of paralysis, or of wishfulfillment as in poem 642 which catches the Dickinsonian double bind or Catch-22:

 Me from myself - to banish-
 Had I Art-
 Impregnable my Fortress
 Unto All Heart-

 But since Myself - assault Me-
 How have I peace
 Except by subjugating
 Consciousness?

 And since We're mutual Monarch
 How this be
 Except by Abdication-
 Me - of Me?

She splits herself in two here, into the sick self and the well self. The "Me" and "Myself 'or in the last stanza the "Me" and the "Me" are a single person swinging between wellness and sickness. The only way to destroy the assaulting one is to destroy the withstanding one. Only death can separate the twins.

Dickinson's poems are characteristically pared back to nouns and verbs. She is not generally a poet of adjectives and adverbs, of embroidery and gilded edges. Hers is the poetry of kernel and core, of bedrock. In poem 870 there are a few adjectives, a handful of nouns and one verb, "is." The lack of padding in the style reflects the bare bones content. The poem exhibits the "scenelessness" on which a number of critics have remarked. The mind confronts itself, naked, illusionless, idol-less, balmless. The speaker of poem 870 does not set the scene, nor litter the stage with props.

The reader does not know where the speaker is while speaking or what surrounds the speaker. The reader does not know the time of day, the season, the landscape, or the mood of the speaker. The voice namelessly drones in an extended analogy or, as I've suggested, in an allegory, but for all the broadness of the cast ultimately retreats into itself. The reader is not even certain who is speaking; Dickinson abandons her customary The poem consists of speech without a speaker as if delivered by a spectre. Who or what is speaking? Is it Dickinson? Is it an imaginary speaker? Is it a disembodied mind? Is it a state or a mood? Is it Being in the centre of Nothingness? Is it pain made vocal in the centre of agony?

While Dickinson could magnificently articulate her sometimes tortured, and sometimes fractured, state of mind in precise words, she could not understand her vacillating moods or linguistically rescue herself from despair. In letter 798 she acknowledges that her own words "chill and bum" her. And in letter 555 she declaims: "I suppose there are depths in every Consciousness, from which we cannot rescue ourselves - to which none can go with us-which represent to us Mortally - the Adventure of Death.

Whatever the price of seeing and saying, of the "Thunderbolt-/ That scalps your naked Soul," Dickinson paid it. In 772 she says, "The hallowing of Pain/Like hallowing of Heaven/Obtains at a corporeal cost/ The Summit is not given ... /All - is the price of All -2'. And yet, for all her powers of surgical clarity, unflinching honesty, and shining articulation, even she may not have been able to understand what psychiatry today would likely call a chemical imbalance and she might more poetically call the inner predator and trespasser possessing her, the inner snake devouring her: "I found the words to every thought/I ever had - but One -" (581). With acute self-awareness she certainly realized how "The Outer - from the Inner/Derives its Magnitude -/'Tis Duke, or Dwarf, according/As is the Central Mood -" (451). But no mind, even as prescient a one as Dickinson's, can fully know itself nor heal itself. What it can do, and did, is find melody for bone.

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