J. S. Porter

Notes on Emily Dickinson's "Terrible Simplicity"

(for Dr. Rick Guscott: poet-psychiatrist & Dickinson aficionado)

(1)
In a certain sense Dickinson was writing one poem all her life, one poem with almost two thousand stanzas, the poem of her inner life, an autobiographical poem as vast in its way and as thorough as Wordsworth's Prelude and Whitman's Leaves of Grass. But her poetic autobiography is no paean to inner peace and grandeur, to recollected tranquility, to the balm of nature or to talismanic dreams and shamanistic visions. Dickinson, like Beckett, is the poet of impotence, and like Plath, the poet of terror and dread, the poet of pain. She dissects fear and panic; she scrapes away illusion and deceit; she enacts the drama of a mind in terror of collapse, a mind sputtering into spasms, a mind about to hit the skids. Her honesty and sensitivity to the mind's fragilities seem so much more "real" in our time than her contemporary Whitman's braggadocio.

Singleness of purpose. Dickinson penned a single Shakespearean tragedy with one character, herself, with one prop, her brain, and with one theme, terror. The poet, terror-stricken, terrorized; the poem traumatized. The poetry of chills and curdles, which puts on display the recurrent crucifixion of self, the mood-govemed, seesaw self, the fully aware, articulate and terrified self. Pain made into poetry. The poetry of open wounds. The poet retouching the wounds in their verbal and artistic forms so as to gain sovereignty over them, so as to brace for their return. Dickinson as tremulousness and temerity. Her genius is to have combined tremulous feeling with a temerity of expression. A bold, bald brokenness. Destitution and defiance.

And if she were writing one poem or one mind-drama all her life- in drafts, fragments, riddles, mind experiments and dramatizations, epigrams-she certainly wrote it in one voice. In a Dickinson poem you wait for the lock to click the coin to drop, the knife to twist. She writes unadorned, with "a terrible simplicity," as if words were live body parts, pulsing, throbbing, aching, writhing. Her first question in her first letter to her correspondent, T.W. Higginson, is: "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?" Later she will confide to the same correspondent: "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."

"Good morning, Midnight!"/ ... good night, Day!" The poem of her life has to do primarily with terror, intermittently interrupted by ecstatic moments and cloaked at times in wry humour, combative iconoclasm and corrosive irony. The poems indicate fears of imminent mental collapse. At times she seems literally to be writing for her life, to save it or prolong it. The scholarly problem of precisely dating Dickinson's poems results from her monotone; one poem sounds very much like another; early Dickinson sounds much the same as late Dickinson. Teffor seems to have struck early and often, and the guard rails and danger signs of her poetic defences are quickly put into place and kept up. So there's little growth in her poems, little evidence of change, just certain poems going down deeper into her own psyche than others, some poems more successfully crafted, more complete than others, more deft fusions of form and content.

(2)
Take poem 556 as an example of her word-thrift and poetic armour. A few nouns, a few verbs, a few prepositions, a few conjunctions, the only colouring of the nouns either definite or indefinite articles.

  The Brain, within its Groove
  Runs evenly-and true-
  But let a Splinter swerve-
  'Twere easier for You-

  To put a Current back-
  When Floods have slit the Hills-
  And scooped a Turnpike for Themselves-
  And trodden out the Mills-

Who can pack more punch in a handful of lines than Dickinson? You experience the poem, internalize it, and grow into it. Dickinson's poetry is almost pre-cognitive; it's read by the nerves, on the bloodstream, by the pulse. You can read her after a time in the dark. The poem lances through you. You can't quite describe how or why, but it bleeds and you bleed. The verbs are ominous, aren't they? Read the poem by the verbs first: "Runs, swerve, slit, scooped, trodden." You're not sure what's happening but it doesn't seem good. Then read it by the nouns: "Groove, Splinter, Current, Floods, Turnpike, Mills." Do you know where you are? Groove. Industrial? On a train track? Ball bearings, pistons, pulleys? The brain running smoothly, then a "Splinter" swerves. Splinter as in wood, as in flesh? Something small, that's all it takes, a small part of the brain swerves, comes off the groove and ... And then, devastation and derailment. It happens very easily; and it's so very hard to rectify. Easier to put "a Current back." The current from a flood. It's easier to put the current back than the splintered and swerved brain back in the groove because what the current does to the countryside the splinter does to the brain. And the brain, like the countryside, can only be set right after the damage has already occurred. Isn't that the sense of the poem?

Is every poem a record of the mind's moods, from euphoria to despair, from hope to panic? By that reckoning, there are 1,775 mind assaults and elations.

You don't need to unravel the metaphors in Dickinson like tangled yam or crack them open like hazel nuts. Even when you don't understand each line and every word, you understand the general dialectic and dynamism. You just have to stay with a Dickinson poem, ride it, wherever it goes, ride it till you feel it, and then you can put the identification tags on it later.

(3)
The lightning has already struck in Dickinson: "Struck no one but myself/But I would not exchange the Bolt/For all the rest of Life@' (1581). Defiance again. The gun has already gone off when you start to read a Dickinson poem. The poem is after the fact. The top of her head has already been blown off, years ago, and she's going to tell you what it was like as if it is just happening now. In poem 445 Dickinson says ... Twas just this time, last year, I died." The deaths are always in the past but the poems tell you about them as if they are still present. The past tense in Dickinson is always the present continuous. Menace only limps away temporarily; it slinks back later.

(4)
"A terrible simplicity." The phrase is Emerson's, from "The Poet." That's Dickinson work in a nutshell: a terrible simplicity. She comes at you "finless," like a bullet. The way I put it once was: "Tbe eye blinks/Short bursts/of breath/How like a gun/Dit. Dit." A terrible simplicity, as if Emerson had her in mind when he coined the phrase, the one who could have gone to see him and didn't when he stayed at her brother's house. What if Dickinson was the poet Emerson was waiting for and not Whitman? Suppose Dickinson had sent a packet of poems to Emerson and Whitman didn't. What then? What would Emerson have thought of her gunfire, her shrapnel, her "terrible simplicity?"

(5)
The terror of her verse. The reader experiences not the crack-up but the lead-up to the crack-up; the precipice, not the abyss. Terror takes you down to the point where you know horror waits for you at the bottom:

 The Whole of it came not at once-
 'Twas Murder by degrees-
 A Thrust-and then for Life a chance-
 The Bliss to cauterize-

 The Cat reprieves the Mouse
 She eases from her teeth
 Just long enough for Hope to tease-
 Then mashes it to death-

 'Tis Life's award-to die-
 Contenteder if once-
 Than dying half-then rallying
 For consciouser Eclipse- (762)

With Dickinson, you already know where she's going, where you're riding to. You know the end, the destination. The death-and-dread poems end in the first line: "I lived on Dread" (770), "I dreaded that first Robin, so" (348), "I lost a World-the other day" (181), "I never felt at Home-Below" (413), "I saw no Way-The Heavens were stitched" (378), "I noticed People disappeared" (1149), "I am alive-I guess" (470), "I heard a Fly buzz-when I died" (465). What interests you is the trip through terror to arrive at where you started-hoffor. The poem frequently starts and ends at the same place. The mind has already splintered or swerved or derailed or unhinged in the first line or even before the poem begins; the mind has nothing to do but circle back upon itself What you want to know, and what Dickinson gives you, is how the derailment happens, "Plank by Plank" (875), "Bone by Bone" (599); The "Murder by degrees" (762), the "Maelstrom, with a notch" (414).

(6)
Kierkegaard gives you "the concept of dread." Dickinson enacts dread.

(7)
You can take a sentence by a psychiatric patient in Dr. John Cody's biography, After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson, and take her words as Dickinson's. They wouldn't in the least be out of place. You can find similar words in Dickinson's letters if not directly in her poems. "...Things look blue today, and I hardly know what to do, everything looks so strangely." Quiet explosions.

(8)
"My Life ... a Loaded Gun" she said. "A porcelain Life," she called it. But if she cracked she didn't break. She grew "accustomed to the Dark" even on "Those Evenings of the Brain-/When not a Moon disclose a sign-/Or Star-come out-within-"(419).

(9)
When you come to Dickinson, or to any great poet, you come with baggage; you come with other books in your hand. The question is which. You can approach her work with Mary Daly's children and radical feminism in hand. That's a lens that enables you to see one part of Dickinson. Dickinson as hag, crone, witch, fury, lusty, wanton, nag, shrew, virgin and gnome, all in Mary Daly's radical feminist understanding of the words in Gyn/Ecology and Pure Lust. Which is to say, Dickinson is a female demon, a long-lasting one, wild and weird, an avenging deity, fertile, unruly, aware, shrewd, unsubdued and a guardian of treasure. She is someone Daly would place among the "haggard," one of those who is "intractable, willful, wanton, unchaste, and, especially ... reluctant to yield to wooing." Daly informs those bent on understanding "the Elemental quality of Gnomic writing" that they had better "recall that Emily Dickinson described herself as a Gnome, and that her poetry has been called Gnomic."

You can peer at Dickinson through the lens of Cody's psychoanalytical biography. That's another Dickinson: wobbly, split apart, writing "neck" poems, the kind you write with a noose around your neck: no time for waste or falsity. You can view her through Julia Kristeva's Black Sun, a treatise on depression and melancholia. Kristeva writes like a poet: "Where does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence, to renunciation?" Didn't Dickinson live alifeof renunciation, "a wayward Nun," saying a Melvillean "no in thunder?" Didn't she know firsthand the "black sun?" Is Kristeva talking about Dickinson? "A life that is unlivable, heavy with daily sorrows, tears held back or shed, a total despair, scorching at times, then wan and empty... a devitalized existence ... I live a living death, my flesh is wounded, bleeding, cadaverized, my rhythm slowed down or interrupted, time has been erased or bloated, absorbed into soffow..." In a letter Dickinson refers to her "Crisis of the sorrow." Has Kristeva read Dickinson? "Let us keep in mind the speech of the depressed-repetitive and monotonous. Faced with the impossibility of concatenating, they utter sentences that are interrupted, exhausted, come to a standstill ... A repetitive rhythm, a monotonous melody emerge and dominate the broken logical sequences, changing them into recurring, obsessive litanies." Has Kristeva stumbled upon a theory of why Dickinson speaks in monotone? Dickinson as a depressive with a genius for metaphor, with her "obsessive litanies"?

(10)
Popular literary wisdom has it that Dickinson learned to write by singing hymns in her church-going youth. Even as good a critic as David Porter thinks that. Why single out Porter? Because we share a surname, and I find myself applauding his thesis that Dickinson is a post-modernist poet before post-modernism. She questions all authority- biblical, classical, societal; she writes self-consciously, self-reflexively, within the falling comet of her own cosmos; she jests, she defies, she undermines; she breaks all the rules of poetic construction. I like the idea of something being dead before it's born, or something being over with before it starts. The other thing I wonder about in relation to Porter, as if we both found ourselves in a Paul Auster novel, is: suppose I lived in the States and wrote books about Emily Dickinson. Suppose one life needs more than one body to complete itself so that your life can be in two places at once and doing morethanonething. SupposeIreallyamDavidPorterwithapseudonymous first name. Anyway, David Porter and popular literary wisdom are wrong about the hymns. Can you imagine singing an Emily Dickinson poem in church?

(11)
Is her poetic speech that of a depressive, with manic moments of delight, a monotonous melody she repeated and repeated? Every poem a tightened spring, a stretched elastic, a cocked gun, a wild drunkenness?

(12)
She keeps writing the same poem over and over because by such voodoo she can temporarily still her fears, slow the slide into panic, scare away the monsters. The word as a good luck charm, as a cross, as a pincushion. Maybe Camille Paglia is onto something in calling Dickinson Madame de Sade. But if so, the pincushion is her own mind and the poems are the pins. Maybe Dickinson is trying to ward off future disturbance by writing about it first, by naming the devils before they beat a trail to her door. By poetic witchcraft she tries to write out her fears so when the terrors strike she'll be ready, forewarned, fore-experienced. And maybe there is a touch of masochism too in retouching the wounds, wounds which at any time are capable of re-opening, re-bleeding.

(13)
You can hold up Joyce Carol Oates' essay "'Soul At The White Heat': The Romance of Emily Dickinson's Poetry," and see Dickinson through that. "The tantalizing 'I'." Who is speaking to you in a Dickinson poem? Identity iseclipsed. A "daunting intimacy." The intimacy is daunting, isn't it? She speaks with authority, with urgency, authentically, as if she's already been to wherever she wants to take you. The poems assume "you" to be her intimate, her girlfriend and sister-in-law Susan Gilbert perhaps. "An art of strain, of nerves strung brilliantly tight." A mind on a rack? Someone who knew Calvary by day and not by a single night. "How tight, how vio this syntax!" Like a lit fuse, like a tripped wire, like a gun, "Dit. Dit."

Harold Bloom's good on Dickinson too. "Except for Kafka, I cannot think of any writer who has expressed desperation as powerfully and as constantly as Dickinson."

"Her unique transport, her Sublime, is founded upon her unnaming of all our certitudes into so many blanks; and it gives her, and her authentic readers, another way to see, almost into the dark."

(14)
She's the poet of desperation, the poet of panic, of mental disturbance and devastation, of terror, all right. Terror. She lives in fear of lapsing back into "Circumference-/Beyond the Dip of Bell-" (378), back into uncontrollable circumstances when the brain splinters and swerves from its groove. Consider poem 1277:

 While we were fearing it, it came-
 But came with less of fear
 Because that fearing it so long
 Had almost made it fair-

 There is a Fitting-a Dismay-
 A Fitting-a Despair-
 'Tis harder knowing it is Due
 Than knowing it is Here.

 The Trying on the Utmost
 The Morning it is new
 Is Terribler than wearing it
 A whole existence through.

Note the Edgar Allan Poe/Stephen King "it." You're not quite sure what "it" is but you know it's not nice. "It" repeated eight times. "A repetitive rhythm, a monotonous melody ... obsessive litanies?" Clearly the anticipation of horror (which I have defined as terror) is more chilling than the finality of horror. "'Tis harder knowing it is Due/Than knowing it is Here." Horror envelopes, overwhelms, even paralyses but it eventually leads to death or stasis; it ends. Terror waits, hovers, lurks, cocks; it stretches and shatters the nerves; it's always around the next comer. In a phrase I used once in one of my own Dickinsonian poems: "hoffor's cooked/terror's cooking." You come apart more from fearing fear than from fear itself, more from the anticipation of the event than the event itself In a Dickinson poem volcanoes pop, lightning bolts, the sea swells and the earth quakes, unexpectedly. The mind is always a dicey, unreliable "Haunted House" (670), likely to blow off at any minute, more terrible in moments of calm than in moments of fury. "When Etna basks and puffs/Naples is more afraid/Tban when she shows her Garnet Tooth....... (1146). Better to prepare poetically, better to act out in words first what will be scorched later into the flesh, better to wear the crown of thorns "A whole existence through" than try on "the UtmosvMe morning it is New."

(15)
And yet for all the bleakness in some Dickinson poems, there is a strange exhilaration, a peculiarjauntiness, "a casual brutality." Take poem 1127 as an example:

 Soft as the massacre of Suns
 By Evening's Sabres slain

There is no end punctuation in this haiku-like knot as if to suggest a nightly and unending "massacre." The subject remains unclear, a mystery. The reader fills in the blank. What is as soft as the massacre of slain suns? Could it be the mind, the breakdown and breakup, the splintering and swerving of the mind? The lines seem throwaways, casual, a prelude to the longer music to come. But the music and the image are complete: a soft violence, a subtle unnerving. The four main pictograms "Soft....... Suns" ..."Sabres....... slain"- alliteratively lull the reader into what turns out to be, upon reflection, a disturbing calm.

(16)
Often the dramatized mind in Dickinson-and her poems are frequently performative, more than descriptive, of certain moods of mind-falls, swerves, panicks, erupts or cracks, but all within a spritely rhythm. There is a zesty despair in Dickinson partly accountable by the structural rhythm and rhyme, partly accountable by "A Wounded Deer-leaps highest-" (165). And perhaps a third factor: Dickinson's poetry has a quality of someone who has come through, who has survived, who has lived to tell her tale. In her sly knowingness she writes in poem 816:

 A Death blow is a Life blow to Some
 Who till they died, did not alive become-
 Who had they lived, had died but when
 They died, Vitality begun.

In Dickinson there is more than one "Crucifixion," more than one deathhas any poet in English "died" more often in her own poems?-but also quiet resurrections, resuscitations, resignations, the will to go on despite the periodic and dreaded swerving from the groove.

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