A Loaded Gun (24 page)

Dickinson was another poet of outbursts.
“Why don't we talk about Dickinson and violence?” Christopher Benfey asked while I was with him at Mount Holyoke. “What does she say? ‘I measure every Grief I meet/With narrow, probing eyes' [Fr550]—it's all violence, all the time.” But there's a contradiction, a rupture in all that agony. “She is the great poet of pauses, the great poet of rest, the great poet of silence. . . . She knows what silence is.”

We cannot imagine Dickinson as another Julia Ward Howe, going to sleep one night in November of 1861 at Washington's Willard Hotel and waking up with the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” bouncing inside her brain.

“Unto the Dead/There's no Geography—”[Fr476], Dickinson sings in her own battle hymn of apocalyptic thunder. There's no redemption, no healing, only a world of tin behind God's “terrible swift sword.” We've all sunk into “Miles on Miles of Nought—” [Fr522] And she herself “Went out opon Circumference,” where no one could listen, no one else could see. She was all alone, “too proud—for Pride.” [Fr705] Suddenly the world itself has vanished, with all its battles and its watch fires.

“He lived the Life of Ambush” [Fr1571B], she wrote, talking about herself and the “Yellow Whip” [Fr1248] of her own words. And finally we come back to the most apocalyptic of all her poems. “My life had stood a loaded gun” may be a woman's war cry, a chant about Dickinson own aggression, her own sexuality, but it's also a poem about the end of the world, masquerading as a fairy tale about a huntsman who carries off a bride he's never even met—his Loaded Gun—on a honeymoon that's also a massacre, a shooting spree in those “Sovreign Woods” the Master owns. We can call him God or the Devil. It's of no real consequence—it's a godless world, fraught with evil, a slaughterhouse, ruled by the Master and his surrogate, the speaker's “Sovreign” Yellow Eye.

And Dickinson's “Whip lash” music, the violence of her images, her ability to stun us with “A perfect—paralyzing Bliss—” [Fr767], and with sounds “Soft as the massacre of Suns” [Fr1146]—seem outside morality, untamed, untouched. She may have seen “New Englandly” [Fr256], but with a wilder heart.

TEN

The Witch's Hour

1

A
DRIENNE
R
ICH COMES CLOSEST
to understanding the dilemma that Dickinson faced most of her life in a village where any female without the “Title divine” of marriage and motherhood was looked upon with suspicion and deep distrust. “
For motherhood,” Rich tell us, “is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.” But that entanglement comes at a great risk, as Dickinson must have known. Women who were neither wives nor mothers in nineteenth-century Amherst fell afoul of the quasi-religious belief that female creativity could only exist
“within the mothering role.” Everything else was considered mere decoration or some kind of witch's work. Once Dickinson lost Carlo, and morphed into an old maid, she was often mocked as the half-cracked village muse, and had to pay a price for that unholy power in the pencil at her side.

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

“T
ALENT
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.

“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.