Deconstructing Dickinson's Dharma

Adam Katz
The Emily Dickinson Journal, Volume 22, Number 2, 2013, pp. 46-64
(Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/edj.2013.0017
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The Emily Dickinson Journal, Vol. XXII, No. 2
46
2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press
ADAM KATZ
Deconstructing Dickinsons Dharma
It was . . . myself I encountered.
Paul Celan, The Meridian
Youre much too much, and just too very very
To ever be in Websters Dictionary
Johnny Mercer, Too Marvelous for Words
D
id Emily Dickinson write poetry? Trick question? However
unmistakably a poet, she was a philosophical poet, and the philosophers
job is to combat the easy assumptions of common sense, as the example of her
many defnition poems shows; or one might say, redefnition poemseven of
defnition itselfor even anti-defnition (Jed Deppman 128-134). Scholars have
emphasized the question of genre, with Virginia Jackson notably contending that
[w]hatever genre we might assign to Dickinsons lines during the years they were
exchanged between Dickinson and various individuals, they became lyrics in
1890 by posthumous readerly fat (87), and Cristanne Miller recently countering
that Dickinsons poetry [does in fact] ft [the] model of how lyric was defned
in the early and mid nineteenth-century United States, even while Dickinson
never uses the word lyric (24, 28). But apart from whether they are this or that
type of poetry, what happens when, taken literally, the poems improbably deny
they are poetry as such? Having established the equation Poetry = Love = God, To
pile like Thunder to its close (Fr1353) implies by algebra in its last line, For none
see God and live - , that if we are beholding poetry, it must have either killed us
on the spot, or else been presented upon meeting God in heaven afer death. We do
not appear to be dead, ergo this is not a poem. Yet its line This - would be Poetry
- (would be, i.e. is-not) implies that here there is something bearing the property
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is not a poem or is a not-poem. This can refer not just to the crumbl[ing]
entity described in the frst two lines but to the poem (or not-poem) in which it
is contained. Set apart between a line break on one side and a dash on the other,
This even refers to itself as referring. Just when the poems atempt the difcult
denial of their very status as poetry, they assert the bare fact of their own existence
as constructions of language. Perhaps this is what it means to take them literally:
not in the usual sense of literal as precisely what words are chosen and thus what
they signify, but that it is precisely these words doing the signifying. Highlighting
this same concern with existence or thatness as opposed to essence or whatness
as a defning problem for poetry, over a century later Barret Waten writes: If
existence is the question, writing will be perceived insofar as that is the question it
asks (154). The whatness- or content-function is not simply canceled, but instead
ceases to point entirely outward toward the referent, and instead partly points
back at or contains its own existence or form as pointing.
While it may not seem particularly surprising that on some level the poems
should assent that they themselves exist and are language, this is a bone of contention
between two scholarly tendencies. In harmony with other Eastern comparisons,
Yanbin Kang sees Dickinson pursuing an essential and elemental silence where
linguistic implement is stripped away in favor of unspeakable nature or the
Dao (Hummingbirds 79, 77). For Roland Hagenbchle, by contrast, [s]he and
nature are rivals; Dickinsons symbols [are] no longer anchored in the world
of natural things. . . . What is lef is . . . the movement . . . of language (151, 150,
153). These two apparently opposed readings, here respectively termed apophatic
and semiotic, are paradoxically both convincing. So rather than recalling Robert
McClure Smiths sense in The Seductions of Emily Dickinson that scholars ofen
project their personal proclivities on the poet, the apophatic-semiotic opposition
bespeaks a critical polemics structuring Dickinsons text from within. While she
did not use these terms, apophasis and semiological appear in Websters
1844 American Dictionary of the English Language and in the titles of fruitful studies
of Dickinsons work.
1
The fact that, taken together, the terms point in opposite
directions, simultaneously away from language and back toward it, indicates that
it may be especially illuminating to search for these two perspectives uneasy
conjunction inside individual poems. Dickinsons literal emphasis on languages
material thatness, semiotic both as pertaining to signs and in Julia Kristevas later
sense as a postmodern rallying cry, tends to appear conspicuously paired in the
poems with apophatic emphasis on what-language-is-not: Poetry in To pile
like Thunder, and in general the transcendent in the complementary senses of
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48
what is higher or beter, and of what is over against the subject as its object or over
against languages thatness as its whatness or referent.
Nature has both these senses of the transcendent in Nature is what We
see - (Fr721B): objects (Hill, Afernoon, Squirrel, Eclipse, Bumble
bee, Bobolink, Sea, Thunder, Cricket) for the see[ing] . . . hear[ing]
subject, and a higher realm or ideal (Heaven, Harmony, Melody). Natures
fnal defnition as what we have no Art to say is explicitly apophatic, as is its
occurrence in quotation marks at the beginning of each stanza as though to place
this word under erasure and indicate that it is only a placeholder which does not
reach the thing. Simultaneously, however, quoting semiotically emphasizes the act
of language and is even itself such an act which circumvents some of the barriers to
adequate expression; moreover, the fact that in the last lines of the frst two stanzas
it occurs without quotation marks intimates that sometimes the word is adequate
enough not to need erasure, and the version sent to Susan Dickinson only places
it in quotation marks once (Fr721A). Last, the fnal property the poem atributes
to nature is Sincerity, which connotes a particular way of using language. Even
if we are not fully capable of adequacy or sincerity in our defnitions of the thing,
nature herself is this ideal of representation being tantamount to its object. In
apophatically accepting the impoten[ce of] our Wisdom . . . To Her Sincerity - ,
we semiotically posit the existence in principle of language or wisdom that is not
impotent but sincere. Rather than combating the semiotic perspective with the
apophatic or vice versa, the poet is interested in transcendent objects, ostensibly
accessible only apophatically and thus perhaps not at all, that yet somehow allow
language a role in their presentation and constitution. The poems leverage all their
reserves to represent this uneasy synchrony between representation and its other,
the transcendent.
2
The poems are apophatic when they emphasize that language is inadequate,
and can best facilitate access to the transcendent by silencing and erasing itself.
They are semiotic when they emphasize that language remains on hand, even
blocks the transcendent. They express these perspectives in their content, and
re-express or complicate them with their form. The content of the line For
none see God and live - (Fr1353) is a classic case of negative theology, but this
apophasis is complicated by the fact that, having equated God with poetry, To
pile like Thunder is yet formally a poem. The poems own formal existence
is simultaneously relied on as a premise by its argumentative content, and
retroactively put in question by the absurd conclusion this premise supports,
namely that, if this really were a poem, we would be dead by now. As a result,
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Poetry is removed to the status of the transcendent, leaving behind here in the
immanent position the bare semiotic existence of the contradiction as such (looks
like a poem, says it is not). The content of Nature is what We see - (Fr721), by
contrast, largely dematerializes linguistic existence or thatness in favor of what
is referred to by the languages essence or whatnessdematerializes immanent
thatness to make way for the thatness of something else, something that cannot
quite be called nature. But just as, both formally (the play of quotation marks)
and in content (Sincerity), Nature is what We see - lets language remain
handy in the process of transcending and at-hand in the transcendent, To pile
like Thunder lets its immanent language turn back into transcendent poetry by
means of an artifcers labyrinth of double and triple negatives. Neither case is
entirely apophatic nor entirely semiotic: the transcendent, which is by defnition
alien to language, and language, which is by defnition a bane to transcending,
are in both poems represented as uneasily abeting each other in a symbiosis here
termed communication.
In solidarity with the sense that True Poems fee - (Fr1491), To pile like
Thunder fips its denial that it is a poem into a positive property of poetry as
such, equivocating between is not a poem and poetry itself does-not-exist:
To pile like Thunder to its close
Then crumble grand away
While everything created hid
This - would be Poetry -
Or Love - the two coeval come -
We both and neither prove -
Experience either and consume -
For none see God and live -
(Fr1353)
Beyond the palpability and afect of description in the opening lines, initially
the most striking thing about this poem is its complex argument, requiring for a
premise the self-refection of writer and readers on the continuation of their own
vitality while staying in the poems presence, that since we did not die it was never
a poem. Apart from the four unlikely possibilities that while we have not died we
are just about tothat in some obscure sense we do die in every moment and get
reborn in the next, that this is heaven, or that the poem is set in a fctional world
where poetry is something quite diferent from how it is in the actual worldTo
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pile like Thunder literally writes of poetry as something transcendent to and
absent from our immanent Experience of bare language. But absence is converted
from being poetrys mere location (or Illocality Fr824) to being poetrys essential
defnition. By simile with thunder, poetry is what pile[s] . . . to its close / Then
crumble[s] grand away. Poetry is not just missing from our experience, it carries
itself of by its very nature to the transcendent realm (poems fee, and poems fee).
Moreover, Webster has to make in the etymology of poem and in the defnition
of create. While everything created hid denotes the temporary blindness
afer a bright fash, but also algebraically suggests that while poetry was carrying
itself away, poetry hid. So rather than being here and then leaving, poetry is that
which had always already withdrawn. This is reinforced if, as we are encouraged
to interpolate be before consume[d] in line seven, we make the less obvious
insertion of is before created, causing hid to switch from verb to adjective
and become a property pertaining even from birth to every created thing as such,
poetry among them. Rather than simply defning itself as not-poetry, language can
start to communicate the defnition of poetry as not-language.
Through the onomatopoeic efects in the frst two lines, however, poetry
threatens to communicate with language a litle too clearly. Dickinson imputes
a temporality and a teleology to thunder and poetry. The rumbly slant echo
of Thunder in crumble and the oral opening up of grand away afer the
dark sounds of Thunder . . . close . . . crumble suggest that this temporality
is a peculiarly sonic grumbling deterioration toward the unoccupied clearing of
silence. But these lines sonic performance is supposed to help atribute this sonic
temporality to poetry; the fact that these lines also make the sounds is a problem.
While we might imagine that poetry as what crumbles away to the transcendent
is allowed to make the immanent sound of its departing, the parallel sense from
hid of poetry as always already not-here invites the reading that poetrys
crumbling is rather a process of atrition whereby its presence-elsewhere goes
from something to nothing at all without ever touching immanence and language.
That in illustrating poetrys sound the opening lines of To pile like Thunder also
onomatopoeically instantiate that sound sucks us into a liars paradox. If poetrys
sound stays here in the lines, poetry does not crumble away from them. If poetry
is not crumbly, these sounds are not poetry. If they are not, it is because poetry has
crumbled away. So these crumbly lines are poetry. So they are not. And so on. The
same paradox arises if we allow hid, poetrys transcendent predicate, to modify
This, languages self-indexing sign, in the frst stanzas hid / Thisanother
non-obvious reading, yet one whose syntactic permission is further granted by
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the absence of punctuation afer hid. Altogether, the lines do not manage to
distance themselves from poetry enough. This is why a subsequent negative is
required: This - would be Poetry - . Poetry would be, but is not, crumbling
because crumblings association with a particular sound tethers it too tightly to
Experience, whereas Poetry remains inefable. Complete crumbling away has
itself crumbled from these lines, which therefore are not poetic.
This triple negative, which reduces to a single unilateral negation of the poetic
status of To pile like Thunder, is uneasily juxtaposed with a multifaceted double
negative that arises from discounting the sonic paradox to make space for logical
considerations, ultimately readmiting poetry to the texts immanent language.
First, crumbl[ing] . . . away . . . would be Poetry if we saw it: then we would die
and it would recede or crumble relative to our own withdrawal from life to death.
We do not see it, so it does not go anywhere, on one hand remaining permanent
rather than crumbling but on the other being already crumbled away insofar as it is
intrinsically withdrawn from sight. This bifurcation of crumbling replaces its prior
sense as atrition-elsewhere with a new sense as permanence-elsewhere: poetry
gets to exist if just transcendently. Second, however, crumbl[ing] . . . away . . .
would be Poetry except we see it and do not die, snapping the equation of poetry
with God or simply rejecting the major premise that the sight cannot be survived.
While partly confuting what the poem literally says and reverting to common
sense, this reading is supported by the last stanza of the roughly contemporaneous
No man saw awe, nor to his house, which appears to comment on To pile like
Thunder, casting suspicion on Ralph W. Franklins dating the following earlier:
Am not consumed, old Moses wrote,
Yet saw Him face to face -
That very physiognomy
I am convinced was this
(Fr1342)
For Jed Deppman this stanza remains profoundly apophatic: The speaker cites
the searing theophany of Moses not for anything positive or visionary but because
his gasping monosyllables register bare survival, an experience outside . . . all
vocabularies . . . and representations (193, 201). Dickinsons quotation marks
here operate like those in Nature is what We see - : even if Moses can begin to
articulate his experience, we cannot quite appropriate his language for our own. Yet
the last two lines, in their polysyllabic confdence, state that awe can be couched
in Mosess terms, and moreover that it is immanently on handotherwise this
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would be inappropriate. [C]onsumed, saw, and the emphatic this speak
directly to To pile like Thunder, giving the impression of conficting reports
from opposite sides of the very same event: only aferward can it be realized as
having been survivable all along. Ultimately, its close; this is the reading we get
from the frst line of To pile like thunder if we imagine that Dickinsons habitual
mispunctuation of its has a modicum of deliberation this time. Even if poetry
remains something The Spirit could not show (Fr1342), it is hidden just past the
horizon rather than infnitely distant. If poetry is poetrys inaccessibility, then to
the precise extent these lines are not poetry, they are. Liars paradox again, but this
is another way of saying that the peculiar communication in this poem between the
here and the beyond is a disorienting stroboscopic alternation between negative
(triple negative) and positive (double negative).
In the brief and probing Emily DickinsonMystic Poet? Sister Mary
Humiliata (Anita Caspary) cites:
Through the Straight Pass of Sufering
The Martyrs even trod -
Their feet opon Temptation -
Their faces - opon God -
A Stately - Shriven Company -
Convulsion playing round -
Harmless as Streaks of Meteor -
Opon a Planets Bond -
Their faith the Everlasting Troth -
Their Expectation - fair -
The Needle to the North Degree
Wades so - through Polar Air -
(Fr187)
Whereas mystics wrote of the martyrs with a burning desire to share their sacrifce,
Miss Dickinson writes with strong appreciation but with detachment . . . there is
never the deliberate puting-by even of the infnitesimal which is the asceticism
of the mystic (Humiliata 148-149). While perhaps thinking of the needle at the
end of Through the Straight Pass as one of the infnitesimal things for whose
metaphor[ical] resonances Dickinson hung onto such extraordinary . . . perception,
Sister Humiliata does not observe that the needle can be a metaphor for language
(148-149). But viewed thus, the needle is the key that unlocks a secret garden of
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startling imagery behind the martyrs embodied unwaveringness. Dickinsons
detachment from complete renunciation is mirrored in the renunciates relation
to their transcendent target as a semiotic relation of language or pointing rather
than apophatic immediacy; the needle is a metaphor for language, which in turn
accesses the divine through a relation of metaphor or signifcation rather than
directly. Yet a compass needle would pass only metaphorically through polar air;
it is in fact the line the needle draws between itself and the pole that punctures the
poles atmosphere. Taken literally, the fgure of the needle Wad[ing] . . . through
polar air evokes the situation in which the explorers are so close their needle
starts to spin and no longer points at all except by its breakdown; how else make
sense of Convulsion playing round than as the needle dancing erratically around
all 360 degrees? What a spectacular metaphor for the apophatic transcending of
language, juxtaposed here with the less elaborate sense in which the needle merely
represents representation rather than its erasure, and juxtaposed also with the
two facts that the Convulsi[vely] spinning needle (1) still points straight down,
and anyway (2) is deployed by the poem as a metaphor for (a representation
of) apophasis and thus precisely the opposite of apophasis as such. In content,
the poem juxtaposes apophatic (spinning) and semiotic (pointing); formally,
it juxtaposes this sophisticated countervailing of metaphors with linguistic
coherence pushed to the breaking point if not quite past. The juxtaposition of these
two juxtapositions is this poems peculiar form of communication.
What if this needle picks the lock of all the poems, and Dickinsons peculiar
form of truthher dharma? In Through the Straight Pass, the needle as a
metaphor for language, a sign for the sign, indexes her detachment from the
apophatic extreme and her concomitant apophatic-semiotic communication. If
not all, many prima facie mystical or apophatic poems turn out to stake complex
positions along the apophatic-semiotic spectrum by similarly insinuating a self-
asserting sign, ofen lurking near the poems ends, like Sincerity as the last
word of Nature is what We see - (Fr721). At stake in the precise status thereby
imputed to language are the questions of which conceptual systems prove most
illuminating when brought into the poems vicinity and of whether something
like a dharma, a practice of contemplation, can be learned from the poems and
applied in our own lives. For example, Kang can reciprocally illuminate Dickinson
and Daoism partly because Dickinsons persistent apophatic themes allow for a
connection with Daoisms strong apophasis (Name beauty, and ugliness is [Lao
Tzu 2]). Thus Kang connects the liberating nomadic wisdom of non-possession
in Ive known a Heaven, like a Tent - (Fr257) with a Daoist empty mind, a
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state of No Trace (Non-action 7). This sensitivity to the aesthetic of simple
furniture (6) and the close connection of Daoism and Chan (Chinese Buddhism)
and the laters translation as Zen enable Kang here implicitly to contextualize
Christopher Benfeys remarks that Dickinson seems an adept of Zen because her
discovery of aesthetic possibilities [in] the plain style of nineteenth-century New
England interiors resonates with the wabi aesthetic . . . [of] the austere [Japanese]
tea-room (83, 85). Now, the overtones of Daoist lassitude and Zen austerity in
the No Trace in Ive known a Heaven, like a Tent - , paired with the semiotic
assertion that should be co-discernible, suggest Theravada (literally, old school)
Buddhism as an additional conversation partner, in Deppmans phrase, for
geting us still closer to Dickinsons thinking (17). As anticipated, a few lines before
No Trace - no Figment - of the Thing, the miles of Stare - lef by the heavens
nomadic absconsion themselves signalize a Shows Retreat - (Fr257). Over and
above just pulling back from apophasis themselves, these lines contest the very
possibility of the apophatic elimination of language, since even signlessness
signifes the Things transcendent Retreat. This is this poems peculiar storm of
communication.
Given the extent to which Dickinsons semiotic sensitivity motivated poem
afer apophatic poems closure, the great number of poems that open up when
viewed apophatically-semiotically cannot be tabulated here systematically.
To specify the sense in which scholars interested in the Eastern resonances of
Dickinsons own personal brand of apophatic-semiotic communication should
turn to Theravada Buddhism as an especially illuminating conversation partner
for the poet, it is frst necessary to sketch further the breadth of semiotic assertion
in the poems, and also sketch some of the theoretical discourses that apparently
oppose each other in relation to this aspect of the poetry. As an example of what
we are looking for:
Exhiliration is the Breeze
That lifs us from the Ground
And leaves us in another place
Whose statement is not found -
Returns us not, but afer time
We soberly descend
A litle newer for the term
Opon Enchanted Ground -
(Fr1157)
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We cannot fully defne exhilaration because, in classic apophatic fashion, it
transports us somewhere Whose statement is not found - . But term is a pun:
literally here it means period or interval, but also word, as in the term to be
defned. So on one hand the full process of exhilaration exceeds language, but on
the other it is precisely the word for that process rather than the process itselfthe
words thatness as referring rather than its whatness as referentthat makes it all
happen. In terms of communication, this is really two poems, one about a thrilling
inefable encounter, the other about languages dominating power; to arbitrate
the dispute, we can ask if the poems language exhilarates us. Particulars aside,
we are on the lookout for terms like term that assert their own factual existence
as language near poems ends. There came a Day - at Summers full - (Fr325)
associates apophasis and nakedness: The time was scarce profaned - by speech - /
The symbol of a word / Was needless - as at Sacrament - / The Wardrobe - of Our
Lord - . So clothes can symbolize language. In the last line of To fght aloud, is
very brave - (Fr138), the soldiers nations do not see Who charge within the
bosom / The Cavalry of Wo - are dressed like Angels in Uniforms of snow:
these uniforms simultaneously mark and erase their gallant[] wearers. The
second to last line of It sounded as if the Streets were running - (Fr1454) reveals
that the transcendent variously (un)named Eclipse, Awe, and Time is in fact
Nature . . . in an Opal Apron: the punchline is that nature is uniformed as nature.
This raises the context of the many poems featuring white clothes. For example,
in the last line of A Wife - at Daybreak - I shall be - (Fr185) the unprecedented
consummate encounter unexpectedly (though prefgured by line twos semiotic
Flag) turns out to be structured, like language, as re-presentation (Master -
Ive seen the Face - before - ); this unexpected seventh line in the pre-established
six line stanzaic structure retroactively erases the cadence fortifying the far more
mystical previous line (Eternity - Im coming - Sir - ), and ambiguously itself
reinscribes that determining efect. Simpler examples of semiotic assertion in
otherwise apophatic poems include the Etruscan invitation - / Toward Light -
(never mind that Speech went numb - ) that concludes Unto like Story - Trouble
has enticed me - (Fr300); the Wick lit by and illuminating the adjoining Zone
behind The spry Arms of the Wind (Fr802); and the Crucifxal sign Lif[ed]
at the end of He touched me, so I live to know (Fr349) despite the dominating
silence[].
Since Prayer, a form of speech, is a litle implement (Fr623), the small
(Fr307) Tools (Fr475) and devices Dickinson regularly recognizes as instrumental
in transcending toward an ostensibly unspeakable deliri[um] (Fr360) may all be
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56
metaphors for language. Thus the liquor never brewed that leaves the litle
Tippler / Leaning against the - Sun is nevertheless served in Tankards scooped in
Pearl - (Fr207), and Bring me the sunset in a cup - (Fr140) nears its end With
implements to fy away. There is a double entendre here: the implements aid in
fying away or may themselves fy away; transcending by means of implements is
also transcending beyond implements. If Dickinson ofen subverts the transcendent
by reinsinuating language into the mix, she also subverts language. It is too soon to
say if she picked a side. [S]tem in Of Bronze - and Blaze - (Fr319), Steeple in
Have any like Myself (Fr723), Trigger in He scanned it - Staggered - (Fr994),
Phials in Dying at my music! (Fr1003), and Crease in This me that walks
and works must die (Fr1616A) prolong the indecision. It is likewise unclear if the
several poems where a sign remains at or afer death conceive this sign as efectively
pointing toward the transcendent aferlife or atesting the impossibility of doing so:
these signs include Promoted Writ[ten] by Angels on the beaten Soldiers
brow at the end of Who never lost, are unprepared (Fr136); the penultimate
Beads opon the Forehead in I like a look of Agony (Fr339); the variant mean
in the last line of To know just how He sufered - would be dear - (Fr688); know
as the last word of The Sun kept seting - seting - still (Fr715); the signifcance of
the cofn for the bereaved in A Cofn - is a small Domain (Fr890); the Not at
Home The Soul . . . Inscribes opon the Flesh / . . . [before] tak[ing] a fne aerial
gait / Beyond the Writ of Touch in The Overtakelessness of Those (Fr894); the
unclaimed Hat and Jacket / [that] Sum the History We [otherwise] shall never
know - of How the Waters closed above Him (Fr941); the lone Orthography /
Of the Elder Dead, the Winds . . . / [that] Recollect the way - , and the Key /
Dropped by memory - in Afer a hundred years (Fr1149); and the Asterisk
for Samuel Bowles that ambiguously Secrete[s] The whole of Immortality at
the end of Who abdicated ambush (Fr1571C). Do these signs communicate the
transcendent aferlife, or its immanent absence?
Sometimes, subjunctive syntax suggests the poems themselves are semiotic
implements like those their content asserts. The blind speaker of Before I got
my eye put out - (Fr336) says it would be so overwhelming to see again that
The news would strike me dead - . Reading this as a critique of Ralph Waldo
Emersons transcendental vision, Michelle Kohler writes that visionary access to
the transcendent is so reckless that just the news of its mere possibility . . . would
destroy her (48). But the complex communicative power Dickinson regularly
imputes to language conversely suggests the news is primarily the force to be
reckoned with. Its own efusive descriptions of the visible world (The Motions
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of the Dipping Birds - / The Mornings Amber Road - Fr336) already give the
poem the same status as this implemental news. The subjunctive frames within
which the poem ensconces this idea of the news (were it told to me . . . That I
might have the sky . . . my Heart / Would split . . . The news would strike me
dead - ) further associate poem and news because the subjunctive indicates its
content is not factual but represented. As Kohler writes, the perpetual deferral of
the subjunctive assert[s] that such vision could only ever be a linguistic prospect
(48). Poem and news share the status of representation. However, since The news
would strike me dead - , the fact that the speaker is alive enough to keep writing
the poem suggests the poem is not the news of impending sight but merely about
that news. This further suggests that, like To pile like Thunder, Before I got
my eye put out asserts itself as not news-that-stays-news but bare subjunctive
language: would works the same way in both cases. Another late poem supports
this reading:
Could mortal Lip divine
The elemental Freight
Of a delivered Syllable -
Twould crumble with the weight -
The Prey of Unknown Zones -
The Pillage of the Sea
The Tabernacles of the Minds
That told the Truth to me -
2 elemental] undeveloped 3 a] its
5-6] In spans in Unknown Zones - / Irreverenced - in
the Sea - 8 Truth] News -
(Fr1456A)
This usage corroborates the sense from To pile like Thunder that crumble
(mysteriously, Franklin notes, marked for an alternative, none given) is something
we would do relative to the thus evanescent news (perhaps us crumbling is the
alternative for poetry crumbling). Most importantly, the subjunctive Could and
Twould cast this piece as an immanent linguistic frame around a transcendent
type of language we do not divine, otherwise reading aloud is suicide. Dickinson
again indexes a complex communication between language and poetry, language
and news, and most generally immanence and transcendence.
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58
By extending into syntax her vigilant tracking awareness of linguistic forms
persistence against transcendent content, Dickinson contextualizes more poems as
both apophatic and semiotic. Among these poems is As if I asked a common Alms
(Fr14), which she prefaced to Thomas Wentworth Higginson with the apophatic I
have no Saxon, now - (L265). Language fails me, Thomas Johnson translates.
The subjunctive frst words As if, however, say the opposite, that what follows
is a linguistic representation. This poem tells basically the same overwhelming
story as Before I got my eye put out - , the laters Mornings Amber Road -
sharing its content and a certain glowing onomatopoeic impressionism with the
formers fascicle variant And food me with the Dawn (Fr14), though this early
poem promises a peculiarly pure form of communication. The version she sent to
Higginson ends:
As if I asked the Orient
Had it for me a Morn -
And it should lif its purple Dikes,
And shater me with Dawn!
Shatering or fooding with dawn exceed a mere morn, but while my Heart /
Would split and The news would strike me dead - simply denote fatal
overwhelming, here there is a rare consistency between immanent language and
transcendent event. Morn is not by any means the wrong word for what is
As if received; what is received is just an extremely intense form of what was
requested. This consistency is simultaneously distanced by the subjunctive frame
and, as the consistency of the frame with the framed, inveterately optimistic about
its own consummate communication. That is, as represented within the frame
of As if . . . , the consistency of morn with shatering dawn is a mere promise of
communicationbut it promises that representation can transcend toward full reality.
The subjunctive mood as a metaphor for language also contextualizes the especially
mystical I think To Live - may be a Bliss (No . . . Diference . . . But Certainties of
Sun - / Midsummer - in the Mind - Fr757) as a discourse on communication (What
Plenty - it would be / Had all my Life but been Mistake). And I would not paint - a
picture - , another poem that denies it is a poem (this time by denying its speaker is a
poet), reconnects with the transcendent (Raised sofly to the Ceilings - / And out, and
easy on) by insinuating a semiotic implement (a talk[ing] lip of Metal - / The pier
to my Pontoon - ) whose transcendent instrumentality metaphorically rubs of on the
subjunctive frame around it (What would the Dower be, / Had I the Art Fr348). Last
in this chain of examples, speaking of the Orient as the source of the Dawn,
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59
Miller has recently shown that, while Dickinson had litle direct interest in Eastern
thought, travel to the East remained for her a transcendent metaphortempered
by the semiotic compulsion to tell [that] bridges the world we know and the
unknown where we long to stay (142; quoting Fr132).
These brief indications illustrate that poem afer poem mixes form and
content to express a complex, multi-layered communication bridg[ing] two
ostensibly incommensurable realms, language and the transcendent. While each
poem does this in its own way and a rigorous typology of Dickinsons many
modes of communication is far beyond the present scope, the fact that the poems
express communication as such rather than just the apophatic or semiotic should
allow for communication as well between scholars who see the poet veering
strongly toward either of these poles. For example, like Sister Humiliata and
a number of other scholars, Kohler sees Dickinson as interested in a mesh of
metaphors that will not sublate the material complexity of its own vehicle (37).
Dickinson seen from this perspective helps pave the ground for the postmodern
semiotization of the symbolic, subversive exacerbation of the bodily diferences
from which transcendent meaning is otherwise built (Kristeva 79). But Dickinsons
communication is not just a clamorous declaration of the antithesis, which
would not subvert anything because it would make the semiotic into the new
transcendent (Jacques Derrida, qtd. in Rodolphe Gasch 172). However ofen anti-
thetical, she also argues the thetic side, in Kristevas sense. For example, whereas
Before I got my eye put out thrives on paradox, simultaneously warning against
and asserting itself as language and even questioning the value of vision, a later
poem writen around the onset of Dickinsons actual eye troubles explores similar
paradoxes much more earnestly:
Dont put up my Thread & Needle -
Ill begin to Sow
When the Birds begin to whistle -
Beter stitches - so -
These were bent - my sight got crooked -
When my mind - is plain
Ill do seams - a Queens endeavor
Would not blush to own -
Hems - too fne for Ladys tracing
To the sightless knot -
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60
Tucks - of dainty interspersion -
Like a doted Dot -
Leave my Needle in the furrow -
Where I put it down -
I can make the zigzag stitches
Straight - when I am strong -
Till then - dreaming I am sowing
Fetch the seam I missed -
Closer - so I - at my sleeping -
Still surmise I stitch -
1 up] down 17 dreaming] deeming
19 sleeping - ] sighing -
(Fr681A)
[Z]igzag stitches is an apt metaphor for Dickinsons characteristically slant-
rhymed, dash-flled verse with its jagged right margin resulting from the frequent
alternation of four- and three-beat lines. Like a doted Dot - makes explicit the
analogy between sewing and language captured in the puns so and seams.
Blindness is a stylistic boon. But while Through the Straight Pass (Fr187)
pointedly interposed the signifying needle between the martyrs and their divine
object, here the humble wish apophatically to erase the semiotic stitches is
painfully sincere. As a symptom of an illness from which the poet dearly wants to
recover, zigzag stitches do not convincingly celebrate their potential subversion
of the transcendent authority of transparency. The poem denounces the erratic
immanence of its own text. Emerson also suspects trif[ing] language, though
one might expectsince the shop, the plough, and the ledger, refer[] to the
like cause by which light undulates and poets singthat the immanent world
is already a transcendent enough Poem (The American Scholar 69). That is,
since all the potentially signifcant things of our world are relics of the Over-soul
from which they emanated, language should not need to be transcended. But
emanation is also a devolution: some excess of phlegm in our constitution (The
Poet 448). While the scholars job is to embrace the common . . . the familiar,
the low (68-69), poetry rises above the ground line of familiar facts (Nature
23): the poet uses forms according to the [transcendent] life, and not according
to the [immanent] form (456). [T]he working of the Original Cause through
the instruments he has already made (23) is the argument that nevertheless
Adam Katz
61
has still to make[] the metre because there is something wrong with the
immanent as it was given (450).
The Dickinson of Dont put up my Thread & Needle - has a lot to discuss
with the ancient Eastern traditions she indirectly absorbs through Emerson and
Thoreau (Kang, Non-action 1). But language has a diferent status in Daoism
and Mahayana Buddhism than in the older Theravada Buddhism, which through
the global Vipassana Sangha has started to impact Western culture only in
recent decades.
3
Daoism, a strongly apophatic nature mysticism that developed
in China shortly before Gotamas awakening in India (Stephen Batchelor 7:50),
heavily infuenced the strain of Buddhism that arrived in China centuries later
and eventually spread to Japan.
4
The short central Mahayana Heart Sutra begins
by declaring the emptiness of the fve aggregates, six sense bases, and twelve
links of dependent co-arising (the basic phenomenological constituents of
reality) (60). Apart from the slight overuse of emptiness as a catch-all for the
three characteristics (impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, non-self), this apophatic
perspective is still consonant with the Theravadas: the contingent, rapidly arising
and perishing transcendent thing itself is empty of the autonomous, reliable
substantiality representation fallaciously connotes, as Dickinson captures perfectly:
We do not know the time we lose -
The awful moment is
And takes its fundamental place
Among the certainties -
A frm appearance still infates
The card - the chance - the friend -
The spectre of solidities
Whose substances are sand -
(Fr1139)
5
Afer similarly declaring the emptiness of phenomenological reality, however,
the Heart Sutra proclaims the emptiness of the Four Noble Truths: there is no
sufering, origin, cessation, or path (60). This is a problem because, in brief, the
emptiness of the aggregates, sense bases, and twelve links is exactly what the Four
Truths themselves proclaim. For these Truths, too, to be empty threatens their
capacity to maintain the emptiness of everything else. Such negative wisdom,
in Kangs phrase, is quite diferent from the parallel treatment of the Four Noble
Truths in the central Theravadin Satipathana Suta: Here he knows as it really
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62
is, this is dukkha [unsatisfactoriness, sufering]; he knows as it really is, this is
the arising of dukkha; he knows as it really is, this is the cessation of dukkha; he
knows as it really is, this is the way leading to the cessation of dukkha (13). And
even with regard to saa (cognition, recognition), one of the forms of language
in the Pali Canon: Here he knows . . . such is cognition, such its arising, such its
passing away . . . (10). Language itself is understood as contingent, unreliable;
but it is still bifurcated sufciently so that, while one form of language can be
recognized as illusory and let go of, anotherwhich does not subsequently
need to be renouncedcan codify and transmit this recognition; compare how
confdently Dickinsons We do not know the time we lose - knows we do not
know. In contemporary vipassana practice, this is mental noting, a proximate
cause of mindfulness (Bodhi 86). As a conceptual system, it has more in common
with Dickinsons tracking awareness of language within earnestly appropriated
apophatic cultural forms than does either the apophatic or semiotic perspective
by itself. Both those perspectives aim to overcome identifcation with respectively
language or the transcendent. This tendentious overcoming is the one thing
Dickinsons poetics of communication will overcome.
Notes
1. In The Missing All: Emily Dickinsons Apophatic Poetics, William Franke clearly
explains the incongruity between the apophatic and semiotic perspectives; for the
later, he borrows the term literalism from Jerome McGann in a fashion much like
my use of literal above (67). The title of Frankes article makes it clear which side
he takes. For an investigation very close to my own in considering the assertion of
language within the apophatic perspective, see Shira Wolosky, The Metaphysics of
Language in Emily Dickinson (As Translated by Paul Celan) and Apophatics and
Poetics: Paul Celan Translating Emily Dickinson.
2. My thinking about Dickinsons many fgurations of the transcendent is indebted
to Gary Lee Stonums investigation of her sublime. Because I do not address her
revision of the literary and philosophical traditions of the sublimerevision Stonum
discusses as Dickinson vying for mastery with and against the sublimeI prefer
the transcendent as simultaneously more neutral and connoting her dialogue with
Emerson. In her rivalry with the sublime, Stonums Dickinson consistently draws
upon nonimitative, nonidentifcatory resources, an apophatic gesture I hope to
contextualize in terms of its persistent semiotic complement (152, 187).
3. The passage on Buddhism Hiroko Uno demonstrates Dickinson may have read on
her teenage trip to the Boston Chinese Museum is historically inaccurate in its no-
holds-barred apophasis; it is not even Buddhist in the Mahayana sense. Whereas it
describes the devotees of this system . . . living without looking, speaking, hearing,
smelling, or feeling; yea, without eating, and without breathing, until they approach
to that enviable state of perfection, annihilation (qtd. Uno 59), the Second Noble
Truth clearly states that craving for non-being is one of the sources of sufering and of
continuation of the cycle of rebirths. The Boston passage instead seems to describe the
ascetic practices Gotama mastered before discovering they were fruitless and moving
on to develop the middle path, between excess and asceticism.
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63
4. In the non-scholarly Emily Dickinson, Accidental Buddhist, R. C. Allen tellingly slides
between Zen and Daoism without noting they are separate systems.
5. At the 2013 conference of the Emily Dickinson International Society, in the discussion
following the Orientalisms panel on which I presented a paper arguing along similar
lines, Melanie Hubbard observed that Dickinsons aptitude for Buddhist philosophies
of contingency and emptiness to which she was not directly exposed likely resulted
from her familiarity with Humean skeptical empiricism.
Works Cited
The following abbreviations are used to refer to the writings of Emily Dickinson:
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UP, 1998. Citation by poem number.
L The Leters of Emily Dickinson. ed. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward. 3 vols.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958. Citation by leter number.
Allen, R. C. Emily Dickinson, Accidental Buddhist. Victoria, BC: Traford, 2007.
Batchelor, Stephen. Spirit of Zen. Dharma talk at Gaia House (16 April 2007). htp://
dharmaseed.org/teacher/169/talk/12450/.
Benfey, Christopher. A Route of Evanescence: Emily Dickinson and Japan. Emily Dickinson
Journal 16.2 (Fall 2007): 81-93.
Bodhi, Bhikkhu, ed. A Comprehensive Manual of the Abhidhamma: The Abhidhammatha Sangaha
of Acariya Anuruddha. Onalaska, WA: Pariyati, 2000.
Celan, Paul. The Meridian. Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. Trans. John Felstiner.
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Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Poems. New York: Library of America, 1996.
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___. Dickinsons Non-action and (the Orient of) Thoreau/Emerson. 18 Mar. 2013. TS. Emily
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Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Trans. Sam Hamill. Boston: Shambhala, 2007.
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Smith, Robert McClure. The Seductions of Emily Dickinson. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1996.
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___. The Metaphysics of Language in Emily Dickinson (As Translated by Paul Celan).
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