deconstructing dickinson's dharma

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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

For additional information about this article

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/edj/summary/v022/22.2.katz.html





The Emily Dickinson Journal, Vol. XXII, No. 2

46

© 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press

ADAM KATZ

Deconstructing Dickinson’s Dharma

It was . . . myself I encountered.

—Paul Celan, “The Meridian”

You’re much too much, and just too very very

To ever be in Webster’s Dictionary

—Johnny Mercer, “Too Marvelous for Words”

Did Emily Dickinson write poetry? Trick question? Howeverunmistakably a poet, she was a philosophical poet, and the philosopher’s

job is to combat the easy assumptions of common sense, as the example of her

many denition poems shows; or one might say, “redenition” poems—even of

denition itself—or even “anti-denition” (Jed Deppman 128-134). Scholars have

emphasized the question of genre, with Virginia Jackson notably contending that

“[w]hatever genre we might assign to Dickinson’s lines during the years they were

exchanged between Dickinson and various individuals, they became lyrics in

1890” by posthumous readerly at (87), and Cristanne Miller recently counteringthat “Dickinson’s poetry [does in fact] t [the] model” of how “lyric” was dened

“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 it’s 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 aer death. We donot 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 rst 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 aempt the dicult

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 dening problem for poetry, over a century later Barre Waen 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 Hagenbüchle, by contrast, “[s]he and

nature are rivals”; “Dickinson’s symbols [are] no longer anchored in the world

of natural things. . . . What is le 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 Smith’s sense in The Seductions of Emily Dickinson that scholars oen

project their personal proclivities on the poet, the apophatic-semiotic opposition

bespeaks a critical polemics structuring Dickinson’s text from within. While she

did not use these terms, “apophasis” and “semiological” appear in Webster’s

1844 American Dictionary of the English Language and in the titles of fruitful studies

of Dickinson’s 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. Dickinson’s literal emphasis on language’s

material thatness, semiotic both as pertaining to signs and in Julia Kristeva’s 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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what is higher or beer, and of what is over against the subject as its object or over

against language’s thatness as its whatness or referent.

Nature has both these senses of the transcendent in “‘Nature’ is what We

see - ” (Fr721B): objects (“Hill,” “Aernoon,” “Squirrel,” “Eclipse,” “Bumble

bee,” “Bobolink,” “Sea,” “Thunder,” “Cricket”) for the “see[ing] . . . hear[ing]”

subject, and a higher realm or ideal (“Heaven,” “Harmony,” “Melody”). Nature’s

nal denition 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 rst 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 nal property the poem aributes

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 denitions 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 poem’s 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 language’s essence or whatness—dematerializes 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 articer’s labyrinth of double and triple negatives. Neither case is

entirely apophatic nor entirely semiotic: the transcendent, which is by denition

alien to language, and language, which is by denition a bane to transcending,

are in both poems represented as uneasily abeing each other in a symbiosis here

termed communication.

In solidarity with the sense that “True Poems ee - ” (Fr1491), “To pile like

Thunder” ips 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 it’s 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 aect of description in the opening lines, initially

the most striking thing about this poem is its complex argument, requiring for a

premise the self-reection of writer and readers on the continuation of their own

vitality while staying in the poem’s 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 to—that 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 ctional world

where poetry is something quite dierent from how it is in the actual world—“To




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pile like Thunder” literally writes o poetry as something transcendent to and

absent from our immanent “Experience” of bare language. But absence is converted

from being poetry’s mere location (or “Illocality” Fr824) to being poetry’s essential

denition. By simile with thunder, poetry is what “pile[s] . . . to it’s close / Then

crumble[s] grand away.” Poetry is not just missing from our experience, it carries

itself o by its very nature to the transcendent realm (poems ee, and poems ee).

Moreover, Webster has “to make” in the etymology of “poem” and in the denition

of “create.” “While everything created hid” denotes the temporary blindness

aer a bright ash, 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 dening itself as not-poetry, language can

start to communicate the denition of poetry as not-language.

Through the onomatopoeic eects in the rst two lines, however, poetry

threatens to communicate with language a lile 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” aer 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 aribute 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 poetry’s

crumbling is rather a process of arition whereby its presence-elsewhere goes

from something to nothing at all without ever touching immanence and language.

That in illustrating poetry’s sound the opening lines of “To pile like Thunder” also

onomatopoeically instantiate that sound sucks us into a liar ’s paradox. If poetry’s

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,” poetry’s transcendent predicate, to modify

“This,” language’s self-indexing sign, in the rst stanza’s “hid / This”—another

non-obvious reading, yet one whose syntactic permission is further granted by



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the absence of punctuation aer “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 crumbling’s association with a particular sound tethers it too tightly to

“Experience,” whereas “Poetry” remains ineable. 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 readmiing poetry to the text’s 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 arition-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. Franklin’s 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). Dickinson’s 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. Yetthe last two lines, in their polysyllabic condence, state that “awe” can be couched

in Moses’s terms, and moreover that it is immanently on hand—otherwise “this”




52

would be inappropriate. “[C]onsumed,” “saw,” and the emphatic “this” speak

directly to “To pile like Thunder,” giving the impression of conicting reports

from opposite sides of the “very” same event: only aerward can it be realized as

having been survivable all along. Ultimately, “it’s close”; this is the reading we get

from the rst line of “To pile like thunder” if we imagine that Dickinson’s 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 innitely distant. If poetry is poetry’s inaccessibility, then to

the precise extent these lines are not poetry, they are. Liar’s 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 Dickinson—Mystic Poet?” Sister Mary

Humiliata (Anita Caspary) cites:

Through the Straight Pass of Suering

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 Planet’s 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 sacrice,

Miss Dickinson writes with strong appreciation but with detachment . . . there is

never the deliberate puing-by even of the innitesimal 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 innitesimal “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. Dickinson’s

“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 signication 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

pole’s atmosphere. Taken literally, the gure 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 poem’s peculiar form of communication.

What if this needle picks the lock of all the poems, and Dickinson’s peculiar

form of truth—her 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, oen 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 Dickinson’s persistent apophatic themes allow for a

connection with Daoism’s strong apophasis (“Name beauty, and ugliness is” [Lao

Tzu §2]). Thus Kang connects the liberating nomadic “wisdom of non-possession”

in “I’ve known a Heaven, like a Tent - ” (Fr257) with a Daoist “empty mind, a




54

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 laer’s translation as Zen enable Kang here implicitly to contextualize

Christopher Benfey’s 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 “I’ve 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 Deppman’s phrase, for

geing us still closer to Dickinson’s thinking (17). As anticipated, a few lines before

“No Trace - no Figment - of the Thing,” the “miles of Stare - ” le by the heaven’s

nomadic absconsion themselves “signalize a Show’s 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

signies the Thing’s transcendent “Retreat.” This is this poem’s peculiar storm of

communication.

Given the extent to which Dickinson’s semiotic sensitivity motivated poem

aer apophatic poem’s 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

Dickinson’s own personal brand of apophatic-semiotic communication should

turn to Theravada Buddhism as an especially illuminating conversation partner

for the poet, it is rst 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 lis us from the Ground

And leaves us in another place

Whose statement is not found -

Returns us not, but aer time

We soberly descend

A lile newer for the termOpon Enchanted Ground -

(Fr1157)



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We cannot fully dene 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

dened. 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 itself—the

word’s thatness as referring rather than its whatness as referent—that makes it all

happen. In terms of communication, this is really two poems, one about a thrilling

ineable encounter, the other about language’s dominating power; to arbitrate

the dispute, we can ask if the poem’s 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 Summer’s 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 ght 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 pregured by line two’s semiotic

“Flag”) turns out to be structured, like language, as re-presentation (“Master -

I’ve 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 - I’m coming - Sir - ”), and ambiguously itself

reinscribes that determining eect. 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 “Crucixal sign” “Li[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 “lile 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




56

metaphors for language. Thus the “liquor never brewed” that leaves the “lile

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 y away.” There is a double entendre here: the implements aid in

ying away or may themselves y away; transcending by means of implements is

also transcending beyond implements. If Dickinson oen 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 aer death conceive this sign as eectively

pointing toward the transcendent aerlife or aesting the impossibility of doing so:

these signs include “‘Promoted’” “Writ[ten]” by “Angels” on the beaten “Soldier’s

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 suered - would be dear - ” (Fr688); “know”

as the last word of “The Sun kept seing - seing - still” (Fr715); the signicance of

the con for the bereaved in “A Con - is a small Domain” (Fr890); the “‘Not at

Home’” “The Soul . . . Inscribes opon the Flesh / . . . [before] tak[ing] a ne 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 “Aer 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 aerlife, 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

Emerson’s 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 eusive descriptions of the visible world (“The Motions



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of the Dipping Birds - / The Morning’s 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] it’s

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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By extending into syntax her vigilant tracking awareness of linguistic form’s

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 rst 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 laer’s “Morning’s Amber Road - ”

sharing its content and a certain glowing onomatopoeic impressionism with the

former’s fascicle variant “And ood 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 li it’s purple Dikes,

And shaer me with Dawn!

Shaering or ooding with dawn exceed a mere morn, but while “my Heart /

Would split” and “The news would strike me dead - ” simply denote fataloverwhelming, 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 shaering dawn is a mere promise of

communication—but 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 . . . Dierence . . . 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 soly 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 o on thesubjunctive 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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Miller has recently shown that, while Dickinson had lile direct interest in Eastern

thought, travel to the East remained for her a transcendent metaphor—tempered

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 aer 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 Dickinson’s 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 dierences

from which transcendent meaning is otherwise built (Kristeva 79). But Dickinson’s

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 Gasché 172). However oen anti-

thetical, she also argues the “thetic” side, in Kristeva’s 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 wrien around the onset of Dickinson’s actual eye troubles explores similar

paradoxes much more earnestly:

Dont put up my Thread & Needle -

I’ll begin to Sow

When the Birds begin to whistle -

Beer stitches - so -

These were bent - my sight got crooked -

When my mind - is plain

I’ll do seams - a Queen’s endeavor

Would not blush to own -

Hems - too ne for Lady’s tracing

To the sightless knot -




60

Tucks - of dainty interspersion -

Like a doed 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 Dickinson’s characteristically slant-

rhymed, dash-lled verse with its jagged right margin resulting from the frequent

alternation of four- and three-beat lines. “Like a doed 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 “tri[ing]” language, though

one might expect—since “the shop, the plough, and the ledger, refer[] to thelike cause by which light undulates and poets sing”—that the immanent world

is already a transcendent enough Poem (“The American Scholar” 69). That is,

since all the potentially signicant 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 scholar’s 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



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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 dierent 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 Gotama’s awakening in India (Stephen Batchelor 7:50),

heavily inuenced 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 ve 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 Theravada’s: 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 it’s fundamental place

Among the certainties -

A rm appearance still inates

The card - the chance - the friend -

The spectre of solidities

Whose substances are sand -

(Fr1139)5

Aer similarly declaring the emptiness of phenomenological reality, however,

the Heart Sutra proclaims the emptiness of the Four Noble Truths: “there is no

suering, 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 Kang’s phrase, is quite dierent from the parallel treatment of the Four Noble

Truths in the central Theravadin Satipahana Sua: “Here he knows as it really




62

is, ‘this is dukkha [unsatisfactoriness, suering]’; 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 sañña (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 suciently so that, while one form of language can be

recognized as illusory and let go of, another—which does not subsequently

need to be renounced—can codify and transmit this recognition; compare how

condently Dickinson’s “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 Dickinson’s 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 identication with respectively

language or the transcendent. This tendentious overcoming is the one thing

Dickinson’s poetics of communication will overcome.

Notes1. In “‘The Missing All’: Emily Dickinson’s Apophatic Poetics,” William Franke clearly

explains the incongruity between the apophatic and semiotic perspectives; for thelaer, he borrows the term “literalism” from Jerome McGann in a fashion much likemy use of literal above (67). The title of Franke’s article makes it clear which sidehe takes. For an investigation very close to my own in considering the assertion oflanguage within the apophatic perspective, see Shira Wolosky, “The Metaphysics ofLanguage in Emily Dickinson (As Translated by Paul Celan)” and “Apophatics andPoetics: Paul Celan Translating Emily Dickinson.”

2. My thinking about Dickinson’s many gurations of the transcendent is indebtedto Gary Lee Stonum’s investigation of her sublime. Because I do not address her

revision of the literary and philosophical traditions of the sublime—revision Stonumdiscusses as Dickinson vying for mastery with and against the sublime—I preferthe transcendent as simultaneously more neutral and connoting her dialogue withEmerson. In her “rivalry” with the sublime, Stonum’s Dickinson consistently “drawsupon nonimitative, nonidenticatory resources,” an apophatic gesture I hope tocontextualize in terms of its persistent semiotic complement (152, 187).

3. The passage on “Buddhism” Hiroko Uno demonstrates Dickinson may have read onher 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 itdescribes “the devotees of this system . . . living without looking, speaking, hearing,smelling, or feeling; yea, without eating, and without breathing, until they approachto 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 suering and ofcontinuation of the cycle of rebirths. The Boston passage instead seems to describe theascetic practices Gotama mastered before discovering they were fruitless and movingon to develop the middle path, between excess and asceticism.



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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 discussionfollowing the Orientalisms panel on which I presented a paper arguing along similar

lines, Melanie Hubbard observed that Dickinson’s aptitude for Buddhist philosophiesof contingency and emptiness to which she was not directly exposed likely resultedfrom her familiarity with Humean skeptical empiricism.

Works Cited

The following abbreviations are used to refer to the writings of Emily Dickinson:

Fr The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998. Citation by poem number.

L The Leers of Emily Dickinson. ed. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958. Citation by leer number.

Allen, R. C. Emily Dickinson, Accidental Buddhist. Victoria, BC: Traord, 2007.Batchelor, Stephen. “Spirit of Zen.” Dharma talk at Gaia House (16 April 2007). hp://

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 Abhidhammaha Sangaha

of Acariya Anuruddha. Onalaska, WA: Pariyai, 2000.Celan, Paul. “The Meridian.” Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. Trans. John Felstiner.

New York: Norton, 2001.Deppman, Jed. Trying to Think with Emily Dickinson. Amherst: U of Massachuses P, 2008.Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Poems. New York: Library of America, 1996.Franke, William. “‘The Missing All’: Emily Dickinson’s Apophatic Poetics.” Christianity and

Literature 58.1 (Autumn 2008): 61-80.Gasché, Rodolphe. The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reection. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard UP, 1986.Hagenbüchle, Roland. “Sign and Process: The Concept of Language in Emerson and

Dickinson.” Emerson Society Quarterly: A Journal of the American Renaissance 25.3 (1979):137-155.

Heart Sutra. Trans. Geshe Thupten Jinpa. In Gyatso, Tenzin, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. The

Essence of the Heart Sutra: The Dalai Lama’s Heart of Wisdom Teachings. Ed. and trans. Jinpa. Boston: Wisdom, 2005.Humiliata, Mary. “Emily Dickinson—Mystic Poet?” College English 12.3 (Dec. 1950): 144-149.

Jackson, Virginia. Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP,2005.

Kang, Yanbin. “Dickinson’s Hummingbirds, Circumference, and Chinese Poetics.” EmilyDickinson Journal 20.2 (2011): 57-82.

___. “Dickinson’s Non-action and (the Orient of) Thoreau/Emerson.” 18 Mar. 2013. TS. EmilyDickinson Workshop, SUNY Bualo.

Kohler, Michelle. “Dickinson’s Embodied Eyeball: Transcendentalism and the Scope ofVision.” Emily Dickinson Journal 13.2 (Fall 2004): 27-57.

Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: ColumbiaUP, 1984.Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Trans. Sam Hamill. Boston: Shambhala, 2007.Mercer, Johnny. “Too Marvelous for Words.” Ready, Willing, and Able. Warner Bros., 1937.




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Miller, Cristanne. Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century. Amherst, MA:U of Massachuses P, 2012.

Satipahana Sua. Trans. Analayo. In Analayo. Satipahana: The Direct Path to Realization.Birmingham, AL: Windhorse, 2003.

Smith, Robert McClure. The Seductions of Emily Dickinson. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1996.Stonum, Gary Lee. The Dickinson Sublime. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990.Uno, Hiroko. “Emily Dickinson’s Encounter with the East: Chinese Museum in Boston.”

Emily Dickinson Journal 17.1 (Spring 2008): 43-67.Waen, Barre. “The XYZ of Reading.” Frame (1971-1990). Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1997.Wolosky, Shira. “Apophatics and Poetics: Paul Celan Translating Emily Dickinson.”

Language and Negativity: Apophaticism in Theology and Literature. Ed. Henny Fiska Hägg.Oslo: Novus, 2000: 63-83.

___. “The Metaphysics of Language in Emily Dickinson (As Translated by Paul Celan).”Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature. Ed. Philip Leonard. New York: St.Martin’s, 2000.

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