Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (58 page)

Many Dickinson poems recount the trajectory of dying and then being buried, as if she wanted to redo Edgar Allan Poe, but with more acid as well as more philosophy. Poe specializes in the horror of being buried alive, as his classic stories such as "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Black Cat," and "The Cask of Amontillado" all suggest; Dickinson also finds burial stimulating, not just because the grave is our last dwelling place (hence worthy of our consideration), but also because some of us are doomed to imagine this itinerary over and over.
Being buried
starts to resonate as a figurative experience of great reach insofar as it adumbrates an immense voyage through time and space.

Now we all know that graves are rather small spaces, but of course that is just the literal side of the equation, and in Dickinson the grave becomes a portal, capping the first stage of a life and beckoning toward the unknown. What happens next? "Whereto?" is the question. Religions

offer their otherworldly scenarios; we have also seen how Joyce's Bloom can't get past "the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies," and well before that, Hamlet discoursed on Polonius's final destination as a kind of "supper," a feast for worms. Even at her nastiest, Dickinson eschews the decomposition route; instead, she heeds Hamlet's other voice, the nobler one that muses about death as the "undis-cover'd country." That country is about to be mapped.

One of her very strongest poems, "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" (no. J280), explores just this territory, showing us just how far you can go once you see death as something imaginatively open rather than materially or doctrinally closed. This poem seems to burst clear from any recognizable nineteenth-century framework, as it offers its picture of dying. What we have is a full-dress burial
on the inside.
Burial as mental event. Here is victory number one: death is imploded; death is metaphorized. According to this logic you could die several times a day, even more often. (Isn't this true to our hidden feelings?)

There is no way to posit for certain the ontology of this poem, in that we cannot determine whether the "experience" of dying is co-opted as a metaphor for other forms of distress (depression? misery? headache? hangover? all of these viable candidates for invoking "dying" as the way we feel), or whether the "event" is to be understood as a real burial (i.e., realism, a la Dickinson). Whatever the referent may be, the event itself has the relentless clarity of a nightmare. The mourners "in the Brain" are described as "treading—treading—till it seemed / That Sense was breaking through—," and the next stanza echoes this same pounding, figured "like a Drum— / Kept beating—beating—till I thought / My Mind was going numb—," inviting us to see this as both the funeral ceremony it appears to be, and also as the insistent pounding of either head or heart, the somatic syncopation that punctuates our mental and physical terrors. All of us have experienced these somatic symptoms; but who has translated this "beating" into the tread of mourners or the beat of a drum?

It is through such figuration, such mind travel, that Dickinson opens

up the sensations of the body or, indeed, the smallness of the grave and transforms them into something large and rich. With characteristic intrepidity, Dickinson goes all the way, she will be fully buried indeed: "And then I heard them lift a Box / And creak across my Soul / With those same Boots of Lead, again / Then Space—began to toll." Note how materially exact this torture is, how excruciatingly precise this language of oppression is (the creaking, the boots of lead), and yet how horribly "multiplied" and displaced the speaker/sufferer is: both in the box and yet also the very terrain where it's happening, the floor-soul that is being tread upon and pounded. Again, I call upon my readers' sensory experiences (of distress, horror, pain) to validate the poet's extravagant notations.

Given the (understandable) claustrophobia of the burial scenario, one initially feels a sense of freedom and liberation at the stanza's closing notation about space tolling, as if death were a surprising exit, not a carceral entrapment but a flight into space. Think again. The last two stanzas open up the scene in ways that intensify still further the terror of the poem, as if the brutalization of being stepped on and pounded were just a prelude for the fuller, more unbounded torture now to come:

As all the Heavens were a Bell, And Being, but an Ear, And I, and Silence, some strange Race Wrecked, solitary, here
—

And then a Plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and down
—
And hit a world, at every plunge, And Finished knowing
—
then
—

Critical commentary is humbled in the face of these luminous lines. But so too are our mundane notions about death and dying humbled, routed by the fierceness and magnificence of this interplanetary drama

of exile and hurt. Yes, we tell ourselves, the "Bell" is that of the church that marks the burial, but what we see is a series of awful transformations, a turning inside out that spells pure vulnerability ("And Being, but an Ear"), the sort of capacity for being hurt that would come if our entire body were a membrane being struck and bruised, so that the noise itself is pure violation. Then, it is over. Silence. But she is still here, lost beyond finding, broken beyond fixing. And the final plummet starts: a surreal roller-coaster ride that makes us yearn for the low-tech journey in a coach with Death as gentleman caller.

Once again, the stunning figures speak: a "Plank in Reason" beautifully tells us that reason
is
a plank, the plank that enables us to stand up and be grounded, the sustaining base of any fiction of agency or knowledge. It breaks. And down she goes; but no free fall, rather a continued saga of trauma and brutality, hitting a world at every plunge. A "world," Dickinson says, making us realize that death is a horrid form of cosmic travel, in which you are struck incessantly, producing a kind of repeated torture that puts paid to any notions of rest or peace at last. Or? That last line is a marvel of ambiguity: the nonstop violations we have just witnessed may also be understood as the very modality of knowing, yielding an epistemology that is closer to trauma than mental event. Or, just perhaps, knowledge is really about to be achieved, on the far side of "then," maybe. This poem wrecks all received views about death, and although it can lead us "to make friends with dying," it does at least establish the final event as a trip unlike any other we've ever taken.

Why, you may ask, make the arduous trip that Dickinson's death poem proposes? I have tried to accentuate the sheer brilliance and intellectual reach of her language and metaphors. Dying, as imaged here, has a kind of punch and insolence that stretches our thinking to the breaking point. Yes, this view is horrible, but I would argue that it is even more mesmerizing; you negotiate this piece in increasing disbelief: what on earth is this woman saying? What starts as a still familiar sense of oppression and misery ends up in a no-man's-land that is pure Dick-

inson territory. Such imaginative travel is good for the soul, and it is particularly surprising as a description of how life ends. If that is not enough, consider that what Marshall McLuhan many decades ago termed the "global village" has shrunk, imaginatively, still further in today's Internet culture, whereby the mere act of logging on will transport us instantaneously through space. We can explore the great museums and wonders of the world without leaving our study. But in no case does it make available to us the splendors glimpsed and (vicariously) experienced in Emily Dickinson's death voyage. Dickinson's surreal metaphors enact a staging of death unlike any that we have hitherto imagined, and it does so by harnessing our own most basic sensations (treading, beating, hearing, dropping) in order to subject them to her special alchemy, whereby they are transmuted into "knowing." This is the knowing of poetry: it provides no answers for any test that you or I are ever likely to take, but it rocks our understanding nonetheless.

My final Dickinson entry returns us to earth (as a chapter on dying should), to an experience of dying that is supremely pedestrian, without any of the fireworks we just witnessed: "I heard a Fly buzz—when I died" (no. J465). We are now at the antipodes of the cosmic fireworks of "I felt a Funeral, in My Brain," are returned to the conceptual murk that most of us pass our days and nights living in. Epiphanies and visionary experiences move us in literature precisely because we have so few of them in life. Would you know "truth" if it hit you on the head? (Maybe that is how one knows it?) Art in general is held in suspicion because it trucks too easily with genius and beauty and all those other ultimacies, seems to proffer its brilliant never-never schemes for the twilight zone so many of us live in. Perhaps this poem will set the record straight. At last Dickinson appears to set her sights on the confusion and static that bathe our existence.

In this bizarre poem Dickinson challenges perhaps the oldest and most revered of all death myths: death as
revelation.
Not only do religious belief systems tap into this model, but proverbs and folklore also valorize the exit from life as a kind of visionary moment, the viewing of

one's entire life in one fell swoop, just before the leaving of it. Death would be the instant of clarity, the dispelling of the murk. We remember that Tolstoy's Ilych saw the light in his final seconds, that Ionesco's Berenger at long last mounted his real throne and assumed his full kingship. So it cannot surprise us that this poem of dying appears invested in, and preparing for, the coming radiance that is to cap the agony. Dickinson emphasizes the stillness in the death chamber, a quiet that is akin to the stillness of the storm, the eye of the hurricane, "Between the Heaves of Storm—." There is a hush that is tinged with awe and fervor, a step beyond grieving toward initiation and ecstasy: "The Eyes around—had wrung them dry— / And Breaths were gathering firm / For that last Onset—when the King / Be witnessed—in the Room."

Evoking the same topos of majesty that Ionesco will use a century later, Dickinson retraces the Pauline journey of First Corinthians, chapter thirteen, the move beyond the blurred reflection of the glass toward the sacral encounter with the godhead, an encounter of pure light and truth when all parties are at last transfigured and known. There is also a distinctly theatrical cast to the story: not just the dier, but the funeral party itself collectively assume the role of audience so that the prime player can be witnessed, can make his august appearance. Again we see the cleansing and disrobing that characterized Berenger's initiation, the removal of all that would be secular or dross, as readiness is achieved ("I willed my Keepsakes—Signed away / What portion of me be / Assignable"), as the rigorous logic of divine revelation is enacted.

And then comes the bomb, a bomb announced in the title, but one that goes off only now: "and then it was / There interposed a Fly—." No other poet could have written this line which annihilates all the reverential and ceremonial machinery in full gear. You almost hear the wreckage of an entire visionary project in this line. With maniacal integrity, the poet stays true to her insect spoiler, evokes to perfection the blurry, devastating performance of the fly that usurps the entire stage: "With Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz / Between the light—and me—." Dick-

inson is sovereignly undoing Genesis here: let the light be stopped, let there be impediment. All notions of revelation are going to be put paid, as the poet completes the saga of failed vision: "And then the Windows failed—and then / I could not see to see—." Paul's story of illumination is turned on its head: we see, once again, through a glass darkly. The hunger expressed in those repeated notations, "and then," underscores the magnitude of this disaster, "windows" dysfunction, for nothing is transparent any longer. This fly may be thought of as the messenger of contingency, the "fly in the ointment" that spoils all dreams of transcendence and truth. Heaven may be there, but, as Kafka said in his own way, it is not for us.

In offering this poem as my final example of what literature can tell us of dying, I am acknowledging the skepticism of those who remain dubious about my central thesis. The poet herself seems to say, "transcendence is a myth"; our real lives and our real deaths are an affair of muddled vision and buzzing flies. At last, one might say, a poet who owns up to the pretensions of the entire enterprise of poetry. Dickinson does possess that kind of honesty. And yet, readers who feel that this poem is not about tragic failure, but rather about some kind of (twisted) victory, are not wrong. The buzz of the fly may also be interpreted as the very noise of consciousness, the static of the brain that is continuing right up to the final shutdown. If we can see it this way, then there is a precious triumph of sorts in this poem, a kind of mad and heroic journalistic impulse that refuses to be cowed or to cease operations; the mind thinks its way right into death and beyond. The human subject is perhaps not equipped with organs that would apprehend the godhead, but it has consciousness instead, and that is where its ultimate loyalties and heroics lie, that is the quest which may be extended right into the grave. Dickinson functions as reporter in this poem, as indeed she has in so many of her poems, and her job is to issue a report about the final phase of human existence. And she does. She notes every step of this last voyage, right up to the buzzing of the fly and the brain that are the final event. Not bad. Death be not proud.

To write right on through dying is to display, with rare power, the rival testimony of literature when it comes to saying death. Dickinson's "postdeath" poems do honor to the human project of gathering knowledge, and they evince a mix of courage, hunger, humor, madness, and duty which restores our faith in the project of art as testimony. The history of civilization is marked by those special milestones when some brilliant mind starts to challenge all the givens of his or her time, starts (as we say today) to think outside the box. Emily Dickinson's poems exploring death obey a profound cosmographic impulse, share some of the curiosity and passion that informed the cartographers of the Renaissance who had to map new worlds. Death, as I have repeatedly said, seems for the secular among us portentous, tragic, and to be avoided (even, especially, in thought) because it must appear to be the end, our end. But writing suggests otherwise. Writing opens what seemed closed, grants us a measure of freedom within the prison our bodies inhabit. The French poet Chateaubriand called his autobiography
Memoires d'outre-tombe
(A Record Beyond the Grave); we may think of Emily Dickinson's poems as raids into that "undiscover'd country," as versions of Whitman's "retrievements out of the night," as territorial ventures that expand the estate of each of her readers.