NOTES: On Dickinson's Cosmology

“Blank” – the unnamable, the unnamed, the secret, the absence, the fill-in-the-blank invitation and acknowledgement, the empty and the deliberately obscured; a refusal to name, literally and figuratively, personally and tangentially.

“Blank” as substitute; enigma for meaning.

“Blank” as the unformed, emerging conclusion.

“Blank” as censure.

“Blank” as the stopping point and the gateway; the mysterious, elusive, unfulfilled knowledge; truth unknown, hidden or waiting for interpretation.

“Blank” as the empty page, as total absence, as representation of all absence, the black hole, Plato’s cave. Lack of certitude about Truth, Love, Faith, moral and religious absolutes.

In contrast, Dickinson is sure of the predictable, recurring stages of nature, the exterior, nonhuman world. This is her firmament. This is her faith substitute. This is certainty, regularity, an unstoppable force, unsympathetic. It is the known. It requires no struggle for meaning. It is independent of emotion. It contains its own scientifically provable logic and intelligence.

There is no mystery. No enigma. All is transparent, meaningful, reliable, beautiful.

Nature is the one force that transcends all unknowns. It is a faith. Independent of human involvement, it achieves itself in self-sufficiency, continues its rhythms without regard for the intrusions, control and interpretation of the human. If nature holds this finality of reason, then all else is subject to interpretation. All else is permeable, open to suggestion. All else is malleable, is human-made, human-empowered and subject to various definitions and interpretation.

By this logic, Dickinson is free. Free of any circumvention and thus, her business is “circumference” both the eyeing of all-that-is and the naming and renaming of all that stands as “truth.” She assaults the synthetic truth – dogma, doctrine, the assumption of moral code and social order, of ordained “right” and “wrong” that is central to humanity, to her narrow neighbors and their determination of “truth.”

The liberty to define gives Dickinson godlike power. In her role as deity, she asserts her own world, assigns her own importance, and defines her own legend.

In her legend-making, Dickinson upturns the legends created by others, most notably, the religiously instituted concepts of right and wrong, the foundational myths of paradise and sin. She creates a mirror universe with her own Eden, site of transgression, of the awareness of self-knowledge, the same biblical scenario damned by Christendom. Her Eden is not only transgressive, it is transformational. It not only represents self awareness, it is the font of creativity, creativity being both the propulsion and product of self awareness, of free thought and independent conclusion.

Dickinson does similar somersaults with the concept of Calvary, another central scenario of Christian dogma, in which the savior is crucified for the sins of others. And yet, the crucifixion results in a resurrection, a new birth, a purity and separation from humankind. Calvary alone is misery, is martyrdom, is a stopping point in Christian logic. Calvary alone evokes only a temporal enactment of the excruciating death of the body. Calvary alone has no glory.

But in Dickinson’s Calvary, what is essential is result: rebirth as a separate entity, like the birth of knowledge, the capacity for unique thought. Calvary turned upside down is a celebration. It symbolizes yet another portal toward emancipation and total emergence as a being that exists beyond the cruelty and limitations of circumscribed life. Calvary is another view of “circumference.”

The cross is not only the structure which kills the human; it is the crossing, the passageway to new birth. It is an essential point of departure, almost, it is the logical outcome. To simply die, succumb to mortality, that is circumspect. It is limited, only one half of the transaction. For the transaction to be complete, for the formula to make sense, rebirth is required.

This unavoidable pattern of death and rebirth, of the advance, denouement and ascension is nothing less than a repetition of natural cycles.

Thus, Dickinson’s early study of botany, her horticultural avocation, her attention to the denizens and actions of the natural world, act as the levers of enlightenment, as the means to recognize the innate rhythms of life, and as a basis for her own theology.

Such a theology encompasses all-that-is. It is self-defining and as its deity, it involves evolving creation. Its tenets are reflections of the natural order. As a mirror, not only does her new faith represent, it acts as the inverse presentation of previously created doctrine. The dogma manufactured by humans who also assumed the omnipotent power of definition and interpretation, and who pronounced items such as “universal truth.” Thus, Dickinson’s heretical perspectives on Eden, Calvary, the Savior and savior, Salvation. She reinvents meaning, a clear act of creativity, of godship. She explodes parameters.

Dickinson recognizes the essential patterns of these synthetic concepts. But she overthrows the interpretations; she bursts through and beyond. She advances, crafting her own doctrine, using the same symbology and yet attacking. Her observations of nature provide a more natural meaning.

That many of her verses are voiced enigmatically is the stuff of myth-making.

Readership: Sue as her primary reader. Sue as faithful to conventional religious thought. Sue’s faithfulness blocking Dickinson’s fervent love, desire and yearning for union.

Sue’s attention to her writing becomes Dickinson’s sounding board. But it is also Dickinson’s opportunity for conversion. And through that conversion, Dickinson would obtain Sue, completely.