(no subject)

[proximoception]

This Dickinson:

I saw no Way -- The Heavens were stitched --
I felt the Columns close --
The Earth reversed her Hemispheres -- [massy earth and sphered skies are riven]
I touched the Universe --

And back it slid -- and I alone --
A Speck upon a Ball --
Went out upon Circumference --
Beyond the Dip of Bell --

I discovered that there is no way forward. The sky was a cohesive material and not a route to freedom. Even the lesser routes to freedom started to be blocked off by the material limitations imposed by space and time. The sudden knowledge that no external escape is possible revolutionized my relation to the universe, as though the whole planet had been stood on end. I found I knew my place in it. It was like touching the real world for the first time.

But that world slid away, leaving me alone and worldless, except for this now so little ball-shaped world, next to which I was tinier still, so tiny as to seem a speck. And where was this ballbound speck now? It had rushed away from the true world to some distant point measuring out as far back as space can go, so far back that [words failing] the movement had perhaps left any realm of comparison with images of physical recession, such as that of the curve of a churchbell from near horizontal to near vertical [or could this be the dip of its curved motion as it's wrung?].

Comments

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Quilty auroras. Here, especially, she seems to fulfill Emerson's prophecy: "I look in vain for the poet whom I describe." The poet who rived the dark with her private ray. The most powerful ray. Ever.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Saw no Milky Way, then? Being wrong feels too much like breathing.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Speaking of most powerful ever:

"Between 1835 and 1860, New England was subject to unusually frequent and intense displays of the northern lights. On September 2, 1859, in fact, Emily Dickinson may have witnessed the most powerful auroral event ever recorded."

Makes me think of Shelley's fading coal--Dickinson's rays get intense right as the lights shows accompanying her whole conscious life up to then die down.

"Hasn't the sky?"

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Yes. That's amazing. Fading coal indeed. What a time to be watching the sky. She would've been very small when the Leonids were so visible everywhere east of the Rockies in 1833, but they came brightly back in '66 and '67. My daughter has a Care Bears quilt (inherited from her mother) that is like a pale rainbow or aurora all stitched together. More aurora than rainbow, I think. These aren't the rainbow's colors.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

The same article does something to explain the columns: Von Humboldt had called auroras "columns of light" in Cosmos.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

This connects it even closer to the Shelley, then. In "bronze and blaze" Dickinson explicitly identifies her art with the auroras. She really has satiated the void circumference with the spacious might of her spirit's light, but at the same time shrunk back to a point within our day and night--to an island in dishonored grass known only by beetles, in Bronze & Blaze, and to a lonely receding speck on a ball in I Saw No Way. She associated the very event, perhaps Sept 2 1859, with this very Adonais stanza, and that seems to have made at least two poems.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Okay, this is weird. I might be channeling the random pomo essay generator or something with my last random Ashbery subject line, but a web search of terms I can only assume you used might get a searcher to this link:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_4_44/ai_54370332/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Only searches I made were to look up Dickinson + auroras, and then to get the texts of the other aurora poems, I think? Can't remember if I've read this Ashbery one.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

I'm reading more into google's powers than are really there.