Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [59]
‘You think my gait “spasmodic” - I am in danger - Sir - You think me “uncontrolled” - I have no Tribunal.’
When biographer Mark Bostridge identified Florence Nightingale’s chronic illness, he warns that ‘posthumous diagnoses are rarely successful in establishing with any degree of certainty the nature of an illness experienced by a person long dead’. The same caution is necessary in naming ‘sickness’ in Dickinson’s letters and poems. What she calls ‘Dying! Dying in the night!’ invites a diagnosis, yet in this case there is also ‘Gain’. In the gifted, long-term illness, and the apartness it brings, is subversive, and as such transforming. It turns the sufferer into a solitary forerunner of ‘some strange Race’. To faint, she says, is to look deep into the darkness where things shape themselves. A jolt projects her from an abyss into an uncharted region of the mind, a purified alertness.
If the twenty-first century is to explore unknown pathways of the brain, Dickinson’s poetry is replete with information about dysfunction and recovery. Here is what she has to tell: ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’. A plank in reason broke, she says, and ‘I dropped down, and down—’. She feels a ‘Cleaving’ in her brain, as though the lid of the brain gets ‘off my head’ and can’t re-attach. Logic and its sequential language are disrupted.
I felt a Cleaving in my Mind—
As if my Brain had split—
I tried to match it—Seam by Seam—
But could not make them fit—
The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before—
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound—
Like Balls—opon a Floor—
One poem records what seems like a Throe: its slow but relentless onset, its drumming in the head, its deceptive pause before, again, a full-on bolt ‘scalps’ its victim. It’s not the victim’s fault, another poem argues; it’s Nature who imposes the blight on the young: ‘Nature—sometimes sears a Sapling—/ Sometimes—scalps a Tree—’. There’s talk of constant ‘Dread’. She must control the Bomb in her body, as well as hide it: ‘to simulate is stinging work’.
Allowing for the poet’s resolve to ‘tell it slant’, through metaphor, are we not looking at epilepsy? The word, from the Greek, means seizure, and the onset, which the poems describe, is what doctors call the aura. Dickinson’s word is a ‘Presentiment’: a Shadow indicates ‘that Suns go down—’:
. . . The notice to the startled Grass
That Darkness—is about to pass—
In Greek, aura means ‘breeze’. In Dickinson this intensifies, as ‘Winds take Forests in their Paws—’. A ‘Thunderbolt’ blacks out consciousness (‘The Universe—is still—’), and then an ‘electric gale’ wafts the body beyond ‘its dull—control’.
If this, at least in part, is what was secret, the conditions of Dickinson’s life make sense: sickness is a more sensible reason for seclusion than disappointed love. A seizure can happen with little warning: about a minute. Too short a time to take cover. This is why those who keep the condition secret would fear to go out, even to join callers in the parlour. During the annual summer Commencement, when Mr Dickinson, as College Treasurer, entertained visitors at home, Emily would emerge, walk swiftly through the crowd and disappear. What seemed eccentric was simply dread. Marriage for epileptics was discouraged and some American states prohibited it by law.13 She saw herself ‘by birth a Bachelor’.
In its full-blown form, known as grand mal, a slight swerve in a pathway of the brain prompts a seizure. As Dickinson puts it, ‘The Brain within its Groove / Runs evenly’, but then a ‘Splinter swerve’ makes it hard to put the current back. Such force has this altered current, it would be easier, she thinks, to divert the course of a flood, when ‘Floods have slit