Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [63]
. . . Somebody run to the great gate
And see if Dollie’s coming! Wait!
I hear her feet upon the stair!
Death won’t hurt - now Dollie’s here!
Epileptics are often attached to a member of family, who makes it their lifelong task to care for them. In the Dickinson Homestead, Lavinia took this on. Because the diagnosis was rarely uttered, still less put on paper, there’s little chance of explicit evidence. In any case, epilepsy was often misdiagnosed, and still so. Well into the twentieth century, there’s a common misapprehension that seizures could be deflected by self-control, extending the sufferer’s torment with a moral obligation to stop what physiologically can’t be stopped without medication. Since poetry was all-important to Dickinson, it was in a sense fortunate that she lived before barbiturates came into use in 1912 for, in sedating the brain, drugs dulled it.
Whatever Dickinson may have endured in loss of control before, during and after a Throe, some part of her brain remained, as she said, alert. Sufferers like Dostoyevsky can be visionary, as well as plumbing hellish depths. The range of experience opened to the gifted can’t be tabulated.15 Dickinson’s oxymorons defy definition: calm bomb; quiet earthquake; reticent volcano. Still, if she did suffer from epilepsy it would explain her claim that Existence struck through the daily ticking of her life. ‘Struck, was I, nor yet by Lightning—/ . . . Maimed—was I—. . .’.
On the surface of that life nothing to see but a closed door; and behind the door, writing at a small cherrywood table, a woman in white; and ‘it’, the unmentionable, waiting there in her room like a loaded gun. She was proud of ‘it’. ‘I like a look of Agony,’ she said, because Agony opened up what lies beyond the limits of language: visionary states of mind she would not otherwise have comprehended and which became prime material for poems. We might guess that during the four years when she produced so much of her greatest work, her sickness was at its height. In later years it was less active, as was her poetic output. By her fifties, the ‘Torrid Noons’ of her early thirties had ‘lain their Missiles by—’, though the Thunder that once brought ‘the bolt’ did rumble still.
To see epilepsy as part of Dickinson’s secret Existence cannot explain genius, only certain conditions that facilitate it: freedom from the demands on a nineteenth-century wife; freedom to keep odd hours; and the seclusion she had to have if she was to take poetic risks that were certain to jar public taste. She was fortunate in her father. Traditional and formidable though he was, he supported her, we might guess from the respect and security she enjoyed in a home she always called ‘my father’s house’.
The shock of discovering a lifelong condition of this kind is the subject of one poem. Evidently Dr Jackson did not name it, because she invents a name, drawing, she says, on a residue of Latin from her schooldays. She does not tell us the invented name, only that to put the unmentionable into Latin helps to distance the blow. She turns over this word - ‘it’ - in her mind, trying to adapt to the diagnosis:
It dont sound so terrible—quite—as it did—
I run it over—‘Dead’, Brain—‘Dead’ . . .
How like ‘a fit’—. . .
A fit. So close did her lips come to utterance. The victim promises herself that what looms so horribly at present, in a year’s time will be a verbal habit.
The daring of genuine confession fuels such poems from well below the surface. She got away with explicitness by telling it ‘slant’. For she plays on the ambiguity of ‘fit’ in the context of wearing an outfit. ‘Murder - wear!’ She will ‘fit’ herself to ‘Murder’, another code word for ‘dying in the night’. In a later poem, ‘I fit for them’, she again draws on the double entendre of fitting herself to certain conditions, as though she had chosen them.