Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [65]
At first DrWilliams was enthusiastic about a cure, and ordered Emily Dickinson to avoid sunlight as well as snow light - the glitter coming off the snow affected her eyes. A poem of 1864 talks of those who must ‘forget the color of the Day’. This would have suited her preference for the dark hours of the night. In the same poem the speaker labours by night to fatigue the ‘glittering Retinue of nerves’ and ‘put a Head away’. (‘Retinue’, aurally close to ‘retina’, would be typical of Dickinson’s aural word-play: a half-note off like a sharp or a flat.) For this speaker, there’s ‘No Drug for Consciousness’, only death, and the voice in this poem despairs of other relief. Her words suggest more than eye trouble: ‘Affliction’, she calls it, ‘Being’s Malady’. If the poet’s eye problem was a symptom, not the prime ill, it would explain why there’s no sign of serious eye trouble before and after this period.
What does seem evident before she went to Boston is an almost desperate hunger to feast her poetic eye on all that exists under the sun,
As much of Noon as I could take
Between my finite eyes—
There’s a before-and-after narrative in this poem, ‘Before I got my eye put out’: before, the poet ‘liked as well to see—/ As other Creatures, that have Eyes’. In the context of her submission to Dr Williams it’s tempting to read this poem literally. The poem is posited on a conditional clause: if she ‘might’, if she were told she might, if she were allowed ‘to look at when I liked’, her Heart would split as it took in the crowded sights of her release. ‘I tell you’, she says. As it is, she has adapted to certain constraints on seeing and developed the traditional ‘other way’ of the blind seer. The poem ends with a contrast of soul versus eyes, deprecating the ‘safer’ enclosures of the soul:
So safer Guess—
With just my soul opon the Window pane—
Where other Creatures put their eyes—
Incautious—of the Sun—
Though she endured the treatment, she found it hard to share the surgeon’s hopefulness. Throughout this ordeal, she maintained that she was neither better nor worse. The treatment, whatever it was, made her eyes water, so that the doctor had to wipe her cheeks - to protect her hat, he said.
Dr Jackson, by now almost ninety, had always warned that experiments could be injurious in the case of incurable sickness, and so it proved. Not only did Emily force herself to undergo a nightmare protracted over two years, but Williams disrupted a creative life at its peak. It seems not to have occurred to him that the instrument of diagnosis, powered by gaslight or sunlight (first tried in 1860), would itself have been likely to set off the contraction of the retinal nerves it intended to examine. Since his patient was sensitive to light, examination would have been stressful, even painful, which, in turn, would have affected the tissues the doctor observed. In 1865, Dickinson sent Sue this rebuttal of scientific observation:
Perception of an Object costs
Precise the Object’s loss—
An act of observation is an act of transformation. Her proposition anticipates the Uncertainty Principle of Heisenberg, that an act of measurement will, in the process, alter the object measured. There’s consolation in the next couplet: a recompense for a loss of objectivity is an enlargement of the fund of the imagination. ‘Perception in itself a Gain / Replying to its Price—’. The third proposition strengthens the second, ‘The Object absolute—is nought—/ Perception sets it fair’. This was articulated most famously by Coleridge: the imagination, he declares, ‘is essentially vital even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead’. Romantic theory views the