(Part 2 of 2 on the fragment)
Scripted mostly on used envelopes, or the odd chocolate wrapper, the collected fragments left by Emily Dickinson comprise some of the most famous literary relics of all time. For anyone remotely interested in literature, this isn’t old news, but it likely isn’t tired news either. In fact, it’s news made fresh again due, in no small part, to the recent facsimile reproductions—see The Gorgeous Nothings and the online Emily Dickinson archive—that allow the average reader and scholar to view, as veil-less as possible, the actual papers that the poet must have carried once in white pockets, set on a tray with flowers, and generally, definitely, touched. For me, seeing the physical manifestation of her mind’s colossal imaginings makes Dickinson all the more real and mysterious simultaneously.
Thus, I experience something like a swinging door in my chest to look on the forms, of papers badly worn, and to try and comprehend their livedness, lent first and foremost by the poet, as well as by her many correspondents (and, I suppose, by the postal workers in between). Dickinson undoubtedly gave consideration to the histories inherent in used surfaces, to the fields and lines that bore her language; an envelope unfolded becomes intriguing geometry, not merely a space for language to fall. Of course, the language itself is obsession-worthy. Ultimately, given Dickinson’s mythos, there is almost as much to say about a scrap of paper shaped like Antarctica, on which only seven words may be written, as there is to say about the seven words.
I want to focus on a scrap that contains seventeen words, sixteen of which became a finished poem (1292), lifted, presumably, from envelope flap to final form. The fragment I’m referring to is composed within the confines of a soft triangle, the cursive running to the gluey edge, in a draft for the eventually famous:
In this short Life that only lasts an hour
How much – how little – is within our power
(Note that on the flap “merely” is written beneath “only” as a possible substitution; otherwise, this is the poem as Dickinson later finalized it). In light of fragments, many things could be said about this object/poem, its form and content. For one, the lines suggest the brevity of individual existence, positing human lives as single “hours” among an implied infinity—drops in the sea, molecules of air—fragments of a bigger picture. Then, “how much” we feel through “how little” language greets us; a fragment of speech contains a universe of feeling, when done well. This isn’t to say the poem is incomplete, rather that Dickinson’s deliberate (and typical) lack of punctuation leaves room for question mark or period, or, as I feel it, a sensation—a falling away or dimming of lights. The overall affect is gradual and surprising. Which reminds me of something Anne Carson said about fragments in an excellent 2002 interview for The Paris Review:
“There is the space where a thought would be, but which you can’t get hold of. I love that space. It’s the reason I like to deal with fragments. Because no matter what the thought would be if it were fully worked out, it wouldn’t be as good as the suggestion of a thought that the space gives you. Nothing fully worked out could be so arresting, spooky.”
In the poem at hand, Dickinson offers no consolation by working anything out for us. How could we not come away in an arrested, spooky state: I last an hour? I have and have no power? A fragment can’t exist without the space to feel through the questions that make our blood nervous.
I get the same terrified-excited feeling looking at Dickinson’s handwriting, the pencil dark or muted depending on its sharpened state, her hand’s weight; there’s a sense of the body’s presence that adds immediacy, like it might’ve just been written, and slid toward me across a table instead of time. A crucial experience of the fragment for me then, resides in its part that is “proof”—in this case, what Dickinson “did,” i.e., she wrote this poem on the flap of an envelope. I can feel the decisions in that. I enter a similar plane. Then, the sensation is contrasted with what I can’t know of Dickinson’s life, the profound and meaningless minutiae that filled the rest of her days in intangible (to me) ways, so that even if I read her letters or a biographer’s account of her life, I can’t get nearly as close to the person behind the poems. If she squinted through an eyelet curtain, worried a chip of paint from the wall, or flipped her plate over one evening at dinner, there are no objects to tell me so. This is the “space” Carson speaks of—wild imaginings—the space is longing to know what we can never know. It’s a long, unimaginably long space.
The question is why do I wish to know this space? Why do I care? Dickinson was an hour. I am an hour. On the metaphysical clock, do they touch? I will that they touch, and use the fragment to go on.