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Coda A Little Destiny “The only excuse for reproduction,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, “is improvement.” “Beasts merely propagate their kind.”1 This moment, from “Chastity & Sensuality,” suggests I think not the sexual squeamishness often attributed to him, but rather an insistence on sex as something other than an isolable property in the self, to be turned to use, instrumentalized and profited from like any other aspect of being organized by a market-inflected possessive individualism.2 Though he would himself feel notably little of Thoreau’s uneasiness before the prospect of the bestial, Whitman, too, dreams of a kind of generation that is erotic and vibrantly corporeal, and yet not reducible to mere biology or brute reproduction. For both authors, sex comes into meaning not as a manipulable possession, and still less as the self-saturating, deeply characterizing trait it would gradually become. (It is precisely this deepening conceptual conflict between such nonpossessive imaginings of sex and its gradual institutional emergence as something quite different that we hear in the sharpness of Whitman’s exchange with the insistent Symonds.) Instead, for each of the authors, sex names a special mode of experience, a conjugation of the self whose effects are at once exhilarating and disconcerting—exhilarating for its clarifying derangements of the ordinary course of bodily existence, and disconcerting for the way it troubles the very premises of personhood, especially as they are anchored in liberal, possessivist terms. Together, Whitman and Thoreau strive to envision sex not as yours or mine, not a property or set of tools, but something else: a style of relation, a unique vector of the body’s being in the world. Even through their divergent enthusiasms and anxieties, they suggest the possibility of an unloosening of sex from, among other things, the market-based logics of liberal individualism and individual productivity in which it found itself, and that the dawning of a hetero/ homo distinction would only further ratify. Coda 65 If this unloosening made both writers untimely, it tuned them, too, again in differently inflected ways, to the call of an intuited future, a yetto -dawn moment whose arrival might convert the only marginally legible errancies of their present tense into more viable possibilities. They were, of course, far from the only writers, and far from the only American writers , to address themselves to unripened futures.3 By way of conclusion to this section, I want now to look briefly at one of their queerer bedfellows: Emily Dickinson. Reading her in concert with the vexed expectancy of Thoreau, or the extravagant death-haunted imaginings of Whitman, one cannot much avoid the sense that, whatever her unlikeliness, Dickinson knows intimately of what they speak. She knows, that is, what it is to feel misrecognized by prevailing imaginings of sanctified ardor and devotion; what it means to balance between a hunger for articulacy and the expansive permissions of silence; and above all how it feels to yearn, with sometimes painful intensity, for another time, a removal from the clockwork of the present tense into some freer, ampler moment. She knows the queer yearning for what Dana Luciano, in a splendid phrase, calls “an otherwise that is not necessarily elsewhere.”4 And yet, along with all these so striking commonalities, there are also divergences among the three that are not merely differences of emphasis. So I want to turn to Dickinson now as a complicating kind of counterexample , one who vexes the visions of sex and futurity we have observed so far, but without disowning them. Looking at a few passages from her letters to Susan Gilbert, I mean to suggest that among the things Dickinson’s writing can make luminously clear for us is just how differently the prospect of futurity might be experienced by men and women, however intently both might be turned away from the moorings of dyadic heterosexuality. Dickinson’s futures are not Whitman’s, and they are not Thoreau’s. Given the many other congruities that cross them, her unlikeness, at least in this respect, reminds us both how powerful a difference gender might make for the sexual politics of futurity, and what forms that difference might take. The young Emily Dickinson, in her extraordinary letters to her beloved Susan Huntington Gilbert—who would later marry Dickinson’s brother Austin and become Susan Dickinson—can sound a lot like the young Thoreau: impassioned, in possession of a talent for figure and a seemingly inexhaustible lexical playfulness, and very often finding in silence...

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