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The Emily Dickinson Journal 15.2 (2006) 34-37


Experience is the Angled Road
Susan Howe
Abstract

This piece reflects on how Dickinson’s textual practice contributes to the particular forms of her aphorisms, and how they relate to the Metaphysical Club’s use of aphorism.

About late 1863 in fascicle 37

All but Death, Can be
adjusted –
Dynasties repaired -
Systems - settled in their
Sockets -
+Citadels - dissolved -

Wastes of Lives - resown
with Colors
By succeding Springs -
Death - unto itself - Exception
Is exempt from Change –

+Centuries removed
+supremer springs

(Fr789; Fascicle 37, H59)

Emily Dickinson is a poet of war, as scholars are increasingly recognizing. While more work can be done on this aspect of her art, we also need to notice specific ways in which her writing practice may have been influenced by American post-Civil War thought in science and philosophy. Intellectuals of Dickinson's generation (born in the 1830s and early 40s) were compelled to re-think the nature and sources of order. Darwin's On the Origin of the Species had been published [End Page 34] in 1859. The traumatic disruption caused by the war was a precondition for its enormous impact in the dis-united United States. Darwinian biology undermined traditional concepts of social and natural order, further discrediting the beliefs and assumptions of the era that preceded it. The book was at once the culmination of a long cultural preoccupation with the idea of evolutionary change, and the most convincing expression of another idea with an equally long cultural history, the idea that order is created by the operation of Chance. What is order? Where does it come from? In The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand describes the pervasive fascination in the New England intellectual community with theories of chance, probability and statistics—especially the group calling itself "The Metaphysical Club." Members of this short-lived debating group, formed in 1872 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were from various disciplines: law, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, psychology. The topics of discussion were the same ones being debated in the Amherst intellectual community. Austin, Susan, Emily, and Edward Dickinson were a part of that community, as were the Todds. (David Peck Todd, an astronomer and graduate of Amherst College, returned there in 1881 with his wife Mabel Loomis Todd, to be director of the Amherst College Observatory.) Chauncey Wright, generally acknowledged as the leader of the Metaphysical Club and Nicholas St. John Green, another of its key members, came from Northampton. All of these people had Webster, Emerson, Fuller, Ruskin, LaPlace and Darwin as part of their common cultural landscape. Higginson, Bowles, and Holland were all influential editors of newspapers, and magazines. They read the same material. Charles Sanders Peirce and Mabel Loomis Todd were regular contributors to The Nation. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Chauncey Wright, C.S. Peirce, and William James had their various and particular abilities. Dickinson was a metaphysical poet. She may have been an agoraphobic but she traveled freely in her head.

Fascicle 38, 1864

Time feels so vast that
were it not
For an Eternity –
I fear me this Circum –
ference
Engross my Finity –

To His exclusion, who
prepare [End Page 35]
By +Processes of Size
For the stupendous
Vision
Of His Diameters –

Rudiments / Prefaces of size
for The Stupendous Volume –

(Fr858; Fascicle 38, H162)

During the second half of the nineteenth century, chemistry, poetry, folklore, philology, astronomy, biology, statistics, psychopathology, and psychical research met and mixed. There was a general feeling that truths of all sorts could be discovered by the processes of experiment, and among the truths that could be found by experiment, and the chance involved in experiment, were spiritual, metaphysical, and moral ones. All sorts of phenomena and behaviors were investigated, recorded, and compared. Old meanings and new technologies (photography, telegraphy, the typewriter) were in process of development. Spiritualism, psychical research, and automatic writing encouraged a fluid relationship between writing and drawing. What Dickinson may be increasingly representing in her writing is process itself. The interest is in the spirit of execution. The spirit of execution is a...

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