This essay is adapted from the nineteenth chapter of my book Figuring.
In the first autumn of her thirties, Emily Dickinson wrote to her confidante and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson:
I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none, and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I am afraid.
Not a "fright," not a "shock," but a terror. What lay behind this enormity implied by a woman who measured her words so meticulously? Generations of biographers have filled pages with conjectures of varying persuasiveness — a death, some unrecorded heartbreak in her volcanic relationship with Susan, the first attack of epilepsy — but the most intriguing theory came nearly a century after the poet encrypted these words.
In 1951, after years of research and travel to various archives, the scholar Rebecca Patterson proposed a wholly novel candidate for the "terror" of 1861: Kate Scott Anthon — a newly widowed young woman Susan had befriended during their studies at the Utica Female Academy and then introduced to Emily, who fell into an intense romantic and possibly physical affair with the enticing newcomer before Kate severed the relationship without explanation, dealing a blow Emily would experience as deathly and furnishing the raw material for much of her mournful poetry.
Their story is a mosaic assembled from various surviving documents, as direct as Emily's letters and as oblique as the marginalia in Kate's favorite books.
Unauthenticated daguerreotype of (most scholars believe) Emily Dickinson and Kate Scott Anthon
In the late winter of 1859, Kate descended a sleigh in her fashionable black hat and widow's veil in front of her former classmate's home in Amherst. Almost immediately, Susan introduced her to the beloved auburn-haired friend who lived across the hedge in the brick house painted deep red and who had been hearing of her for nearly a decade. When Emily, wrapped in a merino shawl, met the tall, handsome woman with the penetrating dark eyes, musical voice, and lively passion for literature and astronomy, she was instantly entranced.
During the three weeks of Kate's first stay in Amherst, the two women, both twenty-eight, became inseparable. They took long walks with Emily's dog, Carlo, read Aurora Leigh aloud to each other, and spent evenings at the piano as Emily improvised — "weird and beautiful melodies, all from her own inspiration," Kate would remember. As Emily played, Kate towered behind her — "Goliath," the petite poet would call her.
When Kate left to go home, Emily beckoned her for another visit to Amherst:
I am pleasantly located in the deep sea, but love will row you out, if her hands are strong, and don't wait till I land, for I'm going ashore on the other side.
Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew Up.
Emily's early letters to Kate pulsate with electricity. Writing weeks after they first met, she tries to disguise with playfulness the push-and-pull of irrepressible, frustrated longing in the code language of botany that was her first poetic tongue:
I never missed a Kate before. . . . Sweet at my door this March night another Candidate — Go Home! We don't like Katies here! — Stay! My heart votes for you, and what am I indeed to dispute her ballot –? What are your qualifications? Dare you dwell in the East where we dwell? Are you afraid of the Sun? — When you hear the new violet sucking her way among the sods, shall you be resolute?… Will you still come?… Kate gathered in March! It is a small bouquet, dear — but what it lacks in size, it gains in fadelessness, — Many can boast a hollyhock, but few can bear a rose! … So I rise, wearing her — so I sleep, holding, — Sleep at last with her fast in my hand and wake bearing my flower. —
Page from Emily Dickinson's herbarium
In the late winter of 1860, they spent a night together in Emily's bedroom — unrecorded, inarticulable, except perhaps in verse:
Her sweet Weight on my Heart a Night
Had scarcely deigned to lie —
When, stirring, for Belief's delight,
My Bride had slipped away —
If 'twas a Dream — made solid — just
The Heaven to confirm —
Or if Myself were dreamed of Her —
The power to presume —
Several weeks after that momentous night, Emily would channel this precious perishability in a letter to Kate:
Finding is slow, facilities for losing so frequent, in a world like this, I hold with extreme caution. A prudence so astute may seem unnecessary, but plenty moves those most, dear, who have been in want… Were you ever poor? I have been a Beggar.
Whatever took place between them, they never addressed it overtly — it is always impossible to articulate the possibility between two people, but especially in a time and place that confined the possible to such narrow parameters for permissible love. Feeling the impossibility of it all, Emily shuddered with anticipatory loss:
Kate, Distinctly sweet your face stands in its phantom niche — I touch your hand — my cheek your cheek — I stroke your vanished hair, Why did you enter, sister, since you must depart? Had not its heart been torn enough but you must send your shred?… There is a subject, dear, on which we never touch.
Little is known of Kate's side of the experience. None of her letters to Emily survive. (The poet had instructed her sister that all letters be burned after her death — a request which Lavinia Dickinson promptly obliged before discovering the trove of poems that made her realize her sister's correspondence might have immense literary value.) But Kate — who signed many of her surviving letters to other correspondents "Thomas" or "Tommy" — did have an unambiguous and lifelong proclivity for romantic attachment to women, culminating later in life with a longtime relationship with a young Englishwoman.
Perhaps at twenty-eight, she was simply not ready to so radically dismantle the superstructure of her life as she knew it. In April 1861, she severed the relationship with Emily. There is no record of what was said, but the devastation was complete and lifelong. Many years later, Emily would write to Higginson:
If ever you lost a friend… you remember you could not begin again because there was no world —
A breathless Death is not so cold as a Death that breathes.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.
In the immediacy of the loss, she interpolated between hope and despair, as we all do when discomposed by a sudden abandonment. A month after her "terror," which might just be her painful acceptance that Kate was gone, her friend Samuel Bowles — whose newspaper had printed one of the only four poems published in her lifetime — came to Amherst. She refused to see him. Most of her letters from that period were burned, but Samuel was one of her most intimate friends — it is likely that she had confided in him the intensity of her heartbreak, if not its source. "We tell a Hurt to cool it," she would write in a poem. Among his own letters is one from that summer to a recipient whose name has been scrubbed — an extraordinary letter of consolation to somebody anguishing with unrequited love, somebody who may well have been Emily:
My dear — :
… You must give if you expect to receive — give happiness, friendship, love, joy, and you will find them floating back to you. Sometimes you will give more than you receive. We all do that in some of our relations, but it is as true a pleasure often to give without return as life can afford us. We must not make bargains with the heart, as we would with the butcher for his meat. Our business is to give what we have to give — what we can get to give. The return we have nothing to do with… One will not give us what we give them — others will more than we can or do give them — and so the accounts will balance themselves. It is so with my loves and friendships — it is so with everybody's.
Emily was not ready to let go of the love she had given, of the hope that it might one day be returned, though alchemised and transmuted into a different form. She wrote to Kate plaintively:
How many years, I wonder, will sow the moss upon them, before we bind again, a little altered, it may be, elder a little it will be, and yet the same, as suns which shine between our lives and loss, and violets.
That season, she composed her most famous poem — read here by twenty-first-century children who are yet to have their loves and losses, and animated by artist Olga Ptashnik:
"Hope" is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
And sings the tune without the words —
And never stops — at all —
And sweetest — in the Gale — is heard —
And sore must be the storm —
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm —
I've heard it in the chillest land —
And on the strangest Sea —
Yet — never — in Extremity,
It asked a crumb — of me.
"Life is long," a poet friend said to me recently as I was reckoning with a similar rupture. But life was not long for Emily Dickinson, who died suddenly in her fifties, not a single grey on her auburn hair in the small white casket cradling her body and a posy of violets. Life is a feather borrowed from the swift wing of time. If she had lived longer, perhaps Kate would have returned to spend her remaining days with Emily and not with her English lover, or perhaps they would have met again in perfect disenchantment, in perfect friendship. "If" is the widest word of all, the immense alternate universe in which all of our possible lives live. Hope is what we call the bridge between this universe and that one.
"To be an artist is a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become a murderer," Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary as a young artist. "The poets (by which I mean all artists)," James Baldwin wrote in his late thirties, "are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don't. Statesmen don't… Only poets." And the truth about us, as I know it, is that how we love, how we give, and how we suffer is just about the sum of who we are. The transmutation of suffering into love — the transmutation of the wear and tear and helplessness of living, of the rage it can induce, into compassion and care — is what we call art. Anyone who performs that alchemy within and then gives another the means to it — whether with a poem or a painting or an act of kindness — is what I would call an artist.
I know of no one who has articulated this task of transmutation more beautifully than the poet (in the largest Baldwinian sense) Ocean Vuong.
Ocean Vuong. (Photograph: Tom Hines)
In a deeply felt New York Times interview — a public reckoning, really — Vuong recounts his improbable beginnings as a writer: how he went from wanting to borrow a friend's gun at fifteen and, despite his Buddhist upbringing, kill a man (the local drug dealer who had stolen his bicycle and kept him from making his shift on the tobacco farm where he was laboring for $9.50 an hour alongside other refugees and migrants) to reading James Baldwin and Annie Dillard at the community college until he came to see writing as "a medium for understanding suffering" — for understanding what hurts us and why we hurt each other and how to stop. He reflects:
I was in a world where anger, rage, and violence was a way to control the environment, and it was a way to control the environment for people who had no control of their lives. A lot of them were hurt and wounded… Because so much was close to me, I always had to look at it. And it behooved me to understand it in order to survive. So when I see cruelty, I look closer, and I say: "Where is this coming from?" And a lot of times, it comes from fear and vulnerability — you're too scared, and you have to strike first… I have great compassion to that, because the doorway through to violence has always been suffering…
It's interesting: You see the doorway in front of you and it feels so immense — it feels like the only path — but when you step back… it's almost like the doorway is in the middle of a field. And you're like, "Oh my goodness — I can step back, and I can just take one step to the side and go around, and the whole world is in front of me."
[…]
In a way, my career so far has been a slow attempt at stepping back and stepping aside from that door.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.
A couple of years earlier, speaking at San Francisco's endlessly wonderful City Arts & Lectures, Vuong considered the place of anger — that handmaiden of suffering — in art, and in his own work animated by the belief that the poet's task is to look more closely at this world, a task resinous with the consolations of causality: the more we see, the more we understand; the more we understand — ourselves and each other — the less we suffer; the less we suffer, the less we lash the world with our suffering and the more we can transmute the anger of helplessness into something more tender and tenacious. Vuong reflects:
When you feel the somatic experience of anger, you throw things, you shout (perhaps at the people you love), you're on the floor (metaphorically, physically). And then, after a while, you have to get up. You have to feed your dog, answer emails, meet a student — in other words, you have to move towards care… For me, care is anger improved. It's part of the same ecosystem. And I'm interested in dismantling the border between these two things, because we're told that they're two opposite sides of a spectrum, but I think they're actually very close together. They inform each other.
Because language is a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents, the care we take with language is care for the world. Vuong reflects on the ministrations of words:
Writers have produced incredible amounts of work with the energy of rage and anger. But, for me, that care that I have to give the sentence is then the medic — it almost calms me down. It's hard to be rageful when you're working with something that needs your care. If each word is a citizen in this world of the text, they are so dependent on me to think clearly and with restraint and with a sense of compassion and dignity to them. And I would lose their confidence in me, in a way, if I were to approach it with too much of myself.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.
Vuong's most elegant and countercultural point is that while anger need not be absent or suppressed in our inner lives, it must not become the end point of our work in the world but rather an opening — a handle on the door to compassion:
If you're not awake, you wouldn't feel angry. But to be alive in American bones is to be enraged by what's happening. And, of course, I feel anger. But I will say… I'm not proud of many things… but I'm incredibly proud that not a single sentence or page I've ever written in my work was written out of anger… It's not that I'm not angry, but I'm not useful — as a writer, as an artist — when I'm angry.
An essential part of the artist's task is also this — to find out, and stand by, how you are most useful in the world. This takes especial courage in our culture, where the self-appointed custodians of virtue bully artists with the shoulds of what to stand for, what themes to take up in their work, and how to address them. (Mistrust anyone who tries to tell another human being what their best contribution to the world is.) To be an artist is also a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become someone other than yourself.
Ocean Vuong by Nan Goldin for Document Journal
Couple with the great Zen teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh's poetic antidote to anger, then revisit Ursula K. Le Guin's excellent meditation on the uses and misuses of anger in an imperfect world.
We are always either drawing closer or drifting apart — there is no stasis in relationships. The direction of movement may change over the course of a relationship, but there is no stasis. Despite our culture's bias for the drama of cataclysm — the violent heartbreaks, the very notion of falling in love, implying a sudden tripping along the path of life — the most profound of these motions of the soul are the work of gradualism, their pace geologic, their velocity that of continents, so incremental as to be imperceptible, until one day two people find themselves a sum greater than its parts: infinity, or zero.
This elemental tendency comes to life with great levity and charm in Drew Beckmeyer's picture-book Stalactite & Stalagmite: A Big Tale from a Little Cave (public library). The tale is big because its theme is the largest of feelings, but also because tucked into the love story is the evolutionary history of how our rocky planet became a living world — something I especially appreciate as a kindred practitioner of Trojan-horsing science into life through love.
Just like those who have lived a long love become each other's memory-keepers, Stalactite and Stalagmite pass the time by recounting their shared memories of bygone eras and extinct creatures: their first visitor, a trilobite — one of the earliest arthropods, who told them tales of life at the bottom of the deep sea; the thirsty giant ground sloth who licked them for every precious drop and casually informed them about the evolution of fur; the immense triceratops who made the whole cave tremble with the echo of his roar; the meteors that turned the sky black and lashed the Earth with acid rain so that for a long while nothing could grow and thrive.
Stalactite bonds with the bat over having the same vantage on the cave, and Stalagmite snuggles with the ichthyostega — one of the first walkers of the land, who tells the story of how fish grew legs.
Stalactite and Stalagmite were there, inching closer still together, when we came onto the scene to draw our dreams and myths and fears on the cave wall, to invent fire and language and science, so that one day tour guides could shine flashlights onto the cavernous darkness and tell children how stalactites and stalagmites form.
The formation of that "something new" is what Adrienne Rich meant when she wrote of love as "a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved." What terrifies us most is the fear that the new formation might be a merging so total and irrevocable that we lose ourselves in the other, lose every last boundary of where one ends and the other begins, fall prey to the self-abandonment many mistake for love.
Overhearing the tour guide, Stalactite and Stalagmite reflect on their destiny, facing that fundamental fear but regarding the new formation with the awareness, honed on eons of observing change, that we never really know what lies on the other side of a transformation — we can only envision what we lose of the past we know, but not the future we stand to gain.
The key, in love as in evolution, is not to mistake the limits of the imaginable for the limits of the possible.
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