Still, gray day, up in the aerie, radio downstairs on low. Tackled brimming carton of local plum tomatoes today. Halved about half, placed in various pans and a cookie sheet, drizzled with E.V. olive oil, scattered with unpeeled cloves of local garlic (so fresh & pungent), and roasted at 225 for three hours. I have a beautiful supply of caramelized, concentrated tomato essence now. I ran out of pans and oven space, so I dipped the rest of the tomatoes in batches in boiling water, in order to loosen the skins. I'll purée the heaping bowls of tomatoes tomorrow. It is a pleasure to put by local produce like this, and what a gift in bleak midwinter.

One of the two grapevines that we've been training to clamber up either side of an eyesore of an outbuilding has produced a small cluster of fruit, ripening to purple, and I popped one while watering - tart lubricious mouthfeel with unpleasantly gelatinized seed. Well, we were growing the vine for its screening qualities.

Yesterday afternoon I thought of the young Danish chef who reminds me of Emily Dickinson as I tried to figure out about dinner. Every time I roast a whole chicken I save the raw liver in a container in the freezer. I now had, defrosted, enough to sauté for a main course, along with a farmstand cabbage and an onion. But what else to round out the meal, complement the ingredients? I was out of potatoes, besides we'd had enough starch (bread with breakfast, pasta at lunch) for the day. Lettuce, tomatoes, and zucchini didn't seem to go, or I wasn't in the mood. Even if I'd had the car I didn't want to go to a market or farmstand just to get - to get - well, what, anyway? And then I thought - apples! Earlier in the day I had looked out the door to the juliet balcony of what used to be our bedroom and noticed that the fruit on the picturesque ancient tree was beginning to ripen, ornamental red globes brilliantly coloring against the foliage and ink dark wood. I threw on a tee shirt and jeans (as a rule I keep clothes handy), marched up the driveway, hung a left at the front lawn, crossed the garden (curious cats in meandering tow), arrived at the tree, stood on tiptoes to reach up, grabbed the edge of a small branch on which clustered a promising reddening bunch, successfully captured it, pulled, and picked off small, gnarled fruit, gathering 8 or 10 apples in all (enough for dinner, I should think), which I held with my palms against my chest as I turned on my heel and began my triumphant stroll home, treasure and delicious future side dish in tow. It was at that point that I thought of René Redzepi, the creative chef. I know, it's almost laughable that I'm psyched that I simply went into the front yard and picked apples, while he is a master herbarianist and mushroomer, venturing into Danish meadows and wooded wilds to forage all sorts of unexpected native herbaceous and fungal edibles. I'm glad he's reclaiming that lost art.

I have an uncle, for years now incapacitated (I wish I knew Latin - I may mean this literally) with Alzheimers. But before WWII erupted (zanim Wojna wybuchła, exploded), he spent his boyhood in the Polish countryside - and learned his mushrooms. Now (well - not now, but forty years ago, say when I was ten, around 1970 - and what was for him many many years after his boyhood and indeed the war) I was visiting my young cousins and my Babcia and my aunt and uncle at their lovely, unexpectedly Prairie-style house in a leafy commuter suburb of New Jersey, and Wujek had just returned on foot from a weekend stroll in the town park, bringing back with him a prized clutch of wild mushrooms that he had gathered. I was amazed, and a little wary - but I trusted my uncle, a total rock. My awareness of mushrooms was limited but precise. Mushrooms came either in plastic-wrapped containers at the A&P or they grew in the wild - but the bloodless enticing eruptions found at the roots of a tree, for example, might be Deadly Poisonous and only an Expert could tell for sure. As was perhaps quite typical in the pre-war day, my uncle was indeed such an Expert, having spent a boyhood gainfully playing outdoors, exploring field and forest, and surefootedly picking up the knowledge along the way. I was prepared to believe that he knew his Polish wild mushrooms, but did this qualify him to judge New Jersey's? He laughed and assured me he knew what he was doing (probably he overcommented - he was a bit tedious and longwinded as a raconteur - a family joke being that he wouldn't just tell you about marigolds - but about the history of the word marigold.) Someone in the kitchen, my Babcia or perhaps my aunt, sliced and sautéed the morsels to perfection in a bit of butter, and seated squeezed in on a bench among my cousins, tanned as nuts, my siblings, my beloved Babcia (I may well have been pressed against her wonderfully cushy self), my uncle at the "head" of the round, crowded picnic table in the latticed and shaded alcove, who having been presented with his ritual glass of hot tea embarked on one of his Midday Rambles, at some point in the midst of that delightful meal, which featured numerous little courses and side dishes, bowls passed all around, and shouts into the kitchen, I managed to score my first mouthful, the most delicious bite of wild mushroomy wildness - explosive mindblowing sumptuous depth charges.

I was age 10 at the time. Soon after - a few years - the August I reached age 16 I met you.

My uncle, the rock, when it came to wild mushrooms (and just being a rock) - he rocked.

Will post now, without editing. But reserve the right to come back early in the morning and fix apostrophes and accent marks - little tweaks - nothing major. This is the main meal - if you return - it won't be that suddenly halibut replaced cod. It'll be more that that --- oh, I don't know -

kisses for you, for now, wherever you are

Good morning darling. Gray, cool morning. I'm a little out of sorts. I woke up too early, before 6, got up, and now it's after nine and I feel tired again. Also a bit anxious. Also just a bit unhinged, a feeling of having been turned inside out. Things are not as they appear. Yesterday I weeded the little woodland garden. It's situated in the west- and north-facing ell of the house. Penelope (the cat) kept me company and the radio was playing inside the house. I could hear it through the open windows - from the living room, one of whose windows faces west, music spilling into the garden where I worked, and also from the solarium, in which D installed a second set of speakers, whose open window faces north - also spilling forth the music. I am unable to see in stereo, but realized as I crouched and weeded that within the ell I could hear in stereo, and that here, suddenly, the living room and the solarium were very proximate whereas, if I'm in the house, it's a bit of a walk to go from the living room to the solarium - I must go through the dining room, pass through a doorway, walk through the kitchen to the doorway of the solarium, and cross through the long room - its northfacing window is at the far end. So as I weeded I felt a sense of space having telescoped, inverted, compressed - windows, portals - and wondered, not for the first time, if that's how the universe is structured, that other worlds are extremely proximate, a matter of perception.

I'm glad you're back - but since you've returned "United States" with the iPhone has disappeared. True, it's only been a day - but I got accustomed to his visits. Very strange. Back in June I decided it was you - based in part, I kid you not, on a couple of songs KZE played one night (when "United States" first appeared), entitled Alaska and Satellite Sky. I decided (tongue-in-cheek - I'm not entirely crazy) to take them to be signals or clues that it was you. I didn't literally believe it - but absent other input - why not? As far as I know, KZE has never played either of those songs before or since (now, it's possible that they have - but not that I've happened to notice anyway, and I often look at their playlists).

(On this morning's playlist - Planes and Satellites.)

So now I am feeling the weirdest sense of divided loyalties - love as always for ever-removed you, and a sudden retroactive fondness for Mr. iPhone - who is now, as revealed, a separate entity. I feel certain it's a Mister, and I have an inkling of who it might be, though my track record for correctly guessing is abysmal - best leave it to pleasant ambiguity.

D's at work now but will be back soon and I'll go for my walk. I'm sure it will do me good, clear my head. Clear my head of cobwebs I wanted to write - and indeed I noticed at the conservation area yesterday morning (I was there early, around 8), that the spiderwebs are back, galleries of them. A teflon-coated fly could I suppose go the long way, step along the circumference of a web. Or take a shortcut to the opposite side - traverse the windows.

I'm glad I gave you Borges' Labyrinths. Did you ever read it? I read this apposite bit from the introduction, on someone's blog yesterday:

We are transported into a realm where fact and fiction, the real and the unreal, the whole and the part, the highest and the lowest, are complementary aspects of the same continuous being: a realm where ‘any man is all men’, where ‘all men who repeat a line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare’. The world is a book and the book is a world, and both are labyrinthine and enclose enigmas designed to be understood and participated in by man. We should note that this all-comprising intellectual unity is achieved precisely by the sharpest and most scandalous confrontation of opposites.

All who repeat a line of Dickinson are Emily Dickinson.

I dwell in Possibility--
A fairer House than Prose--
More numerous of Windows--
Superior--for Doors--

Of Chambers as the Cedars--
Impregnable of Eye--
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky--

Of Visitors--the fairest--
For Occupation--This--
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise--

Kisses, dearest. Have a wonderful day.

Hello dearest. Up in the aerie, sipping rosé, considering your cover design, musing, catching little fragments from today's mental travels that relate. Just now a David Gray song came on, A Moment Changes Everything. He's a brilliant lyricist, the phrase "visions looming in our heads" popped, and I jotted it down. I glance at my notes from listening a while back to a radio interview with the Secret Life of E.D. author, Jerome Charyn, who said of E.D. "she traveled inside her head." This morning on the NYRB blog I read an essay by Tony Judt, the scholarly interpreter of modern European history, who died, last week, of Lou Gehrig's disease. In the essay (here's the link) he views what he dubs "articulacy," the ability to express one's self clearly - rhetorical flexibility - as "not merely evidence of intelligence but intelligence itself." He is careful to note, however, that verbal pyrotechnics can be dazzling but vacuous - evidence of polish rather than of smarts. But he views widespread "inarticulacy" as more unequivocally suggestive of "a shortcoming of thought," confusion of words bespeaking a confusion of ideas, or (more so in our culture, in his view) insecurity: "we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously. Rather than suffering from the onset of 'newspeak,' we risk the rise of 'nospeak'.”

(He's too kind - so many people are led by the nose these days - they don't know what they think - tweets all over the "landscape" don't help - they're too often less haiku than regurgitations into the mouths of hungry starling beaks - but who needs more starlings? Hummingbirds!)

Judt continues, heartbreakingly,

I am more conscious of these considerations now than at any time in the past. In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them. They still form with impeccable discipline and unreduced range in the silence of my thoughts—the view from inside is as rich as ever—but I can no longer convey them with ease. Vowel sounds and sibilant consonants slide out of my mouth, shapeless and inchoate even to my close collaborator. The vocal muscle, for sixty years my reliable alter ego, is failing. Communication, performance, assertion: these are now my weakest assets. Translating being into thought, thought into words, and words into communication will soon be beyond me and I shall be confined to the rhetorical landscape of my interior reflections.

Rhetorical landscape of my interior reflections - nice phrase, I turn it over (in the metaphorical landscape of my mind). So I consider the elements of the cover design, and they don't mesh (for me) with "landscape." The images convey artifact and externalized thought, especially of technology, but not rhetorical or metaphorical landscape. Perhaps the blue background with the faintly traced geometric lines (please don't tell me that that grid is representative of human thought processes, I don't believe the mind is as ordered as that - though it's capable of focusing to produce such a grid). I wonder, then, if the background could be employed to imaginatively contribute to the concept of "landscape." I don't know what the image would be - perhaps an image of art - a prehistoric depiction of landscape (if there is such a thing - Lascaux horse paintings?), Darwin's handwriting, your handwriting, a cartographic representation - map & legend - imaginary, legendary - a mental map. An opportunity, possibly, too, to include "art" (not just technology) in the conceptualization. So maybe, in sum, I see the cover as a little too mechanistic, brutalistic even. I know - that's a very strong word (I don't mean to be blunt myself), but - perhaps from my perspective as a woman, or at any rate as a person with a range of artistic/emotional/intuitive responses - the effect of the cover, to me, is quite blunt and, well, artless, in the stark images, isolated from one another and punctuated with all block-cap text. (Is or isn't the archaeological record either gender-neutral, or gender-specific - but not exclusively "male"?) So that is my two cents - from your unsolicited focus group of one. Either that - or change the title.

***
Other than that - love and kisses, truly, dearest. I've been at a bit of low ebb today as the tide in my mental seascape turned (no joke - it was rough learning that U.S. wasn't you though today I could totally laugh about it). I'm glad Qwest at 184.96 is back. Now a song on KZE - ... there's a lot of jam bands in Colorado.

Peach?

***
P.S. Now it's an unsolicited focus group of two - I had D take a look at the cover and read the post. He thinks, lose the main title already, go with the "arch. of thought" wording - elevate it. That's the original, starkly arresting, incredibly exciting phrase - it should be in the main title! (Plus, I wasn't crazy about the depiction or placement of the hewn stone - too redolent ...) Signed, Anna (Mrs.) DeWintour

Dear friend

***
Belle to J, 24 June 2010

Dear J - Am wondering - are you able to access my blog? Have rec'd page hits that at first I thought were from you (given that they started the day after Nome) but yesterday, to the plummeting detriment of my mood, thought weren't from you after all. Now I'm less sure, in this age, perhaps the satellite signal gets directed to NYC...

Anyway, could you let me know (if you get this message, that is) if you're able to check in on my blog? It is like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle - my knowing that you're reading it has an effect! A crucial positive one that is - if you're not reading it, then I'm inclined to perhaps discontinue it because the impetus goes straight out of it for me.

I hope all is well with you. If you have a chance to drop me a line (an extra one, that is) - then, how is it going for you up there, so far? I hope it is all beyond tolerable - enjoyable even. All my love, Belle

***
J to Belle, 16 August 2010

Dear Belle, I have at last returned from Alaska--I flew in early this morning and was still on the beach at Cape E~ less than 24 hours ago. As it turned out, the promised internet connection through a satellite phone wasn't workable, and I had no internet access after June 17. I did check your blog from Nome that morning, but have been unable to access it again until now.

The field work was successful, but was exhausting, especially because I was in charge of a large and complex operation and had various personnel problems to deal with (I had to send one person home in late July). When a large number of people is stuck in a remote place together for weeks and months, problems are bound to develop, because there is no escape from the group (it's dangerous to wander off on your own).

I hope you've been well, had a good summer. Being in a remote place for a long period of time--as beautiful as it was--makes one appreciate small and simple things like a hot bath and a glass of wine... Love, J.

***
Belle to J, 16 August 2010

Dear J, Welcome back, glad you're back safe & sound. I'm feeling like an idiot at the moment. All summer long I thought you were able to access my blog. I received your Nome hit, and a day or two later I started to get hits once or twice a day from what registered as "United States" from someone's iPhone. At first I didn't think it was you because the IP address seemed to be from NYC. But then I thought, well maybe that's the mystery of satellite service - you look at my blog on Cape E~ and it pings to a satellite in more or less my region.

So I wrote to you (that is, posted daily) faithfully every day this summer - I didn't miss more than a day or two. I had liked to think that I was providing you with a tiny bit of enjoyment. Guess not. Guess I have a fan with an iPhone in the "United States." (Also I seem to have a faithful reader in Denmark.)

Well, I missed you, I don't know if you missed me. Oh well.

Sorry to hear about the personnel problems - hardly a surprise under the circumstances. One of my posts this summer related to how I imagined your situation to be a cross between Sartre's No Exit and the Survivor show where someone gets voted - or kicked - off the island - which, as you say, happened...

Enjoy that hot bath & glass of wine. I'd love to hear more details of your trip if/when you get a chance. Saw a post... written by your camp manager - I really enjoyed it. I certainly hope that he worked out for you - such a crucial role.

Really, that wasn't you all summer? What a bummer, my mind is going through major revisioning now. I'm sorry about that - I like to think you would have enjoyed them. Love, Belle

***
Thank you, "United States"

***
89 years before the day Belle was born...

E.D. to T. W. Higginson, 16 August 1870

Dear friend
I will be at Home and glad.
I think you said the 15th. The incredible never surprises us because it is the incredible.

***
image: Bland House, after Edward Hopper, by Elise (5th grade), 2010 [via]

Hello darling, I wonder where you are and hope all is well with you (kisses). Up in the aerie, wearing jeans and a top - it's quite cool and gray today, shades of fall, and now light rain. Took the eggplant I roasted the other day and made a big bowl of baba ghanoush, a purée seasoned with tahini, garlic, extra virgin olive oil, and fresh lemon juice, to which I added quartered cherry tomatoes from a stand down the road, parsley from a raised bed here, and minced red onion. Put in a disc of True Blood to watch while slicing peaches, but have completely lost interest in the series so inserted a DVD of You Can Count on Me, with Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo. It's filmed in the Catskills, so the views are so familiar to me, and it's just a wonderful movie - over the years I've easily seen it a dozen times and it's fresh every time. Wonderful Matthew Broderick too, playing a complete asshole of a boss. Enjoyed the movie while slicing a big box of peaches - maybe 50 or more pieces of fruit - that was $5 at the farmstand yesterday. I froze most of it in big baggies - this winter there will be peach pie and peach crostata and stewed peaches to have with morning oatmeal. I am like a squirrel socking away produce, but it's so worthwhile - fresh, local, and very economical. Produce is inexpensive now - but supermarket peppers in January? Often $4/lb. or more. Now I'm buying entire cartons for a few dollars.

I am feeling like quite the hausfrau today, what with food prep and the neighbor's chickens spending so much time in our garden. They crack me up. They flock together and cluck nonstop as if commenting on their surroundings or a tasty bug. They're quite beautiful. I snapped a picture today - not a very good one. I hope to have very beautiful photos in the near future - D gave me a Nikon digital camera for my birthday. It's teeny. I don't know how to use it yet, and it needs batteries and programming and - well, I'm very grateful that D will figure it out and explain the basics to me - which is all I ever wish to know with sophisticated technology. Point and click. 

Wonderful chance encounters with wildlife over the last several days. At the conservation area, in a wooded path, a young stag (the beginnings of antlers) stood on the side and regarded me and I spoke to it and it stood and listened - and it was strange - I almost had the feeling it was checking me out! Too many Greek myths. Or maybe it's that time of year for them. Another day, on a different wooded path, I virtually skidded to a halt when I saw a long, thin, black and yellow snake motionless on the path. I gasped audibly and the snake slithered away - quite a remarkable sight, all moving S-curves, sort of sexy, reminded me of Gwynnie's sashaying. The snake sashayed into the shrubbery. I laughed - who was more startled, I of it, or it of me? Then, here at the house, there are the funny brown chickens, and also a Zulu warrior of an amazing large spider that's strung up an invisible (but present) web in the perennial border that fronts the porch. I see it when I water the garden. I posted an image of the very same type of spider several years ago in my old blog - let me see if I can dig out that image and post it.

Darling, now the rain is coming down in earnest and if Ruth Reichl in her tweet this morning reported that the air was still with not a leaf moving - I look out the window now and see not the pines but that the ash and maple are dancing.

I hope all is well with you and that your journey is as smooth as it could possibly be, with every connection going just right. (Many years ago, when I traveled quite a lot for work, once or twice I endured horrible weather-related delays, a whole overnight once spent in an airport, due to a blizzard somewhere that messed up the whole system.)

Anyway, it's August so that shouldn't be an issue. But I can imagine that at this point you'd like to be beamed back, but no, one must go through the process, unless one is, say, in Air Force One, one of the perks for sure of being President. Oh well, anyway, I am thinking of you and loving you, and if you have to camp out for 23 minutes while they board whoever first - well, let me put an arm around you, give you a kiss you on the cheek, and see if you'd like anything else, say a sip of rosé. Oh I know, you're probably pretty grizzly, in need of a hot shower, haircut and a shave, maybe not so much in the mood for smiles. I don't mind, darling, I love you anyway. Well I myself have gotten too warm and have pinned my hair up and popped my top. Now there's a beautiful ambient sound of steady rain and the gray gloaming. So very many kisses, my darling love. Godspeed, adieu.

Good morning darling, beautiful early morning, delicious to slowly wake, pull up soft covers, savor the coolness, shut my eyes, listen to radio on low, drift from song to song, fall into evanescent dreams, surface with thoughts of you, reach for a pillow, put my arms around, yeah you, you're the color of the sun

Hours earlier, around three-thirty, I awoke and felt sufficiently energetic to go outside in the hope of glimpsing the Perseids. (The peak was the night before, but it was overcast, just as well I slept through.) I didn't see any meteors but am glad I stepped out all the same. It was pitch dark, I didn't have a flashlight (not on this lark, I'm not prepared for emergencies either), I didn't want to trip over the garden hose, or a cat, or - lately - one of the neighbor's four peripatetic egglaying chickens that keep Papillon-style finding a gap in the fence and wandering over to the frog pond marsh where our cats, incredulous, regard them with seemingly benign curiosity, grateful, possibly, that the chickens eat tics so that the cats don't have to be Frontline'd. Also, we ran out of cat food yesterday, the four cats had a tribunal and I kept them from laying siege on me by treating them to bits of roast chicken - so our cats, confronted with chickens - live, thinking poultry on our side of the fence - may have collectively decided that they prefer them roasted.

I adjusted my eyes to the dark. Gwynnie and Claire, the bonobo girls, were dark shapes on the driveway. They were so incredulous and overjoyed that I was outside at that hour (or any hour) that they started rolling around, wrestling and making out. It was a mild clear night. I stood in my light robe and looked up at the vast heavens and the grainy Milky Way and necklaces of starlight all around, constellations I can recognize even in a groggy state - Big Dipper certainly - and I thought of you way over there under the same firmament that hasn't - what with lack of astronomical twilights - had a starfilled sky all summer, but perhaps wondrous compensations such as Northern lights and the sound of the lapping sea. I thought of you as under the same canopied heavens and sent you all my love.

I love standing outside in the pitch dark and looking up at the gable-roofed house outlined against the sky. It's an old house, built 1885, and there is something so timeless it. My sense of scale shifts. I'm aware of myself regarding it, the house whose gray aluminum sided exterior is indifferent at best. By day I don't like to look at it. In fact I don't like to be out on the exposed driveway during the day. It's too bright and sunny, very harsh. Last night I thought of E.D. and how she used to garden at night. It's viewed as one of her eccentricities but it makes perfect sense to me; the night, with mild temperatures, starlight, and maybe moonlight, is so gentle and enveloping, easy on the skin, on the senses, on one's nerves, optic and other.

On a dark night the specter of the house magically transforms. It is beautiful, reduced to elemental shapes, like a child's drawing, or a folk art painting, or a neatly constructed origami structure, ingenious, ingenuous sharp angles and simple folds, upstairs windows faintly aglow.

I spent some time on my slow computer, and also at the library, trying to come up with a painterly image to include to illustrate what I see in my mind's eye. Google: Hopper house night sky; Magritte house night sky; then DiChirico; then, haplessly, Balthus. In the end I couldn't find the right visual - perhaps if I get a decent digital camera nighttime shots will be possible, though I don't expect miracles - a scene such as that might have to be painted. Here then so I've tried, my darling, in so many incorporeal words.

I imagine that you must be on your way back, the beach vacated for aeons again once more, and I wish you a wonderful journey back. All my love, as always, dearest. And darling, if you liked the Bringdown (I imagine that was you), here's another Bob Schneider song, 40 Dogs (Romeo & Juliet), that KZE played a little while ago that I just adore. If it had played that afternoon on Warren Street - well, I would have blogged about that. The sound quality is way better in this particular video.

You're the color of the moon, you're the color of the night... I can tell you where we're gonna be when the whole world falls into the sea we'll be living together happily...

From Christopher Benfey, A Summer of Hummingbirds, pp. 249-50

... the considerable job of sorting through Dickinson's manuscripts, in preparation for the landmark edition of her poems published in 1955, went to Jay Leyda. It was Leyda, a scholar and artist of remarkable range, who painstakingly unpacked the contents of Dickinson's desk, discovering along the way her own hoarding practices and constructed manuscripts. Leyda found a poem written on the back of a faded yellow Chocolat Meunier candy wrapper. He found a manuscript about a bird formed of two parts of an envelope pinned together to resemble a bird. He found a poem about a house written beneath the rooflike arc of another envelope. And, of course, he found the Mauprat collage... Leyda, by temperament, training, and travel, was attuned to the visual and tactile allure of these manuscripts... he knew who among American artists would be most interested in Dickinson's own radical experiments... Leyda recognized an affinity between Emily Dickinson and Joseph Cornell - the "small, rickety infinitudes" of her poems and his boxes. It was an affinity that Cornell himself had already begun to sense when he and Leyda began their exchange regarding Dickinson's radical manuscripts.

***
I shouldn't have been surprised - but was - to read that E.D. created time & genre-busting art objects: hybrid letter-poem-collages. Beyond "merely" writing incorporeal poems, beyond penning intimate letters, beyond arranging dried flowers on album herbarium pages, beyond tucking a poem or posy within the fold of a letter - in one iteration she precisely affixed snippets of text clipped from a Harper's beneath an uncanceled postage stamp on the center of a page, and wrote a poem (with variants) around the miniscule collage. I had no idea. I wish I could find an image of the "Mauprat collage" on line to show you - it's very cool. Here's an image of the 1869 three-cent stamp she used.

I have oriented the stamp here as Dickinson did on her manuscript page. Benfey writes,

Dickinson placed the stamp so that the train is traveling upward like a rocket, the smoke cascading down. One has to remember how unfamiliar trains were in the 1870s, and how fast, marking time with their "horrid-hooting stanza," as Dickinson wrote. The blue stamp in the middle of the page resembles a window, and through her own bedroom window Dickinson could actually see the locomotive - named for her father - arriving in Amherst...

***
[Ed.: Actually, that confuses me a bit. "The" locomotive depicted on the stamp was named after her father? Or was "a" locomotive (in service to Amherst) named for him?]

***
The typescript clipped from Harper's - the upper scrap, slanting upward to the left, reads George Sand, the one below it, slanting down (but at less radical an angle - though perhaps time has taken a toll on precise degrees) is of the title of her novel that had recently been published in Boston (though it's unlikely that E.D. had yet read it) - Mauprat. As Benfey writes, "The words 'of bandits a' are legible beneath Mauprat, part of a sentence [in Harper's] describing the plot of the novel: "Mauprat is brought up among a company of bandits and robbers, relics of the feudal past."

And I'm saying nothing of the poem E.D. penned around it, including a list of alternate words, possibilities, co-existent variants. One of the lines reads, We were all inmates of one place... I consult my Complete Poems of E.D. It's #1167. I'll copy it below, along with the variants (in italics) from her handwritten manuscript...

***
Benfey writes,

George Sand was herself a famous writer of letters, one voice in perhaps the best-known exchange of love letters in nineteenth-century Europe. Her correspondence with the poet Alfred de Musset entranced readers, and demonstrated for a whole generation how a love affair could become a work of art. It was a fantasy that Emily Dickinson herself had indulged in throughout her mature life. Her "[M]aster letters" seem, in retrospect, experiments in enacting a grand passion on the page, and so do her late letters to Judge Otis Lord, with her careful insistence that the real life of the affair was verbal, not "corporeal."

That last line - with Miss Dickinson ensconced, on this point, in her century, and I in mine, it's here where she & I ("New Woman" 2.0 and then some) part company - I most assuredly like my cake and eat it too, in my corporeal quest to resolve not the hopelessly structurally divided brain (& who'd want to - source of all kinds of creative tension!) but the unrelated, false, unnatural and unnecessary mind/body split...

***

1167

Alone and in a Circumstance
Reluctant to be told
A spider on my reticence
Assiduously crawled

deliberately
determinately
impertinently

And so much more at Home than I
Immediately grew
I felt myself a visitor
And hurriedly withdrew

Revisiting my late abode
With articles of claim
I found it quietly assumed
As a Gymnasium
Where Tax asleep and Title off
The inmates of the Air
Perpetual presumption took
As each were special Heir -
If any strike me on the street
I can return the Blow -
If any take my property
According to the Law
The Statute is my Learned friend
But what redress can be
For an offense nor here nor there
So not in Equity -
That Larceny of time and mind
The marrow of the Day
By spider, or forbid it Lord
That I should specify.