Sometimes I Try to Pretend It Is Another Kind of Place

Notes from yesterday morning:

A little girl finds a twenty on the sidewalk and scoops it up in delight. Was it lying there or did her dad drop it? It's mine now, she crows, and her dad smiles at me as I walk by. I think, she will never forget that moment.

Last night, in a brownstone garden yards away a little girl played, sword play with a red plastic lightsaber, dancing, skipping, jumping, swooping, play acting by herself in her yard. A man and a woman came outside, her parents I guess, and the man danced with the girl and picked her up and lifted her over his head and spun her around and held her at her waist and spun and danced with her some more - how nice, for a little girl to receive attention as that from a loving father.

They seemed to resent that we were born at a different point in the narrative, that we couldn't fathom their story or fully enter their pain.

***
From letter #413, E.D. to Thomas Wentworth Higginson

I thought being a Poem one's self precluded the writing Poems, but perceive the Mistake.

***
Notes from yesterday late afternoon:

Sitting in the southfacing window of my friends' Brooklyn apartment. We're well into September but I'm wearing (for decency's sake) the one skirt outfit I own - a sleeveless deep-pink top, and a chiffony midlength skirt, limeade and sprite background scattered with pink hibiscus. Honestly, this outfit isn't even really my style, yet I feel pretty in it, and it does say - summer day.

I am feeling Prisoner of Chillonish up here. I've unlocked the window gate and the warm sun feels good on my arm. My hair is pinned up - so I'm not Rapunzel - and readers sit on my nose as my pen scrapes along the page. I drink rosé from a glass brought from home, the same glass from which I drink ice water in the day and night, and OJ at breakfast.

The Arnolfini cedars are both actually taller than the brownstones.
How tall will they get?

The backyards, some of them, look so Staten Islandy here - above ground pools filled with water, empty of people -

I wish you were here. As much as I like to express myself in words sometimes I would like to express myself otherwise.

***
From Master letter #3, Emily Dickinson, summer 1861:

'Chillon' is not funny.

***
I stepped away from the window to refresh my glass, and when I returned there was a young squirrel at the very top of the fire escape - four floors up - come to visit, trying to befriend me. Fortunately the screen was closed because if it hadn't been I think the squirrel would have hopped right in. I talked to it - uncannily the way Sarah Crewe, in Francis Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess had befriended Melchisedec, the rat in the attic - and took a couple of photos (which I won't be able to download until I'm back home this weekend). It's as close up as I've ever been to a squirrel, I think. It was really very cute and beseeching, amazing tiny long fingerlike paws, bright round eyes, wiggling nose, bushy variegated tail, trying its best to be cute as could be so I might give it a treat (which of course I didn't - my friends don't need a pet squirrel on their return). I hung out talking to it for a few minutes but eventually enough was enough. I closed the window and drew the curtains to.
Good night, Melchisedec.

***
From Francis Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess, Chapter 9, "Melchisedec"

The truth was that, as the days had gone on and, with the aid of scraps brought up from the kitchen, her curious friendship had developed, she had gradually forgotten that the timid creature she was becoming familiar with was a mere rat.

At first Ermengarde was too much alarmed to do anything but huddle in a heap upon the bed and tuck up her feet, but the sight of Sara's composed little countenance and the story of Melchisedec's first appearance began at last to rouse her curiosity, and she leaned forward over the edge of the bed and watched Sara go and kneel down by the hole in the skirting board.

"He—he won't run out quickly and jump on the bed, will he?" she said.

"No," answered Sara. "He's as polite as we are. He is just like a person. Now watch!"

She began to make a low, whistling sound—so low and coaxing that it could only have been heard in entire stillness. She did it several times, looking entirely absorbed in it. Ermengarde thought she looked as if she were working a spell. And at last, evidently in response to it, a gray-whiskered, bright-eyed head peeped out of the hole. Sara had some crumbs in her hand. She dropped them, and Melchisedec came quietly forth and ate them. A piece of larger size than the rest he took and carried in the most businesslike manner back to his home.

"You see," said Sara, "that is for his wife and children. He is very nice. He only eats the little bits. After he goes back I can always hear his family squeaking for joy. There are three kinds of squeaks. One kind is the children's, and one is Mrs. Melchisedec's, and one is Melchisedec's own."

Ermengarde began to laugh.

"Oh, Sara!" she said. "You ARE queer—but you are nice."

"I know I am queer," admitted Sara, cheerfully; "and I TRY to be nice." She rubbed her forehead with her little brown paw, and a puzzled, tender look came into her face. "Papa always laughed at me," she said; "but I liked it. He thought I was queer, but he liked me to make up things. I—I can't help making up things. If I didn't, I don't believe I could live." She paused and glanced around the attic. "I'm sure I couldn't live here," she added in a low voice.

Ermengarde was interested, as she always was. "When you talk about things," she said, "they seem as if they grew real. You talk about Melchisedec as if he was a person."

"He IS a person," said Sara. "He gets hungry and frightened, just as we do; and he is married and has children. How do we know he doesn't think things, just as we do? His eyes look as if he was a person. That was why I gave him a name."

She sat down on the floor in her favorite attitude, holding her knees.

"Besides," she said, "he is a Bastille rat sent to be my friend. I can always get a bit of bread the cook has thrown away, and it is quite enough to support him."

"Is it the Bastille yet?" asked Ermengarde, eagerly. "Do you always pretend it is the Bastille?"

"Nearly always," answered Sara. "Sometimes I try to pretend it is another kind of place; but the Bastille is generally easiest—particularly when it is cold."

Hello darling. Up in my friends' aerie study. I started this post about a half hour ago and was so exhausted I just couldn't get it going, so overtired (waking from a nap) that I started feeling emotional in that fretful way. But then I got an email back from the friends in whose apartment I'm staying, instructing me on where to find the key to unlock the padlock to get outside to remove the wind chime. So I just did that - and it completely lifted my mood to sit at the top of the brownstone with the sun in my face, warming my face and body (not that it's cool out, it's that the radiation felt so therapeutic), sipping from a glass of wine, observing the gorgeous cedar deodoras that D and I planted in 1990 that are now as tall as the brownstone buildings - 35 feet or so? I sat on the south facing window ledge. From way downstairs in the garden a little white dog looked up at me and barked, the guy who bought our apartment had a date, from what I could see a soignee young woman in a pretty black spaghetti-strapped dress and flipflop sandals, I guess it was her dog. Up one of the cedar deodoras stepped a bird, making its way up to the top as though the tree were a spiral staircase. I couldn't make out what it was: woodpecker maybe? a jay? But it delighted me.

The reason I was physically exhausted (besides just waking) was that I was out and about quite a bit today. Before nine this morning I walked up to the Heights and took the IRT to Christopher Street/Sheridan Square, wandered around the Village (so glad to see that the Three Lives bookshop is still around, I had wondered), threading my way down MacDougal alongside Washington Square Park (the coffee and breakfast sandwich crowd waking up all along, such a nice hour), zigzagging from Bleecker to Sullivan to who knows where else, winding my way through Soho - just for the walk, get my body moving (idiotically I'd become obsessed with my post yesterday and ended up staying in all day) - then over the Brooklyn Bridge and down the leafy brownstone streets back to the apartment. By this time I'd received a reply from my friends regarding the wind chimes. They'd put them up as "a personal buffer against all the annoying barking, singing, drumming, etc." and would unquestionably miss their sound, but yeah take them down, which I set to do right then except that the gate was locked. So I emailed them again - where's the key?

Then I changed into my swimsuit and walked down Clinton to the beautiful Red Hook pool, an expanse of azure waves and vast blue sky - a wonderful sense of blue marble openness and a lovely crowd. On Labor Day it's the weekenders and die-hards (the manic types letting off steam in early summer having long grown bored of the pool). I swam 14 lengths, got out, and basked in the sun for a while, reluctant to leave especially this very last day that the pool's open this season - denizens waxing elegiac. It felt so good to get some sun (and god knows, Vitamin D) on my skin. I thought I might try for another 14 lengths but didn't have the energy after all that walking. I went back to the apartment, picked chicken right off the bone standing in the kitchen and spooned butternut squash puree out of a container (unseasoned - but it had the texture and flavor of ice cream! and so healthy!). I showered and washed my hair and soaped myself with that lovely verbena soap, and then I lay down and read some critical analysis of E.D. (I used to come at poetry from a not dissimilar perspective - but now I'm on the other side, hard for me to read analysis like that anymore - I enjoy it, yet don't wish to become self-conscious myself in any way; anyway - being creative, and being analytical - two different not entirely compatible modes in the same person, not at the same instant, at any rate.) On the whole public/private question of my occasionally ribald (though not ribald enough lately - see - I am getting self-conscious) I would say that after a couple of afternoons of watching youporns many months ago I concluded (and felt emboldened) that whatever I might put down that might be deemed as naughty and "private" would seem innocent and charming in comparison to a lot of what's out there that I'm hardly even aware of. Not a manifesto, exactly...

So here I am typing away madly, wishing not to edit this right now (perhaps a tweak or two in the morning). I will send this off to you with very many kisses, and go back to the southfacing window with my glass of wine. Love you, darling. Hope all is well with you. XOXOXO

Dear Neighbor

At home it's free-range chickens, here in Cobble Hill pocket park it's speckled starlings marching about and pecking through brittle dry leaves. I'm seated on a bench that faces a sloped oval green, discreetly fenced against active use with a wreath (that starlings ignore) of low posts strung with a black iron chain. It's surrounded by, in concentric layers, a paved path, fringe of trees, shade-planted borders, and a charming pastel mews on one side and brownstoned side street on another. The mounded elliptical center is open - an "earth's eye" facing the sky, blue today. Up top along the slitted center is a flower bed filled with pink and fuschia roses, a fountain of purple buddleia, and frothy sprays of spider cleome. Now and then a pigeon soars, sturdy yet graceful in flight. An old man leans over the crescented chain and spits on the lawn. Brooklyn is a borough of spitters, the whole city, probably. A ball-capped man walks two leashed dogs. A little boy wearing a Nascar tee runs by me along the looped path. Now the spitter is doing tai chi. Mature stands of trees shade the little park. I'm seated beneath a majestic old tree I don't know the name of, and there are honey locusts too, backlit tangles of black wood and lime ovoid leaves. The little boy runs past me again and into the waiting arms of his father who bends down to kiss him adoringly. The BQE, a couple of blocks west, sounds a constant background thrum. On Clinton Street traffic is light, an occasional car edging quietly past.

I woke up in the middle of the night last night and had trouble falling back asleep. So I got up, went to the tiny study, and sat naked in the darkness before the glowing Mac. (I may not, on this visit to the Big Apple, be getting myself out quite as much as I ought - but I am catching up on culture in other ways, taking advantage of high-speed internet.) Listened to a narrated slide show review of visionary paintings by Charles Burchfield, in contemplation of a possible visit to the Whitney. Played Stella the Artist and The Bringdown, luxuriously on demand. Watched a charming short documentary about two men who met years ago when they became friendly rivals for the same girl's affection. Each had nurtured artistic aspirations and longed for escape. Many years later, after lifetimes spent in happy, self-imposed exile - one amidst Paris' meandering routes - and in fulfillment of their dreams (they had become writers) they were meeting now to revisit in bittersweet fashion the impoverished, bleak, bombed-out, remarkably unchanged Bronx hardscape of their youth.

Watched another video, of another writer, that was reminiscent of (or was) a miniature dramatic monologue. He described his book and explained how in writing it he had allowed himself to follow his intuition, seeing where the gilded birds might take him, trusting in the connections that might form. All the while he spoke, in flowing associative prose, his hands in parallel expression would come together; fly apart; poise in midair, fingers elongated; take flight, his corporeal hands like birds themselves, legible of spirit, that in a certain light might leave eloquent fluttering shadows on a wall.

***
I wasn't the only one with insomnia last night. This morning as I left the brownstone for my stroll to the park, on the floor of the vestibule lay a single lined sheet of paper with a handwritten note inscribed to "Dear Neighbor" from "your neighbor." The note complained of a wind chime that "unfortunately causes an unusually loud sound that echoes," losing no time to play the "especially as we have children" card - who "cannot sleep due to its sound." The note with professional, faux-polite alacrity recommended the only acceptable solution: "would you be so kind as to take it down?"

Unfortunately also, I'm afraid the wind chime belongs to the people in whose apartment I'm staying. (I remember freezing nights last winter listening in fascination to the bleak unseasonal clangs outside their fire escape, clamorous paean to lost birds that had missed the migration south.) I'll have to email them to see what, if anything, they'd like me to do. Always tiresome conflicts such as this in the city -- wind chimes? Of all the noises and offenses the city has to serve up - this is the one that prompts a trip around the corner to deliver an anonymous note?

Fall is coming and soon windows all over will be shut tight, cedars will dance and reach for one another in rough winds, and chimes will clang in mad, ferocious choral accompaniment, all through the overly bright starless nights.

Did I say clang? No dearest, I mean, beautifully, sonorously, soothingly, blendingly sound into the snow flakes of a soft winter night dropping over the ledges onto the BQE or the Cross-Bronx or whatever as I lie here dreaming of shimmering hummingbirds...

Good morning darling. I feel a little melancholy this morning, though at the same time set comfortably afloat on my New York adventure. A little planning and preparation pays off. D (the coffee maker in the house) brewed a supply of iced coffee for me, decanted into bottles, which I'm drinking now. I'm very appreciative that I didn't have to throw on clothes first thing and go out in search of coffee.

I wondered overnight what little comforts and necessities you require on a trip away from home. Not simple basics such as clean underwear and shoes - I mean the little things that are psychically soothing, help sustain, give pleasure. I wish I knew. If you were here I would try to arrange them for you. I'm comfortable in this apartment (having stayed here so many times now) in a way that you wouldn't be, not initially - but what hypothetically would help change that, ease the transition? I think of Leonard Lopate's imaginative radio program, where he interviews well-known artists, writers, and others, asking them what are the ten (and no more than 10) items that you would bring along if you were stranded on a desert island, or snowbound cabin. (And which would you prefer - the island, or the cabin?) You don't have to include the tools of your trade (e.g., pad & paper for a writer, paints for an artist) - just the more esoteric essentials. I realize I have my own trivial list started: camembert, rose wine, great coffee, verbena soap, as many pairs of reading glasses as possible (stylish ones), KZE. On my trip for this week I also packed (in a nicely designed Trader Joe bag, sepia oilcloth with black and white images of Victorian explorers male & female, a deep diving woman, a man in a flying machine, and a scattering of red hibiscus flowers and butterflies) Longsworth's Mabel and Austin, Benfey's E.D. and the Problem of Others that I got on reserve at the library, and also the Brian May stereoscopic study A Village Lost and Found.

I am reclusive! It is a beautiful morning outside, sunny and the humidity has broken. And I just feel like sitting up here communing with you, collecting my thoughts, slowly waking. I feel vaguely homesick - yet not for home. Afloat, unmoored. Ungrounded. Cast adrift once more. I think of the Don Gibson song.

So many other thoughts, just a jumbled miscellany at the moment. I think of a song I heard in the wee hours a couple of nights ago - Lyle Lovett singing "You Can't Resist It." It was the first time I'd ever heard it, and I lay in the darkness listening. She was old enough to know better, he crooned, but ... you can't resist it when it happens to you. The song was written quite a while ago, I think, but it spoke directly to me. I myself had once written, trying to sort things out, that I was Old Enough to Know Better. That's what the scolds (external and internal) will certainly say. But when It happens to you - you can't resist it. It overwhelmed me. I didn't feel capable of resisting it. I can't imagine actively trying to resist it (though many years ago I did just that). But to resist it is to kill off something much too essential.

What else this morning? The Secret Life of E.D. facebook page has posted the most beautiful woodcut of E.D., made especially for them by a Finnish artist, Jarkko Pylvas. (I can't manage the umlaut over the "a" in his last name on this unfamiliar computer, nor am I having any success this morning figuring out how to include either the image itself or a link to the page.)

I am so struck by the image. It's like a photographic negative, or black chalkboard with images etched in white, or electrified after-image, as when you look at something dazzlingly bright, shut your eyes, and the image inverts and repeats aglow. It captures E.D. and what she's about beautifully. She's surrounded by feathers, webs, "gods eyes" (ornaments I made as a very little girl, yarn wound and woven around a cross of popsicle sticks - called "gods eyes"), a crescent moon, stars, snowflakes, moonbeams, and starlight. He has captured E.D.'s likeness, idiosyncratic image instantly recognizable - hair parted in a bun, pudgy nose and full-lipped mouth, ribbon crossed at her throat - yet has managed to capture a most elusive quality, a sense of her poetic capacity. She does not look directly at us, as in the iconic daguerrotype. Rather - and more evocatively - she has thought of something; pensive, she looks away, off to the side, heeding the starlight and gods eyes and feathers and webs and stars - she hears beyond the genius of the sea.

Dearest, let me launch this bombananza of a post and get going. Kisses. Have a great day.

Hello darling. Ensconced in a downstate aerie, very hot tonight but it's supposed to cool off tomorrow. I have my little comforts & necessities that make me feel settled in and right at home. It's funny how a few small details make it. Stopped by Grand Central on the drive in to get my favorite French camembert - I nabbed the very last one on this very busy Friday evening, all the young professionals milling about the brighly lit gourmet emporium. Then I crossed "Lexington Passage" and stopped into a shop for lemon verbena soap. Then we zipped downtown to Balthazar in Soho for fresh bread before heading over the Manhattan Bridge, which ended up being genius because I think even with the pitstops it ended up being quicker than taking the Brooklyn Bridge. D's headed back upstate already.

The a/c's on, I've got an icefilled glass, and I figured out the KZE livestreaming. The cat has already come out to say hi, I've topped off her water and given her fresh wet food. I've made up the bed with sheets from home, and have fixed a plate of dinner, also from home: chicken that I roasted this morning, fingerling potatoes (so amazingly flavorful), butternut squash.

I have no idea what I'm going to do with myself in the city yet. Bought a Time Out, which I'll look at in bed or in the morning over coffee, to see what's going on around town. I'd like to check out a place called Poets House in Lower Manhattan. Also the other day someone linked to something or other about an exhibit at the NY Society Library, which I've never heard of before (which surprises me a little that I haven't, considering how long I lived here, and my literary interests). It's an exhibit of manuscripts, letters, memorabilia, and the like of an author whom I haven't even read, Shirley Hazzard, who wrote a novel that I have heard of, The Transit of Venus. It's been on my reading list for probably thirty years - so perhaps the exhibit will be a "way in" to read it.

Not feeling very poetical tonight at all, dearest, just tired, glad to be here - or at least not to be in transit, especially not the Deegan/FDR portions which induce a form of Tourette's in me - involuntary screams, gasps, swearing, rapid mood swings, from conversing calmly on a subject to a sudden yelp. Poor D. He's used to it - but if you and I are ever on such a road together, darling - consider yourself warned. Loved the signage as we got on the FDR: "New Traffic Pattern." Not New and Improved, mind you - just "new" - some new nightmare. Then a portable flashing traffic message sign - all I caught was "When It's Raining Thank You." Poetry in Motion! Though at the same time - glad it wasn't raining.

Love you, darling. Hope you're having a nice evening. Wish you were here. Many kisses.

Hello my love, hello darling. I'm glad that was you, as I came to realize, and not Dick Cheney. I had a few paralyzing moments there fearing that this housewife had accidentally fed into the consumerist culture by extolling a brand new dishwasher. Then again, if it was Mr. Cheney - oh the thought is just too horrible to contemplate.

Of course it was you, dearest. Let me take a metaphorical dip in that lovely if treacherous swimming hole up the road. I returned there the following day, by the way, and the first thing I saw as I pulled into the dusty gravel area - a huge red sign, posted high in a tree, that read "NO SWIMMING." The "NO" was underlined, which for me removed all ambiguity. Had it gone up since I had swum there bucolically the noontime before? Had I simply missed it then? I'm so glad I did, because your water nymph would not have been so blissed out if she'd had any inkling that she was breaking the law. That's all I need, is to be hauled to a town hall justice (the elected justices are not usually attorneys) because I broke some silly ordinance. But I am disappointed that in this area of beautiful water, rivers, creeks, swimming holes, and the like - I am having a hard time finding a nice place to take a leisurely dip. As I said the day before, what if the world were organized around such simple pleasures? Wouldn't that be wonderful?

Spent much of the afternoon vacuuming and dusting the house, in advance of heading down to the city tomorrow afternoon (I'll be there through the 12th). I've been blogging so much about E.D. that I haven't told you how busy I've been putting up all sorts of farmstand produce for the freezer. In recent days I've pitted and quartered a carton of plums, and roasted and spooned out and packed into containers a half-dozen enormous butternut squashes. That's it? Wow - one sentence to write - and an enormous amount of work to accomplish, preceded by a bunch of hemming & hawing. It is all very time consuming, though I did enjoy the pitting plums part, red juice trickling all over my hands and gothically down onto my forearms, lasciviously incarnadining my fingers. I sat at the kitchen table in my dainties, working the fruit, listening to radio, halving each plum along its natural crease, plucking out the pit (imagine - well over a hundred plums, each lifted from the dusky carton, washed in cool water, opened, each with a single seed), and placing each into a large beautiful dark red ceramic bowl. As I sat listening to music and to crickets and birdsong by the open window and musing of you, time passed and the bowl became piled with pitted fruit and the colander of washed plums mercifully emptied, balance of scales shifting, and I dipped my hands deep into the bowl heaped with glistening fruit, depths the color of Heade'ian red velvet only wet, and intoned in orgiastic release, ohhh grrrrrrr.

Ohhh grrrrrr, darling. So very many kisses - remembered, looked forward to.

This morning as I lay in bed and slowly opened my eyes, my gaze fell on long pale curtains that billowed in and out in a soft dawn breeze. In between groggy thoughts of you, wishing to fall asleep again, absently regarding the stirring folds, and recollecting what I could of dream fragments to note for later, my mind seized as ever on a conundrum, and I found myself thinking about my shifting and varying perceptions of the Dickinsonian dramatis personae.

I thought, how strange, so very many years since E.D. lived, and here I am thinking, with a sense of immediacy, of her and of Mabel. E.D. herself once perhaps lay in a bed as I do now and regarded lengths of curtains move. So many years ago, over 125 since her death in 1886. (2010 now - I pick up an unrelated piece from the vast jigsaw puzzle: the house in which I live, in whose bedroom I now lie, was built 1885. Happy Anniversary, House.) I think: will someone, 125 years from now, when I am long dead, lie under soft covers in a dim room, absently regarding the stir of curtains, ghostly as a long white dress, and wonder about E.D. and Mabel, or - who knows - perhaps about me and you?

My understanding of the characters is sketchy and incomplete, even after all my reading. This morning I woke wondering anew at how it was that Emily and Mabel never laid eyes on each other in the nearly four years of close orbit if not consummated acquaintance. I try to nail dates. On September 10, 1882 - a "Rubicon" of sorts, Austin brought Mabel to the Homestead for the first time to introduce her to his sisters. Emily's younger sister Vinnie shook Mabel's hand, and while Mabel played piano and sang, Emily stayed upstairs in her room, overhearing, certainly, strains of melody. (Listening perhaps? How thick are the walls? How deep was her concentration? Yes - she did listen, sending a glass of rich sherry and a poem in to Mabel when the music stopped.) The following day, September 11, Mabel and Austin each noted the word Rubicon in their respective journals, having on that date declared their love. They consummated their relationship, it seems, over a year later, on December 13, 1883, in the dining room of Emily's home. (Given such ardor - what restraint - imagine! Why the long delay - were they physically separated, was someone traveling? Must read more, fix the timeline, get the story down.)

For a while, in imagining them, I had tentatively surmised that E.D. avoided Mabel, deigned never to meet her perhaps out of some vague, possibly class-tinged antipathy (reserved E.D. versus a more modern, effusive Mabel), or because she wished simply to steer clear of the all kinds of built-in awkwardness of players in the midst of an adulterous relationship, a volatile mix of independent minds that E.D. might well have exhibited "emotional intelligence" to sidestep.

(Higginson, writing to his wife twenty years earlier, after having met E.D. for the first time, began his account with, "I shan't sit up tonight to write you all about E.D. dearest but if you had read Mrs. Stoddard's novels [I haven't, and don't have a handle on them] you could understand a house where each member runs his or her own selves. Yet I only saw her." So I imagine that the Dickinson siblings were accustomed to giving one another very wide berth - discreet, loving distance - when it came to tacitly according privacy and room to each for the most intimate, important relationships. (Something Susan Dickinson, Austin's wife, on the other hand, seems to have had no compunction betraying, as when she gossiped alludingly to Mabel about having glimpsed E.D. in Judge Lord's arms. On receiving that spiteful (or so it seems to me, because I don't have a handle on Susan) piece of information Mabel might well have sensed a not-unkindred spirit in E.D.)

(Also when I've thought of Emily and Mabel never meeting, I can't help but project my own ongoing circumstance of a next-door neighbor who for some reason that is lost on me, gives me the silent treatment - for years now. It's really very strange. True - she and I didn't have chemistry - I didn't get her forever-"on" antic humor, and she, I think, thought me dour. Once she was breastfeeding in our solarium and I inadvertently gasped when her baby (now a little girl selling us - no, D - eggs from their freeranging chickens) whipped her head away, suddenly exposing an entire breast and nipple - an incident dubbed by D as "the boob pop." Okay, so this rocker doesn't have a lot of experience in such matters. I'm sure that's not what caused the Silent Treatment - but a couple of years ago I enrolled in a memoir-writing course at the local community college, and because I didn't wish to write about (let alone "share") what was really on my mind, that is, my illicit, wanton, hapless, hopeless, adulterous love for you - I wrote a lengthy dourly humorous examination of the relations with Next Door. On this Earth one is required to protect the guilty, but I'll see if I can't find or work up sufficiently anonymous snippets to post.)

Anyway, a couple of days ago, reading Benfey's A Summer of Hummingbirds, I suddenly gained a different impression, that the two women were engaged in a sort of dance around each other, albeit at a remove, and in fact exchanged artistic offerings. Mabel (on at least one occasion) presented E.D. with a painting of flowers, to which she responded with a warm, even effusive note, along with a brilliant verse. Later,

When Mabel traveled to Europe during the summer of 1885, her paintings were stored on the walls and in the closets of the Homestead, where Emily Dickinson admired them. "I see Vin and Em more than I did," Austin wrote to Mabel in mid-June, "and you are the constant theme. Emily has had great pleasure in looking over your pictures." Emily herself wrote to Mabel in July, telling her, apropos of one of Mabel's paintings, that "Your Hollyhocks endow the House, making Art's inner Summer."

My impression of their relationship suddenly lurched, undergoing a tectonic shift. If the two, as it seems, danced around each other, why didn't they ever meet? I think of Proust, and how he adored flowers but was so severely allergic that he could allow himself to admire them only from behind glass. I wonder if, issues of her general reclusiveness aside, E.D. (who had after all, years earlier, fallen in love with Austin's wife, Susan) had the keen self-knowledge of her own fatal susceptibility to magnificent cattleyas and sumptuous magnolias, and perhaps sensed that man-magnet Mabel's intoxicating perfume might prove too intense for E.D. as well and so she removed herself as a prudent precaution against falling in love?

Will today embark on Polly Longsworth's 1983 study, Austin and Mabel: The Amherst Affair of and Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd, in the hope that More Will Be Illuminated.

***
Here's a quote I read yesterday (via Bookslut) that resonates with me in this context - E.D. willing herself, in her lifetime, into an O-shaped loop, with (being human) mixed results, but a configuration which, posthumously, she certainly now has.

If you read up on strings, you will learn that there are two different types, closed and open-ended. The closed strings are O-shaped loops that float about like angels, insouciant of spacetime's demands and playing no part in our reality. It is the open-ended strings, the forlorn, incomplete U-shaped strings, whose desperate ends cling to the sticky stuff of the universe; it is they that become reality's building blocks, its particles, its exchangers of energy, the teeming producers of all that complication. Our universe, one could almost say, is actually built out of loneliness; and that foundational loneliness persists upwards to haunt every one of its residents.

-Paul Murray, Skippy Dies

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Darling - I'm losing it, for the moment (dailiness, corporaliness & all that). Must run. So much love and very many kisses. Love you.