Joseph Cornell,
Toward the Blue Peninsula (For Emily Dickinson),
ca. 1953, box construction

Joseph Cornell,
Observations of a Satellite,
1956, box construction
[Cornell referred to this as his "hummingbird collage"]

... If there is a heaven, then it’s the sort of cruel heaven where supposedly we’re so transcended we wouldn’t even care about being together...

Dearest love, up in the aerie now, it's five. In a circumspect, liquidy mood all day, reflecting the weather perhaps, gray, humid and languid. Went about various kitchen chores with ease, one task flowing into the next. Spooned caponata into four large Chinese-soup plastic containers for the freezer, made pesto, roasted chicken, a pan of beets and another of eggplants, cut lengthwise in half, step one for baba ghannoush.

Dutifully finished the Wineapple, and my verdict is that it's worthwhile but uneven. As I mentioned, I think she lacks imagination and emotional distance in describing the affair between Mabel Loomis Todd and Austin Dickinson (Emily's older brother). I am fascinated by the affair, myself. I don't quite have a handle on Mabel, but the Secret Life of E.D. facebook people posted a wonderful photograph today that I'd never seen before, of a pair of adjoining rooms in Mabel and David Todd's house, The Dell. The photo is in black and white, but the rooms are so cheerfully and casually elegantly furnished I realized more palpably than I had after having read hundreds of pages about her, what an artistic and bohemian spirit she was, reflected in a very fresh, original, timeless, organic way in her decorating sensibility. Warmth, spirit, life - wonderful qualities that must have been a technicolor blast of color in what I think of as austere Amherst.

Isn't that the most cheerful, inviting space? Apparently Mabel herself created the decorative artwork on the ceiling, screen, cabinet front, and other items. In reading the Gordon and the Wineapple treatments, it hadn't quite registered on me just how very artistic Mabel was (the fault may lie in me, the reader). But clearly her creativity is front and center for her.

Later in the afternoon I picked up the next in my E.D. summer seminar, a book entitled, A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, & Martin Johnson Heade, by a Mount Holyoke professor of English, Christopher Benfey. I've read the introduction and the epilogue already, and appreciate his incisive, associative, original, take on drawing connections and elucidating grand (& small) themes. Anyway - Mabel Todd figures in Benfey's book, and he seems to get Mabel right, in the way I'm just starting to grasp, introducing her to the reader straight off as "the painter and musician Mabel Loomis Todd." That part is forgotten, ignored, or dismissed usually I find - because today she's remembered as the one who "fell in love with Dickinson's brother, and brought Emily Dickinson's poetry to the world."

The other thing I wonder about is how Emily and Mabel though in such exceedingly close orbit for 13 years managed never once to lay eyes on one another - never meet in person. ED went to pains to avoid her - though given her general reclusiveness, that hardly seems surprising. No - I think they were artistic spirits, though of different temperaments. ED was the "outsider" artist - the one raised to the pantheon of Great Artists, in the end - but that status tends to marginalize other bohemian spirits who have as much right and spirit to make music and sing and paint plates and decorate ceilings and drawer fronts. I'm not implying class snobbery here, just more - well, maybe E.D. recognized more astutely than Mabel ever could (though perhaps Mabel sensed it too) that these were two gases, pure chemicals that could never get along and should absolutely be kept apart for fear of combustibility of an awkward, unpleasant nature. So perhaps it can be said that in her way E.D. was a great psychologist - a Jane Austen in reverse, keeping personages apart who if thrown together at least in temporal life could only jeopardize the peace & happiness that granitized, severe Austin had managed to find in the industrious future secretary (in the very best sense), Mabel Todd...

Very many hugs & kisses for you my dearest. This must be one of your last evenings on the beach. Please, dearest, think of me as you stroll along the shore and regard the waves one last time. That was the river - this is the sea!

fragment

the way you're standing with your hands in
your pockets
so familiar to me
you'd stand in the room extemporizing
in an interesting & humorous way
in that little back room that smelled
of wood smoke
I sat on the couch, delighted -

***

There you are sweetheart, there you are, I say. I kiss my finger and touch the screen.

Sometimes when I refresh the stats I'm reminded of the fairy tale Snow White. I recall it from a million years ago, the early 1960s, when I first encountered it. It was before kindergarten. I think of the fairy tale, my contemplating it as deeply as I could at the time, and my mind telescopes to the physical image of the apartment my family lived in at the time, the left hand side of a handsome wood-framed house on Park Lane in Darien. The Evil Stepmother daily queried, mirror mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all, and the mirror would reliably reply, You are, my dear Queen - until one day it didn't, truthfully messaging that she'd been usurped, there was a fairer one now on the scene, Snow White.

Narcissistic implications aside (relating to checking stats - mostly, for me, more E.M. Forsterishly to only connect with you - ), I am struck by the prescience of that image of the Queen/Evil Stepmother. It seems to forecast - back in the early 60s when I first became acquainted with a version of the tale - the wired age, the Internet - Windows. She doesn't sit at a vanity gazing at herself reflected back from a silver-backed surface, No, the Queen isn't merely regarding herself - she's addressing the mirror which dispassionately responds. Today the Queen would be (is) at a desk staring at her computer, or anywhere at all, checking her blackberry - who's texting her? Two versions of reflected self.

I touch the screen again at the words that have come to convey you - "United States" and say I love you so. I can keep the two concepts straight, our great nation and darling you, my favorite soaring eagle.

I'm a bit tired now though I took a short nap in the hope of becoming "refreshed" in that sense. It's sunny and hot today, but not too bad. I spent a good part of the day making what ended up being a large pot of caponata, which I'll sample tonight, spooned over cod. The dish involved a huge amount of slicing, dicing, and sauteeing of vegetables, and can I tell you what a colossally stupid idea it is to wear just a bra and panties and to drop cubed eggplant into a pan of sizzling extra virgin olive oil? I have a small island chain of burn marks on my midriff now - so annoying. They'll fade soon, I trust, but I am annoyed at my own stupidity, not being a bit more careful at that step in the recipe. My perfect skin - now blemished! I comfort myself to think - well, it's not as though we have a date tonight and it would be an issue - it all has time to heal before the eternity at which we'll meet.

Started watching season once-upon-whatever of True Blood and am not loving it. I loved the first season or two (have lost track) but maybe it's too big a switch of gears - comically broad Goth, coming from the fine-grain sophisticated Greek drama of Mad Men. Darling, I'm sure you don't watch any of these shows, but my fingers have to do something as my mind tries to figure out what to write. Good time for kisses, my love - here you are.

Your last week in Timbuktu - I wonder at the mix of feelings you must be experiencing. Just now Stop the World and Let Me Off comes on - that may well be one of them. Is one of the feelings an occasional twinge of goodbye summer nostalgia? My sunrise now is at 5:58, yours now (considering all those lack of sunrises) a spastic, contrarian 6:25. I toggle back and forth between Hudson and Shishmaref online weather statistics. Hudson's (or anywhere in the northeast, or continental U.S. for that matter, or lower 48 - well, anywhere but where you are, or the South Pole too) is as ordered and predictable as a church service. I might as well be sitting in a pew consulting a hymnal when I see stats like this, all filled in, in neat rows.

***

Darling, I am feeling more exhausted than I anticipated. I will have you know that in the spirit of perfectionism I did end up blanching olives - and the capers too - it turned out not to be such a big deal. But I am feeling so tired that I can't even go back to rework the foregoing. I think I may have a few ideas in there, I just simply can't polish them tonight. So I am going to launch this - imperfections and all - and will absolutely not return to correct a thing - it is what it is - a fuzzy picture of the fuzzy picture of where I'm at at this moment, 6:42 p.m....

I hope all is well with you. Very many kisses, my dearest. Loving you - always.

Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson, pp. 238-40.

The irrepressible Mrs. Todd had set her cap for Austin, and Austin had succumbed. It had happened during those heated summer days when the regal Austin Dickinson, his bearing somber and aristocratic, his ice-blue eyes fixed on Mabel, stole away with her from the group picnicking at Sunderland Park. They leaned on the old rail fence, gazing out at the far-reaching view, aware of the smell of new-mown grass and each other close by... on an indolent September evening they fell into each other's arms--or crossed the Rubicon, as Austin martially called their declaration of love. (Consummation came later.) Mabel blazed with self-congratulatory pleasure: "to think that out of all the splendid & noble women he has known, he would pick me out--only half his age--as the mostly truly congenial friend he ever had!" Soon the couple were stealing away, wildly exhilarated (yet another of Mabel's phrases) by those dreamy walks back to the Todds' boardinghouse or out on the river road above South Deerfield in the Dickinson carriage. When apart, they resorted to pen and paper... It would take another year of intense verbal foreplay before Mabel and Austin consummated their affair, and when they did, they chose the dining room, windows shut, blinds closed, of the ancestral Homestead.

***
Oh for Pete's sake. I rarely mark a library book but felt sufficiently motivated to fish out a pencil and make a brief annotation. I scribbled a light wavy line under "windows shut" and penciled, "Dec. 13 - in Amherst!"

***
It's one thing for hoi-polloi commenters on a facebook page to feel compelled to express their tedious moralistic disapproval of an unusual and fascinating love affair that began and ended well over 100 years ago, which lasted for some 13 years until indeed Death did them part, when Austin died. I don't expect much from the rabble - one reason I don't sign up to comment there - how quickly I'd be branded (as I instantly was). But it's another when an ostensibly serious biographer loads her language to heap scorn on the affair. I can be glad, I suppose, that she didn't choose as the main focus of her study the affair between Mabel Loomis Todd and Austin Dickinson, if such would be her take.

But come on that last loaded line of the excerpt - yeah, they did it in the dining room, blinds drawn. (I must say - in my day there are occasions I have done just the same. And hope to again, I might add.) Good thing the windows were sensibly shut that December day, or else the affair might have ended much, much sooner if one or both had succumbed to pneumonia. As I said - for pete's sake.

So, if there are delays in publication - that might all well be to the good in the end so that some hypothetical retired physician (in Gordon's case) or mad housewife (in Wineapple's) doesn't come after one after the fact. What's the rush? Get it done right. I should take my own advice. I'm constantly tweaking my posts after I've published them - bad habit. In my case it's akin (I humor myself to think) to a French seamstress making tiny finishing adjustments, a nip here, a stitch there - they're tweaks. But sometimes the stakes are very high and it's much better to make sure that all is at it should be, completely properly done, every word and punctuation mark precisely as intended, the thing coming as close to the intended ideal as such endeavors can be.

***
Thus it was that I spent the afternoon slicing a boxful of mixed peppers while listening to audio commentaries to the final episodes of Season 3 of Mad Men. I am reluctant to let that series - that season, that is - go, the storylines and characterizations and everything were so powerful and great. So even though a new whatever number season of True Blood is on tap (unopened red Netflix envelope sitting on the kitchen table) - I just wasn't quite ready to switch horses. So I sliced and diced and listened to Matthew Weiner (series creator), sexy man of few words Jon Hamm, dapper John Slattery and charming Christina Hendricks, et al, etc., and when they were done I sat some more, slicing and dicing, packing unpickled peppers into plastic pots (containers actually) and listened to KZE and was so delighted when David Gray came on, wailing Sail Away.

I also ladeled chilled homemade chicken stock into some 16 containers - seriously, I made like two gallons. Am also employing sports psychology methods to visualize my making caponata tomorrow. I've never made it, and I've reread the recipe a few times, trying to familiarize myself with the course. I tend to avoid recipes that have you use every pot and pan you own -

In a deep 12-inch skillet, combine the onions, 1/4 cup of the oil...

Meanwhile, in another 12-inch skillet, heat 1/4 cup of the oil..."

Meanwhile, in a small bowl, combine the sugar and vinegar...

In a medium saucepan, bring 1 quart of water to a boil... blanche olives.

Darling - seriously, do you think I'm going to blanche olives? Uh - no. I may rinse them though - I agree they can be too aggressive straight out of the brine.

Oh this cookbook writer is funny.

... blanche olives for 2 minutes. Taste an olive: If it is still very salty, repeat the blanching.

That won't be happening, but here's what will with all the time saved - very, very many kisses all over you darling delightful you, until I get them just right, just the way you like, to your satisfaction.

Hello darling. Very hot & humid again today, uncomfortable. I'm sitting here topless - of necessity, darling - even with the shades drawn the aerie is sunny & warm. I'm paging through a few books, looking things up, for one, a bird in my Sibley's and Audubon field guide. This morning when I stepped to the back door to my delight a sprightly tiny brown bird with an upright tail stopped for several moments on the porch railing. I've never witnessed a bird alight there before - the migration must be starting to happen, it's mid-August, I'd like to start stocking the feeders again. Later in the morning I spotted a couple of birds in the bird bath (it's rare for me to see birds use it, the object had become merely decorative). The water gets hot very quickly in the black cast iron. I freshened it and added a couple of handfuls of light-colored gravel in the hope of giving the birds a bit of traction against the algae-slimed bottom, and to deflect the heat. The gravel is from a small pile in front of the small original shed, pleasingly righted now, refurbished, and repainted. The shed sits a few feet from the road. A couple of weeks ago as I stood by the car waiting for D, I looked at the shed and surrounds and my glance fell on a single plant rising - singularly - from a low mound of pebbles. I looked again. There was the classic set of lobed leaves, and the plant itself seemed to have a vigorous, insolent air - lady, you think I can't grow out of nothing? D emerged from the house and I beckoned exaggeratedly with my finger. He approached with an uh oh what now expression. Is that what I think it is? He nodded with palpable relief that it wasn't anything worse. Yeah, I saw that too a few days ago. How is it that it's growing here? The gravel's from a shop in town that I was doing some work at - they must have smoked pot at some point and dropped some seeds. If you know the "Arts and Antiques District" of Warren Street - this is hardly a stretch to imagine.

How we came to be in possession of this gravel I'm not sure (though it is handy in garden landscaping, that must be why D acquired it). But the big honkin' plant was near the road, past which all kinds of local heroes cruise incessantly - that's all I need for any of them to spot, as if we're growing it on purpose. If I'm going to be arrested for something - I don't want it to be for that. So D yanked the plant and tossed it on the weed pile at the back of the garden where I wouldn't be surprised if it's thriving, not that I've checked.

I never got into pot, not for lack of trying in college and for a few years afterward in California. But it rarely got me high - or not in the way that I like, with a few pleasurably memorable exceptions, but the weight-gaining nuisance munchies phase - never missed a one.

The bird that alighted this morning? A house wren perhaps.

So what else am I looking up? Did a tour of a couple of farmstands this morning and came away with a small box of eggplant for $3, and a larger one of mixed peppers for $6. I'm looking at a recipe in an Italian cookbook for caponata, a jamlike mixture of eggplant, peppers, onion and celery, seasoned with green olives and capers. Oh good I bought celery too, remarking to the woman that I didn't know that it grows in this region. It's very fragrant, redolent of pure warm celeryness, a revelation after a lifetime of cello bags trucked from California.

***
I had a strange dream last night - perhaps of E.D. As you know I've been reading books about her and her circle, and there's a controversy abrew over a posthumous epilepsy diagnosis on the part of a recent biographer to which a retired physician who claims to be expert in 19th century pharmacology (I have no reason to doubt him) has taken issue - glycerine was never an anti-seizure drug. Anyway, in an instant warring camps have staked their sides. I don't know what to believe - the issue isn't settled for me. The physician may be right, but to me his comments all over the place slamming the biography on this single note has the effect of an expert witness whose testimony doesn't settle an issue (let alone illuminate it) but serves simply to stir doubt in the jury. And then people line up on one end or the other like magnet filings.

am in a room – someone’s reclining on a cot - a woman - (is she wearing a white dress?) - she's talking and says her piece and we listen and then she goes into an epileptic seizure and rolls off the cot (which is placed against a wall at the end of the room) onto the floor – no one (me included) does anything, we’re just holding our breath hoping the seizure will stop soon – she stops convulsing and is a little dazed and I crouch on the floor near her and try to comfort her and tell her that it’s thought E.D. had epilepsy.

***
Prompted by entries on today's Secret Life of E.D. f'book page, I fool around with combining yours and my names, intertwining them... Won't even bother to set forth the result -- too many J's and O's, like a bad Scrabble tile draw... lacking the ring of AMUASBTEILN.

From Polly Longsworth, Austin and Mabel: The Amherst Affair and Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd, p. 121:

Consummation of Mabel [Loomis Todd] and Austin's [Dickinson] love occurred at the Homestead, Emily and [sister] Vinnie's dwelling, the evening of December 13, 1883, in the dining room, where they often met before the fire. It is confirmed by symbols in both Austin's and Mabel's diaries, and also by the existence of two small slips of paper, each bearing the same strange word, AMUASBTEILN. One of the slips was tucked into Mabel's diary at December 13, and bears that date on the reverse. The other slip was in Austin's wallet when he died. The word is composed by alternately merging the letters of Austin's and Mabel's names. The event that evening occurred with the knowledge of David Todd [Mabel's husband], who was fully aware of the depth of feeling between his wife and Austin, and had not been alienated by it. David was, and would continue to be, devoted to Austin, whom he considered his best friend. "I loved him more than any man I ever knew," he said years later.

The Secret Life of E.D. people floated a judgment that the AMUASBTEILN is a bit high-school, but also intriguingly asked if we can imagine whose idea it was, the circumstances under which the letters were jotted down.

Oh I don't know. It was profound for them - it reminds me of the connection between Kitty and Levin in Anna Karenina, the way they intuited each other and easily communicated in code - I wonder if there was news of that novel (even if it hadn't yet been translated into English) in Amherst.

JJOOHLNA

Love you darling. XOXO

Hello my beautiful friend, a kiss for you right off. At low ebb today, a bit. Walked at the conservation area this morning but the pain in my right heel flared up, I realized belatedly as I set out hoping for the brisk pace I'd effortlessly achieved yesterday. Instead I limped, hardly a workout at all, and when I got home took an ibuprofen. Mystery pain. What's up with that? I don't have much for you today, other than my love, as always, and thoughts of you. Wondering - what's in the October archives? Arguably my writing was more serious then. But at that time I wasn't writing for you, or my writing wasn't directed towards you. The posts weren't daily, and they weren't love letters. A month of Montaigne. Listen: let's make a deal. You get me (your) kisses, maybe I'll get you some more serious writing. Wish it worked that way - I know it doesn't. Then again - how does it work for you?

Went to a charming movie this afternoon, The Kids Are Alright, in which Annette Bening and Julianne Moore play a long-married couple whose two almost-grown children meet for the first time their sperm-donor father, Mark Ruffalo. Wonderful performances, great writing - I laughed heartily throughout, but I wasn't crazy about the ending... well, no spoilers. Or why not - I thought it was going to end up a big happy messy blended family - instead the movie got kind of tightlipped and strict at the end and the Big Sexy Charming Adorable Teddy Bear got shut out - that's hardly even credible. Wish we could have seen it together so that we could compare notes. Do you like going to the movies? I don't even know. I don't remember many movie dates with you - a Woody Allen movie in Westport one summer evening (which one was it? possibly the futuristic one with the orgasmitron and the pre-Adkins observation that one day red meat would be viewed as healthy). And we watched movies on television, mostly Janus films, and ancient, absurdist English comedies, Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Importance of Being Earnest. And yet I imagine you must think about movies - and you once mentioned to me how your brother thought that maybe you could have been a film director.

As you can see I'm completely rambling, just to keep connected, darling. Jerrice has strolled into the building, as Will (is that Will?) mentions in exactly the same way almost every week, and now Women of Note is on. D is taking care of dinner tonight, grilling marinaded cornish hens and making a curried couscous salad. 59 and overcast in Shishmaref, 89 with blue skies and thin clouds here.

Love and Death came out in 1975, maybe it was that. But I don't remember it. I just remember holding hands with you on a movie line on a soft evening in Westport which though no more than a few pearls down the I-95 necklace, I had actually never been to I don't think - so it seemed quite far afield and adventurous to venture there. Oh you darling explorer - for you - Norwalk was nothing, Pound Ridge but of course - while for me - honestly, the first time I saw the Greenwich Main Street - well, you wouldn't know that I had grown up in Stamford - it was that much of a surprise. My parents said that they had done so much traveling (involuntary) as children that they liked staying put in the house. They weren't kidding.

The scent of curry is wafting up the stairs, and a song - "you and me, can you hear me, I like to feel your heart right next to mine here, I'm going out for a drive, why don't we go out for a drive you and me, can you hear me, can you hear me, I like the way you walk, the way you talk it sounds so sweet to me, you look so good in blue jeans, your style, it knocks me right out, can you hear me, can you hear me..." Jerrice just announced (& I checked the playlist) it's a song by "local female artist" Bar Scott.

Dearest, I think I will wind this down - as a post it's starting to feel like an endlessly handknit scarf - I could go on and on and on with loopy row after row of loopy stitches. I love you very much, and hope you are enjoying a beautiful Sunday afternoon, and that all else is well with you. XOXO