I am well into (142/397) Lyndall Gordon's /Lives Like Loaded Guns, Emily
Dickinson and Her family's Feuds, /published 2010. Gordon advances an
idea that hasn't been universally accepted, that Emily Dickinson had
epilepsy; which in her day was a shameful disease like syphilis. I read
a counter argument by a doctor who seems not to have read Gordon's book,
for she doesn't base her argument on just the one thing the doctor
objects to.
Gordon writes on page 142, "The point of each poem or scene is not so
much the passing impact of horror and sublimity; more the continuous
improvisation of a lit-up brain."
If Gordon is right does that in some way diminish Dickinson's "creative"
achievement? I tend to think not. Barry Bonds did after all truly hit
all those balls over the fence.
I opened Johnson's /Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson" /at random just
now and found,
/He scanned it -- staggered --
Dropped the Loop
To Past or Period --
Caught helpless at a sense as if
His Mind were going blind --
Groped up, to see if God was there --
Groped backward at Himself
Caressed a Trigger absently
And wandered out of Life.
/I just checked the internet to see if any facts about this poem are
known and apparently there are not. In any case this strikes me as a
fine poem. The "as if / His Mind were going blind" sounds like an
epileptic episode. "Caressed a Trigger absently / And wandered out of
Life" seem excellent images given the possibility of the Mind going
blind as a result of an epileptic fit. Such a person, maybe someone she
knew or imagined, maybe even something she imagined doing herself might
commit suicide while he or she wasn't thinking properly, while the mind
was blind.
Lawrence
