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Marta L. Werner for Randall McLeod flight: (flait), sb. 1 1.a. The action or manner of flying or moving through the air with or as with wings. . . .e. Of birds or insects: a migration or issuing forth in bodies. . . .2.a. Swift movement in general; esp. of a projectile, etc. through the air. . . .3. fig. a. A mounting or soaring out of the regular course or beyond ordinary bounds; an excursion or sally (of the imagination, wit, intellect, ambition, etc.). . . .†4. A state of flutter or agitation; a trembling, fright. . . .6.a. The distance which a bird can or does fly. . . .6.b. The distance to which a missile may be shot. . . .8. A collection or flock of beings or things flying in or passing through the air together. . . .9. The young birds that take wing at one time, e.g., the March Flight or the May flight. . . .10. A flight-arrow. . . .flight, sb. 2. 1.a. The action of fleeing. . .as from danger. . .an absconding. . . .flight, sb. 3. Obs. a. A flake of snow. b. A violent storm (of snow). . . .flight, v. †2. intr. To fluctuate, change. . . .3. † a. To migrate, flit, fleet (obs.). . . .to fly in flights. . . .4. trans. To set flying. . . (OED)
I
Signs & Wonders Among Dickinson’s late papers is a manuscript especially marked by the signs of flight. The manuscript, here identified by its catalog number A 821, constitutes a kind of exit-text. It may have been composed in a few minutes, or even seconds, in the early spring of 1885, since one line of the text reappears, slightly altered, in three fair-copy drafts of a letter composed by Dickinson to Helen Hunt Jackson in March of that year, but apparently never completed or mailed. In Thomas H. Johnson’s The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958), it is annexed to these drafts as a footnote. Its provenance, as well as the date of its composition, however, remain unconfirmed. I found it first by accident, in the Amherst College Library, when it fell (rose?) out of an acid-free envelope, out of the space of claustration. If I had not held it lightly in my hands, I would never have suspected the manner in which it was assembled. Although its brevity and immediacy place it outside the reach of conventional classificatory gestures, it bears a striking affinity to the genre David Porter names "small, rickety infinitudes."1 Look at it now, flying on the screen/page, vying with light:
Taxonomy of Paper Wings A 821 is a "sudden" collage made of two, possibly three, sections of envelope.3 The principles of its construction are economical, even austere. The larger section of the collage is the inside of the back of an envelope, the address face of which has been torn or cut away. One vertical crease bisects the fragment, turning the halved envelope into a diptych resembling the hinged leaves of the codex book Dickinson had long since abandoned and the wings of the bird the manuscript is becoming. Initially, the leaves/wings appear to have been folded closed; at rest, the manuscript is not yet transformed into a fully living figure. Another section of text, perhaps the last, is composed on an unfolded triangular corner of the envelope’s severed seal; it has been designated by the cataloguer "A 821a." A single straight pin, still in place in June 1998, imps the collage elements together, while also spreading open the larger envelope fragment to reveal a blurred message about an imminent transition, or about the desire of writing to intervene between the visible and the invisible.4 The unfolding of the manuscript creates a strange visual rhyming of wings. On the right wing, the lines "Afternoon and | the West and | the gorgeous | nothings | which | compose | the | sunset | keep" slant upwards into the west. On the left wing, the lines "Clogged | only with | Music, like | the Wheels of | Birds -" slant diagonally upwards into the east. On the smaller, pinned wing, writing rushes beyond the tear/terminus where the seen meets the unseen in "their high | Appointment."
The singing of birds marks—some believe causes—both the break and the close of day.6 If we read from left to right across the contours of the open wings, A 821/A 821a appears to record the moment when day turns into night. Yet the grammar—syntax—of wings is the grammar of discontinuity. The slight variations in the handwriting on opposing wings suggest that the texts they carry were composed on different occasions; moreover, on each wing, writing, inscribed by Velocity, rushes in opposite directions. To access the texts, we must enter into a volitional relationship with the fragment, turning it point by point, like a compass, or a pin wheel—like the wheels of thought. 360 degrees. As we rotate the text, disorienting and orientating it at once, day and night, each a whir of words, almost converge in the missing body spaces just beyond the light seams showing the bifurcation in the envelope, then fly apart in a synesthesia of sight and sound.7
Gravity-fields The three fair-copy drafts of Dickinson’s last letter to Helen Hunt Jackson, composed across parts of eleven leaves of fine Irish Linen stationery, shifting between prose and verse, respond to Jackson’s letter of 3 February containing news of her prolonged suffering from a broken leg.
The epistolary relation is grounded in and exposed to time. When Dickinson wrote to Hunt Jackson in March of 1885, she did not know that her friend was dying, that the broken leg that would not heal was a symptom of the cancer already overtaking her. Before she had completed and mailed a finished copy of the letter, the papers announced Jackson’s death. Her carefully drafted response to Jackson’s morning letter of 3 February reaches its destination only belatedly, in the subjective night of its intended recipient.9 How can we ever verify the degree of match between what is transmitted and what is received? Cut to A 821: "Clogged | only with | Music, like | the Wheels of | Birds -" A 821/A 821a may be a poem-breaking-out-of-prose, a time-shifted bird flown out of the constellations of March, a letter’s avant-text and vanishing point, a translation of speed or spirit into a kind of handwriting, a dart that returns immediately to the sender. What it conveys is not a "message" to a specific addressee, but the sensation of seeing, for the last time.10
In the visual linguistics of both an earlier mystical imagery and an Edenic physics, wings/wheels are signifiers for immateriality, for bodies that are not subject to the laws of gravity, and which can communicate between time and eternity.11 By composing A 821/A 821a on the reverse of an empty, unaddressed envelope, no longer the container for a message, but the message itself, Dickinson creates a template for an ex-static flight that is also a trope for her late, contrapuntal communications, in which "arrival" is another word for "departure," and where reaching a final destination involves a radical displacement—the loss of all topi. Unlike the letter, a narrative of illness and death, boundlessly gravid, the undated because dateless fragment is a site of radical temporality. Bird of paradox and paradise, A 821/A 821a’s sudden defection from the space of the letter signals the annihilation of continuity, the instantaneous translation from one condition into another. A 821/A 821a flies to the outermost edges of Dickinson’s production, then out of this world.
In an ex-static postscript, composed in August (?) 1885, on postal wrappers, Dickinson wrote: "Dear friend, can you walk were the last words that I wrote to her - Dear friend I can fly - her immortal soaring reply-" (A 857)
Imprints When Thomas H. Johnson published A 821/A 821a as a footnote following the letter-drafts addressed to Hunt-Jackson, he denied it its autonomy (autonomies) and arrested the motion of its wings: subsumed under the metrics of the letter and reset in immovable type—pinned into a single temporality and spatiality—the iconic implications of the manuscript vanish: the conjunction of writing and sensuous representation manifested by the fragment-becoming-bird fails to take place. Lines broken according to the conventions of typesetting "prose" break the wings of the text, transgress the light internal junctions, the imbrications and tracery, as well as the outer edges of the envelope fragments, that mark the limits of a thought or the junctures between (flights of) thoughts. In the printed text, moreover, the music of the invisible bird is no longer audible. The syntactical discontinuities created by the folding and unfolding, the conjoining and breaking away, of A 821/A 821a’s word-wings are resolved via an editorial reordering of the text-fragments into a smooth grammatical flight. The measure of the "sentence" checks the flight of the image.
A vision has become legible.
II
Flight Paths
"If you saw a bullet | hit a Bird -" (A 828)
A bird’s lost powers of flight may be restored by imping the feathers of another to it:12
Pinned to the body of A 821, the small arrow-wing called A 821a appears to mend (i.e., complete) the text on the right wing and also to name the fragment’s destination, "their high | Appointment." Yet this wing, hardly more than a feather, did not always determine the arc of A 821’s flight. On the body of A 821 four additional sets of pin pricks, two along the outer edges of the left wing and two along the outer edges of the right wing, are signs of at least four previous trajectories or changes in course. Perhaps, like A 821a, A 821 was once imped to other, more expansive wings out of which it has fallen or from which is it still ascending. The wings of a letter, perhaps. Alternatively, several small fragments like A 821a may have been appended to the extremities of A 821 to help pilot earlier, apprenticeship flights of brief duration, flights that missed their marks or found them suddenly. Like birds that migrate only so long as the "drive" is present, the durations of the fragments’ previous flights, the timings and directions of their collisions and releases, and the relations among them remain mysterious, most completely unrecoverable. Pinned, unpinned, repinned, the fragments’ multiple flights shatter the deep, one-point perspective of the letter, reveal the extraordinarily complex, perhaps crossed, intentions of its writer. Moreover, in A 821/A 821a, the pin complicates the play between past, present, and future, keeps the texts/birds flying in a splintered mode of time, in the "terrifying tense" of pure transition.14 The expectations of closure or parousia—"their high | Appointment"—may be endlessly postponed, or reversed, with the drop of a pin. The caesuras and sudden discontinuities initially perceived in the opening of A 821/A 821a’s wings are intensified in the linking and breaking away of lap- or lost wings. To say the least, the common meter of the hymn found in Dickinson’s early, bound poems has not survived this latest flight. On the contrary, in the (un)pinned texts of the 1870s and 1880s one hears an acceleration followed by snapping or short-circuiting of lyrical wires. In place of melody and measure come suddenness and syncope: "meter with neither more nor less, but an impossible measure"15: A gap between the wings. In the 1870s and 1880s the "data" to be explained by poetry perhaps became more and more extreme. The concordance to Dickinson’s poems reveals that around this time the words dart, hour, moment, arrow, second, shaft, bird, and instant appear in her writing with increasing frequency. Fragments, fractions of poems cut into smaller and smaller units of time/paper, are part of the count-down to the end of a century.
III
No Bird - but rode in Ether -: Towards a Bibliography of Departures 16
A certain set of operations repeated again and again, like the rapid motions of wings, may signify that a migration is about to take place . . . A few early harbingers of later flights appear scattered throughout the fascicles and the sets. The first pinned fragment appears in fascicle 7, composed in 1859. It carries an alternate reading, one of the first variants to occur in the fascicles, for the fifth and sixth lines of the poem beginning, "She died - this was the way she died -" (MB I, fascicle 7, 1859). Inscribed on the verso of a small slip of note paper, but inserted as a recto, the pinned slip covers the lines it replaces. Two more pinned texts appear in the fascicles in 1862, one in fascicle 16, the other in fascicle 19. In both instances the pinned slips—here small, but whole leaves of note paper—carry the final, overflow lines of the poems to which they are fastened. On the one hand, pinning appears to be a kind of binding, double-binding: a slip carrying the variant or final lines of a poem is pinned over a poem stab-bound into a fascicle. Yet the pinned slips carrying variants, endings, and variant endings also announce a crisis at and of the limits of the text. In the unbound leaves of the sets, themselves vulnerable to scattering, the association of pinned slips with the bodies of poems is more tenuous. In the final instance of pinning in the sets, the pin is deployed as an extreme mark of punctuation, a dash doubled and made material; it writes the poem apart: "Of the Heart that | goes in, and closes the | Door | Shall the Playfellow Heart | complain | Though the Ring is | unwhole, and the Company"
" — broke | Can never be + fitted again? | + matched –". (MB II, Set 6c, 1866)
If pinning was initially used as an alternative method of binding, a way of associating variants and overflow lines with poems, it immediately declared its difference from binding. Unlike binding, which is premeditated, permanent, and serial, pinning is instantaneous, temporary, random. Pinning/unpinning may be Dickinson’s furthest expression of the aesthetics of "choosing not choosing," her latest response to the recurrent dangers of closure.
Outside the bound packets, in the economy of contingency, contacts between pinned texts may be momentary—transient.
Outside the bound packets, the combinatory possibilities, instantaneous or considered, of (un)pinned texts are registered in the multiple pin pricks visible on the manuscripts’ surfaces. Fragments, pinned, unpinned, repinned, are evidence of a new genre where intention tends toward the artifactual.
Outside the bound packets, the relationship between the body of a manuscript and the pinned slip, between the "superior" text and its variants, has changed. Unpinned, the stray slips may realize the desire implicit in the variants composed at the far limits of poems in the fascicles but still held fast within their gravitational fields for autonomy. Unpinned from the body proper, the pinned slips reappear as compressed, but electric lyrics.
Outside the bound packets, texts bearing no prior relation to one another may be "suddenly" associated by pinning. It these instances it is not the unification (or "completion"), but the juxtaposition of texts, that pinning brings about. A "catching of fire between extremes."19
Scatters
In order to determine whether or not certain kinds of birds possess homing instincts, a person known as a "liberator" throws several up into the air, then turns and turns again, each time releasing more birds in different directions. The birds are then watched out of sight and the points at which they disappear from view recorded. When a significant number of vanishing points has been noted, a scatter-diagram is drawn up for study. At times, for reasons that are not yet fully understood, large numbers of birds returning to the original release point lose their way and drift widely across the migration axis. These drifts, sometimes called "radical scatters," both solicit and resist definitive interpretation.21 Freed from the forty bound fascicles, the accumulated libraries of her poetic production, and whirling confusedly around the absent center of the "book," Dickinson’s (un)pinned fragments resemble the distant and disoriented migrants that do not come fully into focus and that no longer constitute a clearly delimitable constellation. At times, one or two or even several appear to be in closest touch with one another; at other times, texts/wings separated and dispersed by "paragraphs of wind" (JP 1175) seem remote from each other, unassimilated and unassimilable to the larger figure, whose moving edges and outlines also drift and blur. Moreover, even if chance were to discover the breakaway fragments, carefully inventorying and appending them to their "original" bodies, it would still be impossible to establish the order of pinnings and unpinnings, or the distances (seconds, minutes, hours, days, years) between them. Fragments are "small, rickety infinitudes"; they try their chances. De-archivized, they fly to the lyric’s scattered ends: the "proceedings of a birdsong," the vibration of poetry freed from all devices.22 The late (un)pinned fragments are "escapes": texts with no place in an official record—the official record of an "edition" or, more importantly, the narrative (plot) of literary history/linear chronology. Intended by Dickinson to be temporary and occasional in a way different than we suspected, they reveal the liaison between poetics and teleologies as essentially specious. Belonging to an economy of indeterminacy in which "discretion, stability and autonomy" are no longer givens, but only "effects of certain relations," they call for an alternative aesthetics, for what Ira Livingstone has recently called a "chaology of knowledge," perhaps, in which chaos is seen as "a logic at work in the epistemological processes."23 Instead of classifying them according to conventional bibliographical and generic codes we need to find ways of not naming them as they flash by; instead of binding them in chronological order into a book, we need to discover ways of launching them into circulation again and again, ways of expressing the unpredictably varied, stunningly beautiful re-orderings of the texts-birds as they cross the page/screen/sky of our reading. Ideally, the editor—and no less so the reader—of these writings would assume the role of the liberator, throwing the (un)pinned fragments high up into the ether, following them until they are out of sight, noting their vanishing points, and, whenever possible, the modalities of their different returns.24 It has been a long winter.
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