Stars! What a phrase – “perceives abstraction and thinks sensation”.

He is claiming for her, I think, a kind of practical mysticism, one based on a different conceptual ordering of sensation.  Let’s not forget this essay was written in 1932, long before much work had been done in cognitive science and sensory anomalies like synaesthesia. Not that I think he was claiming a kind of synaesthesia for her, but he certainly seems to have been able to see her poetic and perceptual abilities as radically different from those who were writing around her.

What does it mean to “perceive abstraction” and “think sensation?” Based on my own experiences (what I think of as my brain veering left), perceiving abstraction and thinking sensation are both based on privileging the knowledge that comes in via the kinesthetic sense versus privileging information from the eye.  In other places in this blog I have posted stuff about the senses and how they work, but simply, each sense has a set of rules by which it judges, responds to and understands the world.  The rules for the ear are different than the rules for the eye. They are both different than the rule of the moving body or the kinesthetic sense.

When we move through the world all our senses work more-or-less separately, and then are woven together in the brain to create a sense of a unified sensual reality.  That was, I’m sure, just as true for Dickinson as for any of us.  What was probably different was which sense-rules took the position of default.  For most human cultures it seems the default sense is the eye.  Its rules of distance, perspective, line, curve, separation, the focus on objects with defined borders (hence, individual identity as central to the notion of self) and the focus on difference versus sameness, these have become also the rules of the self.

(Why this should have been so for Dickinson, I have no conjecture to make but most “mystics” get it from somewhere – some current explanations include temporal lobe seizures, mis-wired senses or other cerebral or chemical anomalies.)

Imagine instead that the rule of the moving body was the default sense.  How would we conceive of the self if this was the case? The body operates in a universe where there are no clearly defined limits, no clear and obvious distinctions between objects.  The edge of a boulder gives way to the slope of the land; the limit of water transitions to the limit of air. Not the tactile sense, that’s not what I mean here, not slapping the surface of the lake and feeling surface tension snap back: instead, the sense of the body moving endlessly from birth to death.  For the body moving there is never a clear point where now is not. The body moving has no memory or experience of not-now. There is memory to enable that. Space and time are endless oceans to the kinaesthetic sense.  The body is always Here and Now.  It is, experientially, what we know of eternity, one of Dickinson’s great obsessions. Imagine trying to write about abstractions like death and eternity if one’s reference point is the body moving.

I am not at all claiming that Tate would have said this stuff about senses.  That’s me thinking through what I know about the implications of what he had to say with what I already know about differently organized perceptual systems.

A final comment on Tate’s essay: near the end of the first section he quotes her poem “The Chariot.”  It’s the one that starts “Because I could not stop for death / He kindly stopped for me.”  He uses this poem to explicate his idea of the relationship between abstraction and sensation in Dickinson’s work. Tate says: “A construction of the human will, elaborated with all the abstracting powers of the mind, is put to the concrete test of experience: the idea of immortality is confronted with the fact of physical disintegration. We are not told what to think; we are told to look at the situation.”  My only disagreement with the passage is that I would say she told us to experience the situation, not look at it.

In other words, Dickinson doesn’t discuss the abstraction we know as death, rather she presents an experience, a moving scene, in which the feeling of the abstraction is present in our human lives.  By experiencing moving along in a carriage, past children and grain fields with the gentleman Death, we can feel what the concept of death is like for a woman who lived at the cusp between the Puritan moral centre and the Transcendental egoist.

Where the old-fashioned puritans got together on a rigid doctrine, and could thus be individualists in manners, the nineteenth-century New Englander, lacking a genuine religious center, began to be a social conformist. The common idea of the Redemption, for example, was replaced by the conformist idea of respectability among neighbors whose spiritual disorder, not very evident at the surface, was becoming acute. A great idea was breaking up, and society was moving toward external uniformity, which is usually the measure of the spiritual sterility inside.

It is here in this breaking-up that Dickinson finds herself.  Two things Tate says about the effect of Puritan conceptual centrality:

• “It gave—and this is its significance for Emily Dickinson, and in only slightly lesser degree for Melville and Hawthorne—it gave an heroic proportion and a tragic mode to the experience of the individual.”
• This is the “puritan tragedy:” “Man, measured by a great idea outside himself, is found wanting.”

Tate cites Emerson as the one who killed this. In a really audacious (and delightful) description of Emerson, Tate says: “The Lucifer of Concord…for he was the light-bearer who could see nothing but light, and was fearfully blind. He looked around and saw the uniformity of life, and called it the routine of tradition, the tyranny of the theological idea.”  Later in the same paragraph Tate says that:

“in this way he accelerated a tendency that he disliked. It was a great intellectual mistake. By it Emerson unwittingly became the prophet of a piratical industrialism, a consequence of his own transcendental individualism that he could not foresee.

So Dickinson is questioning the paradox these two systems set up. The moral centre which emphasizes the “great idea outside” and the Transcendental (and Protestant as well) emphasis on the centrality of the individual to the universe. This is the engine of her poetry. Her obsession with how this would play out in great moments of life – like dying – makes Dickinson a voice of the climax of this conceptual change in America.