Easy as a Star

Don't tell me what to do on Emily Dickinson's birthday

Maybe Emily Dickinson saw the Northern Lights on her birthday – December 10 (today). Maybe she wrote “Of Bronze – Of Blaze” relocating herself in the firmament among them that day or the next. The timing checks out. The story imagines itself, really. On your birthday, you are granted social license to indulge all your feelings of exemplariness. Birthdays don’t make a person feel exceptional, since we all have them – they confer instead a more radical celebration of existence, in which coming into the world is itself a triumph (we are oppositional creatures, so the opposite feeling also has a history with us, too, I like you have had awful birthdays). Today, your birthday says, you are the shining example of that triumph, which you also did nothing to accomplish, how effortless you are in what you have done! The great poet of birthdays in English might be John Milton, another Sagittarius, whose Nativity ode for the season’s most famous birthday kid, Jesus Christ, begins with a stunningly simple auspiciousness: “This is the month, and this the happy morn.” (Is auspicion a word, alongside suspicion? It is now). My mother used to tell me “the story of my birth,” which I loved for a time, finding something magical about the fact that I was due on January 1^st, but arrived two weeks before, crediting this falsely to an early and original act of disobedience. See, I was already telling stories.

There are many Emily Dickinsons – the poet, the lover, the mystic, the letter writer. The storyteller. She was also a storyteller. Ample evidence for this exists. I might begin with this poem, Franklin’s 445, a good one to read when you feel like people are telling you what to do:

They Shut me up in Prose

As when a little Girl

They put me in the Closet—

Because they liked me “still”—

Still! Could themself have peeped—

And seen my Brain – go round –

They might as wise have lodged a Bird

For Treason – in the Pound—

Himself has but to will

And easy as a Star

Look down opon Captivity—

And laugh – No more have I

There are others – “I started early – took my Dog,” and “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun,” all similar in rhythm and in gambit, placing the physical speaker into an allegorical predicament. A fairy-tale predicament, in which the plot element – here, that would be GETTING OUT – can only be solved by opposition, rather than negotiation. Dickinson was a lawyer’s daughter – surely, she knew about negotiation, imagine what that dinner table was like! – but there can be no negotiation when you have been “shut up” in this way. In fairy tales, impossible problems, like turning straw into gold, echo the essential problem of being born, a blessing and predicament none of us asked for. You meet the problem not with explanation but with the less rational, more profound virtues of experience – fortitude, creativity, frustration, humor, fantasy. For truly, isn’t it fantasy, the wish-fear of getting and having the child, that does the conjuring up of Rumpelstiltskin? Dickinson’s poem is about a girl shut up in a room, a favorite gambit of the fairy tale. And I have always preferred predicaments to plot points. As much as “They shut me up in Prose” is a poem about resistance, it is also poem about birth. A Once Upon A Time about one’s own life. Once upon a time, I was born into – what? Prose, a story. Note the childlike tone. Where do we learn opposition, if not in childhood?

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“Himself has but to will / And easy as a Star / Look down opon Captivity— / And laugh – no more have I.” Isn’t it pretty to think so, Emily Dickinson? Another poem where you say quite plainly that it makes effortless sense to step into the stars – not just to see the Northern Lights but to become them. I know poems do impossible things all the time, but come on, is this really a consolation? The lines might offend in their fantasy if they weren’t by you, to whom we have securely fastened a story of confinement managed by culture (how we love this story for our writers!). Do you remember why the miller’s daughter was spinning straw into gold? Because her father said she could – an ambitious, stupid man, and she became his captive. You had to have your mind, goes one version of you, since culture wouldn’t give you a say (and there are others who got put in the closet after you, in a different way). Not that an account of chosen reclusion would exactly do at this moment in human history, in which choosing feels like something a person’s got to pay for. We do this poem wrong if we believe we are always capable of spinning its narrative conclusion into advice for our own endeavors. These are words that mean more when you are in trouble, like so much writing, to whose central fact we should return. You can’t rescue yourself without getting into trouble.

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Imagine a school in which telling stories governed the curriculum. Not understanding stories but telling them. Teachers would have to do a lot more listening.

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I like the word story more than I like its current cultural cousins – fiction or flash, speculative or braided. It is generally agreed on that the natural aristocracy of taletellers favors the experienced, the witty, and the eloquent, rather than any social class. I may even like the word “story” better than the word “poem,” but don’t tell.

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I wonder always about the 20^th century and the novel, the way that fiction had to encounter the problem of resolution. So many novels just can’t end anymore, or they end like the marvelous ending of Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John: “I could hear the small waves lap lapping around the ship. They made an unexpected sound as if a vessel filled with liquid had been placed on its side and was now emptying out.” So many stories don’t end - they are just over.

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I wonder if other forms of art – like poetry and film – have encountered this problem with less obvious resistance. A lack of resolution is a sign that a poem has spun that straw into gold. A poem begins with fixity and ends in aliveness. The endings of movies are designed to linger for a mortal version of forever. I can’t get it out of my head, we say, the image of Dickinson becoming a star, laughing at “Captivity,” which is of course our mortal condition, our allegorical condition, but also the real condition of actual human beings, living on the earth, even down the street from us.

But this doesn’t make films and poems not stories – not in the least. A story isn’t a story because it ends. It’s not a better story because it knows not to. The stories I like best are anxious and energetic throughout, thinking all the time that someone might just end them, any moment, and the poems I love are like this too.

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Dickinson’s dashes have something to do with story. Before a story has a middle or an end – before it even has a beginning – it arises in the mind as an interruption. A pockmark, or pleat in time. It presents itself as an itch to be told. As storytellers describe to us, in so many different aspects, different for each storyteller. Han Kang talks about the image that began The Vegetarian, of a body planted in the earth. A writer friend I know wrote a whole book about one of her most intimate relationships and the fiction accompanied real life, sometimes with discomfort. Didn’t Zola say about one of his novels that he was going to make a man with a house, a family, and a job and then take them all away from him, and that would be the plot? Of course we do this all the time in real life, we are always telling stories. And I know that the way a story rises into my mind and voice has an excitement, a welling-up like crying but its partner and opposite, because sometimes the eagerness to tell a story makes my throat water, as if I were looking at a feast of pomegranates and pastries and pie. The formal event of the dash, for Dickinson, has many uses, but at least one of them is to represent this break between story and life, the moment artifice makes sense. In “They Shut me Up in Prose,” you’ll notice, it’s in the third line, just as the poem turns from an account of being told what to do to an account of the imagination. As soon as this happens, the poem multiplies and confuses its stories, so alive it becomes in the desire to tell them: “They might as wise have lodged a Bird / For Treason – in the Pound—” The poem knows perfectly well that birds, traitors, and livestock tend to have separate physical fates, but an analogy so mixed reflects not simply the comedy of the moment but its gorgeous abundance of linguistic possibility.

Stories begin as a desire to tell them, and I wonder whether each Dickinson dash announces that arriving energy of wishing to speak, the straw of silence spun into the grain of a first word.

I seem to get further afield each time from that volcanic plain where I suspect, for three hours, I became more than human, my initial story, the one I wanted to tell, the first dash, the open-fielded evidence that I too have been Shut up in Prose and imagined my star-life in response. I keep interrupting myself. New stories keep appearing, I am sort of sorry about it, but also sort of not. I was supposed to do something else today than write this. But birthdays are interruptions; they pleat the calendar with evidence of a life that will not come again.