VI. A Flight of Fragments: Towards a Bibliography of Departures >18

A certain set of operations repeated again and again, like the rapid motions of wings, may signify that a further 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 doubles 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"--pinned slip--

"-- broke / Can never be + fitted again? / + matched --" (MB II, Set 6c, 1866).

Again and again, Dickinson begins writing with whatever is near to hand--scraps of envelope, straight pins--and suddenly, without warning, she leaves the premises. There's no note to tell us where she has gone--into the economy of contingency, where lost pins are accidents or choices, where coincidences belong to those who dare to use them. 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. Outside the bound packets, and especially among the texts of the 1870s and 1880s, the contacts between pinned texts may be momentary transient. Moreover, in the texts of the 1870s and 1880s, the relationship between the "superior" text and the pinned text has changed. Pin holes marking departures may also function as points of entry for new text. At risk in the unpinning of texts is not simply the loss of an end, but the conversion of ends and beginnings in successive encounters with the unforseen. Texts pinned together may change places, or disengage from each other to seek other beginnings, other ends, far from each other.

Pinning/unpinning may be Dickinson's furthest expression of the aesthetics of "choosing not choosing," her latest response to the recurrent danger of closure.

Winds blow through the textual histories of these wings.

>> VII VIII IX