notes
>1. David Porter, "Assembling a poet and her poems: convergent limit-works
of Joseph Cornell and Emily Dickinson," Word & Image, 10, 3 (July-September 1994), p. 199.
>2. The English title, translated from the German, of Wim Wenders' film, In Weiter Ferne, so nah! (1993), which begins, significantly, with a passage from Matthew 6:22: "The light of the body is the eye."
>3. Although I have not done a complete inventory of texts composed by Dickinson on envelopes, a large number of such texts exists, many of which have clear iconic value. Two are especially relevant to this essay: A 109, beginning, "A Pang is more / conspicuous in Spring / In contrast with the [those] / things that sing, / Not Birds entirely - but / Minds" (1881) and H 323, beginning, "The / Bird her / punctual / Music brings" (1883).
>4. I have assumed that Dickinson is the author of the pinnings and unpinnings. Though it is possible that the manuscripts were pinned together by editors seeking to order her papers, it is not likely. The often jarring associations of text fragments suggest an aesthetics at odds with the editorial aesthetics of order.
>5. Peter Greenaway, Flying out of this World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 31.
>6. See Leonard Lutwack, Birds in Literature (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1994).
>7. For a compelling reading of the connection between writing and seeing, see Françoise Lucbert, "The Pen and the Eye: The Politics of the Gazing Body," in Vision and Textuality, eds. Stephen Melville and Bill Readings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 251-255.
>8. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
>9. In The Sense of Sight (New York: Vintage, 1985), John Berger writes, "People talk of freshness of vision, of the intensity of seeing for the first time, but the intensity of seeing for the last time is, I believe, greater" (147). Dickinson's late writing, particularly her fragments, mark the edge of perception itself. This marking accounts, perhaps, for our perception of the fragments themselves as both infinitely distant and infinitely close.
>10. See, for example, Clive Hart's extended exploration of flight iconography and iconology in Images of Flight (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1988); see also Marina Warner, The Inner Eye: Art Beyond the Visible (London: National Touring Exhibitions, 1996).
>11. On 6 August 1885, The Springfield Republican noted: "Mrs. Jackson is reported at the point of death in San Francisco, where she has been steadily declining for the past four months." She died six days later, on 12 August. In a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, apparently composed on the day The Springfield Republican ran the story, Dickinson wrote, "I was unspeakably shocked to see this in the Morning Paper--She wrote me in Spring that she could not walk, but not that she would die--I was sure you would know. Please say it is not so. What a Hazard a Letter is! When I think of the Hearts it has scuttled and sunk, I almost fear to lift my Hand to so much as a Superscription." Shortly afterwards, she wrote to Hunt Jackson's widow: "She said in a Note of a few months since, 'I am absolutely well.' I next knew of her death." The letter to William Jackson confirms the March-August suspension of correspondence between Dickinson and Hunt-Jackson. For the complete texts of the letters to Higginson and Jackson, see Thomas H. Johnson, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), L 1007 and L 1009, respectively.
>12. I am indebted to Randall McLeod's discussion of imping in "Fiatflux," in Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance, ed. Randall M Leod (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1993); see especially pp. 129-135.
>13. Henry Vaughan, "Isaacs Marriage," II. 48-49, in The Works, edited by L. C. Martin. 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957).
>14. Theodor Adorno, "Late Style in Beethoven," Raritan 13,1 (Summer 1993), p. 106.
>15. Michel Pierssens, "Detachment," in Fragments, 166. On syncope, see Catherine Clément, Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture, trans. Sally O?Driscoll and Deirdre M. Mahoney (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
>17. I have appropriated the phrase, "terrifying tense," from Leslie Scalapino's "Objects in the Terrifying Tense / Longing from Taking Place," in A Poetics of Criticism, eds. Juliana Spahr, Mark Wallace, Kristin Prevallet and Pam Rehm (Buffalo, NY: Leave Books, 1994), p. 37.
>18. "Flight" might be a term used for the classification of certain kinds of textual materials, especially those materials unsusceptible to collection, such as a "flight of fragments." A complete inventory of the pinned documents among Dickinson's papers has not been--perhaps cannot be--done. This bibliography is illustrative, not than exhaustive.
>19. Lorine Niedecker, in a letter to Cid Corman, Jan. 30, 1968, in "Between Your House and Mine": The Letters of Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman, 1960 to 1970, ed. Lisa Pater Faranda (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986), p. 149.
>20. Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Geneviève James and James Neilson (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 58.
>22. For a discussion of "random scatters," see G. V. T. Matthews, Bird Navigation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 42, 86, 107, 108, 114, 134, 140. See also Donald R. Griffin, Bird Migration (Garden City, NY: The Natural History Press, 1964), pp. 160-162.
>23. "The proceedings of a birdsong" is a reference to Wilhelm Raabe's, Die Akten des Vogelsangs, qtd. in Anselm Haverkamp, Leaves of Mourning: Holderlin's Late Work--With an Essay on Keats and Melancholy, trans. Vernon Chadwick (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 5.
>24. Ira Livingston, Arrow of Chaos: Romanticism and Postmodernity (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. vi, 16.
>25. I am in the process of compiling an electronic archive of Dickinson's late fragments (Radical Scatters: Emily Dickinson's Late Fragments, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, projected publication date, 1998). The archive will be divided into two (though never mutually exclusive) groups: trace fragments, which appear, sometimes altered, in other Dickinson texts; and autonomous fragments, which are not linked to other texts, but which nonetheless were saved by Dickinson. The goal is to illuminate the play of autonomy and intertextuality in Dickinson's writing by allowing users to see how various fragments appear in, or near, more than one document. The electronic archive will allow scholars to work with Dickinson's texts in unedited form and draw on them in a nonlinear manner consistent with the approach I advocated in Emily Dickinson's Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing (University of Michigan, 1995), but was not able to implement, bound, as I was, by the codex format.