The Mourning That Is Language

IV

The Mourning That Is Language

And now it was a name I sought, in my memory, the name of the only
town it had been given me to know . ... And this name that I sought, I
felt sure that it began with a B or with a P, but in spite of this clue, or
perhaps because of its falsity, the other letters continued to escape
me . ... And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness
often hard to penetrate . ... Yes, even then, when already all was fading,
waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no
names but thingless names.
-Samuel Beckett
The mirror is a contrivance for seeing things not visible directly by the
eye, such as ones own face, and the object seen is called a virtual image
because its position in touch-Space is that from which the rays of light
would come if the real luminous point were there.
-Samuel Alexander

'"IT IS FINISHED' can never be said of us" (L 555), Dickinson wrote,

and her poems on death, as if to insist on the literal interpretation of
such a reading of experience, push the point. For while the most profound estrangement is that precipitated by death, in Dickinson's poems
death is not loss for the dying person but is rather reunion. So, at least,
is the poems' premise: life must be sacrificed, selfhood go by the way, all
defining characteristics dismissed, but the recompense for these exactions is the end of the solitary self, the loss of the boundary between self
and object, not because they are dead to each other but rather because
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they are fused with each other. Perhaps the fantasy accounts for why
Dickinson's speakers practice dying with frequency. In so doing they
court not death but rather union; indeed, as I have commented before,
many of Dickinson's formulations on death are explicitly sexual. She had
written: "Death is the supple Suitor/That wins at last-" (P 1445). The
world, then, is not destroyed for the self as a consequence of death but
is rather reconstructed, and there are poems in which speakers implicitly
imagine death as the phenomenon that makes relatedness possible. 1
Hence a dying speaker becomes one with the death's-head that at that
moment is also the personification of otherness. The union of subject
and object requires death because it requires the cessation of time, just
as it requires the collapse or transformation of spatial distinction. For
the death world is a purely symbolic one in which the body is exchanged
for meaning; or, to put it differently, it is a world in which meaning is
not hindered by limitations of any sort, and relatedness not defined by,
or as a consequence of, identic separation. If only the end could not be,
or could be survived beyond, there might yet be hope for the abolition
of the more iatractable: boundary, the one that separates selves.
The immortality myth 2 implicit in the poems on death that we have
examined in the previous chapter is not especially unique. In the words
of another, older text, when St. Paul in the Letter to Romans (7 :24) asks
"Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" the terms of
deliverance seem also to be the loss of the body if that loss could be
followed by a higher union. It is in the service of union that the displacements in Dickinson's poems unfold: the "failed Windows," the
''Gazing Grain-," -all the projective fusions discussed in the last chapter
are symptoms or manifestations of the desire to be one with the object
of one's longing. Thus displacement itself must be regarded as a phenomenon devised to counter those boundaries that impose the intolerable
distinction, and Romanticism, so obsessed with the point at which
relationship becomes fusion because it cannot help it (or because it does
not wish to help it), must recognize its desires, pushed to the extreme,
in that longing for death which will deliver it to coincidence.
The dead speakers in Dickinson's poems resist transformation; they
stubbornly remain their mortal selves. Death is a phenomenon subject to
the speaker's reconstruction; either she cannot imagine it at all ("and
then/ I could not see to see-" [P 465 J) or she must imagine it as other
than it is. Thus in the hierarchy of Dickinson's formulations, loss comes
after death. She herself stated this matter-of-factly when she wrote: