The Maze of Longing: Response to an Emily Dickinson Symposium
We entered a house, portal ornate and measured with simple lines, filled with corridors strange, yet somehow comforting, and rooms that turned upside down as we walked into them, while doors appeared without warning and opened as if to invite us further inward. What would we find, ever deeper, ever further inwards? The mathematical precision of the floorplans belied a feeling of artless improvisation, chaos twined around and about the wallpapers and the wainscoting, highlighted the trim and sank deep into the foundations. Yet this wildness was not rot, nor corruption--no more than that of any life lived in a morass of a world perhaps denied. Stairs upward instead led us inward, strophes between floors, between layers, kindness of the hostess melded with the casual dismissal of the hermetic, the withdrawn, the soul become it’s own shell, gritty sense of self an irritant to form the lustrous pearl. A moment’s pause to cast eyes about, our breath fog, wondering what had led to this, lea...