by bell hooks
Woolf ends A Room of One’s Own by calling attention to the untapped creativity in all women and our capacity to nurture one another. Recognizing this to be an important stage in the process of self-development, but only a stage, she concludes by urging women to escape from isolation, from sex-segregated space. Her final charge is that women face “that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality, and not only to the world of men and women.” Hurston ends the novel with a fictive mirroring of this prophetic declaration. It is an ending that celebrates woman’s capacity to face life alone. Janie is not cut off from life. Possessing a keen memory and a powerful liberated imagination, she can create and be a world for herself. Last described in the act of reflection—Janie is thinking, remembering, imagining. Still rebellious, she challenges accepted perceptions of reality by positing a radically different way to view dying. Janie sees death not as an end to life but simply another stage of growth. Viewed from this perspective, death can be approached without fear, and the death of a loved one, though grievous, can become another ecstatic occasion where one bears witness to the unity of all life. It is this revelation that she witnesses at the end of the novel, that she calls “her soul to come and see.”
As the novel ends, interiority is not depicted as a space of enclosure. It is not restrictive or confining. Janie opens windows, letting in air and light. Transformed interior space is expansive; it mirrors Janie’s psyche. Importantly, the last paragraph reaffirms this transformation of inner domestic space. Janie has more than a room of her own, she has the capacity to live fully in that room—to resurrect, to reconcile, to renew. Janette Turner Hospital reminds us that Virginia Woolf’s room of her own did not keep her alive. Hurston not only saves Janie’s life, she gives her space to rest and renew her spirit, a space of infinite possibility, a space where she can create. Such a space, Hospital claims, is absolutely essential for the growth and development of the “female imagination”:
The quest for women writers then, and of their protagonists, is a search not just for a room of their own, but for safe private space, for non-toxic air, for a place where the self can really breathe.…
Hurston spent most of her life trying to find such a place. It was an unfulfilled quest. Without stones in her pocket, she, like Woolf, sank into the abyss, one the abyss of poverty and misfortune, the other madness and the suffocation of privilege that does not ensure freedom from pain. In Their Eyes Were Watching God Hurston creates this safe place—a wide transformative space Janie calls “home.”
emily dickinson
the power of influence
When I imagine angels they are not some winged fantastical apparitions hanging on the rafters of the soul looking down. They are for me always embodied concrete guardians, those that the Ethiopian Coptics called zars. In the images the Coptics painted to give face to their beliefs angels are human-like. Angels were only useful in my childhood because they were guardians—there to see to the fulfillment of one’s need, there to protect. I always chose my angels; sometimes they were real human beings and sometimes not. The angel of my solitary spirit, the one who guided me through poetry to the contemplative, to the mystical understanding that one could know the Divine through direct experience and encounter—this angel was Emily Dickinson.
Emily D., as I called her when I was ten years old, was certain of one thing, that solitude was essential for the nurturing of her creative imagination. Solitude was the space where her soul could come out of hiding and be heard. To talk with the world face to face, in the ordinary business of going out of one’s house to shop, to meet—all of these disturbances would have sent the soul marooned to some place of forgetfulness. It would have been harder to find its intimacy again.
There was for Emily D. no better place to care for the soul than inside the home—the house of one’s actual concrete daily living. Writing to her brother Austin in 1851 she shared: “Home is a holy thing—nothing of doubt or distrust can enter its blessed portals … here seems indeed to be a bit of Eden which not the sin of any can utterly destroy.” In the Eden that was her home Emily Dickinson could subvert and defy all the restraints the world might have placed on her imagination and her being had she chosen to venture out more, had she chosen to live the normal life of a white woman of her times. Although I never thought of Emily D. in my childhood as white, I must do so now—to understand the luxury of her solitude, its privilege. No black woman of her day and time could have lived such a solitary life. In the world she lived in, black women were there to serve. These thoughts of race were never in my girlhood when Emily D., my sweet one, guardian and confidante, angel of my solitary spirit, spoke to me. Sharing the magic of stillness and contemplation, she spoke to me most clearly and directly in the shadowy spaces behind her words.
As a girl the only information about Emily D. we learned in school was that she rarely came out of the house. Her solitude was presented to us as weird, as a mark of her strangeness. It was the space behind the poems that offered the insight that there was more to this solitude, something deeper. To this poet who “dwelled in possibility” solitude was the place for magic and alchemy—the space wherein one could meet the Divine face to face.
When I read “This is my letter to the World / That never wrote to me—” I heard both lamentation and liberty. Emily D. seemed to both mourn her estrangement from the things of this world while exulting in the vision’s seclusion and solitary confinement brought to her. That she mourns the very worldliness she has actively chosen to forego participation in to nurture her creative vision clearly shows concern and care for that world. To be at home in the world, Emily Dickinson needed to create a pure space where she could dream and dream without interruption, without needing to fear that the innocence of her vision would be corrupted. Without the distraction of worldliness, Dickinson could fully open the realm of her senses and sensually experience space both in the domestic household and in the natural world.
Living an ascetic, almost monastic existence she could hear more, see more of everything that was happening in nature. Dickinson’s poems reveal her understanding of the interconnectedness of all living organisms. In Rosemary Reuther’s ecofeminist theology of earth healing Gaia and God she asks: “How do we connect ourselves and the meaning of our lives to these worlds of the very small and the very big, standing in between the dancing void of energy that underlies the atomic structure of our bodies and the universe, whose galaxies, stretching over vast space and time, dwarf our histories. Even our bodies, despite the appearance of continuity over time, are continually dying and being reborn in every second.” For Emily D. this connection was made by making a sacrament of the everyday, by remaining close to nature. Close enough to write of the inner life of flowers: “my nosegays are for captives; dim, long—expectant eyes, fingers denied the plucking, patient till paradise. to such, if they should whisper of morning and the moor, they bear no other errand.…” Or in “Forbidden Fruit”: “‘Heaven’—is what I cannot reach! / The Apple on the tree—.” Or when meditating on the meaning of storms in nature she writes “The Soul’s Storm”: “It struck me—every Day— / The Lightning was as new / As if the Cloud that instant slit / And let the Fire through—.” In many poems Dickinson contemplates the ordinary visible things in our daily experiences—a bird, a flower, the next door neighbor’s house, all of which become ways to arrive at a deeper transcendental meaning of the mystery and meaning of life.
Throughout my writing life, I have walked a creative path guided by the life and work of Emily Dickinson. Now as a mature woman and writer in retrospect I can see the myriad ways her commitment to solitude and contemplation deeply threaten patriarchal norms. That is why her solitariness is usually still presented to the minds of young girls and boys as something strange and weird. Even though time has accorded her an unchallenged place in the canon of “great” and serious American literature, the meaning of her solitude still remains suspect and unclear to many
who read and appreciate her work. It is rarely presented as essential to the workings of her creativity in the same way that another poet who enthralled me during my girlhood, Rainer Maria Rilke’s commitment to uninterrupted time is extolled as a sign of his devotion to his art, his willingness to lay down the ground of his worldly being to make that open space within wherein the poems could enter and the visionary voice speak. Dickinson’s solitariness was essential for the cultivation of her creative passion. It was in that solitary space that she found her most intimate connection to the Divine, to that quality of yearning for ecstasy that would lead her to write “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!/ Were I with thee / Wild Nights should be / Our luxury!” Dickinson’s poetry is a celebration of mystical union with the Divine. It is during those times that she is most “alone with the Alone” that her imagination takes flight and soars. It is that soaring in a world where there is no time and space that she, the angel of solitary spirits, finds us and stands watch over our creative spirit.
Working imaginatively to claim that space where we can embrace contemplation and solitude, contemporary artists look to the presence of Emily Dickinson to inspire. Our engagement with her work connects us to one another. My journeying with Emily Dickinson brings me to the work of Roni Horn. In the fundamentalist Christian ethos of my childhood, supplicants would ask of the Divine to let “the breath of the Lord now breathe on me.” This shared breath is symbolic of the passage of divine spirit from one being to another. Like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation it calls us back to life. Emily Dickinson’s work has this life-sustaining power.
Horn acts to give visual expression to that power. By creating objects that embody the metaphysics inherent in Dickinson’s vision and in her words, she both extends that breath and expands it. She opens up Dickinson, creating with, through, and beyond her. In her deconstructive appropriation of Dickinson, Horn maps out a visual typography of the contemplative imagination at work. To Horn, “mapping is a way of ordering things visually.” In her typographic drawings and photographs there is a visual palimpsest that leads the eye back to the words underneath, the words and life of Dickinson that ground Horn’s imaginative quest for a spatial frontier where solitude can reinvent itself within the postmodern context. Horn concentrates on Emily Dickinson’s solitude, recognizing that this is the source of her genius and power. In the narrative “When Dickinson Shut Her Eyes,” Horn reminds us that the poet lived “sequestered from the world” because she knew “that going out into the world hampered her ability to invent it.” While she appropriates Dickinson’s metaphysics of contemplation and solitude, Horn offers a vision of journeying that invites us to realize the possibility of a solitude we invent in spite of lives lived in a constantly frenetic and busy world. To return us to the quality of stillness lyrically evoked in Dickinson’s poetics, Horn gives us the evocative object, sculptures of solid aluminum and plastic that urge a re-encountering of that contemplative stance. The sculpture “Key and Cue, No. 351” stands straight; against a plain, sparse backdrop a single declarative statement asserts: “I FELT MY LIFE WITH BOTH MY HANDS.” Or the “Untitled” piece—cubes stacked that compel us to look and hear again Dickinson’s words: “MY LIFE HAS STOOD A LOADED GUN.” These sculptures have a purity of presence that insists on a world where all that is unnecessary has been stripped away.
In her life and work Emily Dickinson stripped away the excess, the clutter, to make room for clarity. The meditative quality of her words resonates in the images Horn creates to contain and further illuminate that world. The closeness Horn feels with Emily Dickinson, one that defies time and space, impressed itself on her imagination. Reading Dickinson’s letters and poems she found in the work a place of recognition, a mirroring of her own inner landscape. A geography of the heart began to imprint itself on Horn’s imagination. She would enter more fully into the psychic spaces inhabited by Emily Dickinson to return to herself, and her present. Horn’s work is not sentimental or nostalgic. It is a careful analytical imaginative mapping of an inner geography of soul—and the reaching through time of one artist toward another. Articulating this sense of space in the text “Anatomy and Geography” included in Pooling Waters, Horn shares the insight that “inner geography is a plain knowledge of oneself, a kind of common sense gathered through repeated exposure to distilling experiences. Inner geography maps peace of mind in the world as it is and not as I imagine it.” Like Dickinson, Horn’s approach is that of the documentary observer, the surveyor who through a systematic process of looking allows the landscape to reveal itself without the imposition of a predetermined view. She fixates on the landscape of Dickinson’s imagination, doubling this with her concern for an inner geography that transcends that landscape, that makes it over so that it becomes a new site, a new place. Both “When Dickinson Shut Her Eyes” and “How Dickinson Stayed Home” remind us that located at the site of this inner geography are multiple narratives, diverse points of entry. Unlike Dickinson, who was always mapping an inner geography with the spatial constraints of confinement and containment, Horn moves beyond the realm of domestic space, across the globe, to observe, to chart those traces of an inner geography hidden behind the outer busy world of action, change, and ongoing movement. Horn, in her own words, stresses that she “uses the outer world to notate the inner.” Artistically, she offers a revisionist perspective on both Dickinson and her work that interrogates the intensity of her solitariness even as it visually attests to the power of stillness, of contemplation.
Roni Horn’s work demands of audiences direct engagement. We must look both backwards to see the impact of Dickinson and forward into the unique artistic representation of that impact. Horn’s work calls attention to the primacy of solitude even as it reminds us that the outcome of engaged solitude is an intensification of a sense of togetherness. In the writings of religious mystics globally there is a constant emphasis on the way in which solitude enables solidarity. Theologian William McNamara clarifies this understanding: “Discreet solitude is a creative protest against the euphoric or chaotic togetherness that stamps our way of life in the modern world. But it is also the highest and most apt expression of our solidarity with the whole human race, with the whole of creation. The more solitary we are, the more divinely endowed and psychologically equipped to enter a significantly profound relationship with all levels of life—animal, vegetable, mineral as well as human.” Horn seeks to capture that point of entry, to explore the unseen aspects of the contradictions between our desire for connectedness and our longing for spaces that are solitary. Acknowledging both her connection to Dickinson and the way that bond enables a movement out—across boundaries in “When Dickinson Shut Her Eyes”—she creates a journal-like narrative recording: “For the time being, Dickinson’s here with me, in Iceland. For someone who stayed home she fits naturally into this distant and necessary place. Her writing is an equivalent of this unique island; Dickinson invented a syntax out of herself, and Iceland did too. Volcanos do. Dickinson stayed home to get at the world. But home is an island like this one. And I come to this island to get at the very center of the world.” From this location, at the center, Horn is able to look into the heart of the matter and envision a visual montage of landscapes that allows all of us to come closer to Iceland, to that inner Island, without ever having to leave the spaces we call home. This act of remembering, of connecting that which appears to be disparate, separate echoes the thoughts expressed in the last stanza of Dickinson’s poem “The Forgotten Grave”: “Winds of summer fields / Recollect the Way,— / Instinct picking up the key / Dropped by Memory.” Horn’s work gives us a key—a way to open up the doors of our memory so that a space exists where we travel in and through time.
Her work evokes the poetic lyricism of a past that merges with the present so effortlessly that there is no separation in time. Every moment is a present moment. And it is there in that complete and utter surrender to the present that life is found. It is their devotion to the present moment that is the met
aphysical link between Dickinson and Horn. Within Buddhist teachings, works like the Avatamsaka Sutra remind us that returning to the present is the only way to be in contact with life. Interpreting the sutra, Thich Nhat Hanh shares that “time and space are not separate,” that “time is made up of space, and space is made up of time.” Horn’s sculptures urge the onlooker to engage fully with the present. To read the scripts—the messages passed through time—we must be fully aware, mindful in that moment when we confront the art itself. They draw us into the tranquillity of stillness as we observe deeply the image. The joining of physical objects with narrative is a conceptual strategy that calls our attention to dialogical acts of communion that are sacramental.
