Writing in Emily Dickinson’s Bedroom: Real Writing in the World #10 - Literary Pilgrimage (Part I)
Next week Part II: A Message in Edith Wharton’s Garden
This is longer than usual, Real Writers. You can’t condense trying to describe an indescribable experience. If you’re new to my newsletter, welcome! Check out the other Real Writing in the World writing adventures and subscribe and enjoy ways to bring your writing life to life beyond the page or laptop!
The Idea
After two years of preservation/collection work, this past summer the Emily Dickinson Museum shared on Instagram that they had reopened studio sessions for 1-2 hours to write alone in her bedroom. I had wanted to do this for years and jumped at the chance, scheduling it for October so I could also enjoy the leaf show.
I had been looking forward to the trip but when the day arrived to leave, I wasn’t up to a 6 ½ hour drive, (ended up being 8 ½ hour due to traffic), when I normally love a long road trip. And I didn’t have the energy for spending the night in a new place. Isn’t that always the way? We want to stay in the comfortable. I was bringing with me the beginnings of a cold I was fighting, my fatigue and uncertainty, a strange whispery grief for what I hadn’t accomplished or become, that I hadn’t earned the opportunity—mixed with apathy, curiosity, and a need to do this thing I’d wanted to do for several years.
Such is the mixed bag of midlife with all its changes! I ignored these things, packed the car, and off I went.
The day of my private studio session, I woke up nervous--jittery, flighty, spacey. That could have been the cold, but how surreal that in a matter of hours I’d be alone in Dickinson’s personal, explosively creative, and sacred space. While I didn’t expect to sense her there, it did feel like I would have a kind of audience with her.
I had forgotten to bring my pocket edition of her poems (one of the first books of poetry I bought decades ago), so I grounded myself with a trip to Barnes & Noble to buy the “envelope poems” (notes and messages written on bits of envelopes in later years). Then on to Target for pencils. You can use a notebook and pencil or a laptop in the session. One or the other and no pens. You can keep your phone and take pictures (just no video of the tour).
Amherst and nearby Hadley are lovely New England towns. The leaves were well on their way to autumn glory, the air was cool enough for a sweater, the blue sky a dance between sun and clouds, wind whooshing through, having its fun with the leaves—just the perfect October day. Finally free of summer but not yet hammered by winter.
I wandered around, ticking off the hours until the 45-minute 4 p.m. tour, which would give me a short break to hit the gift shop before my 5:15 p.m. session. Sessions are 8:30 a.m. before opening, or 5:15 p.m. after closing. Evergreens wasn’t open (collections work), and I completely forgot to visit her grave (!). I am still kicking myself, but I was too spacey to think logically about how to spend my time.
The Tour
Finally, it was time to head for the house, known as The Homestead. I wouldn’t say it’s a cheery, friendly house on the outside, despite its yellow paint and green shutters. The yellow isn’t uplifting; it’s more serious, somber, even austere (fitting for a Calvinist household). I would call it a welcoming, handsome house, a place to feel safe. That was the vibe for me.
With the leaves strewn about, the wind, and the sky already dimming with shadowed clouds, very atmospheric. I don’t always feel like I’m stepping back in time when I visit author’s or period houses, but I did in the Dickinson home.
Inside, I checked in and had time for the gift shop, where I bought so many things! My favorite is this poster. There are four of them—one for each season. I chose summer—this is how I picture her relationship with her creativity and Nature. The artist for all the seasons is Penelope Dullaghan and her work so vibrant.
The tour was one of the best I’ve had. The guides were all young women—I’m guessing students at Amherst College, which owns the museum (both The Homestead and Evergreens, her brother Austin’s home with his wife/Emily’s friend Susan). They were engaged and knowledgeable, not just saying what they’d memorized. The tour ran 30 minutes longer because of two people who asked A LOT of questions (if you do this too, book a private tour—there’s a schedule for a reason…), delaying the group behind us and therefore delaying my session.
The Studio Session
In this short Life that only lasts an hour How much - how little - is within our power (FR1292)
By the time the museum closed and another poised young woman with long dark hair and a gentle air named Emily (of course) led me upstairs, I was drained from waiting all day, the nervousness, the energy of so many people on the tour. This dropped me into a quasi-meditative state where I had no expectations and was craving stillness and silence.
As we climbed the stairs to the room I had been in a half hour before on the tour, the house started to settle into itself, its real self, the way we all do after a party or house guests leave and no one is watching.
I was so glad I’d chosen the later session, when the house would seem as it might have in the evenings after dinner and the family winding down with the day, in their own routines. As if I was one of them. Rather than the bustle of morning preparing for the many people who would walk through the rooms. To take the tour after the studio session would have wiped out the experience.
The staff set up a table and chairs in the room (there can be a maximum of two people). Dickinson’s small table by the window is a replica, not the real one, but you’re still not allowed to sit and write there (I’ve seen pictures of people doing that but they must have changed the practice).
Emily (staff, not ghost), left me alone; she waited in the room across the hall. I sat down and took in the details of the space for a long time, not sure if I was allowed to walk around the room (it felt intrusive) so I didn’t.
I desperately did not want to romanticize the experience so keep that in mind. You want to, in a space like this. It comes over you so strongly. To start, I read some envelope poems and used a random generator on my phone to see what might pop up as a potentially appropriate message and that’s exactly what happened, here are just the first two stanzas:
One need not be a chamber—to be haunted— One need not be a House— The Brain—has Corridors surpassing Material Place— Far safer, of a Midnight—meeting External Ghost— Than an Interior—confronting— That cooler—Host— (FR407)
How apt: inner demons, fears, the hidden self, concealed thoughts and feelings. Going down into the darkness, unarmed, to meet these where they are (the question of coming back whole or never coming back).
Each dash in Dickinson’s poetry is a crack opening to a windswept mind space, a cleaving from the approved, “sane” self. Not that the opposite is madness, more stepping outside of the boundaries, off the established paths. The challenge is to do it.
I once told a friend, long ago, that I would choose creative ecstasy over any other kind and they thought I was weird and didn’t understand. I still feel that way and my version of Emily Dickinson did too—and she is the pinnacle of achieving it in my mind.
I was never going to spend time working on a writing project (unless there was a poem related to or about her that I was working on and that wasn’t the case), I had thought I’d write her a letter but instead I wrote about the experience of being in the room. It seemed the best way to be present. What’s below isn’t an hour of writing. There was a lot of experiencing the room. Listening—internally and externally. I didn’t write anything except the final sentence below for the last ten minutes.
This room is not a shrine, a confessional, or a tomb.
It’s too warm, but that could be me and the nervousness I’ve been feeling all day (and the cold, which I think is losing). I’ve had to force myself to take deep breaths. It’s more about doing something for myself, which is not happening often enough—for my creative self—to prove that I believe in that self three dimensionally, not in a To Do list way (“write tonight! Edit 30 pages. Look up retreat places”).
Instead, something immersive. A kind of summoning. In my late 50s now, that creative self has changed, as I’ve changed, and I am rediscovering who they are (I hate the idea of “finding oneself” in any phase of life, let alone midlife, but those moments come whether we like them or not or allow them or not).
The best part is being released from caring what anyone else thinks, of having to build, accomplish, achieve, succeed. I did the things. I did them my way (ha). They didn’t turn out as expected, but there were no promises and it wasn’t an extreme sport, but I still did the off the beaten path things.
The windows are tall. Outside the sun is setting, suffusing the room through the windows on two sides. They would have looked on fields, not Main Street with evening traffic. The fields would have glowed gold and the room must have felt like a ship sailing through the air. Who wouldn’t have locked themselves away in here?
I keep thinking that beneath the mats is the path she wore from pacing, perhaps measuring sound, music, meter, the movement needed to generate the words. I would like to take off my shoes.
Voices downstairs as staff close up. Steps on the stairs, like life then—others in the house—far off on the shore while she (welcomed) the night tide, crashing in, wilder than the day’s. The ocean of night to voyage in words.
I understand the preference for night and writing while others sleep—their consciousness switched off; the energy/electricity of their dreams a power source. Part of the current.
The short form with her white dress faces me so in a way she’s here, but an imprint, not her true self. The form is set between the bed and the fireplace, reminding me this is her space, blocking off access to her little writing table. How many metaphors can one think of to explain the white dress? The most obvious being a white page; the most romantic being a soul open to being written or—possessed.
That word came out of nowhere but feels right. That’s how Dickinson feels to me. Full of tension, ready to spring, to possess and be possessed—eagerly waiting for the next wave.
If there’s a spirit here, it watches to see what we’re made of, if we’re up to whatever shows up in this room.
I’m glad I’m here in the evening when the house is as it might have been then—winding down, perhaps people reading somewhere or what must have been precious hours to her when they were out and no one was home.
The riot of flowers that is the wallpaper is like a dare. Full, passionate pink roses and rich gray-green leaves. Dense and cascading blooms and between them crisscrossing lines like a net.
Now the sun fires up the clouds and deepening blue sky. To sit at that little table with the views she had would take your breath away.
Thirty minutes gone—what do I (we—there is a sense of the others who have come before or will sit here in future) hope will happen here? Seeking “the soul’s society” in the place that connection was first forged. We spend the hour in pilgrimage, in a timeless room. That’s what she achieved for herself and what we want for ourselves. That privacy, that creative fierceness, the compression and liberation in this small chamber.
The clock on the mantle is paused at 6:04 and that’s the time now—the hour matches the moment, though I asked earlier and there’s no significance. But I’m seeing the hour in action—the sun sinking, shadows increasing.
The silence has layers the texture of cotton in the ears. It’s not wholly peaceful. It’s tense and intense. Dickinson is a commanding and demanding poet. She’s challenging and irreverent. More than that she defines her reverence and makes demands of what she reveres.
On the tour we were told (and I’ve read) time and again that she wasn’t alone. She wrote so many letters (to almost 100 people—talk about a social network), and enclosed poems and pieces of poems. It’s easier to love the best parts, the hopeful parts, of others through letters. Maybe this is what we come for—to love those unintended parts of her, and the best parts we bring, and know us both.
There is a lamp behind me but the rest of the room grays as the last light seeps away. The white dress becomes a ghost—more of the Dickinson in my imagination. White with silence. There is a way the transparency of a ghost is as opaque and unknowable as the dark.
If there’s a message here—and this is simple and so obvious—it’s to live on your own terms. Creatively and otherwise. I knew this already and the imagined spirit of her is laughing with me—all this way you came for the answer you brought with you, is what I think she’d say. But it’s been good to visit.
And now it’s night.
I may never sit here like this again. Even if I do, it won’t be the first time ever again. The mind wants to analyze and understand. In the last few minutes my consciousness is already separating. It can’t exist in this space, with this focus, for long. Whatever the true effect of this session, it will come in waves, over months, maybe years.
Sirens on the street to say my time is up.
Never has an hour felt so long—in the positive sense. I don’t usually follow its full movement. Like all of us, I’m waiting for something to start or end, or making the most of the time. There usually isn’t enough.
As I packed up, I noticed that written in gold letters on the yellow-green pencil were the words “creative and courageous.”
Emily (staff) and I met in the hall and walked down the stairs. She asked me how it was and it was a genuine question. I don’t know what I said, probably that it was a privilege to have the opportunity, which it is. Extra special was to walk out at night and leave the house as it might have been—had I visited her, said goodnight and left to go home, left her to stay up writing into the night. To leave and look back at the lights on in her room allowed me to stay in that mind space.
I wasn’t trying to do anything special. I didn’t have something I was working on to offer to the experience (or to her?) Expecting too much will end in disappointment. If you go on a pilgrimage with the wish to be open, commune with a space and a writer/poet as you find them, as you find yourself, as you meet yourself, then you’ll leave with something new. Whatever that is. However small.
Later, in my hotel room near Lenox, MA (I was going to Edith Wharton’s home the next day—more in the next post), randomly reading Dickinson poems, I found “The Gentian has a parched Corolla.” The gentian flower is a searing, otherworldly blue (also white), a late bloomer (late August to October), harbinger of fall, a symbol of life beyond death (the metaphors come thick and fast):
The Gentian has a parched Corolla — Like azure dried 'Tis Nature's buoyant juices Beatified — Without a vaunt or sheen As casual as Rain And as benign — When most is part — it comes — Nor isolate it seems Its Bond its Friend — To fill its Fringed career And aid an aged Year Abundant end — Its lot — were it forgot — This Truth endear — Fidelity is gain Creation is o'er — (FR 1458)
The gentian represents humility, integrity, tenacity, power, faith. In aging, Dickinson is saying. In the creative work. There is an afterlife following death (real or symbolic), loss, change. And Dickinson’s afterlife is glorious.
Abundant end,
Chris
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This was so cool to read. What a great opportunity! Thank you for sharing and describing your experience. It's like I was there with you. My bestie lives in Boston and the last time I visited her, we checked out the Louisa May Alcott house in Concord and Nathaniel Hawthorne's home in Salem. I enjoyed myself the whole time. Especially the first house.