An Agony procures –
Affliction ranges Boundlessness –
Vicinity to Laws
Contentment’s quiet Suburb –
Affliction cannot stay –
In Acres – It’s Location
Is Illocality –
-Fr824, J963, Fascicle 40, 1864
I’ve been thinking lately about how everything can be seen in terms of home and away. In western music, for instance, even the most complex Beethoven symphony can be boiled down to the tension between the tonic chord (home) and the dominant chord (away). Or think about the Fort/Da (Gone/There) game which Freud wrote about in "Beyond The Pleasure Principle," in which we see the child's innate drive to push the ball away and then have it sent back home to her. This poem is getting down to that essential thing.
We have the connotation in the word “Tremendousness” that whatever is “away” is great. It's Boundless! But it is also from where “affliction,” a word used twice in this poem, and “agony,” derives. We want the safety of rules, a “Vicinity to Laws.” I remember asking my daughter Sofia, when she was 3 or 4, if she would rather be a wild horse running free or to be one kept fenced in on a farm. She surprised me by saying she'd rather be kept fenced in. Perhaps now, at 15, she would choose to be running wild?
Dickinson thought a lot about this dialectic too. She wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "My business is circumference." Circumference might be seen as the boundary between home and away. If Dickinson's vocation was poet, then you might say that all of her poetry was a meditation on the interplay of this binary.
Dickinson thought a lot about this dialectic too. She wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "My business is circumference." Circumference might be seen as the boundary between home and away. If Dickinson's vocation was poet, then you might say that all of her poetry was a meditation on the interplay of this binary.
Physically Dickinson was very much a home-body, though you might argue that mentally she traveled further into boundless Tremendousness than anyone. "The brain is wider than the sky," she wrote.
I think the astonishing statement in this poem is that "Affliction cannot stay in Acres." If you truly feel at home, then you cannot stay afflicted and in agony. You have a sense here that even if you are in pain, and your body is failing you, if you feel loved and located, then that pain can't reach you, or at least can't last. Elsewhere Dickinson has written of the "infinite power of Home."
And yet, paradoxically, isn't her poetry difficult to locate? And isn't it tremendous?
-/)dam Wade l)eGraff
P.S. I found an insightful essay about this poem from Joely Fitch, Mapping illocality, on the Dilettante Army blog. Here is an excerpt:
“Emily Dickinson is so often a poet of elusive definitions. She rhymes and riddles; she poses impossible questions and goes on to answer them, but leaves always an escape clause—something that slips away from meaning, or exceeds it. I’ve been thinking and writing for some time now about space and embodiment in Dickinson’s work—about the ways she renders human subjectivity as neither continuous with nor separate from its environment; about the persistent (and fascinating!) oddness of the spaces and bodies in her poems.
There’s one word in particular in which I find a center of these concerns, “illocality.” I’m still looking for a way to explain why some thread in me has so long been caught on the fishhook of this word, this illocality. I’ve found one way in through a series of questions that the writer and scholar Sara Ahmed asks in the introduction to her book Queer Phenomenology: “How do we begin to know or feel where we are, or even where we are going, by lining ourselves up with the features of the grounds we inhabit, the sky that surrounds us, or the imaginary lines that cut through maps?”
I find myself asking a question I’m not sure can be answered—where is illocality? Can it be said to be inside or outside of the body? Is it a place, or a feeling, or is the distinction between those things part of the problem? (“Is Heaven a Place—a Sky—a Tree?” Dickinson asks elsewhere.
This poem asks us to wonder where the interior is, where the boundaries of the self are and what crosses them. Pain takes us to the edges of ourselves, past the limits of the measurable. The poem ventures into abstraction because it must. “Tremendousness” and “Boundlessness” sprawl across their respective lines, enacting the vastness they describe in the capacious expanse of their syllables.
“Contentment” is a “Suburb,” here, or contains said Suburb, but “Affliction” can’t be figured in geographic terms. According to the poem’s logic, “Tremendousness” and “Boundlessness” are related to “Illocality,” meaning we have to think about it not only in terms of pain (for “Affliction”) but of expansiveness. It’s worth paying attention to the “ill” of “illocality,” too, as well as to its paradox: “illocality” can only be defined by what it isn’t, by thinking of “locality.” It’s a “Location” mappable only according to its own absence.
To me, this makes no sense—and it makes perfect sense. “Illocality” is place and no-place, a word which somehow contains within its syllables the feeling of embodied displacement, a state of being out-of-phase with one’s occupying of physical space. It rhymes with one of Dickinson’s favorite words, “Immortality,” which makes sense, too: both are expansive, unmappable states of being, which elude definition and yet remain captivating.
In fact, maybe thinking of illocality as the absence of locality isn’t quite right—we could think of it as something more like hyperlocation, as a sense of locatedness that continuously exceeds its boundaries. As suggested by its association with “Tremendousness” and “Boundlessness,” illocality might be a state of radical possibility even as it’s also one of dissociation. I find a link to this way of understanding illocality in an earlier poem, from 1861. It’s a species of love poem:
The Drop, that wrestles in the Sea –
Forgets her own locality –
As I, in Thee –
She knows herself an incense small –
Yet small, she sighs, if all, is all,
How larger – be?
The Ocean, smiles at her conceit –
But she, forgetting Amphitrite –
Pleads “Me”?
Knowing and unknowing, here and more broadly in Dickinson’s work, are inextricable from the ability or inability to locate oneself in space. Here, the poet and her “Drop” are worried about the boundaries of an inside and an outside. Where do we outline the limits of the interior? Is a drop in a sea still a drop? Where are the boundaries of the self—and if the “I” “Forgets her own locality,” then where is she to be located?
“As I, in Thee” is crucial to how I read this poem; the unspecified addressee may be a beloved, or God, or neither, or both. In any case, it remains true that Dickinson is comparing the condition of a drop of water in the ocean to that of an “I” in some relation to a “you,” whose immensity both enchants and overwhelms. The Drop “wrestles”; there’s a struggle here for self-definition, for an identity with clear boundaries, but the very material of which she’s composed resists this.
I read this “forgetting” of one’s own locality and “illocality” both as expressions of the problem of the individual—these irreconcilable forces of understanding oneself as bounded, separate, and as continuous with the world one inhabits, including the world of other people. Here, in the “now” I write this from—early 2021, approaching a year since the COVID-19 pandemic radically transformed the way so many of us move through the spaces of our daily lives—I’ve found myself turning anew to her poems as little machines of understanding, in which I find a universe as complicated as it is in life, suffused with a sense of wonder: Dickinson had a gift for looking at the world and asking what is it? in ways that still feel so striking, so continuously new. Queer phenomenology offers one way of understanding why these reframings-in-language might matter so much. Ahmed declares that “the ‘new’ is what is possible when what is behind us, our background, does not simply ground us or keep us in place, but allows us to move and allows us to follow something other than the lines that we have already taken.”Illocality, involving some degree of defamiliarization, could be what precedes the following of a new line, a new attachment, a different source of identification. I keep lingering in the condition of this “Drop”: suspended between the awareness of herself as a particular entity and the understanding that she’s continuous with, inseparable from, something so much larger, almost incomprehensibly immense."
“Emily Dickinson is so often a poet of elusive definitions. She rhymes and riddles; she poses impossible questions and goes on to answer them, but leaves always an escape clause—something that slips away from meaning, or exceeds it. I’ve been thinking and writing for some time now about space and embodiment in Dickinson’s work—about the ways she renders human subjectivity as neither continuous with nor separate from its environment; about the persistent (and fascinating!) oddness of the spaces and bodies in her poems.
There’s one word in particular in which I find a center of these concerns, “illocality.” I’m still looking for a way to explain why some thread in me has so long been caught on the fishhook of this word, this illocality. I’ve found one way in through a series of questions that the writer and scholar Sara Ahmed asks in the introduction to her book Queer Phenomenology: “How do we begin to know or feel where we are, or even where we are going, by lining ourselves up with the features of the grounds we inhabit, the sky that surrounds us, or the imaginary lines that cut through maps?”
I find myself asking a question I’m not sure can be answered—where is illocality? Can it be said to be inside or outside of the body? Is it a place, or a feeling, or is the distinction between those things part of the problem? (“Is Heaven a Place—a Sky—a Tree?” Dickinson asks elsewhere.
This poem asks us to wonder where the interior is, where the boundaries of the self are and what crosses them. Pain takes us to the edges of ourselves, past the limits of the measurable. The poem ventures into abstraction because it must. “Tremendousness” and “Boundlessness” sprawl across their respective lines, enacting the vastness they describe in the capacious expanse of their syllables.
“Contentment” is a “Suburb,” here, or contains said Suburb, but “Affliction” can’t be figured in geographic terms. According to the poem’s logic, “Tremendousness” and “Boundlessness” are related to “Illocality,” meaning we have to think about it not only in terms of pain (for “Affliction”) but of expansiveness. It’s worth paying attention to the “ill” of “illocality,” too, as well as to its paradox: “illocality” can only be defined by what it isn’t, by thinking of “locality.” It’s a “Location” mappable only according to its own absence.
To me, this makes no sense—and it makes perfect sense. “Illocality” is place and no-place, a word which somehow contains within its syllables the feeling of embodied displacement, a state of being out-of-phase with one’s occupying of physical space. It rhymes with one of Dickinson’s favorite words, “Immortality,” which makes sense, too: both are expansive, unmappable states of being, which elude definition and yet remain captivating.
In fact, maybe thinking of illocality as the absence of locality isn’t quite right—we could think of it as something more like hyperlocation, as a sense of locatedness that continuously exceeds its boundaries. As suggested by its association with “Tremendousness” and “Boundlessness,” illocality might be a state of radical possibility even as it’s also one of dissociation. I find a link to this way of understanding illocality in an earlier poem, from 1861. It’s a species of love poem:
The Drop, that wrestles in the Sea –
Forgets her own locality –
As I, in Thee –
She knows herself an incense small –
Yet small, she sighs, if all, is all,
How larger – be?
The Ocean, smiles at her conceit –
But she, forgetting Amphitrite –
Pleads “Me”?
Knowing and unknowing, here and more broadly in Dickinson’s work, are inextricable from the ability or inability to locate oneself in space. Here, the poet and her “Drop” are worried about the boundaries of an inside and an outside. Where do we outline the limits of the interior? Is a drop in a sea still a drop? Where are the boundaries of the self—and if the “I” “Forgets her own locality,” then where is she to be located?
“As I, in Thee” is crucial to how I read this poem; the unspecified addressee may be a beloved, or God, or neither, or both. In any case, it remains true that Dickinson is comparing the condition of a drop of water in the ocean to that of an “I” in some relation to a “you,” whose immensity both enchants and overwhelms. The Drop “wrestles”; there’s a struggle here for self-definition, for an identity with clear boundaries, but the very material of which she’s composed resists this.
I read this “forgetting” of one’s own locality and “illocality” both as expressions of the problem of the individual—these irreconcilable forces of understanding oneself as bounded, separate, and as continuous with the world one inhabits, including the world of other people. Here, in the “now” I write this from—early 2021, approaching a year since the COVID-19 pandemic radically transformed the way so many of us move through the spaces of our daily lives—I’ve found myself turning anew to her poems as little machines of understanding, in which I find a universe as complicated as it is in life, suffused with a sense of wonder: Dickinson had a gift for looking at the world and asking what is it? in ways that still feel so striking, so continuously new. Queer phenomenology offers one way of understanding why these reframings-in-language might matter so much. Ahmed declares that “the ‘new’ is what is possible when what is behind us, our background, does not simply ground us or keep us in place, but allows us to move and allows us to follow something other than the lines that we have already taken.”Illocality, involving some degree of defamiliarization, could be what precedes the following of a new line, a new attachment, a different source of identification. I keep lingering in the condition of this “Drop”: suspended between the awareness of herself as a particular entity and the understanding that she’s continuous with, inseparable from, something so much larger, almost incomprehensibly immense."
Thank you, Joely!
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