Launched into Eternity

ABSTRACT

 

Emily Dickinson is a poet of the end. She owes her sense of the end and ending essentially to the Christian eschatology that was passionately and elaborately practised by her New England Calvinist forebears. They were obsessed with the end of profane time, death, the coming of Messiah, Doomsday, Resurrection, the Last Judgement, the vision of the New Jerusalem, Heaven, Hell and Immortality. In short, the mystery of the hereafter took up their spirit completely, and they would tend to explain the temporal in the light of the eternal. Certain evangelical movements such as the Great Awakenings sustained this spirit of the early New England Puritans down to Dickinson’s time, and her pietistic community, education, and family environment infused it into her. She took the subjects of their cosmic eschatology, and then downsized and internalised them into the overarching personal themes of her poems and letters.

 

Dickinson associates profane time with flux and the linear process that terminate in death and dissolution. This time is hierarchical in nature and distorts reality as disjunct categories. She understands that temporal consciousness is steeped in this profane time. By contrast, flux and process are absent in sacred time because here all time is present at once, and hence death cannot occur there. Christian thinkers locate sacred time in the presence of God. But Dickinson achieves it subjectively in the lyric state of her mind. Her idea of eternity is one of the continuous temporal present: it is composed, as she says, of “Nows” (P#624). Hence her eternity is basically a temporal construct. Dickinson conceives and aims to achieve immortality in this framework of temporal eternity. She finds the Christian idea of eternal life as an extension of temporal consciousness and thus preposterous, for this consciousness thwarts the achievement of  wholeness that by Christian definition eternal life is. Neither is death complete without the complete annihilation of this time and consciousness. Certain of Dickinson’s poems portray death in which temporal consciousness is alive.

 

Death is the end of profane time and corporeal existence. It intrigues and mystifies Dickinson immeasurably. After the fashion of the Calvinists she shows great interest in the spectacle of dying people. Her poetic personae keep a deathwatch and observe the deathbed conduct of the dying with a view to coming up with some kind of revelation about the nature of the hereafter. She practises dying herself imaginatively. Its elusive formlessness leads her from one definition to another, and she keeps shifting her angles in order to concretise death’s abstraction. Her chief anxiety consists in her ignorance as to whether death would be followed by resurrection, or dissolve this body and mind completely. If resurrection does happen at all, she worries about whether she would be allowed to retain her earthly identity in body and mind. She is scared of the loss of her earthly identity in the afterlife, and is reluctant to accept the new identity that the reconstituted resurrected body would give her according to the Christian doctrine of Resurrection. Dickinson also examines the salutary aspects of death in her letters and poetry. Although it was her lifelong adversary, yet she knows that death is the only way to be reunited with her lost loved ones in the hereafter. Paradoxically death connects this world with the next through separation in her view.

 

Dickinson’s approach to the Christian concepts of postmortal judgement,  and Heaven and Hell is equally sceptical and ambiguous. Judgement becomes a mere formality or a ruse while (and if) the Calvinist Doctrine of Predestination is held as a fact. In the same incredulous mood she questions the objective reality of Heaven and Hell and doubts their physical existence in space. Yet these ideas and terms serve her as models and language for building a private eschatology of her mind.

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Writer- Dr. Masud Mahmood

Publisher- Writers Ink

Cover- Nasima Masud

Page- 260

Year- 2009 (August)

Price- 500 Tk

Distributor- The University Press Ltd

ISBN- 984 70115 0005-8

External Link- Writers Ink

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