Because I could not stop for Death -
He kindly stopped for me -
The Carriage held but just Ourselves -
And Immortality.

Em không thể ghé thăm Thần Chết
Nên dịu dàng Người đến đưa Em
Cỗ xe lăn bánh êm đềm
Người, và Bất Tử cùng Em lên đường

K dịch

My Letter to the World

    
Two images come to mind when I think of Emily Dickinson's poems: Chinese boxes and puppet theaters. The image of boxes inside boxes has to do with cosmology, and theaters and puppets with psychology. They're, of course, intimately related.
    The intimate immensity of consciousness is Dickinson's constant preoccupation. I imagine her sitting in her room for hours on end, with eyes closed, looking inward. To be conscious is already to be divided, to be multiple. There are so many me's within me. The whole world comes into our inner room. Visions and mysteries and secret thoughts. "How strange it all is," Dickinson must have told herself.
    Every universe is enclosed in some other universe. She opens boxes, Pandora's boxes. There's terror in one; awe and ecstasy in the next one. She cannot leave the boxes alone. Her imagination and love of truth conspire against her. There are so many boxes. Every so often, she may believe that she has reached the last one, but on closer examination it proves to contain still another box. The appearances deceive. That's the lesson. A trick is being played on her as it is being played on all of us who wish to reach the truth of things.
    "As above, so below," Hermes Trismegistus claimed. Emerson thought the same. He believed that clarity and heightened understanding would follow the knowledge of that primary law of our being. Dickinson's experience of the self is very different. The self for her is the place of paradoxes, oxymorons, and endless ambiguities. She welcomed everyone of them the way Emerson welcomed his clarities. "Impossibility, like wine, exhilarates," she told us.
    Did she believe in God? Yes and no. God is the cunning of all these boxes fitting inside each other, perhaps? More likely, God is just another box. Neither the tiniest one nor the biggest imaginable. There are boxes even God knows nothing of.
    In each box there's a theater. All the shadows the self casts and the World and the infinite Universe. A play is in progress, perhaps always the same play. Only the scenery and costumes differ from box to box. The puppets enact the Great Questions-or rather Dickinson allowed them to enact themselves. She sat spellbound and watched.
    Some theaters have a Christian setting. There is God and his Son. There is Immortality and the snake in Paradise. Heaven is like a circus in one of her poems. When the tent is gone, "miles of Stare" is what remains behind. In the meantime, the Passion and Martyrdom of Emily Dickinson go on being played under the tent and under the open skies. There's no question, as far as I am concerned, that real suffering took place among these puppets.
    In some other theaters the scenery could have been painted by De Chirico. In them we have a play of abstract nouns capitalized and personified against a metaphysical landscape of straight lines and vanishing points. Ciphers and Algebras stroll along "Miles and Miles of Nought" and converse. "The Truth is Bald and Cold," she says. Truth is a terrifying mannequin, as Sylvia Plath also suspected. This is the theater of metaphysical terror.
    Death is in all the plays and so in this woman. Death is a kind of master of ceremonies, opening boxes while concealing others in his pockets. The self is divided. Dickinson is both on stage and in the audience watching herself. "The Battle fought between Soul and No Man" is what we are all watching.
    That she made all this happen within the length of a lyric poem is astonishing. In Dickinson we have a short poem that builds and dismantles cosmologies. She understood that a poem and our consciousness are both a theater. Or rather, many theaters. "Who, besides myself, knows what Ariadne is," wrote Nietzsche. Emily Dickinson knew much better than he did.

Charles Simic
Written for an Emily Dickinson issue of the magazine Ironwood in 1986