I’ve been thinking a lot about sight recently; my eyes ache more than they used to and I don’t always see well. ‘She cannot see yet,’ I wrote of my character Miss Cull in my last entry. What is it she cannot see? Herself perhaps. I am reminded again of Emily Dickinson whose sight was sometimes obviated, blocked off from plain sight. Seeing, as her speaker puts it, at a slant, like her handwriting.
‘I could not see to see’ declares the poet-speaker of Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘I heard a Fly buzz — when I died — ‘ (591).
Later in life the poet had trouble with her eyes; her sight was deteriorating. Still, the loss of one sense can sharpen another. Emily’s hearing was no doubt acute, and her sense of touch and smell, if all those flowers and birds are anything to go on in her letters and poetry, her herbarium.
In response to loss of several kinds, the poet began to scrape back behind her eyes, to her mind’s eye. Began to feel her way through her other senses, to hear the smallest of sounds more loudly. Hyperacusis the doctors call this, hearing that detects the slightest movement — in which a fly’s wings buzzing is a magnified sound — more magnified because the source cannot be seen. Can you hear an image? I think you can, in your mind’s eyes.
And so the speaker hears a fly buzzing and it signifies the moment of death. The very moment? Or the extended pause that is the end of life, of breath, of being? When I died. As I died. On the occasion of my death. At the moment of going. As I took my last breath. As I lost consciousness. The speaker’s line is implausible: you cannot report on your own death unless you believe in ghosts as Hamlet is asked to believe of his father.
‘When’ — at the time that — a preposition that announces a sure sense of timing. But who is there when we cease to see or hear or know? Dickinson’s speaker gives us a signifier of continuing consciousness. She leaves a mark— one of her strange elliptical and inconsistent - perhaps unfinished - faint marks. It is a mark of life but in minute form; the mark of the poet like Donne’s flea; a conceit of something living but aggravating: a small continuous presence. The buzz of words.
‘Buzz, buzz,’ says Hamlet when Polonius announces, ‘The actors have come hither, my Lord,’ ‘Buzz, buzz’’: the sound of contempt. Such announcements — theatrical or mundane — can hardly be news to the Prince of Denmark for whom there is nothing new beneath the sun except more life —- and yet more —- as long as ghosts can stand in for dead fathers.