The mystery of the white injury

The principal frontage of the house D’Emily Dickinson in Amherst.

"the house is my definition of God" declared Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). Blow, it lived more than twenty-five years recluse at it, in Amherst, in Massachusetts. A residence become a place of pilgrimage.

Emily Dickinson incarnates a form D’absolu: L’absence in the world. Not the withdrawal or the jamming of the tracks which manufactures the myths in Salinger, non: voluntary reclusion in the carmel D’a room, far from the glances, with Cœur burning L’gasoline of the things.

Emily Dickinson or the paradigm of the tower D’ivory, this pale and dense matter on which the light slips. Wrapped whiteness, vêtue of flax, C’are with the matity of the paper qu sheet’it entrusts its heart, its enchantments and its angers, its visions, its interrogations, its certainty. No one or almost N’will know anything of it.

Seventy years S’will run out before a complete edition of its thousand seven hundred and seventy-five poems appears, founders with those of Whitman of American poetry. And almost a century before the first reliable biography, that D’a girl of the middle-class D’Amherst, Massachusetts, which one day was withdrawn in its house, then in its room, and N’left there more jusqu’to its death.

During twenty-five years, no one in Amherst did not see its face. Time with other, however, it sometimes happened to him to descend a bread D’spices with the end D’a cord for the children. The residence of cossue neo-classic family of style gave on the street. Of its window, Emily Dickinson could follow L’animation of Street Hand. L’different bay, it saw Evergreen, the house of his/her brother and Susan, his beautifulœur with which it had tied, a few years during, an impassioned friendship. The world is not indifferent for him or foreign, it finds it in the veins D’a petal or the buzz D’a fly.

It is understood that Christian Bobin saw, for a long time, in the white Injury, an Sœur D’election. And text qu’it devotes to him delivers Emily Dickinson to us secret and vibrating, very whole granted to the interior music which L’lives. Qu’one S’does not mislead there. Nothing mièvre, but on the contrary the rate/rhythm haletant of that (celui?) who seeks far from the noise and the fury to tear off with silence some spangles of vérité: "the tyranny of visible done us of the blind men. L’glare of the verb bores the night of the world ", notices it. Nothing narcissistic or D’hypocritically identificatoire, for as much. Not de: "I make pretence speak D to you’it but C’is of me qu’it S’acts" Christian Bobin S’erases, and this obliteration is the only trace, in hollow, of its presence. With him we penetrate in the residence D’Amherst, and the doors are closed again, us delivering in all their purity the search D’Emily, its passions and its despairs "the house is my definition of God", writes the young woman at the same time éperdue of transcendence and rebel to the religion of his pars. As for the father himself, Edward Dickinson, member of the Congress, with Cœur "pure and terrible" according to words' of his daughter, it is the main beam of this house where each one, according to the word of Vinnie, the Sœur, is a king of its own kingdom.

One is grateful in Christian Bobin D’to have penetrated this kingdom without effraction: no psychology (a mother melancholic person, an authoritative father, etc.) but the dialogue with a perforated life of mysteries, woven in the banality of the daily newspaper. Emily gathers its poems per packages of twenty, sews them and arranges them in a drawer "At the same time when she revêt her dress white, points out Christian Bobin, Rimbaud, with the furious negligence of youth, gives up her fairy-like book in the cellar D’a printer and flees towards L’Orient stupefied" both "work to be made forget". Amherst, like Charleville, became places of pilgrimage.
Évelyne Bloch-Dano
The white Injury, Christian Bobin, éd. Gallimard, "L’one and L’different", 120 p., 14,50 €.
Because L’good-bye C’is the night, Emily Dickinson, éd. Gallimard, "Poetry", 448 p., 9,80 €. www.ebloch-dano.com