Shelled Life

Natalia Cecire • n.cecire@sussex.ac.uk • @ncecire
natalia.cecire.org/presentations

We know perfectly well that to inhabit
a shell we must be alone.

— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1958

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

The Feet, mechanical, go round –
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

Áfter | gréat páin, | a fór|mal fée|ling cómes –
The Nérves | sit cé|remó|nious, | like Tómbs –
The stíff | Héart qués|tions ‘wás | it Hé, | that bóre,’
And ‘Yés|terdáy, | or Cén|turies | befóre’?

As Frée|zing pér|sons, ré|collèct | the Snów –
First – Chíll – | then Stú|por – thén | the lét|ting gó –

The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

Packet VI, Fascicle 18, c. 1862.Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, via the Emily Dickinson Archive.

Recent critical approaches to the open secret have generally echoed...popular skeptical diagnoses in their tendency to read the figure as one of disavowal—a denial that does not so much abandon as put its object in reserve—or as an ideological trick ensuring the neutralization, containment, and uneven distribution of the power supposed to come with knowledge. In post-Marxist, psychoanalytically informed ideology theory, the "open secret" becomes a trope for the implicit workings of ideology itself—for the way in which the ideological not only gains assent without show of force and polices imagination without explicit censorship, but occupies the space of the blank page from which it can produce a consensus that no actually written document could ever yield.

Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience, 2008.

I mean, even suppose we were sure of every element of a conspiracy: that the lives of Africans and African Americans are worthless in the eyes of the United States; that gay men and drug users are held cheap where they aren't actively hated; that the military deliberately researches ways to kill noncombatants whom it sees as enemies; that people in power look calmly on the likelihood of catastrophic environmental and population changes. Supposing we were sure of all those things—what would we know then that we don't already know?

Eve Kosofsky Sedwick (quoting Cindy Patton), "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You," 2003.

[T]he phenomenon of the ‘open secret’ does not, as one might think, bring about the collapse of ... binarisms [such as private/public, inside/outside, subject/object] and their ideological effects, but rather attests to their fantasmatic recovery.

D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police, 1988. Quoted in Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet, 1990.

The economy of the pocket is worth considering. An envelope is a pocket. An envelope refolds discreetly, privately, even after it has been sliced completely open.

Marta Werner, The Gorgeous Nothings

I never hear
that one is dead
Without the chance
of Life
Afresh annihilating me
That mightiest Belief,

Too mighty for the
Daily mind
That tilling it's abyss,
Had Madness, had
it once or, Twice
The (Consciousness of this.) yawning Consciousness, [...]

Emily Dickinson, Amherst Manuscript #236 [slide 1]

Beliefs are Bandaged,
like the Tongue
When Terror
were it told
In any Tone commensurate
Would strike
us instant
Dead - [...]

Emily Dickinson, Amherst Manuscript #236 [slide 2]

I do not know
the man so
bold
He dare
in (lonesome Place - • secret Place) lonely
Place
That awful
stranger -
Consciousness
(look squarely in the Face.) Deliberately
face -

Emily Dickinson, Amherst Manuscript #236 [slide 3]

Emily Dickinson, Amherst Manuscript #236 [source: Emily Dickinson Archive]

I never hear that one is dead
Without the chance of Life
Afresh annihilating me
That mightiest Belief,

Too mighty for the Daily mind
That tilling it's abyss,
Had Madness, had it once or, Twice
The + yawning Consciousness,

Beliefs are Bandaged, like the Tongue
When Terror were it told
In any Tone commensurate
Would strike us instant Dead -

I do not know the man so bold
He dare in + lonely Place
That awful stranger - Consciousness
+ Deliberately face -

+ Consciousness of this.
+ lonesome Place - • secret Place
+ look squarely in the Face.

Emily Dickinson, Amherst Manuscript #236 [relineated]

The ultimate problems of sex, fertilization, inheritance, and development were thus shown to be cell-problems.

Edmund Beecher Wilson, The Cell in Development and Inheritance, 2nd ed., 1900.

There is at present no biological question of greater moment than the means by which the individual cell-activities are coördinated, and the organic unity of the body maintained; for upon this question hangs not only the problem of the transmission of acquired characters, and the nature of development, but our conception of life itself.

Edmund Beecher Wilson, The Cell in Development and Inheritance, 2nd ed., 1900.

For the living organism protection against stimuli is almost a more important task than reception of stimuli.

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920.

Let us picture a living organism in its most simplified possible form of an undifferentiated vesicle of a substance that is susceptible to stimulation. Then the surface turned toward the external world will from its very situation be differentiated and will serve as an organ for receiving stimuli. Indeed embryology, in its capacity as a recapitulation of developmental history, actually shows us that the central nervous system originates from the ectoderm; the grey matter of the cortex remains a derivative of the primitive superficial layer of the organism, and may have inherited some of its essential properties. It would be easy to suppose, then, that as a result of the ceaseless impact of external stimuli on the surface of the vesicle, its substance to a certain depth may have become permanently modified, so that excitatory processes run a different course in it from what they run in the deeper layers. A crust would thus be formed which would at last have been so thoroughly ‘baked through’ by stimulation that it would present the most favourable possible conditions for the reception of stimuli and become incapable of any further modification.

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920.

These slides were made using reveal.js 3.5.0 by Hakim El Hattab.

[discarded slides follow]

Dickinson is not only sexy, she's edgy; Polymorphous Perversity! Lesbianism! Autoeroticism! Necrophilia! Cross-dressing! Masochism! Recent Dickinson scholars, such as Gary Stonum, Martha Nell Smith and Ellen Louise Hart, Robert McClure Smith, Marianne Noble, Cynthia MacKenzie, Páraic Finnerty, and Sylvia Henneberg, have pointed out these tendencies.

Suzanne Juhasz, "Amplitude of Queer Desire in Dickinson's Erotic Language," 2006.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –