Mad as a Box of Frogs

Emily Dickinson has always only ever been confined by others’ lack of imagination.

The best thing I ever read about Emily Dickinson was from a dystopian novelist who called her "unapologetically, aggressively brilliant and as mad as a box of frogs." I want to be cremated, not buried, but if I did want to be buried, that's exactly the kind of thing I would want on my tombstone. When Mary Oliver asks me what I want to do with my one wild and precious life, that's what I answer, every time: live so that I die with the aura of some kind of lady-genius who was as bananas as a bessie bug. Whimsical, is what I mean. Mischievous, playful, wacky, weird. And not sorry about it. 

We know so much less about Emily Dickinson than we could know. Firstly, because her sister Lavinia followed Emily's wishes and burned most of her writing after she died. And secondly, because Emily's brother's mistress went through and straightwashed all the poems Lavinia left intact, erasing so much of Emily's longing for (and wooing of) other women, especially her lifelong love, Sue Gilbert (wife of said brother). Thankfully, Molly Shannon's Wild Nights With Emily and Hailee Steinfeld's unquenchable charm in Dickinson have reshaped our image of Death's favorite poet from the dour spinster recluse to a curious, naughty, sly, vivacious, almost impish woman who spent her entire life writing on every scrap of paper she could get her hands on. 

One of my personal favorite scraps is Dickinson's recipe for black cake, which she sent to her friend — er, "friend" — Nellie Sweetser, along with a bouquet of flowers. The booze-soaked cake was to be stuffed with raisins, currants, cinnamon, mace, and nutmeg. It also called for two pounds of flour, two pounds of sugar, two pounds of butter, and 19 eggs. Scholars have insisted forever that Emily sent the recipe instead of the cake itself because the thing weighs 20 pounds when the batter is beaten and baked. But I don’t think that’s the real reason. The only thing Emily liked doing as much as writing was baking. She baked constantly, famously lowering baskets of bread from her upstairs window to gaggles of kids waiting down in her yard. She never received accolades for her poetry in her lifetime, but she did win awards for her bread. A 20-pound cake was just a Saturday for her.

No, I think Emily sent the recipe — which, by the way, indicated that the cake should be tucked away for an entire month before being eaten — because she was at home inside her own flights of fancy, and always wrapped up in the glorious anticipation of what could be. 

When Sue went to Baltimore to teach math for nearly a year, Emily wrote her dozens of letters and poems. She imagined what Sue's days were like: "I fancy you very often descending to the schoolroom with a plump Binomial Theorem struggling in your hand which you must dissect and exhibit to your uncomprehending ones." And she imagined what it would be like when Sue returned: "When you come home, darling, I shan’t have your letters, shall I, but I shall have yourself, which is more — Oh more, and better, than I can even think! I sit here with my little whip, cracking the time away, till not an hour is left of it — then you are here! And Joy is here — joy now and forevermore!" 

Emily waited on Sue to come over for tea, for Sue to be ready to walk together to church, for Sue to realize she loved Emily more than she could ever love Emily's brother, for Sue to invite her over for one of their Wild Nights, for Sue's letters, for the letters of her other female companions when she worried Sue's love for her was waning, for her writing to be published, for her poetry to be lauded, for her dough to prove and her batter to rise and her oven to heat and her cakes to bake. Her life was full of delicious pining. 

I always think about Emily Dickinson's black cake around Thanksgiving, especially in the years since COVID arrived, mostly because I, too, spend so much of my life now hoping from inside the walls of my own home. But also because the recipe is just a taste of who Dickinson really was — so very alive, so very romantic, so very brilliant, so very kooky — even though (mostly male) literary critics and scholars have written an entirely different story about her over the last century. They envision her depressed and waifish, some kind of gothic madwoman in the attic, probably because she never had a husband, and never wanted one. Probably because their own wit is a tealight compared to the blazing blue star of Emily Dickinson's mind. The stories other people create about us are never really about us, you know? 

Yes, there was a graveyard outside of her bedroom window, where she spent so much of her time. Yes, all the stopping for Death. We have 1,800 of her poems, a handful of her letters, and some of those precious scraps. But still, only a sliver of an idea of the woman that she was. “Recluse” is the word most people us to describe her, but Emily Dickinson has always only ever been confined by others’ lack of imagination. She waited — but not for her own demise. She loved and she loved and oh she loved and she planned to do it forever.

Show me Eternity, and I will show you Memory —
Both in one package lain
And lifted back again —
Be Sue — while I am Emily —
Be next — what you have ever been — Infinity.