Introduction: The Reflexive Appropriation of Space

Abstract

I: The possibilities of SPACE in Dickinson's "Four Trees"We must be careful when speaking about SPACE as it often leads to empty thoughts. Although we are surrounded by spaces and cannot experience our environments without presupposing space, its omnipresence (both physical and conceptual) makes it difficult to grasp. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that definitions of space frequently rely on cognate concepts-time and place-that confuse rather than clarify what the term "space" might mean. Space is vast and requires that we experience it through boundaries. We learn space through mediated encounters.More significantly, spaces intentionally altered for cultural reasons, whether to promote specific forms of community or to engender a particular individual experience, introduce more variables to consider before articulating what that space can mean-both for itself, and for an expanded awareness of the value of thinking critically about spaces. Space, in other words, is not neutral: the spaces that we inhabit or frequent tend to influence our actions and values. Our preunderstandings of certain spaces-remaining reverent within a space considered "sacred" by a community, accepting joyful frolics in spaces set aside for frivolity and laughter, respecting silence in spaces of thought-allow us to navigate our worlds with diminished impatience and frustration. We understand, more or less, what we can expect from the spaces where we place ourselves and spending time within these spaces attunes us to their nuances: we learn more of what to expect and how we should behave as we spend more time within them.Emily Dickinson's Fr778, a poem that Christopher Benfey describes as "one of Dickinson's fullest and happiest expressions of the relation between nature and the human knower" (113), provides an example of a textual space that plays upon ways that our perception simultaneously reveals and conceals (in time) the multiple potentialities for a true experience of a given environmental expanse. She writes:Four Trees - upon a solitary AcreWithout DesignOr Order, or Apparent Action -Maintain -The Sun - upon a Morning meets them -The Wind -No nearer Neighbor - have they -But God -The Acre gives them - Place-They - Him - Attention of Passer by -Of Shadow, or of Squirrel, haply -Or Boy -What Deed is Their's unto the General Nature-What PlanThey severally - retard - or further -Unknown -The various interpretations of Dickinson's meditation focus primarily on her language (Miller, Benfey) and the ecological implications of place (Christine Gerhardt's reading is particularly impressive). My interest in offering the poem is to show how its space juxtaposes the cultural and the natural senses of space in a particularly apt way.The space that Dickinson evokes is an "Acre," a term that itself suggests a variety of perspectives on the same space. According to the 1831 Webster's dictionary that Dickinson was fond of consulting, the term acre has many cognates in other languages: in English, the "primitive sense" of the term as "an open, plowed, or sowed field" had been "limited to a definite quantity" by various legal statues, such that the English statute acre was "A quantity of land, containing 160 square rods or perches, or 4840 square yards." Dickinson's use of Acre here enfolds two disjunctive possibilities: it is a measured and calculated plot of land as well as one whose disorder invites a more "primitive" apprehension of the space. What Dickinson contributes to the initial "natural" space (assuming an originary field) is this precise tension: using the word "Acre" merges two distinct ways of viewing or experiencing space. The space of the poem (and its spaces, including dashes), a space distinct from the natural world, is constructed within this point of tension. The second stanza offers only indirect commentary on the space of the Acre, suggested still as the solitary backdrop that allows for an awareness of the trees as a group, discussed here only as "them" and "they"-this choice allows Dickinson to introduce temporality, a "Morning" in time contrasted with the eternal view of the "nearer Neighbor," God. …