Time, Zero and Rendering of Time in Emily Dickinson's Poetry

Abstract

On his attainment of the complete knowledge (not knowing), Buddha remarked that he did not remain what he was then. In such a dissolved state, Buddha’s time too ends with the attainment of his knowledge in which he did not remain any longer. But his time flowed further more on his living further more for humanity/people. If his thoughts were preserved and he himself died, then his time too would end. But it did not happen so. He went on living and with it his time too continued to a greater evolution. Buddha’s dissolved state of consciousness is seen in Dickinson and in her poetry too. But she is different from him in the sort of dissolution of her self. Buddha was in ‘center’ and she is decentered and in circumference. Unlike Buddha’s flow of time, for Dickinson, in the search of her ‘self’ (her loved one, the Unknown, the God), the time does not flow further more. It was only after her death that her poetry came into existence and time did not flow there as it did with Buddha. In other words, there is the death of her formal feelings that is seen like numb, tomb, frozen, degreeless noon, silence and zero. With the numbness of the action or feeling, the time ends in her very lifetime. There is no question of flowing of time anymore in such condition. Her numbness is the zero point of the black hole – that has no fuels of any kind at all but its own gravity - speed due to turning of its into massiveness. Her poems are massive as they have zero point in them. Similarly, Emerson’s time flows for his mystic union with the Over-Soul or the divine power. But Dickinson has no trace of her God. She has no definite or infinite God. Her God (itself) is lost. So, time does not flow in for any her God. If there were God for her, the time would certainly flow there. But as there is no God and only the numb state, so there is no time but only the singularity/zero – point that viii radiates gamma rays – the massive energy of the permeated conscious self or of the God’s particle. In most of her poems, eternity is a vain (useless) search for her. She had no certainty for attaining her lost one (her God in the soul). Hence, her artistic emotion does not evolve furthermore there. No mobility of emotion or her consciousness is seen in her poems. If no mobility of consciousness, then there is no mobility (evolution) of time too in them. To sum up, in Buddha, Emerson and other great philosophers, thinkers, time evolves and flows continuously. But in most of the tragic poems of Emily Dickinson, the time does not seem to flow any further. It ceases to exist with the dissolution of her self or life to a frozen, numb state of the zero degree of consciousness. At the same time, in many of her poems on love, time and eternity, she evolves with greater fusion and with this the time too evolves as we see some sign of life progressing for higher sublime unification in mysterious way. She is seen to be back to time (finite) and God of Him (infinite). There is finite-infinity or evanescence of life in her poetry. Thus, in many of her poems on death, immortality there is dissolution, death, emotionlessness or frozenness where time does not exist and in the poems on love, time and eternity indeterminacy, uncertainty, enigma of the circumferential finite –infinite is mostly seen in her major poems which perplex us the most