Certain Slants

As you check your mail, you notice a letter that makes you stop in your tracks. Normally you despise checking your mail, because it’s full of wasted paper, advertisements, envelopes addressed to people who haven’t lived at your address in over ten years, political propaganda, calls for donations. You really get upset at all the paper that goes into printing up things that get tossed immediately. Even with recycling, you feel it is a real crime that all the effort to sell, threaten, cajole, and otherwise influence people.

This letter is different, however. You are not at your home in the States, so you don’t ever get publicity from supermarkets addressed to you, or even to “Resident” because you don’t have a registered address in Santiago de Compostela. It’s really just an accident that your bedsit even has a mailbox, because the front of the house faces Rosario Street and that’s where mail gets delivered to the owner of the house. It’s also an accident that you even bothered to look for mail, except that something white was peering out of the little metal rectangle to the right of the door.

You are on your way to do some errands and, of course, to get some more research done on Ruth Matilda Anderson, although each day that goes by that becomes more and more of a challenge. It’s not about what Ruth accomplished as a single woman photographer in the 1920s and 1930s, but your project for studying that influence. You are feeling guilty and wondering how to get back on track. And now this. A letter that just comes to you out of nowhere. At least you think it’s for you. It has to be for you, right?

You look at the envelope. It looks old, the paper looks old, rimmed by the dark edges of use, how it was handled, how it was delivered. 

How was it delivered? Actually, not how, but by whom?

You question the source of the letter because you can’t see that it’s ever had a stamp in the upper righthand corner. Without a stamp, nothing reaches its destination. You start to wonder if there has been an error on the part of the letter carrier. Or more likely, some kids in the neighborhood might have gone around pretending they were delivering letters to people who lived in the San Pedro neighborhood. You did that yourself, a couple of times

You decide that isn’t the case here.

The envelope is old, an old kind of old, not just a few years old, but lots of years.

The envelope is made of paper of very high quality. It’s not the dime store paper envelopes that are completely see-through and whose glue barely manages to keep the back v-shaped flap down. It’s otherwise a very normal envelope. Or is it? The letter simply doesn’t look like it was mailed recently.

One other reason for the theory that the letter (if it is a letter, because all you’re seeing right now is the outside, not the possible contents) is not new is that it is addressed in handwriting that people don’t use any more. It’s actually the type of writing you’ve seen that belonged to people your grandmother’s age or older. You have always loved the old cursive styles and mourn the fact that children don’t learn it in most schools any more. You know that is a serious error on the part of schools, but you don’t know how to explain that to ignorant people.

You’re not going to let yourself think about ignorant people now because you are intrigued by the letter - by the potential letter, you remind yourself, not wanting to get your hopes up - and are now imagining all sorts of things that might be inside. You know it is intended for you because it does have your name on it and even the number assigned to the bedsit: Lavinia Rivers, 1 Rúa do Medio, 15701 Santiago de Compostela. No mystery there, at least.

You dawdle a bit, you realize, but the handwriting on the front of the envelope is so stunning, so well-executed, so… not twenty-first century. Besides having all the scrolls and swirls of the 1800s, you notice it is inscribed with ink. Not ballpoint pen ink, naturally, but ink like the ink that comes in small, squat bottles. It’s either a bit faded or it was always a paler slate blue, almost violet in color. It’s not that hard to make something look old. Art forgers do that all the time. Document forgers are pretty good, too, at faking the origins of old manuscripts. You hope you won’t have to take the envelope and its contents to an antiquarian or art historian to find out when the letter was written. 

You have to open it. The back flap is sealed, but you have a bookmark with you that is a thin piece of metal in the shape of a botafumeiro. It’s one of those kitsch things tourists always buy, so you did, too. The botafumeiro is one of the main symbols of the cathedral and there are certain masses where the huge incense burner swings from one side to the other of the main altar, in the transept. You’re not going to apologize for buying one.

The bookmark works perfectly. The thin metal piece prises the flap away from the back of the envelope and you are somehow pleased you didn’t rip anything. Clearly the high fiber content of the old-looking paper had something to do with that. Now you can see there is something folded and tucked inside. Not that you ever doubted there would be, but you knew you would be very disappointed if somebody had left you something that was empty.

You are especially glad to be able to read cursive, because the folded paper unfolds to reveal more of the exquisite handwriting. The creases in the paper give the impression that they were made with care, after the ink had dried. (Funny how letter writing has changed so much in recent generations. People probably don’t even know what a fountain pen is anymore, you think.) You start to read, and it does not take very long, because there are not many words on the page. 

The problem is, the words were sent in the form of a letter on the outside - the envelope and the address - , but they are in the form of a poem on the inside. You are mildly disappointed, although perhaps there is more to the lines than meets the eye.

You read:

This is my letter to the World

That never wrote to Me —

The simple News that Nature told

With tender Majesty,

So the poem is a letter, or the letter is a poem. You note that it is written in English, and not in a style most people in Santiago would use. Then you think that the words are actually familiar, that you’ve read them somewhere. You can’t tell if the writer - the I of the poem, for poem it must be - is lamenting her situation or not. (How do you know the source of the poems is a she?) Perhaps it is just a humorous account of the World’s inability to write. Poets write, but Nature doesn’t, the World doesn’t.

Or does it?

No, that’s not it. The World never wrote because it was out there being the World, while Nature was tending to the task of writing. Nature knows how to write, and the speaker in the poem knows that. 

Her Message is committed

To Hands I cannot see —

For love of Her — Sweet — countrymen

Judge tenderly — of Me

You aren’t certain of the ‘her’ in the second part. It probably refers to Nature, who communicates with the speaker. Nature is, in fact, her guardian or something similar. The speaker trusts Nature and is the motive for the actions she takes in the world.

You aren’t certain what this means. Are others - the countrymen - a source of criticism? Do they disagree with the I who pledges her allegiance to Nature rather than the World? What are these two things - Nature, World - who seem opposed to each other?

You realize, suddenly, that there is a reason why the poem seems familiar. It was written by Emily Dickinson, probably during the Civil War. That could easily be the reason for her reticence in dealing with the world, right?

You wonder what Emily really thought she had to offer the world, and the answer is immediate: Nature is simple and majestic, not violent, not at war, not enslaving. 

You are wondering what this possibly can matter, even if the lines are pleasant to read. You think that it might not be the actual poem that was sent to you, intended for you, but rather it was Emily who was trying to tell you something. Except that Emily is long gone, and therefore nothing of what she wrote, nice as it was, could have been intended for you. 

Nevertheless, you wonder: Did she send it to you? There are examples of her handwriting easily available on the web, but you already suspect that the letter will match the poet’s penmanship exactly. You consider the possibility that the paper is an original one, produced by her hand. That brings up the question of how it got to Santiago, on the other side of the ocean, doesn’t it? You don’t have a clue as to how that could have happened, do you? Yet you have to know, don’t you?

Your plans for the day are shot now, let’s face it. You need to unravel this mystery, think about what Emily is trying to tell you, figure out whether she delivered the letter to you and…

This is absurd and you know it. The Bard of Amherst lived 1830-1886. Get over yourself. But you can’t, because you’re convinced there were things written by her that you were intended to receive. It doesn’t matter if she never knew you and you never knew her. You always thought there was something unsaid about her life, her loves, her interests. Then you remember the box at A Tertulia and know that is your destination for the day.

There's a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons –

That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes –

You have your letter clutched inside your raincoat, protecting it with all your might (which isn’t such an effort, since there are only a couple of sprinkles and the sun will be out in the afternoon). You race to the door of the little place and hurry in. You ask for the box and it’s in your hands again. You open it and confirm what you thought you remembered: there is another poem by Emily Dickinson among the contents. You had seen it then put it aside. It was one of her most famous poems and is now in a lot of anthologies, on lots of web sites. It didn’t seem like an important part of the contents when you first came across it while examining the box in your spot at the back of the bar. Now you realize your error. Nobody who has ever read “a certain slant of light” can ever forget the line, but here, in Santiago, the part that demands attention is the line “of cathedral tunes.”

Emily had been protesting against the weight of the tunes, the heft of religion, how it oppressed people, hadn’t she? The Light matters - it makes Landscape listen and Shadows cease to breathe. That’s what she said.

You don’t know how to define light, just as you didn’t understand the ‘simple News’ that is referred to in the letter that came directly to your door. You don’t even know if Nature means birds, trees, paths, and bees or if it’s something more conceptual that the poet wanted us to see as better than what’s out in the World. You don’t know how the two poems are connected and you aren’t planning on writing an article about them. That isn’t something you know how to do, literary criticism.

However, you do work with things that tie together, women’s history, things like that, don’t you? You do understand that this appearance of two poems, in English, by a writer who was a contemporary of Rosalía de Castro (1837-1885), is probably not a coincidence? You do know you need to figure out if there is any relationship between the two writers, although you doubt it because they lived in two separate worlds - but in the World? - and Rosalía was one of few women writing in Galicia back then. Don’t try to go digging under rocks to find how they fit together.

You realize you may never find out who delivered your letter, but you can at least figure out why. Why have you been told to look at Emily? Yes, she’s a famous writer, but she’s never been a prominent name in the teaching you do. She was a loner, a woman who sat indoors, who never went far from home. You have preferred to work with women travelers like Catherine Gasquoine Hartley, Jane Leck, and Katharine Lee Bates. And now, you are working on shedding more to light - did you say light? - on all that Ruth Matilda Anderson did. Ruth had not been afraid to go out into the World - let’s capitalize it, like Emily does . She had made several trans-Atlantic voyages. She had taken on the World, you might say.

Still, almost nobody knows about her in her own country, and everybody knows about the Bard of Amherst. How did that happen? You need to study Ruth’s life and travels more if you expect to find out, you tell yourself. However, you aren’t doing enough of that. You’re here in this little bar, reading some pages that appeared after many years, by some freak accident.

You are beginning to think that this was all planned. Maybe not recently, but somewhere in the past, it was. You don’t think it was an accident. You already know what Ruth thinks about the whole cache of items in the box that has come to light - Light? - yes, light. Ruth needed proper lighting as well as a proper dark room, to achieve her thousands of images. She needed to study her surroundings and arrange her subjects in the correct places, attire, and activities. She got people to do as she asked, even if communication might not have been perfect.

Emily didn’t use much equipment. She had pen, ink, and paper. She had Light, too, which she observed quite carefully, from the looks of things. She didn’t take any photographs (if there even were such things back then, which there were, it seems), but she didn’t need to. She had her words and they were attached to her eyes and ears really tightly. They flipped and slid, skirted issues and broke them wide open. She bundled up what she saw and tied it with slim ribbons that could be slipped off in an instant, showing the contents. She had no equipment that she couldn’t carry on her person, unobtrusively.

Ruth had to lug all sorts of heavy equipment around, chemicals and those heavy photographic plates. She had to tease the faces and garments off the plates, none of which bore strong testimony to the effort it had taken to capture what had been in front of the camera lens. 

That was hard work, Ruth, but you must agree that it was well worth it. 

You find yourself talking to her as you're listening to Emily, quiet little bird that she was. The two versions of reality are coinciding, competing, clamoring for recognition. You know Ruth is on your side, but you don’t know what Emily wants. She never went out and photographed the World. For that, she was always called a recluse. You don’t understand that, because spending time reading isn’t a bad thing, is it? You do that a lot, too. Ruth did go out and record what she saw, but few people noticed, until recent years. You wonder if she would have done it, had she known the photos would be relegated to oblivion for many years.

You are tired of thinking like a researcher, somebody who reads, dissects, categorizes, interprets and otherwise drains the life out of what people do, what women do. You don’t care about any of that any more, you know that is an almost worthless activity.  

Worse than worthless, it’s boring.

You know now that you’ve received the letter as a lifeline. You don’t want to choose between sabbatical responsibilities and finding out the true story of the box and its contents. You are not going to allow the World - anybody’s version of the World - to be defined for you.

You came to Santiago for Ruth. You will understand the city because Emily too came to the Santiago. You know this, because you know that anybody who writes something like

Nature is a haunted house--but Art--is a house that tries to be haunted.

has a fist in your heart, her quill pen in your brain, and a task for you to complete. You will know why the Bard was able to reach the little building on Pombal Street without leaving Amherst, why she traveled in the company of others who were also in search of a library - para a nosa biblioteca, for our library, the note in the box had said - . She is the one who can begin to set you straight.

You know you need to ask Pilar, because she has the answers you need.