EMILY´S DASHES
Laser print on canvas. 2016. Documentation from Rake visningsrom, Trondheim.
2015 contribution to Imago Mundi, Luciano Benetton Collection: http://www.imagomundiart.com/artworks/johanna-willenfelt-emilys-dashes
‘There is something incomprehensible in pain that supplies its peculiar quality of blankness.’
(D. Morris, The Culture of Pain, 1991: 77)
Emily´s Dashes is a visual interpretation of Emily Dickinson´s poetic suit on pain. Her poem Pain–has an Element of Blank– is probably the most frequently quoted lines in modern-day collected writings on the human experience of pain. Quite potently so, the poem does not only give a precise definition of the contradictory nature of pain, that is, of the unlivable moment of pain which exists parallel to the lived sensation of pain, but it actually finds a language to render this uninhabitable event visible. Included in this language is Dickinson´s idiosyncratic use of the dash. The dash is a graphic stroke used to mark a break in sense or to represent omitted letters or words. In Dickinson´s writing, dashes are used to indicate the unexpressed, but they are also inserted as strokes of violence so as to fragment and displace language itself. Througout her life, Dickinson deployed the dash, to different degrees and in varying scope, so as to create in each piece an infinite series of differentiating movements. In Emily´s Dashes, the words composed to express the temporality and affectivity of pain are omitted. For every signifying letter there is a blank space. Alluding to the volatile nature of pain, the piece offers an encounter with the transience of pure time: the event that is not but concurrently is the most contracted moment of all time.
There is a pain – so utter –
It swallows substance up –
Then covers the Abyss with Trance –
So Memory can step
Around – across – upon it –
As one within a Swoon –
Goes safely – where an open eye –
Would drop Him – Bone by Bone.
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 –
Pain – expands the Time –
Ages coil within
The minute Circumference
Of a single Brain –
Pain contracts – the Time –
Occupied with Shot
Gamuts of Eternities
Are as they were not –