Unsilent Springs

Under the Canopy: “The morning lit—the Birds arose—”

In March 2020, in “the earliest ending of winter” and the long beginning of the pandemic, I spent more time than usual at my desk reading and watching the world outside.1 The variorum of Dickinson’s poems lay open before me;2 beside it, H. L. Clark’s 1887 The Birds of Amherst & Hampshire County. In the middle distance between laptop screen and windowpane, poems and birds and questions kept crossing. How could I make a book of Dickinson’s birds—that is to say, her poems, that is to say, the birds of her world—addressed to readers of the Anthropocene that would not be a snare? How could a book of Dickinson’s birds “conjure an awareness of what accepted categories cannot contain, what familiar taxonomies cannot order, what one medium cannot express”?3 How could an archive not turn into an exhibit, with all its ties to the old cabinet of curiosities and, worse, the specimen case, but become instead a miscellany and a murmuration?4

Dickinson’s Birds arose—and continues to arise—out of these unsettled questions. A digital-humanities (DH) work of the “third wave,” it is necessarily hybrid in its nature, combining elements of the documentary archive and the scholarly edition but claiming neither as an identity. For, while we hope that, like the archive, as recently described by Arlette Farge, Dickinson’s Birds will be experienced as a “spring tide” and a “forest without clearings,” and further that, like the carefully prepared scholarly edition, it will remain responsible to the material forms and textual evolution of Dickinson’s poems, in composing it we have let go of the gnostic desire to store and classify her works for eternity also characteristic of both these structures.5 Instead, by gathering and disseminating digital surrogates of approximately 350 manuscript witnesses from Dickinson’s oeuvre that name or allude to birds and 253 audio files and sonograms of Amherst’s avifauna in relation to the unfolding hours of the day, the revolution of the seasons, and the calendar of her writing life, Dickinson’s Birds embodies a letting go of both identities to imagine an archive turning into a sound installation and a thought experiment in speculative worlding.

Set quietly beside not only archive and edition but also before the unimaginably vast and inhuman scale of the Anthropocene itself, Dickinson’s Birds is perhaps best described as a fragile mode of inquiry allied to a brief moment in the twenty-first century and the unthinkable stakes associated with it. It seeks to make possible a durational encounter with her poems that illumines them as part of the “flickering, shimmering field of forces without independent existence and in constant flux,” and with Dickinson’s lyric oeuvre itself as an entropic place in which the constant surging of time presages its eventual dissolution and passing away.6

It seeks to stir intensified concern with the smallest, most vulnerable, and most ephemeral of things, with poems and birds, in the belief that these things, too, have their infinity.

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With the exception of only a few months, Emily Dickinson lived her entire life in Amherst, Massachusetts, deep in the Connecticut River Valley, where the primary biome is a temperate deciduous forest composed of oak, maple, beech, and elm. Above the forest canopy and hidden in its understory were the wild songbirds of Dickinson’s world, the birds that still dart and whirr through her poems, letters, and fragments. Of the more than two hundred and fifty species of birds known to nest in this fertile valley or pass through it, she named a relatively small number, possibly just those she heard from her window or observed in her garden: robins, bobolinks, sparrows, jays, crows, eagles, cardinals, orioles, larks, phoebes, blackbirds and blue birds, hummingbirds, owls, eider ducks, whippoorwills, partridges, cuckoo birds, doves, linnets, and wrens, and a few that must instead have alighted from the pages of her books, lapwings, nightingales, swans, peacocks.7 Yet unnamed birds also crowd Dickinson’s work. Her fascicles shelter so many birds that they seem at times like nests; when she turns from fascicle gatherings to loose bifolium sheets, the birds migrate with her; and even her latest fragments carry birds or turn into them.

[Track: “June 1864,” bird-weather-soundway.8]

Just as birds are ever-present in her writings, so birdsong is arguably the most constant, evanescent sound she recorded through writing in the years before the first wildlife recordings had been made.9 Birds’ sound-making is also place-making: it orients humans to our own ecological emplacement in nature, locale, and time. As we have long known, for Dickinson the birds were harbingers of the seasons of the year and even the hours of the day. After the long New England winter, their dawn and dusk choruses broke open the biophony to sound the unaccountable fullness of our terrestrial condition in a “A Music + numerous as | space—.”10 While the birds’ varied departures in late summer and fall for their wintering ranges and their many returns to Amherst in early spring with the ice still “in the pools” affirmed for Dickinson the cyclical, eternal nature of the life-forms of our planet, their brief lives and their often invisible (witness-less) deaths seem to have given her an exact imagination of our own similarly contingent, vulnerable, and common existence in time and weather.11

Such a world is beautifully hinted at in a simple map drawn from an archive not far from Dickinson’s.12 Made in April 1823 by fourteen-year-old Frances Alsop Henshaw for a class on geography and penmanship at the Middlebury Female Academy, the rose- and charcoal-colored map of Massachusetts offers a spectral sense of emplacement. While the artificial borders look to have been traced from a printed map, large tracts of the interior remain empty. Amherst itself is nowhere on the map, and the few tremulously calligraphed place names she recorded seem to be erasing themselves in a sepia-dissolve. Perhaps Henshaw had become lost in contemplation as she worked on the assignment. Perhaps her mind had wandered and she had opened a window into the sudden spring migration. No legend or scale accompanies the map, but as the stroke of Henshaw’s writing sweeps out, overtaken by the stroke of drawing, a sense of vastness breathes in the paper: the basalt mountain ranges (such as the Holyoke Range) that rose up at the end of the last Ice Age are rendered in charcoal scribbles and contour lines, and the rivers Merrimack (Merruasquamack), Narraganset (Pettaquamscutt), and Connecticut (Quinnehtukqut) materialize as dark arteries winding through the landscape. Through drawing’s counterwriting, the map opens into the realm of the spatial imaginary. The empty spaces of Henshaw’s map remind us that every map embodies only a tiny island of reality and leaves most of the world undisturbed by our representation; they invite us to conjure a quieter earth, its corridors lit up by birdsong.13

In Dickinson’s nineteenth-century world, birdsong was certainly fuller and less masked than it is for inhabitants of the twenty-first century. Yet Dickinson also lived in the post-Industrial period, when new technologies were changing the sound of the world forever. Even the small site of Amherst, Massachusetts, reverberated with change. Between 1830 and 1870, the town’s population rose by 53 percent and the sounds that entered Dickinson’s windows suddenly included not only those of the old earth but also the din of the three to four thousand new human inhabitants and their occupations.14 By 1850, Massachusetts had witnessed the loss of 60 percent of its forests, one of the most devastating ecological losses in American history, and in Dickinson’s lifetime the quiet farms that had prevailed in the landscape were outnumbered by clamorous textile and paper mills, brickyards, and tool factories.15 In 1853, the passenger train originating in Belchertown pierced the soundscape, a strange stimulus for birdsong: “A train went through a burial gate, / A bird broke forth and sang.”16

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Tapping into the oldest and innermost part of our brain, sound imparts immediate data telling us where we are and whether it is safe, along with relational data that tells us how far we are from other, familiar things. When sounds are missing, that, too, tells us something. Does the birdsong that, though already diminished, still welcomes us into Dickinson’s world make us preternaturally aware of deeper silences in our own? How might we measure the ecological distances, the changed meters, between Dickinson’s sound-world and our own while also attending to those soundings, however faint, that propose new pathways for moving forward in the altered world, new opportunities for attunement and ethical engagement with beings whose “otherness” is palpable but with whom we nonetheless share an uncertain future?17

[Track: “December 1864,” bird-weather-soundway.]

While clairaudient access to the past is not likely to be possible even in a distant future, might the prospect of hearing again through the mind’s more speculative ear one thin bandwidth of Dickinson’s vanished soundscape by capturing, albeit incompletely, the calls and songs of the distant descendants of her birds, still be salutary?

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Flyways: “And filling all the | Earth and Air”

Unlike the printed book bound by a gravity the process of writing does not have and a final form it is not meant to have, the virtual book is weightless, tuned to the sky.18 And while the actual order of the pages of the codex never alters no matter how many times we mentally reassemble them in our memories, in the virtual book frames suspended in air allow for more speculative arrangements and interleafings (see Figures 12.4 and 12.5). By a sleight of hand, a touch—a tap—Dickinson’s Birds metamorphoses from one archive into many possible archives generated on the fly: archives of fascicle bird-poems or bifolium-sheet bird-poems; of bird-poems sent across the miles or of those that never circulated beyond Dickinson’s private papers; archives of beautiful fair-copy bird-poems and archives of still more beautiful rough-copy bird-poems; archives of blackbird, bluebird, or bobolink poems; archives of spring, summer, fall, and winter bird-poems, of morning and evening bird-poems; and archives of the birds themselves singing, nesting, migrating, endangered.19

This multiplicity of the archive calls to mind the image of murmuration, the phenomenon that results when hundreds, sometimes thousands of starlings fly in intricate aerial formations across the sky. In the murmuration, researchers believe, starlings behave mathematically like metals becoming magnetized. While studies of the starlings’ velocity reveal the murmuration as a system poised at the edge of criticality, “like snow crystals in the moments before an avalanche,” studies of their orientation reveal a topological system in which vast collective phenomena emerge from short-range interactions that ripple through whole flocks.20

The way of the murmuration is the way of what Michel Serres calls “the multiple”: it is by immersion.21 An intricate cloud of starlings, the murmuration (the multiple) also names a new mode of thinking, more grateful than confounded that we never experience or have access to the completeness of any phenomenon in nature or the world. From this perspective, Dickinson’s birds, the cloud her poems make, are not manifest to us (any more so than they may have been to her) as a unity, but rather as a mobile, ever-changing figure, an “emergent unreadability.”22

The way of the murmuration is also the way of the “meshwork”: both ways belong to an ontological model of the natural world, and the archive-world, in which the “processes of formation,” the “fluxes and flows of materials,” have ascendancy over states of matter and even over materiality itself. Seen as meshwork, the world has not stopped worlding. The bird in the firmament and the poem in the current of composition or reading are not “objects” that can be set in motion, but rather movements that only ever intermittently resolve themselves in the “form of a thing.” In the meshwork of Dickinson’s Birds, moreover, relations between and among birds and poems cannot be conceived and plotted in advance of our encounters with them, but become manifest through our involvement in their circulations, metamorphoses, inherent variance, and potential for departure.23

Like the birds themselves, the bird-poems are without fixed abode: they offer a view of the earth from light-years away. For, while Dickinson’s poems did not sing the ecological crisis we have named the Anthropocene (how could they?), still, by sounding new convergences between the lyric, birds, lateness, precarity, and the inhuman, they flew headlong from the nineteenth century into the cataclysm of the twenty-first. Like all works that reach us from other times, Dickinson’s bird-poems do so in translation, touched by the strangeness of their crossing. When they arrive—or rather, in their passing through toward another possible end—their anachrony, their readability in times, worlds, and ways that are not those of their own day, is part of the message they are unknowingly carrying.

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The flying indices are one entryway to a knowledge of Dickinson’s poems and birds. They are a summons to engage at the same in the protocols of both readings that are “distant,” in the aggregation and scrutiny of vast amounts of data, and those of very close reading. Yet, while the indices encourage us to hypothesize new orders of poems and birds, in new scales, they never quite lead us to the end of the archive or its custodial logic. In the poem and bird archives, sight is still the guiding sense for sorting, with every searcher finding their singular way among the primary offerings and secondary data, both bibliographical and ecological, via a familiar set of signs. Look: we can follow poems by date, archive setting, state, medium, and circulation status; and lo, we can track birds by their presence across centuries, their habitats, their changing conservation statuses.

In the distance between the eyes and their targets, the analytic faculty arises and takes hold, holding open the possibility of a metaknowledge of poems and birds as disciplinary objects. Another portal is needed if we are to end our seemingly endless fall into archive logic and effect instead of our fall into worlding, becoming immersed in the meshwork, awareness of new sympathies conjoining us with the “light ethereal influences” beside and around us.24 In choosing this second way, the searcher renounces the purchase of sight and enters the “other time” of sound, the time, as Salomé Voeglin tells us, of “ephemeral invisibility” and “always now.” In this way, sound’s way, the searcher is not separate from the world, but “placed in the midst of its materiality, complicit in its production.”25

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Sound-Ring: Data Firmament

Like the ancient astrolabe that inspired it, the sound-ring is at once calendar and wheel. Here, though, instead of capturing the brightest stars and deep sky objects visible in the northern or southern hemisphere in a given season and exact hour, it illuminates the bright arrivals and departures of birds and weather and poems across months and seasons of the year as observed from the coordinates of Amherst, Massachusetts. By means of this digital divining instrument, the archive’s algorithms of classification are at last dispersed as currents of birdsong and proceedings of weather.

Against a fixed disk marking the intervals of the earth’s rotation about the sun, two concentric rings spin around a common point. The inner ring is composed of data and sounds of those birds identified by a few natural historians who traversed the Connecticut River Valley and made their lists before ornithology was recognized as a science: Ebenezer Emmons in 1833, J. A. Allen in 1864, and H. L. Clark in 1887. The bird-ring does not illuminate a specific year of the nineteenth century, but rather those recurring patterns of the birds’ arrivals and departures that remained unbroken, or appeared to, until 1914, when the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon troubles them forever. The outer ring is composed of the atmospheric data and sounds of nineteenth-century weather as they were recorded by Amherst College professor Ebenezer Snell and his youngest daughter, Sabra, in a five-volume journal spanning the years 1835 to 1902. Here, where time and weather reign, the average temperatures, the prevailing genres and directions of winds and clouds, the accumulations of rain and snow, the fall of meteors, the florescence of the Aurora Borealis are waymarks in an evanescent geography. Since the atmospheric phenomena of the Northern Hemisphere vary from year to year, we have mined the granular data of the Snells’ records for 1864. This year is not selected at random. In addition to corresponding to the publication date of J. A. Allen’s bird list, it is also the year in which Dickinson copied and bound her final fascicle and then turned to composing exclusively on unbound sheets, leaves, and fragments. At this moment, the weather of her work changed forever. Finally, incised into the inner ring are a few, fragmentary sounds from the world of the Industrial Revolution that reverberate through nineteenth-century Amherst into the meshwork.26 The fleeting sounds from this world are among the only cultural references in the tracks of the soundscape: church and sleigh bells, the whistle of a train or factory, the shards of an Isaac Watts hymn, cartwheels and footsteps. Even together, they remain ambiguous signifiers; they do not let us get our bearings in Dickinson’s world or our dream of it before being evacuated by the wind.

The turning of the ring around the seasons stirs the birds of nineteenth-century Amherst from the silence into which they have sunk in our collective unconscious. The early recorders’ telegraphic notes of the first sightings of a bird in spring (“Bobolink. 4 April. Miss Morse”) and last glimpses of it leaving for its wintering range (“Red Crossbill. Latest date seen, May 2”) sound archives of inexpressible feelings and open our sense of another place and time when the most devastating effects of the Industrial Revolution were still unsuspected and the sound of the Anthropocene was still a sub-sub song in the bright Book of Nature. In this world where, to its most immediate ear-witnesses, all still seems well, where the passage of time and birds unfolds in humanly imaginable increments that still feel reconcilable with the deep time of creation, the calendar feels like a proof or at least a promise “against our vanishing.”27

In studies of bird migration, ornithologists often compose graphs or maps marking where the migrating birds “fall out” in their long journeys over the earth. Here, the turning of the ring month by month also activates a visual depiction of its sonic data. In these scatterplots, small dots representing individual species of birds belonging to the chosen temporal interlude glow and pulse, their coordinates in the plot determined by their place in the migration cycle and their body weight in grams. Along the horizontal axis, waves of arriving migrants appear in the lower zone of the graph, while departing birds cluster in the graph’s highest zone; nesting migrants and year-long residents glide across the mid-plane of the graph; and rare or accidental migrants flicker at random coordinates, small pinpricks of light in the graph. “Joy and Gravitation have their own ways,” Dickinson wrote.28 Along the scatterplot’s vertical axis, the heaviest birds vibrate closest to the ground while the lightest migrants tremble nearest the horizon line of the sky. The scatterplot is a mist-net of unforeseen, trembling connections. Laid one over another in the order of the earth’s yearly circuit, the scatterplots illuminate galaxies of birds moving in the meters and measures of the seasons.

In the ring’s twelve tracks sounding the months of the year, each month sounds for a duration of two minutes; each season, then, sounds across six minutes, and a year’s revolution sounds in just twenty-four hours—a single day. In the fall from archive into world, our translation from scholars into sonic subjects was seemingly accomplished. In our work curating the months’ scapes, we often felt like ringers working a net, unwinding the birds of the nineteenth century from the threads of time in order that they might sound again in our own. As a musical composition, the ring is variable and inconstant: shifting among registers, wavering, emergent, it does not produce a coherent order of birds or weather, but a chaology of orders. In some moments, we hear the sounds of a single species or the sudden swell or dissemination of a season’s migrants following the arc of the sun. Sounding inside our bones, the small, unlasting homes of our bodies, these tracks may induce a restorative, impersonal feeling of tranquility or letting go. They may sound something heard forever in the mind of Nature, or only the sound of “a certain Slant of light” in trees.29

[Track: “September 1864,” bird-weather soundway.]

In other moments in the ring we find ourselves immersed and estranged in a new sonic materiality, the commingled whirring of the meshwork beyond human organization. Here the ring that sounds the whorl of the present where time is weather also sounds the whirlwinds of the past and the future: not silent but spectral springs in which the song-souls of birds long-since extinct cross the northern zone alongside those whose vanishing is an unimaginable inaudibility still approaching us.

In the ring, Emmons’s, Allen’s, and Clark’s bare taxonomies of birds on the verge of becoming disciplinary objects fall away in skeins of sound. In the ever-turning ring, the time-shifted, re-wilded birds are agents, vital guides to a moving, numinous, extensional world. The turning and returning birds attune us to a roaming knowledge, to a contingent and simultaneous inhabiting, to leitmotifs of wonder and difference.

Among its other potential classifications, Dickinson’s Birds is a listening machine drifting just outside the poet’s west-facing windows and our own window opening into the end of the world.30 While many of the sounds transmitted from it are hauntingly beautiful, they do not offer an analytical understanding of her work but instead prize open the possibility of an affective, meditative, entangled, and present experience of it.31 If the orientation of the archives of poems and birds is centripetal, rushing inward to the conservation of order, then the orientation of this digital divining instrument is centrifugal, rushing out toward an infinity of possible orders. Thus, while the ring is composed from the data of a place, with the records of birds and weather of more than 150 springs ago, it never offers a documentary sense of place. There is no totalizing schema by which to make conclusive sense of the data the ring holds or disseminates, only a plurality of sonic possibilities, multiple grammars of flight. Under these conditions the dream of restoring all of the sounds of the birds to Dickinson’s writings in order to hear again her world as she heard it may be joyfully traded for an experience of inward listening to, and for, Dickinson’s birds and words in the thinner air of the twenty-first century, not as still and finished archives but as data choirs: shimmering, conductive, moving-sounding in and out of focus, and passing on.

A line segment that goes from one point to another on a circle’s circumference is called a chord. Below the ring a digital slide rule, a chord of “arrows,” marks the advent of each new bird poem in Dickinson’s lyric oeuvre linked to the year and season of its composition and to the fluttering sound of the bird/s within it. Like the wave machines of the nineteenth century, the timeline will make audible as wing-beats the larger rhythms of Dickinson’s imagination of birds from the spring of 1854 to that of 1886.

By listening to the sounds along the line in their successive unfurling, we may be rewarded by a new capacity to hear the fragile and differentiated cadences of Dickinson’s interior birdscape, while, by lightly tapping on points along the line to listen at once in and out of time to a single season of her writing life, we may receive both, on the one hand, a sudden intuition of the long durée in which the soundings of Dickinson’s birds reverberate against the soundings of birds made outside the precincts of human history and memory, and on the other, a heightened experience of the present moment in which our finger-falls onto a keyboard are part of the manifold and ephemeral data of the world we listen to and create.

In 1804, seeking evidence that Pewees, now known as Eastern Phoebes, returned to the same nesting sites in successive springs, John James Audubon began the practice of bird-banding: “When they were about to leave the nest, I fixed a light silver thread to the leg of each.” In the spring of 1805 two of the Pewees returned still trailing the silver threads.32

Among the wild songbirds named in Dickinson’s poems, the Phoebe sings three times: once in the fascicles circa 1863, once more in an undated manuscript announcing the oncoming spring; and once circa 1865 on a loose bifolium sheet carrying a memo on fame: “I dwelt too low / that any seek—/ Too shy, that any / blame—/ A Phebe makes / a little print / Opon the Floors of / Fame–” (MS A 90–7/8 [Fr1009A]).

It is possible that acoustic information is part of our code from the beginning.33 Sonic fibrils unfurl in the tremulous air between centuries. Birds and sounds, poems and fragments pass—swerve—through the eye of a needle.34

While the digital slide rule below the sound-ring tracks the linear unfurling of Dickinson’s poems between the springs of 1854 and 1886, inside the ring it is not the poems’ original connections to the author and her intentions, but rather their states and motions that first come forward, and then, in the forward scattered light, the fragments of the lively worlds within them. In the scattergraph they compose, the poems that were always already fleeing their lyric forms undergo a further luminous dissembly into impersonal, emergent vitalities. Here, “Out opon Circumference,” the manifold data of the world they carry streams out as stars, suns, planets, seas, vales, hills, clouds, petals, stones, dust.

The continual bewildering of poems and birds in the ring, as well as on the site and in this essay, is not affirmation of their tropic interchangeability, as a Romantic tradition of lyric reading would suggest, but rather an attempt to evoke the “inhuman lyricism” of both as they circulate not as laden tropes but as singular vitalities, semiconductors of sounds, and strange strangers to us and to one other.35

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“scattering as behavior toward risk”

In 2020, a study revealed that Robins are now beginning their migrations five days earlier every decade.36 Birds, with their measurable responses to environmental perturbations, may literally be ec-static signals of the profound ecological changes in the era of the “sixth extinction.”

A calendar marking the twenty-first century arrival and departure dates of the now distant descendants of Dickinson’s birds would indicate that the cycles of the natural world perceived just two centuries ago as eternally unchanging are shifting year by year, perhaps second by second. Playing the disks carrying the birdscapes of the nineteenth- and twenty-first centuries one over the other would make audible the small variations and imperfect rhymings of the birds’ altered migratory patterns. Would it signal the warming of the world and call on us to calibrate our passage in a new climate in extremis? In contrast, moreover, to the nineteenth-century calendar composed of the small data collected by a few naturalists with imperfect instruments, the twenty-first-century calendar sifts datasets too vast for human comprehension, measuring the otherwise unimaginable ways in which we have altered the world. Now the birds provoke a crisis of self-description: the imminence of the Anthropocene is evidence that the hours apportioned humans to offer an account of ourselves and our world may be run out.

In the face of such changes, it is little wonder that we are acutely reflective about endings of all kinds and how to forestall them. One manifestation of this reflectiveness can be seen in the work of a group of digital humanists at the University of Victoria whose anxious anticipation of the imminent coming of a “digital dark age” in which thousands of digital projects would be subject to degradation, deterioration, and ultimately death prompted The Endings Project.37 Together, the members of the working group evolved a series of principles and protocols relating to the treatment of data, documentation, processing, and release designed to “future proof” DH resources. Most importantly, sites sanctioned by The Endings Project must exhibit no external dependencies to stay functional, including server-side scripting or database software. Such DH projects thus achieve time-without-end through staticization.

In composing Dickinson’s Birds, we too have often, perhaps very often, been subject to a twenty-first-century disquiet. So much of our work, especially our listening work but also our engineering work, intensified our awareness of the vulnerability of birds and poems, of the fragile circuitry of the digital meshwork, that small shelter we were weaving for them, and of their and our greater house, the singular, blue-spinning earth itself. The discovery of a broken link, a missing text or sound file, though signifying nothing essential, nonetheless triggered our Anthropocene anxieties not only of the project’s end, but of the world’s.38

Is “what | they sung for” all “undone”?

The Anthropocene is necessarily the dark blind from which we see our present reality. From the interior dark of the blind, small apertures give us birds and worlds as glimpses only, but the world’s hiddenness—its maintenance of itself more in concealment than in revelation—remains as vast as it ever was. While more than ever before there are reasons for our belief that we live in the end-times, so a life involved in observing nature and reading poems prepares us to live in doubts and uncertainties, even to deeply desire and attend to them. Dickinson’s time-shifted birds and lyrics may be emissaries of our untimely ending, but they may also be small reminders that the long arcs of change (poetic, technological, ecological) are not only longer than those of our individual human lives and memories, but discernibly nonteleological. We do not know what ends we or the world will come to. The ecological and epistemological orientation of Dickinson’s Birds relinquishes the prospect of an Edenic restoration of the nineteenth-century poemscape and birdscape for a poesis of rewilding the sounds and words that composed it in and for our own times. Here a boundless vigilance for birds and poems caught forever in a common gravitational field is accompanied by hope for a future unendingly opened by uncertainty.

Ultimately, the perpetuation of Dickinson’s Birds across time will be radically conditional. Like the sound art projects that are its nearest muses (Douglass Quin’s 2010 Fathom, Jana Winderer’s 2018 Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone, Krista Caballero and Frank Ekberg’s 2013–present Birding the Future), its existence will be intimately linked to the larger fate of the planet. And so its contingency and its possible vanishing, rather than its infinity, will be its message. Although we do not yet know how to bring about this conditionality (pace techne), we seek a mechanism whereby the existence of Dickinson’s Birds is linked to changing climate conditions in the external world.39 While the precise rates and scales of change triggering mutations in the project remain to be determined, rises in climate exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius per year will initiate the first losses of local data—the erasure of the Linnean classifications of the birds, loss of information about their histories, habitats, and conservation status, as well as losses of bibliographical data related to the poems: their composition and copying dates, their fair and draft states, their archival locations—while annual rises in climate attaining or exceeding 2 degrees Celsius will trigger more widespread losses of conceptual data: the scholarly apparatus will fall away, our notes on the project’s origins and aims, our introductions, paratexts, and indices to the archives of poems and birds, our annotations on the project’s text and audio files, followed next by the decomposition of the digital surrogates of Dickinson’s manuscript images and our transcriptions, as well as the spectrograms, those visual maps of the frequency energies and sound elements of the variant calls and songs of individual birds held for a moment in our machine. The extinction of any one bird species sheltering in Dickinson’s Birds will trigger an immediate and irreversible collapse of the machine’s substructure. In this end, in addition to the loss of content, random power surges will begin, causing broken links, memory errors, search function failures, and database corruption. The server account—the site’s address—may disappear.

Until that time, however, no one end will be imagined as final.

And even “after the end,” the sounds of birds and weather and poems will persist for an unknown epoch, streaming from the lost site en route towards an inhabitable otherness, or only the coordinates of a “quiet seeming | Day -”.

[Track: “April 1864,” bird-weather-soundway.]

Notes

This essay is a revised and re-directed version of the first part of “Sparrow Data: Dickinson’s Birds in the Skies of the Anthropocene,” The Emily Dickinson Journal 30, no. 1 (2021): 45–84. This version updates materials on the digital instruments central to Dickinson’s Birds and includes a new meditation on the notion of endings in digital and Anthropocene contexts. I am indebted to Ryan Cull, editor of The Emily Dickinson Journal, for his insightful recommendations for the revision of the first version of this work and for his kind permission to publish this new version in the present collection. I am also grateful to Matt Cohen, Caterina Bernardini, and Ken Price for bringing us together in Nebraska for the symposium “The Digital Futures of Scholarly Editing” and for their wise and gracious editorial counsel. While my title is an evident allusion to Rachel Carson’s critical work, the term “data chorus,” altered here to “data choir,” originates with my collaborator Caroline McCraw; it appears in her essay on this project in Conjecturing a Climate: Reading Dickinson in the Anthropocene (forthcoming). To all of my collaborators—Caroline McCraw, Danielle Nasenbeny, Abe Kim, Patrick Bryant, Rayne Broach, Will Sikich—I give thanks. We have worked together so long that the origin and circulation of thoughts about this project cannot be traced to any one of us but belongs to all of us. What is best in this work is as much theirs as mine; any fault in it, though, is wholly owned by me.

1. 1. See Wallace Stevens’s “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954).

2. 2. Quotations in this essay from Dickinson’s poems are from their manuscript versions. Citations are to first line(s), date, current archival home, manuscript identifier, and poem number in The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum, ed. R. W. Franklin, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1998). Quotations from Dickinson’s letters are also from the manuscript versions. Citations are to date, current archival home, manuscript identifier, and letter number in The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1958). All transcriptions in the body of the essay are from Dickinson’s manuscripts and are my own. The “+” is the symbol often used by Dickinson to mark a variant reading in her work. See Emily Dickinson, “An awful Tempest mashed | the air -”, circa spring 1861, Houghton Library, MS H 83 (Fr224A).

3. 3. Lisa Pearson, It is Almost That: A Collection of Image + Text Works by Women Artists & Writers (South Egremont, Mass.: Siglio, 2011), 280.

4. 4. In spring 2020, when I was just beginning to think about composing a book of Dickinson’s birds, a group of scientists, soundscape artists, and global citizens were way ahead of me. Inspired by the work of bioacoustician Bernie Krause, the public soundscape project Dawn Chorus was born. The creators of the site describe its advent in the following way: “In the spring of 2020, we humans experienced an unprecedented, global break in public life, the ‘Silent Spring.’ This early phase of the corona pandemic meant the beginning of an extremely challenging time for millions of people. At the same time, this point in time was associated with a sudden, profound silence: cities, airports and industrial areas literally stood still, and there were numerous sightings of wildlife in suddenly deserted areas. The otherwise dominant sounds of human activities were temporarily silenced, leaving room for the sounds of nature. At the same time, global travel and exit restrictions literally forced us to pay more attention to things on our doorstep. Into this stillness, the project Dawn Chorus was brought to life by BIOTOPIA-Natural History Museum Bavaria and the Foundation Art and Nature, with the support of the Max Planck Society” (dawn-chorus.org).

5. 5. Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013), 4, 69.

6. 6. Timothy Morton, “Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology,” Oxford Literary Review 32, no.1 (2010): 9. See also Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010) and Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

7. 7. While the Massachusetts Avian Records Committee records 510 bird species associated with Massachusetts in 2022 (maavianrecords.com/official-state-list/), the number of species inhabiting or passing through the geographical region of the Connecticut Valley in Massachusetts is closer to 260; see the comprehensive record provided by Aaron Clark Bagg Jr. and Samuel Atkins Eliot, Birds of the Connecticut Valley in Massachusetts (Northampton, Mass.: Hamshire Bookshop, 1937). Birds recorded in Amherst, Mass., constitute a still smaller set: in 1977, Peter Westover compiled a list of 234 birds known to have been sighted in or near Amherst (Birds and Their Habitats in Amherst, Massachusetts, with Complete Annotated List of Amherst Birds [Amherst, Mass.: Hitchcock Center for the Environment, 1977]).

8. 8. I am deeply indebted to Danielle Nasenbeny and Rayne Broach for their work on the soundways, which were created with Audacity, an open-source multitrack audio editor. Although they cannot sound in this printed version of the text, the references may both allude to their absence and act as ghostly traces of lost melodies. See the Manifold version of the essay for access to the sound files.

9. 9. The earliest known recording of a bird is Ludwig Koch’s 1889 recording made in Germany on wax cylinder of a captive shama. The first sound recordings of wild birds were likely those of a song thrush and a nightingale made in England in 1900 by Cherry Kearton, also on wax cylinder.

10. 10. The lines are from Dickinson’s poem beginning “The Birds begun at | Four o’clock -” (circa early 1864), Amherst College Archives, MS A 81–8/9 (Fr504B).

11. 11. The line comes from Dickinson’s poem beginning “Before the ice is in the pools -” (circa late 1858), Amherst College Archives, MS A 80–1/2 (Fr46A).

12. 12. The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection is available online at davidrumsey.com. Originally hand-drawn and colored by Henshaw on a loose leaf, it was later gathered into a slender volume containing eighteen additional maps along with descriptions of the Ptolemaic, Brahean, and Copernican Systems of Astronomical Geography, the Meridian, the Horizon, the Zones, and the Climates. While Henshaw’s maps began as copies of the maps in Carey’s 1805 American Pocket Atlas, they became singular and luminous objects. In his cataloging notes, Rumsey provides further information on Henshaw’s sources: “The maps are copied from the 1805 edition of Carey’s American Pocket Atlas, except for Ohio, which is from Arrowsmith and Lewis’s Atlas, 1812, and Indiana, from an unknown source. The text is copied from Morse’s Geography Made Easy, probably 1807, 11th edition, but certainly before the 12th edition (which was changed substantially); the text describing the maps is original. The only mystery is why she used such out of date sources if, in fact, she made this book in 182[3]” (davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~214957~110004:Massachusetts; “Pub. Note”). The fusion of alphabetic and cartographic literacy found in Henshaw’s maps clearly reflects the influence of Emma Willard, the educator and map-maker who led the Academy from 1807 to 1809.

13. 13. The notion of the “ghost map”—a map that “make[s] visible the invisible traces of past human action in the landscape”—haunts our map; see Philip J. Ethington and Nobuko Toyosawa, “Inscribing the Past: Depth as Narrative in Historical Spacetime,” in Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives, ed. David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M Harris (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2015), 72–101.

14. 14. Much of this information is published at Digital Amherst, a pilot project developed by the Jones Library, Amherst, Massachusetts; see digitalamherst.org/exhibits. I am also grateful to Karen Sánchez-Eppler and her students for sharing their research on Amherst industry in the nineteenth century (2018 Dickinson seminar, Amherst College).

15. 15. The contextual information here is from John Opie, Nature’s Nation: An Environmental History of the United States (Boston: Cengage Learning, 1998).

16. 16. See Dickinson, “A train went through a burial gate” (circa autumn 1863). The original manuscript has been lost, but was once part of fascicle 20. The transcription here is taken from Franklin, Poems of Emily Dickinson, Fr397[A]; Franklin’s text derives from Poems (1890).

17. 17. Dickinson’s existence before the advent of recording technologies makes it impossible to hear the world of the mid-nineteenth century as she heard it. But even if new technologies could recover the sounds of this lost world, a still greater—indeed impassable—barrier to full sonic knowing would remain; for our powerlessness to hear Dickinson’s birds as she heard them is not merely technological but profoundly perceptual, part and parcel of our twenty-first-century condition of loss and longing. Standing, even partly aware, on the shoreline of the Anthropocene and in the midst of the “sixth extinction” distorts our hearing. This need not lead us to lose heart. On the contrary, once we relinquish our fantasy of recapturing a perfect sonic memory of Dickinson’s world and acknowledge that our auditory access to the past is necessarily strained and fragmentary, so perhaps can we also attune ourselves more keenly to those sounds that her world and ours still have in common and find new ways of commemorating time’s passage as it is woven and measured in the cadences of birdsong.

18. 18. The subtitle of this section heading appears in Dickinson’s poem beginning “His Oriental heresies” (circa late 1881), Amherst College Archives, MS A 212 (Fr1562B).

19. 19. In addition to providing detailed textual and material data on Dickinson’s bird poems, Dickinson’s Birds encourages attunement to the ways in which her poetry evokes the world(s) around her and her complex, sometimes uncanny experience of emplacement. Our encoding of the poems in the installation reflects their relationship to scale, place, motion, time, and sound. We began by inventorying the poems’ scalar allusions to Universes, Worlds, and Solar Bodies. We then recalibrated to catalogue all references to Nature, Landforms, Flora, and Fauna. We considered their climates, the meteorological and atmospheric processes they record, and their multiple temporalities. The central importance of sound in the poems is manifest in our attention to three interlacing registers in Dickinson’s work: the geophony, the biophony, and the anthrophony. 

20. 20. Of course, the first meaning of murmuration is sonic: the action of murmuring—making a soft, indistinct sound, sometimes at a distance. For a brief but interesting note on starling murmuration, see wired.com/2012/03/starling-flock-dynamics/. For a video of this phenomenon, see petapixel.com/2020/04/02/this-video-captures-the-mesmerizing-patterns-traced-by-a-flock-of-starlings/.

21. 21. See, especially, Michel Serres, Genesis, transl. Genevieve James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); see also Serres, Branches: A Philosophy of Time, Event and Advent (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

22. 22. See, especially, Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

23. 23. See Tim Ingold, “Bringing Things to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials,” ESRC National Centre for Research Methods, 2010, 4, accessed 1 March 2021, eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/1306/. Ingold’s most crucial distinction is between the “object” that “stands before us as a fait accompli . . . defined by its very ‘overagainstness’ in relation to the setting in which it is placed” and the “thing” that is “not . . . an externally bounded entity, set over and against the world, but . . . a knot whose constituent threads, far from being contained within it, trail beyond, only to become caught with other threads in other knots.”

24. 24. It is Henry David Thoreau who wrote of the “light ethereal influences” of nature in a journal entry of July 23, 1851 (A Year in Thoreau’s Journal: 1851, ed. Daniel Peck [New York: Penguin, 1993], 126).

25. 25. See Salomé Voeglin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (London: Continuum, 2010), 5.

26. 26. In the present tracks, a few fragmentary sounds from the human realm are incised into the bird-and-weather-scapes. We continue to experiment with the sonic interpenetration of “natural” and “human” realms, with the larger aim of reimagining their respective thresholds.

27. 27. This line-fragment is drawn from Allen Grossman’s poem “Of the Great House,” the title poem in his book of the same name (New York: New Directions, 1982).

28. 28. The line is drawn from a late prose fragment in the Amherst College Archives and special collections. The entire text reads, “Spirit cannot be | moved by Flesh— | It must be moved | by spirit— | It is strange | that the most | intangible is the | heaviest—but Joy | and Gravitation | have their own | ways. My ways | are not your | ways -” (MS A 871 [JL PF44]).

29. 29. The part-line cited here opens Dickinson’s poem “There’s a certain Slant of light” (circa early 1862), Houghton Library, MS H 74 (Fr320A).

30. 30. The site might also be imagined as a “possible world”: neither Umberto Eco’s “small world” nor W. H. Auden’s “secondary world,” the “possible world” into which Dickinson’s Birds lifts/launches us is autonomous; for more on these “worlds,” see Salomé Voegelin, Sonic Possible Worlds, Revised Edition: Hearing the Continuum of Sound (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).

31. 31. As Caterina Bernardini noted in an early reading of this essay, the same principle applies to the reading and studying of poetry, which calls for a methodological shift toward poetic experience rather than poetic “understanding.”

32. 32. John James Audubon, Dictionary of American Biography,audubongalleries.com/education/audubon.php.

33. 33. See Andrea Moro, “Why You can ‘Hear’ Words inside Your Head,” BBC, September 29, 2020, bbc.com/future/article/20200929-what-your-thoughts-sound-like.

34. 34. The words appearing here are all drawn from Dickinson’s bird poems.

35. 35. The phrase “inhuman lyricism” is Virginia Jackson’s; see Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton. N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).

36. 36. The line of poetry that opens this section is the title of Susan Howe’s poem “Scattering as Behavior Towards Risk,” in Singularities (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1990).

37. 37. The Endings Project (University of Victoria, 2018–present) began as “a five-year project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) that is creating tools, principles, policies and recommendations for digital scholarship practitioners to create accessible, stable, long-lasting resources in the humanities” (https://endings.uvic.ca/about.html). For more on its origins and aims, see https://endings.uvic.ca/principles.html.

38. 38. The quoted lines in the following section heading, which imagine this possibility, are from a partial draft of Dickinson’s poem beginning “A Pang is more conspicuous in Spring” (circa 1881), Amherst College Archives, MS A 108 (Fr1545A); for a complete draft of the poem, see MS A 109 (Fr1545B).

39. 39. The setting, once determined, could not be changed by us, lest some sudden regret, some anthropocentric need to save our work might urge us to intercede and stop its alteration or dissolution.