Nature is a haunted house…

In a letter, Emily Dickinson wrote: Nature–is a haunted house–but Art–a house that tries to be haunted.

@Poetry tweeted this quote, and I can’t get it out of my mind. Haunted–by what? A house that tries to be haunted, would seem to be empty–in need of being filled with… what it lacks, but nature has. Has, but as something which is and is not there. Nature’s house we did not contruct, but find ourselves within it. Are we, then, that which haunts it? And the house of Art, a strange sort of house, though we build it, we cannot dwell in it, as we do the house of nature. In our very building of it, it pushes away, keeps us outside, with every word we add, with ever new stroke of the brush, and though what we would render is within, what emerges is yet another surface, and other wall, another door, though we imagine it to be open, but cannot enter.

In nature’s house, we wait for death, and paint the house that refuses death entrance, and us… unless (ah, the paradox!) we empty ourselves of the death that haunts us, and enter, not as ourselves, but only with the emptiness of what we have become, when we have ceased becoming.