Collage. US Postal Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Project Apollo Archive, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Look closely at any moon landing photograph and you will find fine gray plus signs in a grid across each one—plus signs that allowed for distortion to be corrected + for distance and height to be calibrated from space as well as on the moon’s surface. That could stitch a panoramic sequence of images + plot the moon. Each Hasselblad camera the astronauts brought was fitted with a clear glass plate etched with this precise network, a réseau of stitches—pinning the moon to the moon to keep its surface and the vast black horizon in line. Reseau: a grid + a reference marking pattern on a photograph or sewing paper + an intelligence network + a net of fine lines on glass plates + a foundation in lace.
+++
Look closely at many Emily Dickinson poems and you will find + signs that indicate a variant in a line. A variant may appear + above a word + to the side of a line + underneath a word + at right angles to the poem + stacked at the end like a solution to an equation. Whole poems + sequences may be variants of one another. Dickinson did not choose among her variants, offering them as concurrent alternatives— evocative lace constellations left for us to hold up to our future sky as we try to align the wild nights + noons of her poems + epistolary impulses. Stitched across the surface of her work—plus signs that allow for + stray signals + distortion + that calibrate interior vastness.
Rather than the stunning aluminum-coated fabric of the Mercury crews stepping out of comic book frames of imagined interstellar travel, the astronauts who planted their feet on the moon were outfitted in the same glaring white as a wedding dress. A color in the future that will become as synonymous as silver with the zeitgeist of sixties space-age fabrics—avant-garde apparel made of paper and metal and mirrors and all that lamé, every garment a mise en abyme reflecting and replicating a future possible. Silver and white, twin colors that wax and wane in popularity across time, reappearing again and again when we most need to transport ourselves beyond whatever present moment in which we find ourselves suspended. Colors that carry us across the thin gray twilight line that separates us from a speculative future.
Fifty years into that future, it’s difficult to undo the images of those sonogramic white suits. The ghostly bulk of the astronauts’ bodies adrift on the moon now an afterimage in our collective consciousness. The exterior garment as luminous and otherworldly every day and intimate as the era’s conic Playtex bras. Chosen in part for the fabric’s superlative heat resistance, in part because its less reflective surface kept astronauts safer from the risk of dazzling themselves with their clothing while facing the unfiltered sunlight. Underneath this bright white micrometeoroid layer, underneath the layers and layers of nested silver insulation, the main pressurized body of the space suit is a simple Earthly blue.
The year we landed on the moon a documentary is screened detailing the seemingly impossible technological processes involved in getting us there. Over looped footage—a modified sewing machine moving stitch over stitch over a seam—a sheet of mylar pulled from a roll until its silver fills the screen—a pair of gloves being constructed blue finger by finger—there is audio of women talking. Chatting back and forth with each other as if they were doing any day’s work. The hidden intimacy of the moon is in this small loop: the space suits with their otherworldly specifications had to be sewn one by one.
The seamstresses hired to help fabricate the space suits first had to learn how to read engineering blueprints, to understand construction and seam lines from drawings rather than the pattern of a previous garment. There was no previous garment to take apart, no way to learn where hidden seams and extra protection from friction might be required. No lines or creases or details to close read what happens to fabric on the body when worn on the moon, the intricacies or possible failures of a former design. The seamstresses had to sew the space suit together in their minds. Undo it to imagine it again as flat fabric. Understand how to cut, piece, dip, coat edges of ever more wild fabrics to keep them from fraying, tearing, coming undone in space while being worn.
Given the unfathomable demand for stitches so meticulous they would allow a body to safely endure a lack of breathable air, the seamstresses learned to sew at a level of precision even the most spectacular Earth garment would never call for. They learned to sew with almost no use of straight pins to tack together their fabrics and keep them from slipping as layer after layer of delicate fiberglass heatproof fabric was run through the machine. That even a single misplaced stitch might call for a suit to be fully restarted. Learned an errant pin and an infinitesimal hole in the pressurized suit were the only difference between—and—. And no Earthly rehearsal before the seamstresses’ trick of turning flat fabric into an airtight heirloom was performed live by astronauts in front of a national audience.
Pinned down in grief, and imagining I have landed on the moon, I hear them. Their voices bounced down fifty years in the future like stray signals from the night sky. As if I am overhearing a garment in process across multiple moments in time.
Emily Dickinson’s one white dress is a copy. Of which there are actually two. Dickinson’s one white plus twin replica dresses—make three. Three white dresses are not literary lore. They are the beginning of a bedtime story: In the great green room there were three white dresses, three dresses in white that were acceptable to be worn around the house though not around town, sewn in a nineteenth-century style called a wrapper housedress, meant for housework and harder wear and more often than not made of darker fabric. Though obviously not Dickinson’s. Even if by then white cloth was considered easier to clean than fashionably bright aniline dyes and prints, might even have been considered more practical, her many white dresses still invited hot gossip. After all, other than brides and mourners, who only wears white? Dickinson’s unlikely white dress is often speculated to be bridal, as if she considers herself wed to her poetry—or to God—or to herself. Dickinson’s one white dress, in which she was always talking to death.
But a historical artifact cannot be taken apart at the seams in order to make a pattern for twinning, cannot have its stitches cut one by one. To make a new pattern from an existing garment that must remain intact is called “lifting” or “rubbing off.” The dressmaker hired to twice replicate and lift Dickinson’s one white dress had to imagine the pattern from seeing the dress already put together. Had to take it apart in her mind. Plan it backwards. The language of producing a facsimile dress is the language of the writer at work: drafted, corrected, proofed. Though only the first was likely a collective effort, drafted, patterned, and stitched in a room with other women in intimacy.
It’s difficult to know when entering the exhibit of her house which dress has been pulled out intact for display—the dress that embodied Dickinson’s body or the dress that suggestively embodies her mind. The dress and the story we tell about her round and round. Hard to know in which she’s hidden herself. In a white dress where would she hide? Three white dresses, each with fourteen yards of trim like the frill of a stamp’s edge along the collar, the cuffs, the unexpected note-size pocket with its envelope-flap closure. Only one with original embroidered lace. The iconic, dead-ringer dresses, one or the other, resting on a dress form in the East bedroom, arms bent as if about to take off. Her fair copy is kept safe in a glass case across town.
How many worlds can a garment inhabit at one time? Let me reverse some of its stitches. In the city where I will be born an inventor will begin a humble company making latex bathing caps and swimwear. The company will grow larger, move cities, divide itself into different cells, some for the war effort and some for more commercial manufacturing. After the war, women from surrounding towns will be hired to work on the lines at a newly announced division, Playtex, stitching bras and diaper covers and latex-dipping “living” girdles. Twenty plus years into the future, it’s seamstresses at Playtex who are initially tapped to move over to the handcrafting of space suits for the NASA astronauts.
Every other company’s proposal for dressing and encasing the interstellar body in a military-engineered solution will fail. Their armor-like designs incapable of mimicking the human form or allowing a body to move with enough grace in low gravity. Hard-shell relics unsuited to carrying anyone to the moon. Playtex’s flexible rubber girdle and the bra’s nylon tricot was, is, and will be the secret to fitting women’s earthly bodies into the restrictive garments of Dior’s postwar New Look and the astronaut’s bodies into space suits. A garment that holds both a future and a past body in its fabric. An impossible, other-worldly, fantastical body achievable only through an adept understanding of how to alter the figure underneath the architectural lines of the clothing. In other words, through the illusion technology of undergarments.
Much of the language for the technical components and construction of the lunar space suits will be of the body: bladder, ribbed rings, webbing, joints. A language of intimacy and interiority. A language the seamstresses will already understand. Closer to earlier forms of embodiment in which we clothe a spirit with a body—a space suit: both an embodied body and an intervention of the body. The interior of the space suit touching the exterior of the body. The exterior touching endlessness. Each latex-dipped component a well-guarded technique to a fragile body dazzling us while bouncing through airlessness. Each of the space suit’s seventeen concentric sheets of mylar glued by the seamstresses, thinner than single-thread lace. A body kept safe in the vastness of space through couture handiwork—a reseau of women rendering the moon possible with precision stitching and cutting and gluing. An abundance of hours.
At any given time just one of Emily Dickinson’s white dresses is planted in her bedroom like a flag on the moon, stiff and awkward, trying to float on a breeze that does not blow. A room that has been celebrated for housing a mind that looked like no one else’s mind ever. A mind capable of making poems like lace, full of gaps and pauses and absences. All those variants letting us listen in as she works out a live problem on the page. All those em dashes with dots over the top, turning connective pauses into birds, inviting us to leap from one space to the next. To keep the vast horizon of her mind in line. As if her words were signals bounced from places more vast than we can imagine—reflected off the moon’s surface—returned to us overheard.
Listen closely to any worn garment and you will find fine lines that mark details of construction + patterns of wear + indications of more than one wearer. Signs of possible variation + annotation + distortion—initials embroidered along a pocket + the strain in a buttonhole that might indicate a garment was worn during early stages of pregnancy + the ellipsis of holes showing stitching has been undone—seams and hems let down + let out + in. These lines will allow you to draw the garment + take it apart in your mind + translate its cut and composition onto the page. Create an image + a pattern + help calculate the relationship of one part or one wearer of a garment to another.
Listen. I am reading the garment out loud.
For over a century there has been just one verifiable photograph of Dickinson. In the iconic black and white silver daguerreotype, she is not wearing the white dress. She’s a teenager fixed in a dress she will live in forever. And that dress is made in an undefinable dark printed fabric with a slight sheen. Not surprising, given dark fabrics were considered more suitable as it kept sitters from becoming spectral blurs—there and not there. But people will mostly forget this first dress. There’s nothing spectacular or singular about it. The daguerreotype era produces millions of replica dark dresses. There’s no narrative we can attach to its common folds. The white fabric arrives in the future.
One hundred years of one documentary photograph and one surviving white dress going round and round, depicting Dickinson as an ethereal-looking teenager superimposed over an ethereally dressed adult. Even as it’s been told round and round that neither her family nor her considered the image a particularly good likeness. Until a second possible daguerreotype is uncovered. In the image there are two women, two dresses. One dress a griever’s black speculated to be worn by a recently widowed friend. The other, when magnified, revealed to be checks—a grid of fine lines woven through the fabric. A pattern that was considered best for daguerreotypes, a perfect contrast in the folds between light and dark. Like the original, the portrait is so small it requires intense forensic attention to gather information about the possible wearers and their dresses.
The Dickinson Museum textile collection is searched. A possible copy of the pattern and sheen of this second daguerreotype dress is found. Fabric with light gray and white threads creating a reseau on a stunning blue background. Swatches of a blue dress that were saved, deconstructed and stitched onto paper backing to be reused, along with other snips of bright dress silks and plaid satins, as part of a hexagon quilt block. A match that might verify Dickinson is the wearer and begin to unfasten the afterimage of a monochromatic era of Victorian mourning wear.
Difficult to then undo the collective image of Dickinson the artist in her singular, sonogramic white dress. What would we do with her, would we recognize her if she came to us in blue? This new future possible Dickinson would be a Dickinson in process and in sequence—stitching and unstitching—patterning her poems and not yet on the moon. A variant twin Dickinson that changes ages, changes dresses between acts from dark to blue to white—who might allow for distortion, for distance between the first dress and the last and now. A panoramic view of her materiality that pins herself to herself. In the absence of a physical dress, we have to reimagine her in a blue wider than the sky, in the long seconds she was suspended and exposed—there and not there—sitting impossibly still as the camera’s lens remained open, arm around a mourning friend, before the salt fixes and gathers her back into black and white like moonlight on the daguerreotype’s silver surface.
So many needle holes and needles + errant pins left in Dickinson’s poems. Not all for sewing. Some used to wound + puncture + stab + mark. And the way she chose to stitch her poems—leaving audible pinholes in their fabric—morse code notes poked straight through the pages—that allow us in the future to take all those undone white sheets, restitch and unstitch them back together in sequence. A panorama of poems + a mind in the gray line between daylight and darkness. Undo each poem + dress and what’s left are the ellipsis of pinholes—dots and dashes—traveling across the fabric + page.
The dressmaker hired to multiply Dickinson’s one white dress first would have made a toile, a practice or draft dress made in muslin, meant to be taken apart to turn into a pattern that could be twinned and twinned and twinned, turning one dress into many. Meaning there are or were likely four possible dresses: the original, the two replicas, and the toile that would have been undone—a speculative future dress + a ghost of the final dresses returned to its prestitched state. A toile is a garment made to be altered, to never be worn. Each of these duplicate heirlooms that will never contain Dickinson’s or anyone’s future body. Or her reason for adopting such dazzling fabric for workwear. Dickinson’s multiplying variants + dresses + pinholes, turning her into many, keeping mourners from creaking across her soul. Dickinson, who was constantly more astonished that the Body contains the Spirit + or that clothes could then contain the body at all.
What a pity that instead of a flag we did not plant a copy of Dickinson’s paper white dress on the moon—symbol of the common poem—+ which, like the moon, affects us all, unites us all. + Each month going round and round—turning from light to dark to the moon’s silver glint and back again depending on whether it’s waxing or waning. As if underneath her one luminous white dress is its exact space-black lace replica waiting to hurtle back to Earth.
An adapted excerpt from Alterations, to be published by Transit Books this July.
Cori Winrock is a poet and multimedia essayist/artist. Her second collection of poetry, Little Envelope of Earth Conditions, was awarded Editor’s Choice for the Alice James Books Prize. Her debut book, This Coalition of Bones, received the Freund Prize.
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