Subtext: Conversations about Classic Books and Films

A coffin like a little frosted cake, a lily of the valley for the dead boy’s hand, an invitation to serve as a page at court: the second half of “First Death in Nova Scotia” keeps borrowing the imagery of a royal wedding. Why does Jack Frost paint Arthur’s hair red instead of draining its color, and why is the red of the maple leaf a sign of death? Wes & Erin follow the child as she turns her cousin into a doll, a page, and a fairy tale—until the snowbound roads refute the story, and the poem’s final rhyme of “go” and “snow” closes it.

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Transcript

0:11 Erin: Okay. Welcome to part four of our discussion of the poems of Elizabeth Bishop. We are partway through First Death in Nova Scotia. We just finished the second stanza. We're talking about the conflict between warm and cold that we've seen so far in the poem. And then at the Beginning of Stanza 3, these images of something which is cold and yet desires touch, or we desire to touch it in spite of, or maybe even because of its coldness, is followed by the mother's attempt to make the child breach the distance or the barrier with the dead Arthur laid out in his coffin by a few different means.

With speech, she instructs the child to say goodbye to Arthur, lifts her up, presumably so that she can see Arthur, and then also to give him a gift of the lily of the valley. And speech here is interesting because we've also just been told that through a sort of childlike perspective, that what seems to characterize the loon is not that the loon is dead, though this speaker, who seems to be both child and present day bishop, knows that the bird has been shot and stuffed. But what seems to characterize the fact that the bird is not a live bird is simply the fact that he's not speaking, that he's keeping his own counsel.

So there's something here about speech separating living and dead, where the mother is instructing the child to speak and Arthur's not going to be able to respond, just as the loon isn't going to be able to respond. Not that the loon can talk, but you know what I mean.

1:55 Wes: So you're getting at the relationship between death and keeping one's own counsel. Because I think, you know, on the one hand there's just the very literal fact. Yeah. We can't communicate when we're dead. Although if you've ever lost someone, you know, you know, which I know you have, the way the dead seem to try to communicate with us in our dreams and otherwise you might have experienced them, but people often do. But the other aspect of this is just that contemplativeness, which is maybe I'm reading too much into this, but which is what I associate with this image of the loon keeping its own counsel floating on the marble topped table. That kind of inwardness is an ascetic position, right. Rather than just going, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know how those loons love to talk. Whatever sounds. What are the sounds?

2:43 Erin: The crazy sounds. Yeah, the chatter.

2:46 Wes: Is it. Is there a thing about loons? And on Golden Pond there aren't loons featured in that. Yeah. Yes, but I forget the sound of their calls. But anyway, yeah, maybe they never shut up in real life. But if they could shut up, if they could restrain themselves a little bit, that would be an ascetic moment. And that the moment, moments of self restraint, right. To the extent that they are suppressive of instinct or desire or impulse, could be considered deathlike. Right. They rein life in, so to speak. So the limit of this, you know, for Nietzsche, it's science and all that stuff. Science and religion. Science and religion are the ultimate manifestations of this kind of asceticism.

3:31 Erin: You're reminding me, I mean, how in the previous part you made the connection between keeping one's own counsel and Canadian reserve. So, you know, we should note that this is the first death that the speaker has experienced. And she's obviously not registering, as I said, you know, she's not quite registering the loon as dead. She's registering the loon as thoughtful and contemplative, as you say, caressable and. Right. And otherwise she would think her relatives maybe just sitting there at a dinner table are dead. If she thought that that was the same thing.

But not speaking is the same thing as being dead. Right. There's a way in which she's not recognizing the loon as dead. And perhaps that is. Well, actually it just Occurred to me. Perhaps the loon is analogous to. If we know Bishop's biography is analogous to Bishop's father. Right. And the sense in which this child experiencing this. This first death that she's conscious of is at the same time not conscious of the death that's actually all around her. So she's not conscious of the loon as being dead. That this is a dead object that she's already come into contact with regularly, just as she was too young to register her father's death, which was for her or for her family, her first true death in Nova Scotia, the first death that she experienced there.

You know, I think this is just all indicative of the child's perspective that there's this breach of innocence. I don't know that, though, that there's actually loss of innocence here, because she's still kind of conceiving of maybe in the very last stanza, but she's still kind of conceiving of Arthur as an aestheticized object, as an imaginative page at court. When I say aesthetic object, I mean the fact that there's the cake and then Arthur compared to a doll. There's not really recognition he's embalmed as well.

5:22 Wes: Right. Aesthetic object in mimesis. It's all about preservation. In the case of the loon, it's preservation over a prolonged period of time. And it's not just a typical representation. Right. If you were to paint a picture of the loon, you might have immortalized it for however long a picture lasts. It's a bit different to write. Conflate the representation and the object of representation, which is what the taxidermy is doing. The taxidermied animals, in a way, just a representation of the living animal. But you're using the dead body of the.

Of the animal to represent what it was when it was living. It's a sort of insult added to injury. Maybe. But in the case of the right, the dead human being, they have to be embalmed and preserved long enough to say goodbye. And she is being confronted with that necessity. And I'm not sure she's being confronted with it in the nicest way. Although, again, I may just be reading into this, but when the mother says, come and say goodbye to your little cousin Arthur, and then gives her a flower to give him. I don't know, now that I'm reading it, maybe it's not so bad, but it seemed rather cavalier in the poem on my first reading.

But, yeah, I mean, I think maybe the point that you're getting at is that she's in a bit of denial about. As any child would be and as all of us are to some. To some extent about confronting the reality of the death and the preserved loon. Right. The loon that's still alive in a way, even though it's is dead. Lends itself to that kind of denial.

6:56 Erin: I think it's a lack of awareness. I think that she's only woken up to the idea of death and sees death as death in that final stanza. Prior to that, it doesn't seem that there's a recognition. So it's really just about what we recognize as death in our everyday lives and what we just sort of take for granted or walk past.

7:20 Wes: When do children comprehend death? I have this memory of my nephew who's now like a lawyer with his own children. But I remember when he was. I think when he was 3, we were at the Natural History Museum and Washington, D.C. and we were looking at the bones of dinosaurs. This is very apt story, I guess, for this poem. And it dawned on him that these are the bones of things that used to be living and that they were dead. And he had me explain this idea to him that these. It was as if he was shocked to learn that things could die. And then he said to me, let's not tell anyone else about this. Let's not tell anyone else. Yeah, very sweet.

8:01 Erin: Oh, I love that. Wants to preserve everybody else's innocence.

8:05 Wes: But I've always. Yeah, but I've always wondered, well, is. Am I just fabricating that story in my head? I forget. There is an typical age, I think, that they say that children start being able to comprehend death, but I don't remember.

8:20 Erin: It must have been in a movie for me.

8:22 Wes: Yeah. So she may be at an age here where the significance of death can't really be communicated to her.

8:27 Erin: Right.

8:28 Wes: Or she may be just at the point where she is learning that death is possible. And this is like the first real confrontation.

8:36 Erin: I mean, I think come and say goodbye is kind of your typical. You know, what else is this woman going to say?

8:41 Wes: Okay.

8:42 Erin: You know, it's kind of a typical thing for someone to say. And presumably these two children are around the same age. Because this. I mean, that's what makes this so extraordinarily tragic. That Arthur was very small. And this maybe is a desire on the part of the mother to give the child a sense of the need to say goodbye to this relationship that she might have had with Arthur as a playmate and recognize that he's not going to be your playmate in the future. I'm just reading into this, but this leads me into. I don't know if you had the same reading, but the strange wedding imagery that subsequently comes up in this stanza.

She gives him a lily of the valley. This is a flower traditionally associated with weddings, especially royal weddings. Royals always carry lily of the valley at their weddings. Though I think it can also be. It's unclear to me if just white regular lilies, which are actually an entirely different kind of flower than lilies of the valley, which are actually in the asparagus family. I saw. Anyway, white lilies, association with funerals versus lily of the valley, perhaps not being typically associated with funerals. Here they are. But they're typically associated with weddings.

And then we get Arthur's coffin as a little frosted cake. In my mind's eye, this is a white cake, so that's obviously a wedding.

10:06 Wes: It's funny, I was thinking of it as a chocolate cake because I'm drinking chocolate. The coffin is black or brown.

10:13 Erin: I don't know. I don't know if they have other types of. I mean, this would have to be a specially made coffin.

10:19 Wes: It could be a white coffin. It was just. It made me think of that show where they make things out of cake and you have to try to tell if it's, like, the real thing of the cake. First thing I would do is I would see if, is that a coffin or is there actually frosting on there? Dip my finger into it. But, yeah. No, I like this idea that you're introducing that because of the lily of the valley, we might think of this as a wedding cake.

10:45 Erin: I hate to speculate about this. I feel like I'm in a John Mulaney special talking about children's coffins. But would it be more likely to have a coffin for a child be white as a symbol of innocence, just as the lily of the valley? I don't know if in 1915 they were making white coffins or if they were only making white coffins for this specific purpose, or if you could only get one type of coffin in Nova Scotia, I have no idea.

11:15 Wes: It could just be a pine coffin. You know, it could be where it'd be white. Ish. But I like to think if his name is Arthur and he's got kings above him, he's got a nice fancy coffin there.

11:27 Erin: But who knows, right? This, I think, started off the chain of associations that made me realize, okay, we have these two children that are roughly the same age. They're cousins. We have this theme of royalty and of course we know. I mean, this is a stretch, but of course we know that cousins can marry in royal. You know, it's usual for cousins to marry in royal families. And there's a bit of inbreeding in the list of the figures in the chromograph, including King George with Queen Mary, which this might be their wedding portrait, we don't know, but they were of course a married couple.

And we have this idea that the speaker being of the same age, same size, there's just an idea of the pair of the pair of them together. And the wedding imagery maybe highlights that or it highlighted that for me that there was an implied closeness which isn't expressed in the poem, but which seems to come through via these angular means. Also, the idea of Arthur being a page, of joining the court as a page. I did look up in what circumstance? Because I associate royal pages with royal weddings. Right. You have the little boys serving as pages in the wedding.

And I looked it up and that is indeed the most common use of pages in attendance at royal weddings. That older boys in their teens would serve as pages in other types of official capacities, but that particularly young boys. So presumably boys of Arthur's age would serve as pages at a wedding. So just a further. You know, this is mysterious to me. I'm not sure why this is, but it's definitely. It's ringing wedding bells for me.

13:09 Wes: Well, funerals tend to do that, you know. But isn't that what they do at funerals, they throw an article of the dead person behind them and then the first person to catch it is gonna be the next one? Mary.

13:23 Erin: No, I was taking you seriously for a second.

13:27 Wes: You know, it occurred to me while you were talking, because the coffin is a little frosted cake and the red eyed loon eyed it from his white frozen lake. Loons really do have weird red eyes in real life, right?

13:38 Erin: Mm.

13:39 Wes: And the loon is white breasted, but mainly they're black.

13:43 Erin: Right, right. And this is, I'm assuming, the child's interpretation.

13:48 Wes: Right.

13:48 Erin: And so now the child is ascribing a kind of desire or appetitiveness to the loon.

13:54 Wes: Yeah.

13:55 Erin: Being hungry.

13:56 Wes: Yep. So that the coffin becomes something that could feed the living as opposed to something that is just a vehicle for the dead to the underworld or to the royal court or wherever it is you're gonna go.

14:13 Erin: Arthur is like a doll. You know, one thinks of the figurines at the top of a wedding cake. One thinks of the fact that little girls may play wedding with their dolls.

14:23 Wes: So that's it. This is interesting. Yeah. He was very small. So there's these different references to littleness of Arthur. One is the come and say goodbye to your little cousin. The coffin was a little frosted cake. And then Arthur was very small. Right.

14:39 Erin: Maybe he's even younger than the speaker. Gosh. Maybe he's only two.

14:42 Wes: Yeah. So that's. Is that enough cake for everyone? Just kidding, Sorry.

14:47 Erin: Oh God.

14:50 Wes: It's just thinking of the tininess, how tiny the coffin must be.

14:55 Erin: Yikes.

14:56 Wes: Substantial reduction in the cake, the amount of cake. But. But seriously. So yeah, I think we're meant to think of a very small coffin and we have this doll like figure in it who hasn't been painted yet and so is pale. But this is the part I was going to have you to explain to me. Jack Frost had started to paint him the way he always painted the maple leaf forever. All right. Yeah. So I'm getting the image of something like limned around the edges with color or something that's just been something unpainted that's has been painted a little bit. But I don't know what the reference here is.

15:34 Erin: Okay, so this is what I was going to actually begin the episode with. I wanted to ask you about this because I had only ever associated Jack Frost. Tell me if you identify with this with the ice on the window pane, with the frost on the grass or on leaves.

15:53 Wes: Exactly.

15:54 Erin: So I associated him in other words, with just with coloring things white. Yes. Then I looked him up because I was like, wait a minute, I never noticed this before, but he's doing, it seems the opposite of what he should be doing. So he's actually adding color where one would think that she would say, oh, the boy was normal. And then Jack Frost had painted the whiteness on the rest of the body. But in fact, Jack Frost traditionally does both. Paints the leaves red in autumn. So he colors the leaves and he is responsible for coatings of ice and snow, etc.

So this is related to the false warmth or the false promise of aesthetics or aestheticized objects, I should say, because there's warmth here with the red, which is the hot color. But like the glass eye of the stuffed bird, it's a deceptive red. It's not the red of vitality, but it's red as a signal of death. Because the leaves are preparing to fall by turning red and then will be either before or after they fall, coated in white again. So it's a short lived red. And then they're going to turn brown and Then Jack Frost is going to do the second phase of his painting project and turn everything, I guess, back to baseline, just white, blank.

17:15 Wes: What is this painting of the Maple Leaf Forever? What is that again?

17:20 Erin: I looked this up. Maple Leaf Forever, no parentheses, is the title of a patriotic British Canadian song. And obviously the maple leaf is the symbol of Canada. So it's sort of using Maple Leaf forever as they're saying, like, Canada is immortal. Rah, rah, Canada. In context here, it's obviously pointing out that it was kind of an ironic object to associate with foreverness when leaves are quite transient, you know, it's not like plutonium forever or something like that.

17:53 Wes: And then the red strokes on the hair. So that's an odd. Another odd image because presumably his hair isn't white. His hair probably isn't red either. And I considered blood, but that seems very unlikely, implausible.

18:08 Erin: I think that Arthur is a redhead.

18:10 Wes: Okay.

18:11 Erin: That has to be the only thing. And so she's sort of imagining that he's.

18:15 Wes: He has the red hair, but his. Yeah, his skin is white. Okay. That's what it is.

18:20 Erin: Right, Right.

18:21 Wes: That's the only color that's left to him. Okay.

18:23 Erin: Right. And so she's not really thinking. This is interesting. She's not really thinking of Arthur in his former state. She's seeing him as an unpainted doll, not living Arthur, who's now turned white. She's seeing him as a sort of like brand new unpainted doll, Arthur.

18:43 Wes: So it's not that he's just lost his color, it's that he's about to get his color. It's an interesting reversal.

18:48 Erin: Yes. Yeah. And there's an intervention that's been made and then abandoned by Jack Frost to paint him.

18:55 Wes: Poor Arthur.

18:56 Erin: The act of painting itself is this touch, this aesthetic touch. But there's still sort of contact, Right. In this poem's repeated references to the desire to touch, the desire to, in the case of the cold breast of the bird or maybe the marbles, the desire to touch and hence warm up. And so here, the imagination of the child, anyway, tells us that Jack Frost has touched the hair with this red, vital color, but then otherwise abandoned the project. And anyway, the red is associated with a maple leaf. And so this red is actually a signal of death. So there's a dead end, so to speak, for vitality.

19:41 Wes: There's the opportunity to return to color, the color of the chromograph, to the royal court, where they're wearing their red and ermine. Ermine. Ermine. Ermine.

19:52 Erin: Ermine.

19:53 Wes: Ermine. Wow. And warmth again, Right. Feet wrapped up, invited Arthur to be the smallest page at court. Right. So another. Again, another reference to his smallness, his diminutiveness, and I guess to his youth, his age. But he can't go because his eyes are shut up tight and the roads are deep in snow, so his passage is barred. And in any case, he wouldn't be able to see where he's going. And maybe the eyes being shut. Right. The significance of color is not even available to him. He's beyond the ability to comprehend color versus no color. So it's a very poignant image.

Right. So the whole arc of the poem is that, right, in the color of the chromographs, she sees life or afterlife or transcendence of a sort, Right. With the royal aspect of it. And so there's. There's some hope set up for Arthur for what's going to happen to him in the wake of his death, which is cut off at the very end of the poem.

21:00 Erin: The associative logic that I mentioned in the previous part between the stanzas. I especially love it here because she's talking about Jack Frost being a painter and coloring. And then we get the return to the chromographs, of course, which are colored, highly colored on the walls. So it makes her look back up at them, too, as she's sort of realizing that there's nothing bright left for her to look at on Arthur's body, which is plain. And so she drifts up again to the thing that would capture her attention, the colored photographs. And then the royal couples are warm. Here we get explicitly told, you know, that color and red is warm, and

21:40 Wes: ermine is reminiscent of the feathers of the bird.

21:43 Erin: This is a chromograph of ermine. Right. So literally, the ermine may look warm to the speaker, but of course, if you touched it, it would be cold. This is not real ermine. It's an aestheticized ermine that can't offer warmth.

21:59 Wes: If you can't stuff animals, wear them.

22:03 Erin: Right.

22:03 Wes: I just looked this up. There's stoats. It's made from stoats. Ermine. Have you ever seen a stoat?

22:10 Erin: Yes, I've seen ermine, too. Yeah?

22:15 Wes: Have you?

22:15 Erin: What's it like? Ermine? It's very warm.

22:18 Wes: Fabulous.

22:19 Erin: Very.

22:20 Wes: Very.

22:20 Erin: Yes, very fancy. Very. I do not condone the wearing of fur, but I have seen.

22:25 Wes: Oh, you know, real ermine. I didn't know you had a position on that.

22:28 Erin: Yeah, I think it's. It's really? Actually really nasty and horrible. What's. These farms where they. Yeah, I don't even want to think about it.

22:38 Wes: So. Yeah. Something I don't know anything about. All right, so don't do that. People don't shoot loons and stuff. Don't move her. And don't make the mistake of thinking the coffin is a frosted cake, because I did last time and that did not go well.

22:57 Erin: Wasn't enough to go around. I'm sure there was plenty of cake at President Taft's funeral.

23:05 Wes: Wow. I haven't laughed that hard about the 19th century since 19th century. Reference going over. Yeah.

23:17 Erin: Yep. I try to keep all my comedy very au Courant.

23:22 Wes: He's 1909 to 1913.

23:24 Erin: Right, Taft?

23:26 Wes: Yeah, sure. Yeah. Okay. I'm calling it 19th century.

23:30 Erin: It was probably an urban legend that he was buried in a piano case. Right.

23:33 Wes: You know, he was born in 1857. So. All right. No, I'm just. Just, you know, catching myself on saying 19th century, but okay, I know.

23:41 Erin: Yeah. I was like, ah, early 20th century. Same. I mean, he was still reigning in.

23:47 Wes: You gotta reign me in. These bad facts.

23:50 Erin: Sorry.

23:51 Wes: Jump on them.

23:52 Erin: I don't mean to be a. Know it all that, you know. Oh, I know my presidents and when they were around. Anyway, do. Do you agree with my idea or, you know, I don't know if I agree with it, but. But do you think that they invited Arthur to be the smallest page at court is an idea that's been lent her by the mother? Or is this something that occurs to the speaker or that the speaker imagines?

24:15 Wes: I think it's more poignant if this is just a child's imagination trying to deal with death. But what would the adults be explicitly doing?

24:26 Erin: Well, the mother might say, oh, Arthur's going to go. You have to say goodbye to him because he's going to go off now to Never Never Land.

24:34 Wes: Yeah. So certainly a possibility. But even. Even if it hasn't been explicitly stated, I think it is kind of implicit. Right. In the scene and in the. And in the social dynamics. It's certainly that idea that he's off to royal heaven or might be off the royal heaven seems to be implicit, but. Yeah. So you seem to like the reading that she's been told that.

24:56 Erin: I don't know which I prefer, but I think it's interesting that it's so immediately refuted with that. But. So it's almost as though she's been told this and then that's the moment when it kind of hits when the Reality of this hits her as we've been kind of leading up to that. She finally kind of understands that what's gone on here and what's impossible here, she looks out and realizes, wait a minute, this story, right, that she's either invented or that she's been given by the mother can't be true. So, in other words, life isn't a fairy tale. He's not going to be a page at court. This is real life. He's really dead and he's not coming back.

25:36 Wes: Yeah. The royal figures, the couples are. They're inviting Arthur. Right. So there's a call and response here. So she's recognizing them as inviting Arthur. And then her thought is a response to that invitation, which is not to say, you know, she might not also have been told this, but in the fantasy that we have in the poem, she's responding to this invitation.

26:00 Erin: Well, and perhaps this is a stretch, but I thought of the fact that there's this immediate friction here at the end between these competing thoughts. The imaginative fancy that Arthur is going to be a page at court and the reality of the snow on the roads contradict. So within the speaker's mind, there's a kind of. Again, I'm using friction because, you know, I'm thinking that while friction is kind of a warm. It's a warm idea, there's a discursive and imaginative conflict there, or an internal argument between her fantasy and the reality. And this is also the moment, I think, where there's a kind of closeness to Arthur, which is further evidence for my idea that in her mind now, internally, there is this true moment of warmth both from the friction between these two ideas.

And then because she occupies, in a way, the perspective of Arthur in order to put together that he wouldn't be able to go out. And his eyes are shut up tight. I mean, they're partly shut up tight to keep her out. He's in a world. He's in a state of his own. He's not looking at her. He's not. There's no obvious. Of course, there's no communication going on there, but she's sort of occupying Arthur's perspective and then pitying him, pitying the impossibility of this. And that, too, to me, is creating a closeness with him, really, for the first time, because she's.

Because I think prior to this, there's emotional distance where she's not getting it.

27:26 Wes: Absolutely.

27:26 Erin: So there's sort of a redeeming warmth at the end, strangely, with this moment of impossibility and of the tension or the friction between imagination and reality.

27:36 Wes: Yeah, this is a really good point. We really don't have any direct sense of her sentiments until the end. Right. She doesn't say my. My cousin. Right. It's Uncle Arthur, Arthur's father. And she's disassociated maybe a little bit. Right. And there's the movement to the loon. We hear some narrative of what her mother is saying. And the mother calls him little cousin Arthur. And then she picks up that word in the fantasy. Right. The little frosted cake. And Arthur was very small. We get the beginning of some sentiment towards him in this. But otherwise it's very.

Yeah, it's. It's quite distant. Right. For the most. For most of the poem. And then at the very end, I suppose it's in. You know, again, it's not a direct statement of feeling. Right. Of grief or sadness or something like that. But it's such a poignant question. How could Arthur go. It's a great way to capture the feeling. Right. That you might get when someone has died.

28:39 Erin: That's right.

28:40 Wes: Originally, the end of the poem was. And she was sad. And that she rewrote that line many, many times. So finally she settled upon. But how could Arthur go. Anyway. Sorry.

28:52 Erin: No, no, no.

28:53 Wes: Or I was sad. Was it she was sad? Or I was sad and I was sad. Sorry. Yeah. Do you have any. You want to give some last words?

29:03 Erin: No, just. This is such a. Yeah. All speech, I guess, in this. So in this poem is memorial. Yeah. Just the poignancy of the ending and the irregular rhymes. Or even the perfect rhymes. Right. With repeating words. Say in the stanza above. Forever. Rhymed with forever here. It's such a simple rhyme. Go and snow. Which at the same time, like, there's a. There's such a finality with that last rhyme. We get this perfect juxtaposition between the two ideas that we've been talking about.

29:37 Wes: Go.

29:38 Erin: Which is indicative of vitality, movement, aliveness and snow. The frozen and static, the dead.

29:46 Wes: Very good. Yeah. So next time we'll be doing. The logical successor to this poem is Planet of the Apes. Of course.

29:54 Erin: Of course. It's an anti taxidermy movie. Right.

30:01 Wes: That's true. The animals have revolted, just like the peasants. They're revolting. It's 1968. That. That version, as listeners to the show can imagine, it's one of my favorite films. Just because it's 1970s adjacent,

30:17 Erin: spiritually 70s

30:20 Wes: and Charlton Heston, you know. Yeah. So it'll be Planet of the apes and then the power and the glory. Graham Greene.

30:27 Erin: Just more. More logical progression. Okay?

30:30 Wes: It all fits together somehow.

30:34 Erin: We always find it. We always find a connection. All right. Thank you.

30:38 Wes: Thank. You.

In the cold, cold parlor of Elizabeth Bishop’s “First Death in Nova Scotia,” a child is lifted up to say goodbye to her little cousin Arthur, laid out beneath chromographs of the British royal family and beside a loon shot and stuffed by Arthur’s own father. The title is a small lie: the first death in Nova Scotia was that of Bishop’s father, which she was too young to remember. What the child sees instead is a world sorted into hot and cold, near and far—the brilliantly colored, distant royals; the white, frozen bird keeping its own counsel; red glass eyes “much to be desired.” What does a preserved, aestheticized death invite us to feel, and what does it hold at a distance? Wes & Erin continue their reading of Bishop’s poems.

Upcoming Episodes: “Planet of the Apes” (1968); Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory.”

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Transcript

0:11 Erin: Welcome to part three of our discussion of the poems of Elizabeth Bishop. Today we're going to be focusing on First Death in Nova Scotia. Wes, I was just wondering, were you familiar with this poem at all before I suggested it?

0:26 Wes: No, not at all. And I have to admit that I've been actually thinking about the poem, but the title that's been in my head is Last Death in Nova Scotia. Odd transposition.

0:40 Erin: Not really. I think the title. You're anticipating my first point, which is going to be that the title is a bit of a lie. If we know anything about Bishop's biography, which we do because we covered it. Her previous parts. Right. The first death in Nova Scotia that she would have experienced, though she wouldn't have remembered it, was the death of her father. Did you enjoy it? This is one of my favorite.

1:01 Wes: Yes, it's great.

1:02 Erin: Yeah. It's not among the best known of her poems, but I mean, every single one is really a gem. This is from Questions of travel from 1965. That collection has two sections to it. One called Brazil, which is obviously Brazilian poems, and then one called Elsewhere. And this is in the Elsewhere section, of course. Should I start out just by reading it and then we'll dive in?

1:29 Wes: Yeah.

1:31 Erin: First Death in Nova Scotia. In the cold, cold parlor, my mother laid out Arthur beneath the chromographs Edward, Prince of Wales with Princess Alexandra and King George with Queen Mary. Below them on the table stood a stuffed loon, shot and stuffed by Uncle Arthur, Arthur's father. Since Uncle Arthur fired a bullet into him, he hadn't said a word. He kept his own counsel on his white frozen lake, the marble topped table. His breast was deep and white, cold and caressible. His eyes were red glass, much to be desired. Come, said my mother, Come and say goodbye to your little cousin Arthur.

I was lifted up and given one lily of the valley to put in Arthur's hand. Arthur's coffin was a little frosted cake and the red eyed loon eyed it from his white frozen lake. Arthur was very small. He was all white, like a doll that hadn't been painted yet. Jack Frost had started to paint him the way he always painted the maple leaf forever. He had just begun. On his hair a few red strokes. And then Jack Frost had dropped the brush and left him white forever. The gracious royal couples were warm in red and ermine. Their feet were well wrapped up in the ladies ermine trains.

They invited Arthur to be the smallest page at court. But how could Arthur go Clutching his tiny lily with his eyes shut up so tight and the road steep in snow.

3:14 Wes: Really great. You should try to say, stood a stuffed loon, shot and stuffed three times really fast.

3:22 Erin: I know.

3:24 Wes: Stood a stuffed loon, shot and stuffed. What kind of people put. I was gonna say taxonomy. That's not right. What's the word for stuffed?

3:33 Erin: Taxidermy.

3:34 Wes: Taxidermy. Taxidermy. At a funeral or at a viewing or whatever it is. It's a little insensitive, don't you think? A little. Uncle Arthur fired a bullet into him and it's like, wait, did Uncle Arthur kill the little boy or did he kill the loon? Sorry.

3:53 Erin: I know. What is this connection? Yeah, I mean, I think this is the invasion of death into the normal. You know, the normal life of the domestic scene. So this loon is ordinarily there in some kind of Canadian flowchart going down from the. You know, the British royal family to the stuffed loon on the table.

4:15 Wes: Canadian flow chart. Canada is pretty far down the chart.

4:23 Erin: But in the accident of proximity, you know, some really interesting kind of mental association is happening. Which sort of. Everything in the poem operates through this kind of association. I think even between the different stanzas. This is a poem of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 stanzas of 10 lines each. Short lines. They're trimeter lines. I just was noticing a lot of sort of surprisingly logical jumps. And, of course, it occupies, for the most part, the child's mind. Or it's kind of like a tunnel view where you have the adult looking through the mind of the child looking at the scene.

So that kind of associative logic is childlike as well. Like, there must be something that Arthur has to do with these pictures on the wall, though. I actually think that that connection with Arthur being a page at court must have been suggested by the mother. That's at least my reading, because it's immediately refuted by the child with that. But. And that logical refutation which suggests that the mother said, oh, Arthur's going off to be page. Of course, I guess the mothers also made the association between Arthur and these images. I don't know.

5:31 Wes: I hadn't thought of that. But it's a very poignant moment whether or not that's been put into her head by an adult or whether she's just thought of that herself as if the royal scene represented part of heaven or something like that. But in the beginning. Let's talk about these chromographs. And I looked this up, and it's. Technically, they're what there's a different word for this. And I forgot.

5:56 Erin: Chromolithography.

5:57 Wes: Yes. Okay. Chromolithograph. These very colorful pictures in contrast to the whiteness of the boy and the loon. Although I guess he's still got a little color. We'll talk about. You might have to explain that to me a little bit, but. Yeah. What is the. Maybe we should speak of this. The general significance and the specific significance. Why do people have these representations of royalty in their homes? It's a very middle class sort of thing. I remember my older sister, who's like 11 years older than me, who we, you know, we all lived in England and Ireland and she went to school in England and she had an English accent by the time she came to the United States.

But she had all these little pewter figures of all the royalty in England. And it's kind of a little. A single. I don't know what you call it. You know, kind of little shelves that you put on the wall, small, small pewter figurines, but all in a. All the king, all the royalty, and a little. Whoever lived in a little house together, so to speak. I don't think they'd get along very well. They didn't, but. What is that? I don't know if this is a trite question. It's like I'm asking what the fascination with royalty is, but we kind of know that. But you know what I mean.

7:05 Erin: Well, I have something in common with your sister. I do love souvenirs of Tudor royalty, at least. And I do have a couple of things from the Queen's Jubilee, because I was over there, luckily, right after her jubilee, when all this stuff was being sold. And then shortly thereafter, she passed away. So I picked up a few things. I do like them. I think the important thing is that these are colored. I mean, the color is an important part of the last stanza. But I think that for the most part, these chromographs or chromolithographs, a lot of times they were, I guess, like hand painted.

The really well done ones could be mistaken for art, for a painting. And so that made them a little bit suspicious, I think. But also they were used because they're so highly colored. They were used in things like advertisements, like tourist advertisements showing a beautiful view of someplace. And they were also used in children's books, so an illustrated book of maybe fairy stories or something that would appeal to children. I think that association in particular is what's prevalent here.

8:08 Wes: Right.

8:08 Erin: The child's name is Arthur. He's also a junior. So this sort of idea of faint idea of succession and these images on the wall which are obviously part of British Canadian culture, this is. Their monarch is still very distant at the same time. So. And that distance perhaps creating a kind of mythology or the desire to have these people say artificially close. The only way that they. That a Canadian would be likely to see these. These royal figures is through one of these chromographs. And I think that that idea of distance and closeness as well as of hot and cold, the hot and cold poles in Bishop are really important. Right. And even in this book, the book itself, Questions of Travel, which I mentioned has these two sections which are kind of like poles, Brazil and elsewhere. There's a hot and cold association between those two.

9:04 Wes: Right.

9:04 Erin: Brazil being the hot place and elsewhere as just a general marker of some kind of remote other being cold. I started to read this whole poem through that kind of vector with cold associated with remoteness and heat with closeness. Of course, not a groundbreaking connection, but you have this idea of these people on the wall who you want to keep close. But as we'll see again and again in the poem, art objects are kind of suspect and maybe they promise a closeness which is in fact really a distance.

9:40 Wes: Yeah. And in this case. Right. It's the. I'm not sure if this is what you're suggesting, but you know, as a Canadian, you might want to say, look, I have roots in the. In the old country.

9:49 Erin: Right.

9:50 Wes: In America we're proud of rebelling. We don't think, let's put royalty on our walls. So maybe some people do. But in Canada, despite the difference and the distance, you know, you could think, well, I'm still connected to the motherland in some important way. I guess I was thinking of this when you said the false closeness that it promises. Right. So this is a connection to ancestry, I guess, and genetic ancestry and cultural ancestry. And arguably it's probably not that important. Maybe I'm overstating that now I'm thinking of, oh, wait a minute, what about English common law and how important it is in the United States?

And I. I don't know. Right. But there's this promise. So the, the heaven parallel that I'm noting that I think comes later, as if the. In death you're right, you're going to return to the court here. You're going to return to this higher up realm. Right. It's royalty. So it's also higher up, like heaven. And it's. There's lots of parallels. We could say to divinity. And they are the royalty, after all, are supposed to be established by divine right. So to go become a page there is analogous to being a little angel and going up to heaven. So. But the picture on the wall is suggestive of a destination for the one who's deceased.

And it's a destination which is very colorful in contrast to the, you know, the whiteness of the deceased, although it has little, you know, he, the little boy apparently has some color in his hair. I don't really understand that part, but we'll get to it. And then the loon has the red eyes and the. So there is. That's. There's a. In there. Limned L, I, M, N. Is that right? Limned with color? A little bit. And maybe it's a little bit painted on in the way it is with a chromolithograph, something like that. But yeah, this is what you made me think of when you're talking about the.

Was it the false promise of the aesthetic object or the promise of closeness that you can't really get? I don't know if this is related to what you're saying.

11:50 Erin: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. The false promise of closeness or the false idea that through the aesthetic object you can achieve a kind of closeness with. With what? I don't know. I mean, I suppose with certain sets of abstractions. Right. Like what you're referring to. Heritage, national identity, you know, in keeping with that too, or in a further, you know, nod to that desire for proximity to heritage in England. The boy's name is Arthur, which, you know, there couldn't be a more resonant English name than that. And obviously the fact that his name is Arthur and he's been struck down, we don't know by what. Maybe the flu. Right, exactly.

12:31 Wes: Also a very royal name.

12:32 Erin: Right. But, you know, the combination of this boy's name with the position that he's in obviously is full of pathos. That seems to me to be a gesture. Not that Arthur isn't a common name already, but there's the fact that his father is Arthur and there's this, like I said, idea of succession that seems to be an invocation of a kind or self conscious gesture that a person who is really into royalty and whose name happens to be Arthur, who perhaps inherited, you know, being really into royalty from his father, names his son Arthur as well. And then, as you suggest with that last stanza, where Arthur goes and imaginatively joins the court as a royal page, the speaker's imagination, or in the mother's imagination, which she has then infused in the girl, the speaker, that is a fairy story.

A further. A further kind of aestheticized or artistic, if you will, kind of idea that's contrasted with the cold reality, which is that they're in Canada, the streets are full of snow. He can't get there. You know, not to mention that he's also dead. And so there's the desire through imagination to give Arthur proximity to royalty and warmth and to all of these values and the reality that these are. That this is a false promise or this is a false association to be making or flight of fancy.

13:55 Wes: Yeah. So also. Yeah. You're making me think the coldness of Canada and the snowiness of Canada further accentuates the being cut off from the motherland, so to speak. And the images of color are like a way of. Like the colorful images are represent an overcoming of that distance, the distance between Canada and England. And in a way, the settlers, the. Is that what you call them, immigrants? They're more than immigrants, though, I guess. They're settlers from England, the people who settled Canada. Any. Right. In a way, they've been cast off and in some cases. Right. They were fleeing persecution maybe. I don't know. It's not like Australia is a penal colony.

14:42 Erin: Right, Right. And it's not. It's not like America either, where the

14:46 Wes: Puritans were trying to get out of there. I mean, some of it is about opportunity, but I don't know specifically the history of Canada, but just feeling of being like an orphaned child, maybe. Right. The death of the child here becomes resonant with the position of someone who's cut off from the. From the motherland and the more colorful origin. Something like that. But I like the way she. Right. We learn of her relationship to him. Right. To Arthur. Without her mentioning herself or the fact that he's her cousin. Right. I have to do the math to figure out if that's right.

15:27 Erin: No, that's right.

15:28 Wes: And that's stuffed by Uncle Arthur, Arthur's father. And I like. I really like that. What is it? Enjambment.

15:37 Erin: Yes.

15:38 Wes: And then also you get the relationship on the other side between uncle and father. Anyway, so we learn of her relationship without any direct mention of it.

15:48 Erin: Let's scroll back just a little bit, though, because I want to dig in actually, just to those first two lines because I think they support your point.

15:55 Wes: Yeah. It's very unusual for us to be past the first two lines.

15:59 Erin: Right.

16:01 Wes: Three minute mark. So you back us up.

16:03 Erin: Right. In the cold, cold parlor, which I've got to Say that this is the first poem that actually induced the realization for me that parlor is a very cold word. And ever since then, I've thought of parlor as a cold word. I want to talk about that with. With loon as well, which is a word which is aerated. You know, it has holes in it for the wind to blow through or something. So parlor is a cold word. And obviously we're going to get several images of the domestic space being quite cold, I think, not only because of the fact that it's obviously the dead of winter, but that there's something going on here because my mother laid out Arthur.

And then the only two living figures in the poem are the speaker and the mother. Uncle Arthur is referred to, but he's not present. The mother is laying out the body of the boy. For obvious reasons, one would think that the parents of Arthur are actually absent from this scene out of grief. Right. But they're elsewhere. Which is, again, I think it speaks somehow to this idea of heritage or this strange thing that's happening with Fatherland Father Ness. You know, there's a sort of. Maybe there's a guilt that is suggested with the loon, but there.

But there's an absence. And so then there's also this idea that grief brings closeness. Right. The mother has to touch Arthur, lay out his body. The speaker is instructed to hand the lily of the valley to Arthur and say goodbye to him, and to speak to him as if he is alive. But then also, of course, the alienation and the distance of grief and death, which is suggested by the absence of Arthur's parent.

17:44 Wes: Well, I want to repeat what I said in the beginning. If I were laying out a body, I might take the stuffed dead animal that happens to be in the room and move it somewhere else. Seems a little bit insensitive. So I think maybe that sensitivity.

18:00 Erin: But, I mean, it's interesting to consider why.

18:03 Wes: Because I don't want to draw any. Draw, like, any sort of comparison between the dead boy and the dead animal.

18:11 Erin: But don't you think that. Very insensitivity. I mean, stuffed, it's used twice. It's quite violent in a way.

18:17 Wes: Yeah. And I think this is the other point I was gonna make is that, well, hunting, it's the sport of kings, right? It's the recreation of royalty. Horseback and fox and, you know, the typical tropes here. Right. And. And maybe I've seen too much Game of Thrones where, you know, it's. Yeah, it's a mark of royalty in the sense, to some extent, if you have that much power and wealth. You've escaped necessity. Necessity, meaning what we have to do to survive. That represents a more primitive condition that we're no longer in yet. The royals can voluntarily return to that and treat it as a form of recreation.

So I think that that's significant. And then the other part of this is that, yeah, the boy is placed in parallel to the stuffed loon who has been killed by hunting. And we get that, you know, Arthur fired a bullet into him, and we have to figure out that it's not the little boy, it's the loon that has to have the bullet fired into it. So I think there's a purposeful confusion or parallel between the boy and the loon. And the effect in the beginning of the poem is to say somehow he's a victim of this royal space or whatever it is, this royal thing, and at the end of it, he needs to return to it.

Or that's what his afterlife might. What might constitute his afterlife.

19:39 Erin: I think you're definitely right. But as you were talking, another reading of why the Loon is There occurred to me, which is that it would be deliberately left there to be. This is a little wacky. But to be in attendance at the. No, no, no, hear me out. I know it's stupid. The loon is the symbol of Canada, one of the symbols. And we also have the royal figures. So it interestingly reverses the ending idea of Arthur serving at court, where here they are in attendance at his funeral, in a way. So we have the British royalty, the symbol of Canada. I mean, it's gruesome and bizarre and very.

20:20 Wes: No, as you said, that I just had this image of me, my own funeral and someone putting my stuffed cat. Oh, no.

20:29 Erin: Well, hey, that's very.

20:30 Wes: In the casket with me.

20:32 Erin: Yeah,

20:34 Wes: right. She could attend. Attend to me for. Be in attendance with me forever.

20:40 Erin: But, yeah, it's also worth saying, and I don't know if I mentioned this before, but there's, you know, with hot and cold polarities in questions of travel. We just had a bunch of poems about Brazil. And obviously Brazilians have gregarious nature, et cetera. The Maritimes, at least, perhaps Canada more generally. I don't know. I only know from, like, Anne of Green Gables that the Maritimes are very strongly associated with a characteristic reserve. So there's also a kind of. Right. Which is very British, obviously. So I think British Canadians would identify with a kind of Canadian reserve. So there's a kind of stiff quality and of course, a coldness. Right. Associated with Reserve as well. Which might think that a stuffed bird has to salute at the

21:33 Wes: dead comrade offending the Canadians. Erin, don't you know there are enemies? So.

21:38 Erin: Yeah, please, please.

21:40 Wes: I love.

21:40 Erin: I love Canadians. I really hope I'm not miscarry. I think this is. I think this is well known.

21:46 Wes: Yeah. Animals at funerals and.

21:49 Erin: No, no, no, I don't. I'm just saying. I'm just saying. I think this is a particularly weird. Obviously particularly weird, formal kind of family. I know plenty of very warm Canadians. It's more of a historical association. The same way that we would associate, historically, the British with being more. More reserved, say, Pre World War II, pre 60s, whatever. Pre Diana's death. I don't know. Anyway, I'm gonna get myself into trouble. Please, Canadians, I love you. I really do. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to truck in these stereotypes if I am.

22:23 Wes: I think Canadians are used to being loved or at least liked because they're so likable.

22:27 Erin: They are. But they're also ignored and wrongfully so because we're just the most obnoxious youngest child on earth. Getting all the attention now.

22:38 Wes: You're just buttering up the Canadians now.

22:40 Erin: No, that's how I really feel. And I feel really bad about. I just feel really embarrassed as an American, obviously.

22:46 Wes: Yeah, sure.

22:47 Erin: Not to get political anyway, so I

22:49 Wes: think it is quite funny, you know, since Uncle Arthur fired a bullet in him. He hadn't said a word. It's funny whether or not you have to stop to think about whether that's the boy or the. The loon. But then there's a turn here to really a great image of the loon keeping his own counsel. So that. That cold temperature. Right? So we get a number of associations here between lack of color and coldness and the frozenness. But also the frozenness of the body, right, that is no longer alive. But now we get an association with that and reserve, you know, the kind of reserve that you were talking about, which can be contemplativeness.

He kept his own counsel. So the. Yeah, the bird hadn't said a word. The bird is the word. No, the bird hadn't said a word. And since it was killed, of course, it never could have said a word. But now that becomes keeping his own counsel, giving this image of contemplativeness, right? There's a depth to the breast that is white and cold and caressible. And then there's a little turn at the end where the. You have the eyes that are red glass. So a bit of color standing out here in something white and then desire, which is another shift right from contemplativeness.

Now this little touch of desire that's been added to that frozen white contemplative image. It's a line that at least, yeah, it was unexpected for me and I don't know. Yeah. What is much to be desired here.

24:26 Erin: I did a little bit of research into children's marble games and the red marbles were highly desired by children. I worked this out. Obviously, if Bishop's mother is in the poem, it has to be before she was committed, when Bishop was 5 years old. So I would estimate since Bishop was born in 1911, that this is taking place around 1915. Say she's four years old and she's. Or maybe she's newly five. I don't know. I think three would be a little young for what goes on in the poem. But we're talking about a four, maybe five year old girl who may be, if not playing marble games because she doesn't have the dexterity, maybe kind of collecting them because they were also sort of desirable, just as collectible objects at this time.

I should also scroll back and say just in passing that if this is dated around 1915, Edward, Prince of Wales, Princess Alexandra, King George and Queen Mary. These represent three generations of royalty actually. So there is kind of a heritage happening even within the chromographs on the wall. There's so much going on here because of this conflict between cold and the warmth of touch. As if cold things are calling out for something to warm them up. So the cold breast of the bird is actually calling out for touch somehow. And the caress would then warm the feathers of the bird.

Obviously cold marbles haven't been touched for a while, are going to get warmed up by the heat of one's hand. I don't know if you had marbles as a kid, but I used to like to run my hand over the tops of. You know, like if you had a bag of marbles, you put your hand in and you like that cold feeling. There's kind of that yin yang there. There's the yin yang of fired and the dead bird. So the act of killing is a kind of a warm act. There's a hot, cold association there. There's the fact that the loon, which is an aquatic bird and of course it's associated with Canada, so it's used to frozen lakes.

Yet at the same time there's an obvious barrier being created by the imaginative frozenness so that the loon can't dive under the water. Or would have to find, you know, would have to break through the ice or find a way to get into the water in order to do its aquatic bird thing. I read online that these loons actually can't really walk very well because their legs are so far back for swimming purposes that on land they kind of like stumble around. And so they really are only made for water. And here we have this, the frozen lake, which is kind of.

Kind of barrier between them and their natural habitat. A cold barrier. And then the red glass, obviously, red being a hot color again. And red will return again and again. But this is the loons real eyes, of course, they've been replaced with glass in the taxidermy process. But loons in real life have red eyes. Very striking red eyes. And these are obviously, you know, these marbles chosen to resemble the loon's eyes in life. So a lot going on here that I think, then kind of coalesces in the rest of the poem.

27:34 Wes: So it's interesting here that death can induce this kind of desire. And I mean, not just death, but the static, contemplative image created by the preserved loon. Right. The frozen, stuffed, dead loon. Right. It doesn't just leave you uninterested. It creates interest and you want to caress it. In that case, it's clear what you want to do with your desire. But in the case of the eyes, it's. That's left vague. You know, they're much to be desired. Although I like your explanation in terms of marbles. Right. We might just want to possess the things that the eyes are made of here.

And they're like gemstones. Can think of that as another royal association. So something about death and frozenness can induce a kind of desire, which is odd, right? Because of killing something or when something is dead for that thing, it's the cessation of desire. But just to go back to hunting and royalty, Right. If you're above necessity and the need for survival, it's an interesting sort of occupation to curate death. Right. To hunt for sport and to then preserve those dead objects. As if to keep them alive forever. But to keep them alive forever in a dead state.

And as if to bring the natural world into the living room or into your home in general. When, of course, to be natural is to be growing and alive truly. So maybe this says something about your talk of the aesthetic object. Or maybe it says something about representation in general and the limits of representation. So we do a little bit of taxidermy, maybe even in poetry, I don't know. If that really works. But certainly whether it's chromographs or other forms of representation, of course they leave the real thing behind and the representation itself is not alive, at least in the same sense.

29:37 Erin: Right. I was thinking actually, as you were talking about the warmth of desire being related to the appetitive, you know, and what you've talked about so often with art and the appetitive. We want to caress the bird, we want to touch the. Right. There's something about these art objects which are, which are, you know, I'm calling the taxidermied loon an art object merely because I think in this maybe middle class home, Right. These are these and the chromographs, you know, not top tier art objects or meant as art objects. But yeah, the heat of desire.

And yet in relation to art, we always come up against a barrier that keeps us from. I think this is. Right. I don't know if I like what I'm saying because traditionally my argument would be art creates closeness or that you can, you know, through. Through the written word especially. There's. There's a way in which the written word can enter you and, and have. Make that connection that way. Or that it actually needs you to warm it up. Right. It needs you. It needs you to read it in order for it to live.

30:38 Wes: Yeah.

30:39 Erin: Say a painting. A painting in fact, is going to degrade if you touch it. You can admire it from afar, but it's only ever going to be a kind of false promise. I don't like this argument either.

30:54 Wes: The Kantian view, not just Kant, but many others, is that there's aesthetic interest is disinterested because it's an interest in the form. So the appetitive involves wanting to do something with the object. So if it's an apple, if it's a real apple, I want to eat it. That's the form of desire that is induced by the apple. But if it's an aesthetic object, I don't have that kind of appetite. Right. The painting of the apple, if I enjoy it, it's not that I want to eat it, it's something about the form, it's something about the representation. And so we can see a clear parallel here.

Whatever kind of desire the loon is inducing, it's not the desire to kill it that the hunters had at one point or the desire to eat it. So that there's something here like the aesthetic, but it's still a kind of desire. And maybe, maybe the. The talk of wanting to write the desirable red glass Eyes. One might cross the line there and say, actually, yeah, I just want to pluck. I just want to pluck the red glass out because that's valuable and I want to possess it. Or the desire to caress. Right. That's not a. That's not an aesthetic relation. Exactly right.

You would want to caress a living thing out of affection. But it may say something. The use of that metaphor may say something about the aesthetic which is a bit warmer. Right. Than the word disinterest would have us think. Disinterest is always a little bit of a misleading word, but so the relationship to the aesthetic object is, of course, complicated.

32:29 Erin: Right. Well, and as I said, I do think there is this. This charge between cold, maybe especially cold, smooth things, and us where we desire to touch. You know, sometimes even a statue that looks particularly smooth, you know, it almost invites touch in that way.

32:44 Wes: What about a frosted cake?

32:46 Erin: Should we have frosted cake? Yes.

32:48 Wes: Yeah, we'll get to that next time. All right?

32:49 Erin: Right, yes. So next time we'll get through the last three stanzas. We're halfway through, more or less. So next time we will finish our discussion of First Death in Nova Scotia. Thank you, Wes.

33:01 Wes: Thank you.

A poem about a map opens North and South, the first collection of the great twentieth century poet Elizabeth Bishop, and since, maps have been associated with her poetic vision—at once telescoping and binocular—and with the polarities and preoccupations of her work. The map’s privileged, sweeping, bird’s eye view of the earth is also hand-held, man-made, intimate. Depending on its level of minuteness or obsession, it can contain the tiniest details as well as, let’s say, the whole enchilada. And though it purports to be scientific and objective, it is representational and therefore subjective, particular, imaginative, and personal. For several episodes, Wes & Erin will be reading a selection of some of Bishop’s most anthologized poems, starting with “The Moose” as expressions of, among other things, her map-like imagination.

Upcoming Episodes: Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey”; more Elizabeth Bishop poetry: “First Death in Nova Scotia,” “One Art.”

Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail

For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.

Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.

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Transcript

0:11 Erin: Welcome to part two of our discussion of the poems of Elizabeth Bishop. We are currently about. Oh, I'm okay. I'm proud of us. We're just about halfway through the Moose. That's not bad compared to our usual record. We're not halfway through stanza one. We're going. You know, it's about a bus trip. It's encouraging us to pick up the pace a little bit and get to our next stop. So we were just going to pick up with the woman in stanza 13 climbing into the bus.

0:41 Wes: Before you say that, I just want to make one little observation.

0:44 Erin: Oh, sure.

0:45 Wes: Just that we get right as soon as the light goes out, it's then that we get the barking of a dog and the smell of salt. First it's the smell of salt hay and then it's the barking of a dog. So smell is introduced. And is that the first time sound is really introduced in any. You know, we get the bus starting and all that, but I think that's right. It's very visual up to that point, I think. And then as soon as we lose the light, we get these new sensory modalities. The collie just supervised this dog, gives us a nice bark, and presumably we can't even see him. We just hear him. So I just love that. I just. I love the transition into darkness. It's so.

1:26 Erin: Yeah.

1:26 Wes: I don't know how else to say it.

1:28 Erin: Yeah.

1:28 Wes: And it's then that we. This really is the midpoint of the poem because now we're going to make this transition into the world of the bus, I guess. As the woman climbs in, we have

1:41 Erin: the ship's port lantern, as you said, being an indication that it's now nearly or fully dark outside.

1:47 Wes: She says red light swims through the dark.

1:50 Erin: Yeah. I'm assuming that at this point a bus would have some form of illumination, at least for when it's stopped and the doors open for people getting on and off the bus. Right. It would. It would light up on the inside interior. Yeah.

2:03 Wes: Yeah.

2:03 Erin: Or at least maybe it would stop, certainly if it were stopping at a station or a little, you know, whatever those things are called. Those little. Yeah, there's a word for it.

2:14 Wes: We need something to see the freckles by.

2:16 Erin: Right. We need something. Exactly. But wherever they would be stopping would have some form of street light illumination or something of that order. Anyway.

2:26 Wes: But it's interesting you say this, because I didn't picture a bus station at any point in this. And I just imagine people along the side of the road.

2:34 Erin: Right. But if it were a course, it

2:38 Wes: couldn't be that way.

2:39 Erin: Well, I don't think it's a station. I think it would be a stop with a. You know, like a lean to. You know, what are those things that just.

2:44 Wes: Yeah, sure.

2:45 Erin: That just protect you from the elements.

2:47 Wes: Yeah. Bust down.

2:48 Erin: Right.

2:48 Wes: Yeah.

2:49 Erin: And that would probably have at least a street light. But anyway, then we get the moonlight. Maybe my favorite. Oh, it's so hard to say, but maybe my favorite image in the poem is the hairy, scratchy, splintery moonlight and mist caught in them like lambswool on bushes in a pasture. Just. There's nothing. There's no image greater than that. That's unbelievable.

3:13 Wes: There's kind of a more wildness to this. Right. The image now, the hairiness and scratchiness and splinteriness. It's a bit less Domesticated, I guess, than the previous part of the poem.

3:27 Erin: That's a really good point. I hadn't thought of that. Even a suggestion of danger, like the lamb running.

3:34 Wes: I just thought, this is where the hobbits are entering Fangorn Forest.

3:39 Erin: Yes. Yeah, yeah, the New Brunswick.

3:41 Wes: But you go a little bit more. It's a little wilder and more primal. I think once you. Even if you're on a bus, once you get into the woods, there's something different about it.

3:52 Erin: That's right.

3:53 Wes: But yeah, you're right. The idea that the moonlight could get caught in that. That's a great image.

3:59 Erin: Something giving chase to the lamb would cause it potentially to get a little ensnared in the chase.

4:06 Wes: It's as if Lambswool has, you know, a lamb is brushed up on the bramble or whatever and left its wool so that. So the moonlight, instead of making this cosmic journey and landing on articulating the environment, has been subordinated to the environment. Right. It's become. It's been captured by these hairy woods. It's caught on it and, you know, a piece of it has come off from being caught on something that's scratchy and splintery. So that. That. Yeah, this is the great reversal. And that's the place where you can really get some good sleeping. Yes, right.

4:44 Erin: Yes. And where dreamy things can happen.

4:47 Wes: Divagation. Yeah, wanderings.

4:51 Erin: I looked that up. Wandering, straying or digressing from a main course, path or topic. So like a digression as long as

4:59 Wes: the bus stays on track.

5:00 Erin: Yeah, that's right.

5:01 Wes: You do whatever you want with your mind.

5:02 Erin: That's right. And the night. I just looked on Google Maps while I was writing my little notes in the margins. And if you were to take a bus today from Great Village to Boston, it would take like 10 hours. So it definitely is a, yikes, full course of the night on this night bus. So I love what happens in stanza 16, which begins in the creakings and noises, an old conversation not concerning us, but recognizable somewhere back in the bus. So I really love that it's grandparents voices, she says, uninterrupted talking. This is where the I becomes an us.

And this is a characteristic of a bishop. I think she's rather reluctant to use an I, capital I in a poem. She's more likely to use a we or an us. And here it's as if they're all part of the same family now in the bus and the adults. It's almost like everybody on the bus who isn't a grandparent is a child and the adults in the back are talking and we are all, oh, that doesn't concern us. Just go to sleep. It's none of your business. Just stop eavesdropping on us. Right, so there's some community that's been formed already by the people who are not the grandparents talking.

Do you get that impression?

6:20 Wes: Yeah, it's a bit confusing. So, yeah, let's try to figure it out. Because it. So it begins. A dreamy divagation begins in the night. She doesn't say, I started dreaming or they started dreaming or we started dreaming. Although it seems almost like it's collective. Right. So that the bus is dreaming or everyone on the bus is dreaming together, which kind of lines up with the not concerning us later on, the gentle auditory slow hallucination. So that's a very interesting idea. Right. The dream is usually associated with subjectivity. Right. The cogito and Descartes.

Right. The dream tells us that we might have trouble distinguishing reality from what's in our own minds. And we in our own minds are very potentially cut off from reality. But it's a. It's an alienated individual position here. The dream is. Seems to be collective. And perhaps it's collective because it's partly real. Right. Is that the conversation? I thought, okay, there's a conversation going on in the back of the bus and it is old people talking. But as you're lying back, you could sort of. You can't hear exactly what they're saying. And you might have that kind of half dream, Right.

Where you're. The dream is kind of lined up with or intertwined with what's going on in reality. So she's hearing in the conversation of the old people, her grandparents voices. Is that the way you took this? Or. Or they, they're hearing the grandparents voices or. Yeah. How do we, how do we interpret this?

7:54 Erin: I interpreted it as, you know, people of the age of grandparents having a real conversation. But the idea that one could be having an auditory. I mean, we are given the word auditory slow hallucination. So the idea that there could be an auditory hallucination or kind of half dream of one's own grandparents having a conversation, or it may be superimposed on a real conversation kind of inaudible going on on the bus. I never noticed this before. The G in grandparents is capitalized. So it does seem to sit to suggest the speaker's particular grandparents rather than.

8:30 Wes: Oh, I was going to. I thought you were going to say archetypal grandparents.

8:34 Erin: Oh, yeah, I suppose it could be yeah, it could be read that way, too. I think all of these things are true, right?

8:40 Wes: Yeah.

8:40 Erin: I mean, the image works because of the, shall we say, universal particularity of this experience.

8:47 Wes: The ordinary way to write the poem would be to. And a much simpler way would be to put this in her point of view and not try to put it into a collective point of view. But that seems to be what she's doing.

8:59 Erin: Yes. The effectiveness, though, I think is the. And it could just be the speaker's perception of it, but the atmospheric quality, because everyone on the bus is going to share an experience shortly, but already they are sharing an experience and a kind of atmosphere that they're all listening to the hum and having that. You know, when you're in the car and you. Maybe when you're a kid and you put your ear up against, like, the. The car door or the window or something, and you hear orchestral music. I don't know if you ever had that. I used to always hear classical music when I would put my head up.

9:38 Wes: Yeah, I don't think I have that.

9:40 Erin: All kinds of. And I always think, like, I should write this down. But you always have, like, a hallucination of an orchestra playing songs. Different songs. Sometimes like fantastical songs. Yeah. You know, my particular experience maybe doesn't quite get at the. Yeah. The sense that this is shared.

9:57 Wes: Well, you're put into a kind of dreamy state, and yet you're getting at the auditory hallucination part. I mean, for me, I think, as a child, and this, I think, is very evocative of childhood. It's something about being half asleep or falling asleep. You're on a journey and there are adults in the car and there's some. Maybe some sense of safety, I think is very relevant to this poem. But being ensconced in the world of adults and not quite alone when you do this thing, which is potentially very lonely, which is go to sleep. And of course, a lot of kids don't want to go to sleep because that loneliness factor. But it's a much different experience if you're traveling. You're all on the way to something together. And of course, you're with people who are awake and, you know, are going

10:45 Erin: to be awake, maybe because the kids are falling asleep. Their. Their voices are lowered and softer. And maybe that also contributes Right. To the. The way in which. That lulls the children in the back simply because they're aware of not wanting to talk too loudly. Certainly that would be the case on a bus like this, where they're Having a conversation where they're talking in. In lower voices and maybe actually inducing that calm and hum for sleep in the people, the other people in the bus who aren't talking.

11:15 Wes: And the question is, what are the adults doing with their talk? Right. It's not going to work if your parents are just fighting. In this case, it's the grandparents. Voices are clearing things up and I guess bringing certain things to resolution, coming to terms with these losses. But a lot of it does sound a bit gossipy and not necessarily like the most comforting.

11:39 Erin: Yes. Yeah.

11:39 Wes: Sort of talk we could imagine. Yeah.

11:41 Erin: Well, you know, in a situation like this where you might be a child in this car, could be that you're coming back from whatever, like a, like a late night and then the adults in the car are working through whatever has just happened over the course of the night. And. Oh no, she was the one who had that long. Yeah. Who had the criminal record because of that thing, remember where they. Oh, yeah, yeah. That was like 20 years ago. So you sort of get that. But for an entire family history going back ages and ages, talking in eternity. Deaths, deaths and sicknesses.

The year he remarried, the year something happened. Oh, yeah, what year was that? Right. Something about the journey afterwards or maybe away from home. If these people are also. If their home is Nova Scotia and they're departing it, you know, then there's that backwards looking quality where something about the idea of the journey and moving away from the place is giving the opportunity to then take stock and look back. So there's this sort of like dual action happening in the poem where the further the bus goes, the further back they're kind of looking from deaths and sicknesses to then remarriage and then childbirth.

Son lost when the schooner foundered.

12:58 Wes: These are all very blue collar tragedies, right?

13:00 Erin: Yes.

13:01 Wes: He was arrested for insider trading.

13:04 Erin: No, but I mean, you know, there's a reverse order to what's happening, you know, so we get. We have death, then sickness, then remarriage, then dying in childbirth. So there's a rewind is what I mean. Yeah.

13:17 Wes: Well, we come back in the end to death. The way it's all summed up.

13:20 Erin: Insider trading. Sorry.

13:23 Wes: Huh?

13:24 Erin: Sorry, Just insider trading. That really is funny.

13:31 Wes: And he had an affair. No. A sharp indrawn breath. Half groan, half acceptance. That means life's like that. We know it. Also death, you know, and then the question, what does also death mean there? Death knows it, we also know death. But it, you know, it made me wonder at various points I wondered. Well, Is this an element here of a journey to the underworld or to the afterlife? Maybe it's a job not claiming that that's strong thematic part of this, but maybe a hint of that type of thing. Because the journey, I mean, and it does seem like journeys are good places for this or like when I travel, it produces in me a very different state of mind.

And I do find it very calming in a way, you know, especially actually being on the train or something like that, because you're in between two different locations and you maybe you're not caught up in the expectations or the constricting qualities of any particular location. If I'm at home, I have to do this and that work, or if I'm at a destination, then I'm dealing with relatives or I have to be a tourist or something like that. But there's something liberating about being in between two locations. So it does seem like a place for this type of dreamy hallucination or this reflection or this clearing of things up.

It's almost like therapy. Right? That's what all of this sounds like. People are talking through their problems, but where is it that they get to in the end here? The half groan, half acceptance. So it's not fully acceptance. It sums things up with this, maybe a degree of resignation. So yeah, I don't know. What do you make of the stanza?

15:15 Erin: Well, they're traveling west significantly. Right. I do take a lot of this to be a kind of, say, pre figurement of death, even though at the same time the fact that they're in the woods, the fact that not to jump ahead too much, the fact that the moose will come out of the woods and appear notably in the middle of the road, there is a suggestion of middle age or middleness, or midway in the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark forest. So I think it works both ways, or perhaps it's working in several ways simultaneously for the various passengers.

So maybe the speaker is experiencing something more akin to the Dante esque middle of the journey on the bus. And something about the bus journey is also, symbolically speaking, a kind of final bus journey for some of the other passengers. And that intersection seems significant, but I don't know how, just in the sense that there's a retrospective quality happening or maybe even a reversion to childhood that goes on for the speaker and the other people in the bus by virtue of the propinquity to these old people at the end of their life's journey.

Because there is very little about middleness Here, come to think of it, other than the moose appearing in the middle of the road. Right. It seems that the other people on the bus are like children and the grandparents are the adults.

16:50 Wes: I mean, I think part of what's comforting when we're children is that feeling that adults know the answers and that adults know how to cope with all the dangers and have experience doing that and therefore can protect us. The reality, of course, as we realize as we get older, is that that's not true. So what they may have is more of this acceptance that's sort of highlighted in this stanza, which is potentially a good thing, but maybe a double edged sword because it does seem to be a form of dying. It does seem to be a form of the very thing that we want to be protected from.

17:30 Erin: There's also, though, that. What I used to call my mom, the external hard drive. I used to say back before she.

17:42 Wes: She liked that.

17:44 Erin: I think now it would make her sad because she'll say, you know, very openly that she. Her memory is gone. But it used to be that she knew all the, you know, you could ask her who said that at that one. You know, there's that kind of. I mean, that's a sort of jokey, gossipy scorekeeping thing that she would keep tabs on. But there's also just the idea of long memory being the history keeper, the record keeper, the, you know, and there's sort of settling accounts over the course of this conversation. Oh, right, it was that year. Okay. And then this happened and then, then that happened. And that's important too, I think, for, you know, it situates children in a context. Not just say this idea of death that you're referring to, but also how to situate oneself in a life.

18:34 Wes: Right.

18:34 Erin: There's a. There's a sort of frame that the grandparents or the elder relatives have that whole history up until you enter the narrative and where you fit within that. We mentioned in part one a little bit about Bishop's family history just to kind of prefigure the types of story that she inserts, I think very significantly into the poem, particularly about poor Amos who just wouldn't stop praying in the store and had to be. Had to be put away. Right. Of course she does a gender swap, but yeah, we all have family stories like this, of this kind of unruly behavior or madness of some kind or other or some sort of family drama.

19:19 Wes: Yeah. So it's universal. But the way she captures it is very clever with this talk that we don't quite know whether it's just the conversation of the people, the old people at the back of the bus, or whether it's her dream or whether it's both or somewhere in between. They're interlaced, those two things. And that. That interlacing gets at this aspect of universality. Although I think by the time we get to the stanza where she's fantasizing about the grandparents and the featherbed, this, it start. Seems to become inescapably personal, which is why I think of the.

The point of view is getting more and more focused. Right. With. With time. Yeah. And potentially it's still universal, but it seems almost like a personal memory. Right. So talking the way they talked in the old feather bed. Right. The way they. Her. Her grandparents presumably in the old feather bed, peacefully on and on. Dim lamp light in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shaw. Shawl. Yeah, get another. And get another dog here.

20:28 Erin: I love this.

20:29 Wes: The collie, the barking dog. And. Yeah, so this, this stanza is wonderful. And it gets at exactly this thing that you've been talking about, which is the, like, comfort of being a kid overhearing adults talking. It really, despite this talk of death. Right. A reconciliation with death. This is the point. Seems to be the point of view of a child who finds this very comforting. And. Right. She'll say in the next stanza, now it's all right now even to fall asleep, just as on all those nights, the way in which the adult world and the safety of protective figures can make sleep okay to do. And then suddenly that's interrupted.

21:07 Erin: But I love too. I mean, yes, it's so particular, but it also just in this one stanza does so many things in miniature that the poem is doing all along, this telescoping in again to a scene which. Which even as a child, if it were her childhood in particular that she's referencing, she couldn't possibly know or see. She wouldn't be able to see the grandparents in their featherbed. She would have to be picturing them in the featherbed and she wouldn't be able to see the dog in the hall. And also I wonder if this. If the stanza in its operation is kind of doing.

I mean, this is just occurring to me now, but maybe it's doing that kind of hallucinatory work that has prior been described where we actually get a remix of, you know, this is the third dog in the poem. But it's also the elements in the stanza are a kind of recapitulation of the light, the red light swimming, the port Lantern becomes the lamp light in the hall. We get the dog barking now becomes the dog curled up in the shawl. And then maybe even because we also get kitchen, maybe the shawl is even a kind of transposition of the table, tablecloth shook out.

Right. So there's something actually in the stanza which has that hallucinatory quality that she's describing where these three elements swim in the imagination and then become the lamplight and the dog and the shawl in this half asleep kind of dream space. Maybe that's pushing things too far, but it does seem to be. It's the dreamiest stanza perhaps in the whole poem. Maybe the following one. Now it's all right now even to fall asleep. But this gets interrupted that next stanza. So this one, I think is the real depth of the dreamy or borderline dreamy or hallucinatory moment.

23:00 Wes: Yeah, this is great because it really underlines the way deviation creates the capacity for stasis or for comfort. So the deviation of a bus trip or of the dreaming. Right. Which is movement, which is dynamic and has that momentum, forward momentum that we were talking about, sort of underwrites or grounds this ability to. For stasis, for stopping, for going to sleep, for feeling comforted as a child and safe, I think. And I keep repeating that word because of the. What's going to happen. The use of the word that's going to happen in this poem later.

But yeah, I'm not sure if you were saying that explicitly, but that's what came to mind my mind as you were talking. This. The way in which this journey, divagation, motion can ground something that's going to be more static or stationary, which is what we're going to get in the moose. Because it interrupts the. It explicitly interrupts the motion of the bus and the external line of the poem in a way that parallels the comfort that's produced by the dreaming.

24:08 Erin: Yeah. In stanza 22 is where we have that break that you're describing. The moose finally appears. Well, the moose doesn't appear until stanza 23 finally appears.

24:21 Wes: We've been waiting for you.

24:22 Erin: We've been waiting for you. The title has promised that you would come and then here you are. It is foretold of your coming.

24:29 Wes: Comes through the curtains, takes his bow. Right.

24:32 Erin: We get nights, just as on all those nights. And then the moose's appearance, the lights turn on. And that rhyme you get, I mean, it's a very basic, simple rhyme. Right. But there's that sort of sudden jolt which is then also visualized where in the middle of night we have this appearance, this bright because of the headlights on it. Appearance of the moose. And it looms and sniffs at the bus's hot hood, which I'm assuming means that it thinks that the bus might be a boy moose.

25:06 Wes: No. Well, it's a very hot bus, I'll say that.

25:10 Erin: Ow. Ow.

25:14 Wes: That enamel. And it's dented and, you know, depends on if you like bad buses. No, just kidding.

25:21 Erin: Dented from its last encounter with a girl bus.

25:25 Wes: Yeah. It's funny because I wrote in my notes, but was just reading it stanza by stanza. And the previous stanza I'd said, okay to sleep, even with death looming. Looming for all of us, you know, all day one. You know, one day we all die. Looming in that sense. And then suddenly the moose is looming, standing there, looming. And I thought, whoa, that's really interesting

25:45 Erin: that I. Oh, yes, chose.

25:48 Wes: Chose that word before I even got to the next stanza. Not to give some, you know, obvious rote sort of identification of the moose with death or the experience of the moose as having something to do with that. But obviously they're coming into contact here with something quite primal and important. It's not just, oh, look, there's a nice moose, but is he sniffing or she's sniffing the buses hot hood because she thinks it might be another moose. That hadn't actually occurred to me.

26:21 Erin: I must have been infected with that reading at some point that this was a frisky moose, that it otherwise doesn't seem frisky at all. It seems pretty. Like a pretty staid, respectable moose.

26:34 Wes: But frisky and ditzy.

26:39 Erin: That's right. Hello.

26:41 Wes: What?

26:41 Erin: Oh, look, I seem to be in the middle of the road. Pardon me.

26:46 Wes: So, towering, antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house. We're safe as houses, a man's voice assures us. Perfectly harmless. Which you presume, right, that the. The man making that assurance is. Precedes the idea of it being homely as a house and safe as houses. Even though. So. So she interestingly puts the associations before her associative responses before the actual stimulus. Right. I don't think she's the one who is thinking about how they must be safe and. And he's saying something. I mean, as far as I know. I don't know back then.

But you were warned about bison and mooses, right? Or is it mooses or moose? I think we're warned because they don't. They. They seem harmless, but they're not. And so I was quite surprised by this stanza. And I thought this idea, okay, safe as houses. Well, yeah, houses ought to be safe, but they're not always safe. The bus, the moving container of the bus turns out to be, in a way safer and more conducive to reverie and dreaming and all of that.

27:59 Erin: No matter how you slice it, whether you see the moose as harmless, truly, or not so harmless, this has got to be just a little bit of a wink, right? A man's voice assures us.

28:09 Wes: I mean, I think we're definitely meant to be skeptical.

28:12 Erin: Yeah.

28:13 Wes: This perfectly harmless line, it's not there for us to nod our heads in agreement.

28:20 Erin: Oh, yeah, he's right, right, right. I think it's more like, oh, here's another mansplainer.

28:26 Wes: He's moose splaining.

28:28 Erin: Mooseplaining this woman moose to moose splaining. Just out for a good time, having her existence commented upon by another man's voice. Probably a podcaster. One of those male podcasters has a manosphere podcast.

28:45 Wes: Girl mooses are.

28:49 Erin: Then we get these childish again. The passengers are like children and having this childlike response to the appearance of the moose, including. It's awful, plain sad. So much judgment of women's bodies.

29:04 Wes: I mean, they're not good looking creatures. Let's just. They're, you know, put that on the table. Come on. They are in an ugly sort of way.

29:11 Erin: Yeah. I mean, okay, I guess they don't follow, you know, classical proportions. They don't represent the golden mean.

29:21 Wes: They're not into beauty society societal beauty standards. All right.

29:28 Erin: They are like cartoon characters.

29:29 Wes: They're miss Positive is what they are.

29:35 Erin: Well, what I love though, about the description, you know, we get several, I suppose. Yeah. Contradictory descriptions of the moose in a way, because we get homely as a house or safe as houses. We get awful plain. But then she looks the bus over grand otherworldly, so she has some gravitas. She's like a great character actress who. Who may not be beautiful in that leading lady way, but she's Kathy Bates. Yes. Yeah, well, that's maybe a bit insulting to Kathy Bates, who I do think is a very attractive woman, but.

30:19 Wes: Sorry, Kathy.

30:20 Erin: I know, I love her.

30:21 Wes: Come on the show sometime, please.

30:24 Erin: Oh my gosh, I would die. I love Kathy Bates anyway. And then we get curious creatures. Well, first we get the idea that it inspires joy and then we get curious creatures. So there's a. The joy is then immediately undercut by a kind of ambivalence. Right. So there's just all of these descriptions of the moose combine to create a kind of ambivalent portrait, such as it is, of the animal.

30:47 Wes: Are we going to be able to answer this question? Why? Why do they feel the sweet sensation of joy? I mean, I think I would probably feel it.

30:57 Erin: Why? Why do we all feel it? I mean, they have. Well, they've successfully done what I couldn't see a moose in real life. So they're like one up on Erin. Can't wait to go back and tell her we saw moose. Yeah, I've seen certain things. I can't think of a specific example of this, but I've had plenty of instances. Whether it is a wild animal or, I don't know, like a sunset or a really spectacular natural event of some kind or other. You do get that feeling of joy, kind of excitement.

31:28 Wes: Yeah. Unfortunately, most of my encounters with large animals are at zoos. I did see a bear once. I was going to the bathroom. My mom had a house in Front Royal, Virginia, at the beginning of the Appalachian Mountains. And it was up high on a. We called it a mountain, but it was, I guess, more of a hill. But so it was out, you know, it was kind of. There was a bear on the mountain, let's just put it that way. And, yeah, I was going to the bathroom one day and looking out the window. There's a window right. You know, above the toilet. And suddenly there's bear's face looking at me. Wow. What the. So, but that, you know, and. And that was majestic. No, just kidding. That it was. I. It was surprising.

32:13 Erin: Yeah.

32:14 Wes: And there's an element of fear that involved. Even if you're, you know, even if, you know, black bears are harmless and there's a wall between you. Some. Something scary about it. I didn't have time to feel like it's majestic. Yeah. You know, like you have had these experiences in. In nature, but I can't think of a encounter like this. But it. I seem sure that if I had an encounter like this, I would feel exactly the same way. So. Yeah. What is otherworldly about it? What is majestic about it? It's a big, dumb beast. And I say that with love, without any criticism in the sense that.

Right. It's an encounter with something primal. And I think we have to take into account the size of the animal as well. I mean, it is interesting to run into a fox or something like that, but it's also a matter of scale here. But. Yeah. What is otherworldly about it? I mean, I think the most. The most obvious part of this is that you know, we have lost something in our humanity and becoming language using creatures and becoming self conscious creatures. And sometimes when we're confronted with an animal like this, we're confronted with that loss.

We're not as connected to the environment because of the intermediation of something like language, which poetry of course tries to overcome. It tries to put language into a disintermediating. Sorry to use these business terms. I don't know why this is happening. Into a disintermediation.

33:46 Erin: Actualize. Yeah, yeah.

33:49 Wes: When it. Yeah, right. Synergize it's agenda. Often where language might put distance between us and the world. Poetry, I think, can undo that distance. Like I was saying, with the very vivid imagery, I can undo that distance with figurative language. And maybe that distance is also undone to some extent by the dreaming or the half dreaming hallucinatory state that she was in. And the comfort of that, the return to childhood, which is also a simpler time. I don't know. I'm thinking out loud here. But yeah, I wanted to try to get more at this, you know, the otherworldly status of the moose and the joy that comes from encountering it.

34:34 Erin: I was thinking to myself, is the moose's gaze really clearly encapsulated? And then I thought, yes, she regards us amicably. And then I was like, no, no, that's the passenger who gets on the bus.

34:44 Wes: Right. Does the moose have freckles? Yeah, that'd be an interesting twist, right?

34:50 Erin: But yeah, but there is one.

34:51 Wes: Turned her into a moose.

34:53 Erin: Well, I would think that this would be a more garden variety animal encounter and maybe even a more, to use a word, I don't like, problematic poem in terms of its relationship with the animal. If it were to focus on the gaze of the animal. Because I think that is the thing which is often at the core of these interactions with animals in which we project or hope to have a kind of meaningful encounter. You want to meet the gaze of the animal and in so doing understand it. Right. And of course you don't realize that you're just projecting onto it a kind of maybe mutual regard.

She regards us amicably. That you are seeing it and it is seeing you. And there's an acknowledgement and there's this, you know, spiritual encounter that you have with this animal. And all of that, of course, is often quite silly. It's often quite reductive and fanciful and unrealistic. But I am thinking of an encounter that springs to mind is in Utah. I hiked the same trail almost every day. And I Would often hike it late in order to escape the full heat of the desert sun. Which is a little dangerous, right? Because sometimes the sun would be setting and then all kinds of things come out.

And one time I was trying to get back to my car before it got completely dark. And what I thought was a wolf, but what must have been a coyote. And the coyotes in Utah are huge. They look like wolves and completely white. Came out from over a hill, crossed my path, turned, looked at me in the eyes for a very long time, turned and went over on the other side of the hill. I mean, curiously, then, of course, I got to the car and I actually found out that a beloved family member, an elderly family member of mine, had passed away. And I said, I think I just saw her.

You know, I had this feeling of, like. I don't know, the sense of this connection, inherent connection between these two. This woman who was dear to me and this encounter. But, of course, that's all silliness. And the idea that I was having a sort of interaction through the gate. Some sort of reciprocal. Right. Interaction with this animal was also entirely just my own projecting onto the animal. However, I will say that that's an instance in which I felt fear. But then there was also this, like, joy at the encounter, I think fear because it was dark.

Because I wasn't actually sure if this was a wolf because it blocked my path. It was far enough away that I didn't feel as threatened as I might have. But it was definitely a mixed perception.

37:28 Wes: You didn't shoot it and then hang it around your neck. No, because I was thinking. I just suddenly thought of the albatross poem.

37:37 Erin: Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

37:38 Wes: Rime of the Ancient Mariner. And that sort of relationship to the natural world where. I mean, I forget what we said about it, but maybe I said something about envy and wanting to kill the albatross for. Because of its freedom or something like that. I don't. I don't know. But I think it's important because, yeah, this is part of something about the encounter with the natural world. Whether it's a big moose or something else. Yes. Is otherworldly. Strangely enough, it's otherworldly to us, even though it's where we come from. It's uncanny, maybe.

And Freud actually, in the German, I think uncanny is sort of like unhomelike is what the German sounds like. And Freud made a lot out of this. I think it's home, but it's a home from which we've become alienated. We're animals, we're something more than animals. And so that primal encounter brings us back to that foundation, that natural foundation in us, but we can't fully come to terms with it. And I think the other aspect of this, I think the death. Right. So there is a link to death. Just. And I was thinking about that when you described thinking of it as seeing.

As seeing your departed loved one. Because if we could regress to that animal state, it would be a kind of death. I think that the association with the movement to the pre. Linguistic, natural foundation is something like the movement towards dying, but there's something comforting.

39:07 Erin: Yes.

39:07 Wes: Right. And we encounter that when we encounter the gaze. To have a. Have a gaze returned by an animal like that usually like, like our internal. Our entire psychological structure, what makes us self. Self conscious is the internalization of a human gaze. Right. To the extent that we. We get an animal gaze, I think we are returned to that more primal part of ourselves. And it does seem to me to have something to do with being reconciled to mortality. Right. Which is part of what the function of that dialogue between the elderly people is doing.

39:44 Erin: You're leading me into the one, say, reading of the moose that I wanted to get to. And I just want to say that I think the great thing about Bishop and about this poem and all her poems is that the moose is a moose. It's not a symbol. I hesitate to offer any kind of

40:03 Wes: direct reading, but that's her job on this podcast, though.

40:05 Erin: I know, I know. It's. Yeah. In the letters with Robert Lowell when he's writing to her about her poem At the Fishhouses, he says, alas, all my fish just become symbols.

40:16 Wes: Ah, very good.

40:17 Erin: I hesitate to reduce. I think what you've just said makes me think that it's the maternal, the mother.

40:25 Wes: Which also brings us back to the house.

40:28 Erin: Yes, the house. Yeah. It's something that comes like the clapboard churches, like clamshells seem to arise out of the ground, if you will, or are directly compared to these native creatures. The houses are then in turn used as comparisons for the moose, the maternal. The idea that this is something that returns us to nature, that this is the encounter that we would have presumably upon death. It's the loved one that is somehow comforting, maternal, and is a female moose. It's moose mom. I don't know. I don't know. Something going on there.

41:04 Wes: Moose mom.

41:05 Erin: Natural and strange at the same time, not us. And I guess that's why I. That's why I mentioned that the story of my grandfather at the beginning, because I don't know why I wanted so badly to see a moose right after my grandfather's death. But there was something, like, logical about it to me. And I was familiar with this poem, but I very much did not have. You know, it was not something that was the forefront of my mind at all. But I think there is this inherent connection, and it's silly. You know, I kind of can't believe I'm saying this, but I do.

I do think there is this kind of connection between this desire that I felt to see this animal. Like the particular kind of primordial itch that the moose in particular seems to be scratching for me in that moment. For Bishop, in this poem, something that is at once safe and comforting and from another world, natural in that kind of elemental way.

42:00 Wes: Yeah.

42:01 Erin: That all kind of coalesce in that image.

42:04 Wes: Very good.

42:05 Erin: Okay. I think that's it, Wes. All we're left with is the dim smell of moose and an acrid smell of gasoline.

42:12 Wes: Oh, you know, we should have talked about that. Maybe we can start with that on our next Bishop recording. We'll. We'll begin with the smells, the smells and the significance of that image at the end.

42:25 Erin: Nice.

42:25 Wes: That smellage at the end.

42:26 Erin: Smellage. All right. Thank you.

42:29 Wes: Thank you.

A poem about a map opens North and South, the first collection of the great twentieth century poet Elizabeth Bishop, and since, maps have been associated with her poetic vision—at once telescoping and binocular—and with the polarities and preoccupations of her work. The map’s privileged, sweeping, bird’s eye view of the earth is also hand-held, man-made, intimate. Depending on its level of minuteness or obsession, it can contain the tiniest details as well as, let’s say, the whole enchilada. And though it purports to be scientific and objective, it is representational and therefore subjective, particular, imaginative, and personal. For several episodes, Wes & Erin will be reading a selection of some of Bishop’s most anthologized poems, starting with “The Moose” as expressions of, among other things, her map-like imagination.

Upcoming Episodes: Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey”; more Elizabeth Bishop poetry: “First Death in Nova Scotia,” “One Art.”

Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail

For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.

Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.

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Transcript

0:11 Erin: A poem about a map opens north and south, the first collection of the great 20th century poet Elizabeth Bishop. And since maps have been associated with her poetic vision, at once telescoping and binocular, and with the polarities and preoccupations of her work. The map's privileged, sweeping, bird's eye view of the earth is also handheld, man made intimate. Depending on its level of minuteness or obsession, it can contain the tiniest details as well as, let's say, the whole enchilada. And though it purports to be scientific and objective, it is representational and therefore subjective, particular, imaginative and personal.

Over the next few episodes, we'll be reading a selection of some of Bishop's most anthologized poems, starting with the moose as expressions of, among other things, her map, like imagination. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. Wes, have you ever seen a moose in the wild?

1:12 Wes: I have not, but I have seen Instagram videos of them and people getting too close, and I've heard that they actually are quite dangerous.

1:23 Erin: Oh, perfectly harmless.

1:24 Wes: As cute as they look. So not safe as houses. Which is a very surprising line, unless you think that houses maybe aren't as safe as they seem or ought to be. But that's something we'll talk about later. How about you?

1:38 Erin: I have not. And I actually, it's become a running joke among certain friends of mine that I haven't seen a moose because I long to see a moose in the wild. This is my dearest wish.

1:52 Wes: Is that the first time anyone said that in history? I long to see.

1:56 Erin: I don't know.

1:57 Wes: It's a good first line for a poem, actually. Why do you long. Long to see a moose in the wild?

2:03 Erin: Really? Maybe because of the poem. I don't know. I just really want to, but I. Maybe this will become significant without getting too personal or maybe with getting too personal. With apologies to the listeners. Ten years ago now, when my grandfather passed that summer, my grandmother wanted to go up to Maine and revisit certain places that she had been with him. And we ended up going to Acadia. And I was so excited to see. Am just. I got it into my head that I had to go to Acadia and see a moose. And I even bought a sweatshirt. I'm not wearing it right now. I looked down to see if I was wearing it. It's the same size and shape as this one. This is a Yankees, 1996 World Series sweatshirt.

2:42 Wes: It's not a Rocky and Bullwinkle sweatshirt, is it?

2:45 Erin: No, no, no. It's an acadia and it has a. It has a moose on it. And so I bought it the first day that I was there and I was like, this is my sweatshirt and it has a moose on it. And I'm gonna. I'm gonna see a moose. And I did not see a moose. And then I. I bought a moose sweatshirt in, I think Grand Teton, and I was like, I'm gonna see a moose. And I did not see a moose. And then I lived obviously many years in Utah, and things would happen. Everybody knew I wanted to see a moose. And I would go to these trails where you could see moose. And I would like be going up a trail and someone would be coming down saying, there are moose up there. We just saw a moose. You just saw baby moose. I'd get all excited and I would. I would run up and it was gone and people would taunt me.

3:32 Wes: So you don't want to see like a magic white hart or something like that?

3:38 Erin: No, no, I just want to see him. Even the garden variety moose? No, no. Just a humble moose will hide itself from me when. When it knows that I am after it.

3:49 Wes: Because they are a goofy, right? Are they majestic? Are they goofy looking? Are they both?

3:55 Erin: I think they're both. And I think that kind of qual quality is really well captured in the poem. No, I mean that quality of if not being then looking safe as houses or being a gargantuan size, and yet having. I know this is a female moose, which I believe is called a cow, as opposed to a bull. Right. But the bulls, even their horns have that hand like quality to them. You know, it looks kind of like an outstretched hand.

4:22 Wes: Interesting.

4:24 Erin: Yeah. They're not majestic.

4:25 Wes: Yeah, I think that's important to the poem. It's not some obviously majestic creature, although it is large and there is majesty in it in the poem, but it's not the typical majesty that you can just get from, oh, look at this beautiful animal.

4:41 Erin: Yeah. And this is kind of why I brought up my grandfather. There was some connection for me as I think there is something quite personal going on with the moose at the end, other than the shared experience of everybody in the bus, all of that. Like there's something bigger than us, more than us, and yet familiar in a way. And it's magical in a sense, because to see it is kind of a rare thing. Yet it also comes out of the landscape that she's that she's grown up in and that she's part of. I think there's a. Yeah. A lot of interesting dualities going on.

5:17 Wes: Okay. So maybe you can read the whole thing and then you could give a little bit. Or we could give a little bit of the biographical background because this is a bus trip she actually took. Right.

5:26 Erin: Yeah.

5:27 Wes: The significance of Nova Scotia, which is where she's departing from in the poem and all of that stuff. But. Yeah. Do you want to start by reading?

5:35 Erin: Sure. The moose from narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea, home of the long tides, where the bay leaves the sea twice a day and takes the herrings long rides where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay. Coming in the bay, not at home, where silted red sometimes the sun sets facing a red sea and others veins the flats. Lavender rich mud and burning rivulets. On red gravelly roads, down rows of sugar maples, past clapboard farmhouses and neat clapboard churches, bleached ridged as clam shells, past twin silver birches through late afternoon a bus journeys west, the windshield flashing pink, pink glancing off of metal, brushing the dented flank of blue beat up enamel, down hollows, uprises and waits patient, while a lone traveler gives kisses and embraces to seven relatives and the collie supervises goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dog.

The bus starts. The light grows richer. The fog shifting, salty, thin, comes closing in. Its cold round crystals form and slide and settle in the white hen's feathers in gray glazed cabbages on the cabbage roses and lupins like apostles. The sweet peas cling to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences. Bumblebees creep inside the foxgloves and evening commences. One stop at Bass river, then the economies, lower middle, upper five islands. Five houses where a woman shakes a tablecloth out after supper. A pale flickering gone the Tantramar marshes and the smell of salt hay.

An iron bridge trembles and a loose plank rattles but doesn't give way. On the left a red light swims through the dark. A ship's port lantern. Two rubber boots show illuminated, solemn. A dog gives one bark. A woman climbs in with two market bags. Brisk, freckled, elderly. A grand night. Yes, sir. All the way to Boston. She regards us amicably. Moonlight as we enter the New Brunswick woods. Hairy, scratchy, splintery moonlight and mist caught in them like lamb's wool. On bushes in a pasture the passengers lie back, snores some long sighs. A dreamy divagation begins in the night, a gentle auditory slow hallucination in the creakings and noises, an old conversation not concerning us but recognizable somewhere back in the bus, grandparents, voices uninterruptedly talking in eternity, names being mentioned.

Things cleared up finally. What he said, what she said, who got pensioned. Deaths, deaths and sicknesses. The year he remarried, the year something happened, she died in childbirth. That was the son lost when the schooner foundered. He took to drink. Yes, she went to the bad when Amos began to pray, even in the store and finally the family had to put him away. Yes, that peculiar affirmative. Yes, a sharp indrawn breath, half groan, half acceptance. That means life's like that, we know it. Also death talking the way they talked in the old featherbed, peacefully on and on, dim lamplight in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shawl.

Now it's all right now, even to fall asleep, just as on all those nights. Suddenly the bus driver stops with a jolt, turns off his lights. A moose has come out of the impenetrable wood and stands there, looms rather in the middle of the road. It approaches, it sniffs at the bus's hot hood, towering antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house or safe as houses, a man's voice assures us, perfectly harmless. Some of the passengers exclaim in whispers, childishly, softly, sure are big creatures. It's awful plain. Look, it's a she. Taking her time.

She looks the bus over, grand, otherworldly. Why. Why do we feel. We all feel the sweet sensation of joy? Curious creatures, says our quiet driver, rolling his Rs. Look at that, would you? Then he shifts gears for a moment longer by craning backward. The moose can be seen on the moonlit macadam. Then there's a dim smell of moose, an acrid smell of gasoline.

11:05 Wes: Thank you. Very nice. It's really great to hear it spoken out loud. Spoken is the wrong word. It's the word read, performed. Do you want to say anything about the form of the poem before I ask you about some of the autobiographical background?

11:22 Erin: Yeah. Short lines, six line stanzas, 20, I believe. 28 stanzas in all. Irregularly rhymed, should we say? Kind of like a lot of bishop, you know, we get A, B, C. Then sometimes not rhymed where you might expect. So the rhymes peek their heads out and then. And then recede. Chatty a little bit in places, lots of repetitions of words. But that. That's something we could talk about More. But, yeah, kind of. Kind of mysterious form. One of the best things I've ever heard or read, I guess, about Bishop was by Michael Hofmann, who wrote quite a bit about her.

And he said that it seems as though every time Bishop is writing, whether in form or in a kind of nonce form that she's creating, that she seems to be just inventing every form, like from scratch. You know, there's no blueprint. She doesn't have a familiar style in which she writes or particular kind of verse form that she seems to gravitate to. And when she writes, you know, a sestina or a villanelle or a sonnet or something like that, it seems like she's almost inventing the form as she goes along. And in this instance, there's a real. I keep wanting to say homemade after Crusoe in England.

But, yeah, I think that's maybe what he was trying to get at, that homemade quality, that sort of bespoke kind of quality. And in the places where the rhyme goes in and out, I think that's really exemplified.

12:53 Wes: Well, it better be bespoke. She took forever to write it.

12:55 Erin: Yeah, that's right. She started this in, I think, 1946.

13:01 Wes: And then she finished it when this

13:04 Erin: was published in Geography III. So she finished it in the 70s.

13:07 Wes: Okay.

13:08 Erin: Geography III came out in 1977. And this must have been published before then, individually, perhaps in the New Yorker, I think. Oh, Geography III is 76. I would say maybe 72 is the date that comes to mind. Don't quote me on that.

13:24 Wes: Do we know why it took her so long? Obviously, she put it down for a couple days here and there.

13:29 Erin: It was the July 15th issue, 1972. So close to the day that we're recording. Why did it take her so long? She just worked on things forever and ever and ever. You see it, if you read. I highly recommend to listeners that they Get Words in Air. A very, very thick book of all the letters between Bishop and her friend Robert Lowell. You see her bringing up things or even mentioning in a description that she's writing to Lowell in a letter, a line that will later show up in a poem. Yeah. Low rate of productivity is great to.

14:08 Wes: You know, I can relate to that.

14:11 Erin: I take it as my model, honestly. Like, you know, live. Live Large and die with a slim Collected is kind of a.

14:19 Wes: Kind of a great Monroe Doctrine. But call it. What's another name? Bishpro.

14:28 Erin: That's right.

14:29 Wes: Is it right that she was forced to complete it because she agreed to read it this is something for deadlines. Right. At Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa ceremony.

14:38 Erin: I didn't know that. I know she read it at that ceremony, but I didn't know that that's what. The impetus for completing it. But that doesn't surprise me.

14:45 Wes: Yeah. So deadlines help every once in a while.

14:47 Erin: Absolutely, absolutely.

14:49 Wes: And then biographically. Right. This is based on a trip that she actually took, and she. She'd been to visit relatives in Nova Scotia and then came back on this bus trip. And the. There really was a moose. There really was a collie. Seven relatives for the rest of it. Yeah, yeah. Seven else.

15:11 Erin: Yeah, yeah. The specificity and all of it's. You know, there is a kind of like a photo realism, not just in the style, but in the. You know, we could sort of be certain that these things happened the way that she is recording them somehow, and yet she's spinning it into something more than just reportage.

15:30 Wes: So she was raised partly by her grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia. Right. Her. Her father had died in infancy and her mother was institutionalized.

15:41 Erin: That's right, yeah.

15:41 Wes: She aged at. When she was 5.

15:43 Erin: That's right.

15:44 Wes: So it's important just because. Yeah. The bus is leaving Nova Scotia, but go. Go ahead.

15:48 Erin: Yeah, it is important. She was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and she's buried there. I've seen her grave up there. It has a line or two lines from The Bight on her tombstone. All the untidy activity continues. Awful but cheerful. Yeah. So she was born in 1911. Her father died, I think, of Bright's disease when she was 8 months old. And then her mother was institutionalized when she was 5, and she never saw her again. She didn't die until the 30s, I think, while Bishop was at Vassar.

16:23 Wes: Do we know what she was institutionalized for? Mental illness in general?

16:28 Erin: Yes. I don't know exactly what. In a short story of Bishop's, she describes as her. A scream coming from her mother. And whatever was wrong was exacerbated by her husband's death. And so then Elizabeth was left to be raised by her grandparents in Nova Scotia who were quite poor. And I guess she was kind of running around barefoot on the farm and stuff like that. And her father's family were very wealthy, and so when they came up to visit Elizabeth, they were, I guess, horrified by the fact that she was just like, you know, running around, hanging out with farm animals.

And they took her to. Back with him to Worcester, and she was very unhappy there. Very ill child. She had asthma and eczema. And really, like, I think almost died of both at one time or other, very unhappy. And then eventually she moved to an aunt's house in, I want to say, in Revere, Massachusetts, and she was a little happier there. And then she went to Vassar, and I've been to the Vassar campus to see various buildings associated with Bishop and also to see. They did a really fabulous exhibition of her postcards at the Vassar Library a couple of years ago, which I really loved, seeing her hand and her little.

In jokes and asides and really amazing to see. Anyway, at Vassar, the librarian there set up a meeting between Bishop and Marianne Moore, who became a mentor to her. They were very close. And then also over the course of her life, she was very close with and had an important friendship with Lowell. Hence the enormous book of letters. I have it here. It's so heavy I could barely pick it up. But this is a great book. It's kind of like an epistolary novel. Yeah. And she was. I think it's important to say, too, that she was a lesbian who had a very long relationship with a Brazilian architect named Lota de Macedo Soares, who was her partner in Brazil for 15 years.

She lived down there, known for travel. A lot of her collections, whether it's Geography III, which is the most obvious one, or north and south, have. There are a lot of Brazilian poems. There are a lot of geographical poems. The first poem in her first collection, north and south, was the Map, which is often read as a kind of ars poetica. She's known for these types of, you know, sweeping landscapes that the moose begins with, and an interest in landscape and in this kind of bird's eye view. But then also you get these telescoping details, like a cinematic close up interspersed.

Much is made of that in Bishop, of that kind of vision of hers, and specifically of, I don't know, the idea that she creates these. These beautiful miniatures, which is true, but maybe sometimes can be a little. I mean, she's revered, as she should be, and she's one of the most popular poets and she also has a great ear and she has so many other great things going on. So I don't want to exclusively focus on that kind of visual element, though it's there and it's very rich.

19:43 Wes: So from narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea. That's a very good opener. Why are they narrow provinces? And what is the. What are the fish and bread and tea doing? Fish and bread sounds vaguely like it could be a biblical reference, but maybe it's not. But you add tea. Right. There's something mundane here and perhaps restricted, provincial. And that's what she's going to be departing from. I mean, well, begins with the tides, but.

20:12 Erin: Yeah, right. Yeah, that's right. Narrow in a few kinds of ways. Because there's a strange. Because of the Bay of Fundy, there's almost that like U shaped corridor of land around it. So Nova Scotia is kind of narrow. And then up into. Then there's the narrow isthmus. I don't know, I don't know if I'm using that word correctly. Up into New Brunswick. Yeah, so there's something maybe a little, I don't want to say spiritually narrow, maybe somewhat limited or like practical. Practical and, you know, just the necessities and a place we learn that that is. That maybe has to be stalwart in response to the vagaries of the water around it. The Bay of Fundy, I was reading online, the tide, over the course of just one tide, can rise and fall 50ft because the bay is like a giant funnel. When it goes out, it just leaves this vast, open, muddy plain basically behind it.

21:16 Wes: She portrays this very beautifully. We get the image of the tide retreating and then the flats that are being illuminated by the setting sun as burning rivulets. And then there's almost a transition into the bus ride when she says on red gravelly roads, eventually the subject of that is going to be the bus. Although in the beginning, before we get to the bus, it looks like the rivulets have almost become roads. So you almost get the sense like the tides come in and it's going to go further inward, it's going to go all the way to Boston, but it's going to become the inhabitants of the bus who are much like the herrings. Right. In the first stanza. The herrings on the tides take herrings on long rides. So it's almost as if as the tide comes in, she is caught in the tide and brought along with it towards her destination.

22:08 Erin: That's right, yeah. And the bay itself, the water itself is also like a traveler, you know, you might go to visit it and find it's not at home, it's gone out for on a trip or something. So there's also that connection as well. Whereas the roads are part of this more solid and dependable and the water being fickle and not always depended on to be there.

22:31 Wes: Well, I was going to say there's something very poignant about the way she describes the tides and whether they're in or out. And I can't put my finger on it exactly. It's almost. It's this idea of. Right. Where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay. Coming in the bay, not at home. If the tide is in or coming in the river clashes with it in a wall of brown foam. Is that the idea now? And what's the image there? Is it always a wall of brown foam? Well, either way, I just. Something about this idea of. It depends on whether the bay is at home or something like that. It's a poignant image.

23:12 Erin: It is. It's that sense of just. Of disappointment or just missing someone, like a missed opportunity. Seems kind of surprisingly emotionally resonant, considering that she's talking about a tide.

23:25 Wes: And we. You know, it introduces the idea of home and. Which I think will be significant. And later on we'll talk about whether the moose is safe as houses and the reflections of the elderly and all that stuff. But.

23:40 Erin: And boundaries, too, right. You have very slippery boundary between the bay and the. And the sea, between the rivers and the bay that feeds them. And I think that boundary very much plays into the idea of home. And you could say that the bus seems to be a part of that too. Right. Like the bus becomes the home. So there's a little bit of the slippery idea of this transposition of home life into the bus, or the people on the bus all becoming the. We like a family within it. The way that it can literally cross national boundaries. It's going to Boston across the border.

24:18 Wes: Yeah. And then they'll be observing provincial life, I guess, from within the bus. And. And, you know, a woman shaking out an apron, for instance, or home life. But, yeah, I had the same thought to you. The bus. The interior of the bus becomes its own kind of mobile home, I guess. I guess the wall brown foam part. There's that push and pull, or it's a matter of who's doing the pushing. Right. In one case, the brown foam. The wall of brown foam is caused as. As the river pushes on the retreating tide. And the other case, it's the tide pushing back against the river as it comes in. But in either case, there's a clash there.

24:58 Erin: Then there are places, though, where there's blurring of boundaries. Like one of my favorite lines in the whole poem, the idea of the churches as ridged as clamshells. She always takes that. This is much remarked upon among scholars of Bishop. Where you get the thing that's. That's really big, suddenly reduced in size to the handheld, but coming out of the same idiom. You know, both the clamshell and this clapboard church are in a way equally native to Nova Scotia. The brilliance of connecting those two things and fishing being an industry in the area, you know, sort of springing out of the fishing industry.

25:42 Wes: Yeah. And shells are what's left as the tide retreats. Right. As it's as if the houses are just the natural residue of a retreating tide.

25:52 Erin: That's great.

25:52 Wes: From the beginning of the poem, there's a sense of momentum, and almost like you, at least in my case, I felt like I'm on a camera moving over the landscape, and it starts with the tide, and then it moves to the burning rivulets. Right. So now we're hovering over. I don't know what you would call it, a. A tidal plane. Anyway, she calls it the flats. Right. So all the silt, and we're moving along there, and then suddenly we're on a gravelly road. So the sun takes over from the sea. The redness of the sun. And then the bus takes over from the sun. But that's the momentum of the poem is from sea to sun to bus.

26:37 Erin: Yeah. The bus flashes pink. We get lots of pairs of the same word, creating a kind of chime with each other. So we get the windshield flashing pink. Pink glancing off of metal. And we wonder, I suppose, because part of the reason why the roads are red is because of the clay content. Right. Of the road itself. So we get that combination of, like, something red in the road or in the composition of the soil and rock of the area.

27:07 Wes: Laterite, I think, which I only know because of Graham Greene, who I've been reading. Oh, and what heart of the matter. He's talking about laterite houses, like. So from the red clay, you can make, you know, homes from as well, and common in Sierra Leone. So he used the word like a hundred times before he finally looked it up. All right. There must be something that's going to not know what he's talking about. I'm like, oh, okay, now I get it. Yeah.

27:41 Erin: So that's the mineral, the.

27:44 Wes: It's reddish. Yeah. Reddish clay type of soil, topsoil or something like that. I should know more about this because I used to write about this, too, when I was writing about transportation and engineering.

27:56 Erin: Right.

27:57 Wes: It's important what kind of soil you're building on. But anyway, I remember nothing about that. But, yeah. So it could be the right word. Who knows? But. But, yeah. So you're getting at the. Yeah. The way the redness of the sun is interacting with the.

28:12 Erin: Yes, it's coming.

28:13 Wes: The redness of the soil.

28:14 Erin: Yeah. And that kind of redness coming from below and above to glint off of the bus. The windshield is flashing pink from the sun and the metal is flashing pink from the road. They're both brushing the dented flank of the blue beat up enamel from one direction or the other, it seems. Yeah. Sort of tunnel of red in which the. In which the bus is traveling.

28:41 Wes: Such a vivid image that she gives us. It made me think, you know, sometimes it's almost better than film. It's more vibrant or more. Don't know how to say it, but I was thinking about this because in some of the philosophy podcasts we do, there are philosophers who deny that we have imagery in our head. Exactly. Or we can never. Which seems true. Right. We can't imagine anything with the vividness that we would have if we actually saw it. But it makes me think when I read a poem like this, but also. And also reading some of the novels I've been reading. Well, there's a special kind of vividness to figurative language that perception can't capture. In some ways it's more. More vivid, definitely.

29:26 Erin: I think the sonic quality of the word, the repeated. Right. It's on the one hand a repeated image, but then it also creates that kind of just the soundscape, makes them feel somehow more synesthetic to say, but somehow more picturable or more tangible or more. I don't know, the pink glancing off metal, the dented flank beat up enamel. You know, there's just. It's like. I think that's contributing to it, to the vividness of the image. And yeah, you talked about momentum, too. I mean, this entire. This whole first sentence is six stanzas long. It ends with.

and a collie supervises. So there's also that kind of. Yeah. Locomotive propulsion of the camera work, so to speak, Zooming in and then following the road into the bus. And then the bus arrives to sort of catch again, quite cinematically the scene that's actually happening or the place where the eye, if there is an eye in the poem, actually is the lone traveler embracing these relatives with the collie watching on. So there's a sense in which the I eye of the poem doesn't actually catch up with the speaker until stanza six and the end of this first sentence until we get goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dogs.

So there's kind of lamination at that moment of the I eye and the capital I.

30:49 Wes: We seem to be gradually getting more of a point of view. Right. It's very omniscient in the beginning, hovering over the landscape. And I think gradually we're going to be getting a her point of view in the bus and then a we. But also just to note, this is one. I think this is the first of three pauses. Right. There's gonna. It's gonna pause here, the bus. The momentum is gonna stop as the bus lets on the lone traveler, which I presume is her. Right. Her saying goodbye. And then there'll be a pause when the amicable freckled woman gets on. She's there because we need everything to be in threes. And then we. Then we're gonna pause for the moose in the very end. I didn't miss anything. Right. There's not other places where we stop?

31:32 Erin: No. I mean, there are, of course, stanzas that end some more definitively than others and stopped with a period. There's a stop at Bass River. Right. So there is a little bit of that kind of start. Stop syntactically. But I think you're right that those are the stops where there's content.

31:49 Wes: Content goes.

31:50 Erin: Yes. And where there's a very particular. Yeah, the content of the bus, except for the moose obviously doesn't get on the bus. But there's a stop that's motivated, let's say, rather than just being described as various stops along the way where we don't know who got on and who got off or whatever. Certainly there's also a movement toward that more personal experience of the speaker. But then there are also things that the speaker couldn't possibly know or you know, because once she's said goodbye to everyone and gets on the bus, then we also get the sort of nature show close ups.

The crystals of fog, the lupins like apostles, the sweet peas clinging. One of my favorite parts, clinging to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences. Again, we get two uses of white right next to each other. Bumblebees creeping in the foxgloves. All things you really can't see from certainly from a moving bus.

32:43 Wes: Yeah, the point of view gets focused very, very gradually, maybe through the whole palm. Maybe it's not fully focused until the very end, but. Yeah. So you're pointing out something important which is at the sort of omniscient point of view is still here in these very. What do you call it when you take a close up with your phone? Macro, ironically. Yeah. These very close up pictures of flora and fauna and very Beautiful.

33:12 Erin: Yeah. They compound and then they get more and more loaded and mysterious. And just when we're about to maybe go over the edge, we get recalled back a little bit. That's at least how I'm reading, for instance, stanza 12, about the ship's port lantern and the boot and the bark of the dog. And then suddenly a woman climbs on the bus. And so we're sort of stopped from going off into some sort of train of thought that you could follow there down a rabbit hole. But I love that stanza on red light swimming through the dark. It reminds me of the last stanza of disillusionment, of 10 o'. Clock. Do you know the old sailor, drunk and asleep in his boots, catches tigers in red weather? I think that's how it goes, the Stevens poem, because we get the boots and the red light in the ship, so they're probably. No. No real connection there.

34:07 Wes: So all of these little intricate descriptions that she's giving, right. It begins with the light growing richer, which I take it mean, means we're approaching dusk and evening, or we're in dusk and it's evening is approaching and a kind of mini winter, Right. Something. It's a diurnal cycle, but there's a bit of a parallel to something seasonal. Right. So we get crystals forming and the images like sweet peas clinging and the bumblebees inside foxgloves. As evening commences, it's almost like. I don't know if this is true, but it's almost as if we're getting the response of the animals and flora and fauna to the commencement of evening.

That's our first indication of it. So I was surprised to see, okay, it's still light out enough for us to see a woman shaking a tablecloth out after supper. And that is beautifully described as a pale flickering. Right. Almost as if that's something like the light reflecting off the enamel bus, or not pink anymore, but just a flickering of pale light and then gone, I suppose. Does that mean that we're now without light? Is that sort of the way nighttime is ushered in by the end of the next stanza? And it's in the next stanza that we see a red light in the dark.

Now we have a ship in the dark. So it's almost as if. Yeah, the shaking of the tablecloth is like a magician. Abracadabra. Now it's nighttime, Right?

35:39 Erin: Yeah. I love that. Yeah. You're making me realize how many connections there are to Keats in this poem. Right. There's something Keatsian about it, very. To Autumn, you get the sweet peas clinging on the fence. You get that image of fecundity things on top of other things. You know, the mossed cottage trees and the late flowers for the bees. And then the shaking out of the tablecloth is like the hair lifted by the winnowing wind. Right. Because there's. There's wind, there are flowers and bees. And then there's also, of course, redness and that image of, you know, like the evening.

Autumn. Evening redness. And maybe this is. Yeah. Rows of sugar maples. Those could be red as well. If we're in an autumnal landscape, can't be too late because everything is, you know, it's got to be like August, maybe because we have this. Or. No, I guess maybe not. Gray glazed cabbages. I don't know enough about cabbages to know at what point in their development.

36:40 Wes: Yeah. Whatever season it is. I just think that the evening is almost like a mini winter. It gets colder and we see the.

36:46 Erin: Definitely.

36:47 Wes: We see the effects of it. But, yeah, maybe autumn is probably the logical season for.

36:53 Erin: Right. Yeah. And that point. Or that point in the transition from summer to autumn where, I mean, even on a summer night in Nova Scotia, the evening temperature is quite autumnal regardless. And so when the woman climbs on with the market bags, we get.

37:09 Wes: Shall we take a. Shall we?

37:12 Erin: Oh, yes.

37:13 Wes: Let's let the freckled amicable woman on in part two.

37:17 Erin: She'll have to wait.

37:18 Wes: Let's not let her on the bus yet.

37:20 Erin: You have to wait for everyone else to get off before you can get on. It's one of the cardinal rules of public transportation. Okay, we will continue in part two. Thank you.

37:29 Wes: Thank you.

The very apparatus of the mummy’s tomb—his body locked in box upon box, his organs apportioned to canopic jars, hieroglyphic inscriptions on every surface—suggest the complexity of the undertaking. What might these two strands of the mummy’s DNA—in Shakespearean terms, part-Antony, part-Cleopatra—reveal about the relationship between colonizer and colonized, and about our own desires, fears, and guilt? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1999 film, “The Mummy.”

Upcoming Episodes: Elizabeth Bishop poetry, including “The Moose”

Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail

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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.

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Transcript

0:12 Erin: Welcome to part two of our discussion of the 1999 masterpiece, The Mummy, directed by Stephen Sommers, who is obviously, you know, the Orson Welles of the 90s

0:25 Wes: and also known for such movies as Van Helsing.

0:29 Erin: That's also a movie.

0:30 Wes: I like the Mummy Returns and Odd Thomas and GI Joe.

0:38 Erin: Oh, there it is.

0:39 Wes: Rise of Cobra.

0:41 Erin: There it is. Yeah. That's probably the greatest. That's probably his Magnificent Ambersons. Just to say a little bit more. Also in defense of this film, I think it's just fun. Right. You had fun watching this, I'm assuming. Yeah. There's something about it, to me that. Not just because we're talking about origins and stuff like that, that is a kind of, er, movie or the ultimate movie in terms of the fact that movies are just. There's something about them that is fundamentally silly and they're in a certain respect, like the silliest art form. And of course that makes me want to say something also about mummies as the ultimate representations of film itself, which has, I think, been a point made by people like André Bazin and, you know, all sorts of.

Susan Sontag in On Photography talks about this. Right. Just the idea of the photographic image as the preservation of dead people is. Is often the case.

1:35 Wes: And it's. You know, the chemical processing of film is like embalming.

1:40 Erin: Yeah, exactly.

1:41 Wes: Lots of parallels.

1:43 Erin: I'm just. I'm trying very slowly to construct a justification for why we are covering this on subtext. No, but I. But also. And I should. I should have said this at the beginning of the last one. This is my Gimme. My. My summer fun. In the same spirit of doing Elf at. At Christmas, I think I wanted to do a silly summer blockbuster. And of course they're also doing another. Another Mummy film soon with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. Finally. She'll be back. So it's also in honor of the resurrection of the career of Brendan Fraser.

2:16 Wes: He's going to be £300 in this one.

2:18 Erin: That'll be great.

2:19 Wes: Rachel. Rachel Weisz has to roll him around. I'm sorry.

2:23 Erin: So mean. That would. That would still be fine with me.

2:28 Wes: I just going to be called Beached.

2:35 Erin: So mean.

2:36 Wes: The I love the whale.

2:38 Erin: Yeah.

2:38 Wes: I cried, like, audibly at a theater.

2:44 Erin: He's so great.

2:45 Wes: Yeah, he's great.

2:46 Erin: But anyway, back to the conversation here about what? Did I say something about Picnic at Hanging Rock. Oh, this film is kind of like the inverse of Picnic at Hanging Rock. I thought in that Picnic is about the victory of the colonized over the colonizer that you eventually get destroyed by or defeated by the forces that you try to control. You get defeated in your attempts to fashion a narrative. Yeah. What is unknowable overtakes you and destroys your efforts at a kind of mental containment.

3:19 Wes: And again, it's contact with, like, a primal origin.

3:23 Erin: Exactly.

3:24 Wes: So in a way, it's the origin of your high level of consciousness, in a way. But it's primal. And so it can defeat that.

3:30 Erin: Yeah. And this is why the Mummy is. It's almost like a fantasy that you can feel secure as a colonizer, that you will eventually figure it out, that there is something to be figured out, that ultimately all of this has a logic that you can solve the puzzle. In fact, solve it twice over.

3:47 Wes: Right.

3:48 Erin: Because you have the first. The puzzle is about bringing the mummy to life, even though it can sometimes be accidental. There's an effort of piecing something together when the mummy comes to life. And then one has to also finish solving the puzzle or solve a second puzzle in order to then kill the mummy or send it back to the underworld or whatever the. The explanation is. And along the way, one also has to at least avoid, if not defeat, the fallout of the curse. So, yeah, so it's a fantasy about overcoming all of that. And I think the idea that makes this very psychologically suggestive is just that this, the mummy, is the puzzle that comes with its own kind of solution, in the way that Picnic at a Hanging Rock is the opposite of that, in that it's stubborn and it can't be solved.

And I think the Evelyn character seems to embody this herself in that she has this maternal figure who's Egyptian, her father is English. So whatever drama is taking place with the mummy is also internalized somehow. Again, this is played with more in the Mummy Returns, which makes it stupid and weird. It turns out that Evelyn is actually the reincarnation of the pharaoh's daughter. So there's this whole Elektra dynamic thing that ends up going on. It's really, really, really ridiculous. But the female figure in the original 1932 Boris Karloff mummy, as I already said, she also has this dual heritage, this dual nature.

And so the implication of that seems to me to be the idea that we have the desire to understand our own origins. So she's both puzzle and puzzle solver, and we want to figure ourselves out in order to resolve something that in us is unresolved. I think the curse, too, operates on the same logic in a way. Like I was thinking about how the curse is kind of like a conspiracy theory. You know way more about this than I do. I know this is an interest of yours, but you're applying a kind of faulty abduction to what you think is the fallout of something that has, rather than a sort of conspiratorial, systematic explanation, it has a magical explanation.

So this idea of logic and mystery, or logic and magic, or the known and the unknown being sort of right next to each other for the purposes of one solving the other and therefore making you feel at peace and no longer cursed, no longer suffering under some lack of knowledge or understanding.

6:13 Wes: Right.

6:13 Erin: You figured it out. You've defeated these forces in yourself. That seems to be the kind of psychological underpinning in talking about abduction, which

6:21 Wes: I'm actually reading about right now. We're doing the philosopher Peirce on our show. So inference to the best explanation. You're making me think about her first reading of the spell. Is it a spell? That we would call it. Right. She's a curious seeker of knowledge, really. Really. She's not trying to give a theory of anything literally. Right. She's just out of curiosity, reading what's in the book. But if you were to make a comparison to abduction, it's almost like it produces its own theory in reality. And the theory is the. Is the backstory.

So what it does is it raises something from the dead. It's almost like breathing life into some theoretical entity that comes back to haunt you or something like that, that attacks me. And in the case of the conspiracy theory, Right, the theorized entity is a intelligent designer of a sort, but a malicious one, a persecutory one. And you get that in this case, right? There's a persecutory entity is aroused by one's curiosity.

7:25 Erin: Yeah. Just another complication to this is the fact that the mummy has been cursed to go after whoever awakens it by some sort of overarch. I mean, in this film, it's the idea that Imhotep has violated the pharaoh's mistress and he's sentenced to the Hom-Dai and all that stuff. But the mummy itself wants to be found. So that's why this is like a perfect little puzzle box for a colonizer's self Exoneration, because the mummy wants to come back to life. So it's a curse that wants you to trip the tripwire and it wants to play itself out. So it almost has this self fulfilling prophecy or self determinism element to it as well.

8:06 Wes: Right.

8:07 Erin: It's just another way I think of twisting such a thing. I mean, it's an angle that, that the films get at which the actual Curse of the Pharaohs, as it was publicized in the 20s, that angle wasn't there. But it seems like this is the further twist to get it to make Americans and, and British people and all that like, feel, feel like they're not responsible somehow or that this has some, some will to get a toehold in the human world again, that you're almost being used as a pawn in their scheme.

8:36 Wes: It's interesting that Imhotep, he's sentenced to the worst possible punishment, but there's a real like escape clause to that, which is if you're resurrected, you get to have. Be all powerful and destroy the world and get your girlfriend back. Is that the deal?

8:54 Erin: Because you got your girlfriend?

8:55 Wes: Maybe it's worth, maybe it's worth a try. Okay, I'll take that bargain.

9:03 Erin: Right.

9:03 Wes: It's an odd sort of curse and it's an odd sort of risk to take. And it speaks to the perils of vengeance. Right. If vengeance goes too far, it can, can come back at you with a vengeance. Sorry, that was another aspect of the movie that I thought was really interesting. This, which I thought you were kind of getting a little bit there, which is the oddly risk of risky form of punishment. Right. Absolute pain, but with the risk of absolute destruction of the entire world. And again, I think it's not unrelated to the perils of romantic love where, you know, again, where the world can get blotted out by a fused or codependent, let's say in modern parlance, relationship, the same thing.

You know, few parallels of fusion with a maternal object, which we've talked a lot about on this show, in relation to a failure of a paternal authority, which in this case is the pharaoh. So there's something here about not being able to mourn an object or the maternal, the ultimate beloved, and try to maintain that object high at all costs, which can lead to this kind of destruction. The reading itself bothered, you know, when she read from the book so casually and started this whole thing off, that really got to me. And she didn't get really all blamed all that much for it, like.

So it's like, oops, just got a Bunch of people killed.

10:23 Erin: She doesn't have parents, so.

10:27 Wes: Did I do that?

10:28 Erin: Yeah. I mean, when we first see her in the. In the Museum of Antiquities, and she knocks down the bookcases, which I would say is a really, like, a missed opportunity, because I had a memory. I've seen this movie so many times, and I had a memory of her doing this at Hamunaptra, that she knocked down all the columns, but that's actually not in the movie, so they never do a callback to the bookcase gag, which I think is. Anyway, would have worked well, but she knocks them all down. And then the curator, who's actually a member of the Medjai, says, give me frogs, flies, locusts, anything but you.

Compared to you, the plagues would be a joy. So, yeah, she's the Mummy. She's a tool of the Mummy. She is the mummy. She's an extension of the Mummy. She herself is a plague. She can read and write ancient Egyptian, as she says, and she can decipher hieroglyphics and hieratic. And she knows it all. She knows all about. All she needs is field experience.

11:26 Wes: Yeah. Underneath all of this is that kind of nerds fantasy that, you know, hey, reading books is going to make me powerful after all, like Prospero and the Tempest, because it's going to be magic. Right. There's a spell in there which I think is kind of partly unconsciously beneath for people who have given up worldly power for the sake of a life of the mind. Let's say there's this, I think, maybe unconscious temptation to an unconscious fantasy that there's some kind of power in this that just transcends the power of knowing. Right. Transcends the power of being a professor.

Whatever it is one. Or a writer, or whatever it is one does. One can transform the world, cast a spell. Maybe writing is supposed to be like that. Maybe. I suppose that is the writerly fantasy that you're gonna affect other people in some way, but in this case, it becomes grandiose. Right. It's all powerful, all destructive. But yes. The kind of shy librarian out in

12:22 Erin: the field, as you were saying, not too shy.

12:24 Wes: Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Cause she's not really that shy.

12:27 Erin: She's sheltered a little.

12:28 Wes: Yeah. Sheltered, okay. Yeah. But they don't really play up that part of her character as much as they could. Right. She could be more. She's bookish, but she could be more nerdy than she is. She's goofy. They do make her goofy. Yeah.

12:42 Erin: Yeah. My favorite moment in the whole Movie is her drunk. I'm proud of what I am. I am a librarian, which is really.

12:52 Wes: Hear me roar.

12:54 Erin: Yeah.

12:55 Wes: Yeah. That is great. She says, look, I may not be an explorer or an adventurer or a treasure seeker or a gunfighter, Mr. O', Connell, but I'm proud of what I am. And he says, what is that? I am a librarian, and I'm going to kiss you, Mr. O'. Connell. Call me Rick. Doing his best Harrison Ford impression, she, of course, passes out before they can actually kiss. I should have let you read that.

13:19 Erin: No, no, no. It's way better that you read that.

13:21 Wes: Yeah.

13:24 Erin: She does say at one point explicitly, I think, that no harm ever came from reading a book.

13:30 Wes: Oh, yeah.

13:31 Erin: So this romance between o' Connell and Evie is, I think, part of the lasting appeal of this film, which I literally saw a car a couple years ago that had a bumper sticker on it, and I looked up the bumper stickers. Honk if you'd rather be watching the 1999 cinematic masterpiece, the Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. This is a real bumper sticker that I have seen in the world.

13:56 Wes: Does it go the whole bumper? It's a long one.

13:59 Erin: It's yellow and kind of fat. I didn't really give much thought to this, but does it have a parallel or a. An origin somewhere that we could think of? He's sort of. What's the term that people use? Like a himbo. You know what I'm talking about? I mean, he's intelligent and resourceful, right? But he's definitely the brawn and she's the brain. I guess it's just like a Beauty and the Beast thing, only he's also beautiful. So. Yeah, but, yeah, bookish girl and big, brawny guy who is sort of antagonizing her, but also who inherently respects her and does whatever she wants.

14:35 Wes: Sort of like Harrison Ford in Star Wars. I mean, even though this film is often compared to Raiders of the Lost Ark, the attitude of Rick is more like, I think, Harrison Ford in Star wars, where he's sort of Han Solo is kind of cynical, and I guess the Rick character. Could you call him cynical?

14:52 Erin: I mean, he's willing to go back there, and he's. For a guy who almost died by hanging, he bounces back pretty fast.

14:58 Wes: He's worldly and not idealistic, practical in certain ways and all that stuff. So he is above love in that sense. He's not explicitly that he made out to be a womanizer or something like that, but he's the bachelor par excellence. And he's in a very different position than Imhotep, who is consumed by love to the point of risking everything, not just his life, but being eternally cursed.

15:27 Erin: You're making me realize how much of a nerd Princess Leia is. I wouldn't have thought of her in that way, but that's basically what she is. She's kind of nerdy.

15:37 Wes: Yeah. With those buns, you know, she belongs in. But she's much more feisty than Evelyn, I think.

15:45 Erin: Yeah. She's angry.

15:46 Wes: Yeah. Her and Han Solo, really. Yeah. Annoy the shit out of each other.

15:52 Erin: Yeah.

15:53 Wes: In a way that. There's some of that in this, but it's much more benign, I think.

15:58 Erin: Well, I mean, we could talk maybe about the three Americans. I don't know if you have anything to say about them. They're kind of just there to be caricatures of Americans and then to get their flesh sucked off their bodies. Yeah. It does give some funny opportunities for a comment by Jonathan, for instance, which Rick seems to sort of escape.

16:19 Wes: What does he say?

16:19 Erin: You know, they're all holding. Holding a gun in each hand and shooting all the Medjai when they come on the boat. And all Jonathan says when he looks at them, he sort of looks with disgust and says, americans, you know, because they're all, like, hooting and saying, yee haw. I don't know. It just makes us look like badasses. But not for long. They're kind of fun. And I guess it occurred to me, too, in making the connection between the Mummy and the vampire, which I suppose I still haven't talked about, just the fact that you have the. In Dracula, you know, you have the three.

They're not all three Americans. Only one is American. But you have the three guys, you know, that each proposed to Mina, or whatever her name is. I haven't read this in a long time, but they're the trio that fight Dracula. So it almost seems like that's something that the movie is explicitly playing with, because these three figures, it doesn't quite line up with the figures in the 1932 mummy, so they seem to be bringing in more Stoker. But my favorite character in the movie is Dr. Bombay. Winston, are you a Bewitched fan?

17:21 Wes: I did watch Bewitched a bit as a kid, but it's been so long. Yeah. I can't call myself a fan.

17:28 Erin: Yeah.

17:28 Wes: But I did watch quite a bit of it on reruns as a kid, so.

17:32 Erin: Good. I love Dr. Bombay.

17:33 Wes: Yeah.

17:34 Erin: And I love Winston. I love that character. I was initially thinking about him as a kind of. Obviously some sort of ultimate figure of colonialism, but he's actually kind of the opposite of the Mummy.

17:46 Wes: How do you mean?

17:47 Erin: He's not at all about being obsessed with a single woman. He seems both completely uninterested in women and also interested in any woman at any given moment. He's seen with a woman on his arm and he's just getting drunk all the time. So he's this figure of dissipation and doesn't seem particularly attached to anyone. And his lack of attachment makes him just the perfect figure to want to sacrifice himself for some cause. His only attachment seems to be to die some sort of glorious and heroic death because he feels guilty for being a survivor and he just wants to go out with a bang.

So no attachments in this world. No desire to get back to some sort of past of his? Well, there is actually. Okay, now that I'm talking through this, it's interesting, right? There is a desire to sort of undo the past, to undo the fact of his survival, but it's about pressing the eject button and just getting out, getting out of this world entirely. His desire for this glorious death is about being useful and then disappearing. As the oldest maybe character in the film, he's an interesting counterpoint to the truly old characters in the film. Like Imhotep.

19:05 Wes: Yeah, he says, I just wish I could have chucked it in with the others and gone down in flame and glory instead of sitting around here rotting of boredom and booze. Yeah, well, they give him his glory in the end.

19:18 Erin: Yeah, he's just, yeah. The perfect opposite, I guess, to the Mummy. Where the film, if it does fall apart in any locatable place or if the whole thing is just kind of a silly. A silly mess. Lovable mess. Perhaps it's when the Mummy transports both Benny and Evelyn back to Hamunaptra in some sort of self created sand tornado, he becomes sand at one point to go through her keyhole. That sounded dirty. Just saying that. I regret that. Yeah, I don't know, but best not to look at that too closely. But maybe I should just use that as the way into talking about the vampire thing for a second.

The thing about the vampire is that the vampire is rapacious. Much more a figure of, say, sex rather than love. And someone who wants to constantly make new conquests. As opposed to this pharaoh who seems to only be, or not pharaoh. As opposed to this mummy who seems to only be giving his attentions to Evie as a way to secure her as some human sacrifice so he can get his girlfriend back. He still only has one woman in mind. I thought of you the whole time. I guess. Also another difference that occurs to me. So we have him sucking the life out of these American guys.

So obviously there's something vampiric about that, but it's in order to reconstitute his

20:43 Wes: own, just add American flesh.

20:46 Erin: Yeah, it's very, very Silence of the Lambs. But yeah, it's, I suppose, kind of about stealing the life force, but not really. And then I was also thinking about the vampire as being just alive forever and therefore not tied to a particular time, sort of to a place, but not really. You know, he has his castle and he does sleep in a coffin and stuff like that. But he's not really specifically identified with a particular culture. Whereas the mummy is obviously more rooted in a historical context. So it seems as though the mummy is more about both through this constant love object and through the particular culture out of which he comes. Much more about history and the past in a specific sense rather than this sort of sexualized undead threat that can appear anywhere and overtake you.

21:40 Wes: So what's our taxonomy of the undead? We have mummies, vampires, zombies, Is that it? Are there any other major undead categories in films?

21:53 Erin: I don't know if Frankenstein's monster is enough to be a category unto itself. That's a zombie, right?

21:59 Wes: He's a category unto himself.

22:00 Erin: Oh, okay.

22:01 Wes: He's not really a zombie. He's, you know, he reads Milton, right? Come on.

22:07 Erin: He's an electrical man.

22:09 Wes: Also, he's part very, very sensitive guy. Yeah, he's not very good looking. Actually. He's really good looking in the movie. Did you see the.

22:20 Erin: I haven't.

22:22 Wes: The recent movie. Yeah, they make him. No, he's a very good looking actor, which I thought was like, all right, he's still stitched together, but, you know, you got a good face and he's very tall. But any case. Yeah. So I think he's in a category of his own. Zombies. Yeah. I'm just thinking about my different feelings of the effectiveness of these different. I guess none of them really do it for me.

22:44 Erin: Vampires do it for me, really. But yeah, I maybe have to have a blood disorder to really.

22:50 Wes: Oh, yeah. Well, there you go. Yeah. Have you tried that for your blood disorder? Yeah, exactly, you sod. About zombie films. I don't. Philosophically, socially, it interests me because it's about the collective. What is the zombie? I think it's about old people, really, but stumbling around trying to Eat us because they envious or the dead.

23:14 Erin: Yeah, but that's also what vampires are about to a certain extent. Yeah, yeah. Basically this is all. They're all mummies is what you're saying. They're all the past trying to.

23:24 Wes: Yeah.

23:25 Erin: Trying to feast on the living and

23:27 Wes: the envy of the past for the living. So we, you know, of course, you know, we, we live by their rules. Right. All of our norms, as I was saying. Right. So the civilization is. Right. Has its formative origins and influences in these ancient civilizations. And then our dead ancestors, often the norms, at least their packaging. Right. Was determined by those who live before us. And we just sort of adopt their ways so they continue to live on in us. And sometimes we live on in very zombie like ways. It's like, well, I'm living by this code of ethics or these desires and things that I'm supposed to want and I, I don't know why I want them and I don't know who put this into me, you know, my parents or my culture or whatever.

And so we do stump, you know, sometimes stumble around in the zombie like way in the state of pseudo desire. Right. The zombie is enough, I think in that state. Can't really desire. It doesn't. I mean it's animate, but not animate anyway, you get the, you get to get the picture. But you know, we, we can feel norms, the norms given to us by the dead as persecutory. But also I think there's some sort of fear of like the guilt, survivor guilt, you know, that produces a persecutory fantasy like the dead are going to come back for us.

24:44 Erin: Hmm.

24:44 Wes: It's not enough for them to persecute us with our harsh super in the form of a harsh superego. Right. And strict mores or values. They've got to come back in person and take life back from us. So those kinds of thoughts I find very interesting. But a bunch of zombies stumbling around like I think I could get away. It doesn't do it for me. I know. They make them faster now, I guess in some movies. What's it called? The Z. What was it called?

25:13 Erin: World War Z and then the Walking Dead.

25:16 Wes: I just. Yeah, I can't explain why. It just, it has no emotional effect for me.

25:21 Erin: Yeah, I feel the same way. The key with the zombie is that it might get you and then you become one of the undead too. And you. And I think this goes to your reading of these. The idea that the zombie is the victim of large cultural forces seems to be reinforced by the fact that the zombie is always part of a larger body of people. Whereas the vampire and the mummy seem more cult of personality, like they seem more. More individualistic and they have their own specific thing that they're after or about self employed. Right, right. Where. Where in the vampire it's maybe more appetitive and in the mummy it's more about. It's more intellectual, you could say, because it's more about memory and the past.

26:02 Wes: Yeah, there's more association of lust, I guess with vampires and with zombies it's a lack of, you know, again, like a pseudo desire. And desire. Not desire to do anything except to spread the. They reproduce, but they reproduce themselves by biting. Right.

26:19 Erin: It's not.

26:19 Wes: Not sexual reproduction or reproduction through love. So. And then in the case of the mummy, I think it's more about love. Right. We have lust, we have the aggression, at least in this story. Or maybe it's about knowing, maybe it's about knowledge, you know, the kind of things that you've pointed to. We're curious, but then we're greeted with something incomprehensible. This also makes me think of Peirce because he's kind of pointing to the ways in which knowledge is grounded in the incomprehensible. Right. Because at some point some kind of raw data comes in.

It's unconceptualized and unknown. Kant calls this the manifold. And it's. Or it's the thing in itself. The alien unknowable thing in itself. Behind the manifold, perhaps. God, we have this weird situation where you're trying to cross the gap by knowing. But the very concept of knowledge implies something unknowable and alien and perhaps even persecutory. So again, once again, the curiosity, and the kind of benign curiosity of being in a museum looking at ancient artifacts could become fraught in some way.

27:24 Erin: I knew we'd get to Kant. I knew we'd be justified.

27:26 Wes: Sorry.

27:27 Erin: In choosing this film. No, I love it. I love it.

27:30 Wes: Yeah. It turns out Peirce was a big Kantian and Hegelian and it's just shocking to me how little I know about him and how profound he is. But. But anyway, final words.

27:40 Erin: I just. I hope I've proved to you how profound this film is.

27:45 Wes: I will. I will take it under consideration. No, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it.

27:52 Erin: Okay, well, thank you. And careful what you read.

27:57 Wes: Thank you.