Scribblings with Green Chalk

Time’s dust is slowly accumulating between me and my essay on Elizabeth Bishop’s conception of poetry as a glass eye gifted with sight. I decided to close the process of revision and consider the essay done, though I still can’t read it without thinking that it could be improved in many ways. Today, I would also add other questions to my original inquiry. But that could be a separate essay, couldn’t it? The question of creative and created sight remains open.

Because the most interesting points about sight were made by Bishop, not by me, I hesitate to paste here any excerpts from my paper. One possible point of departure for more questioning would be this paragraph, which brings together many of the ideas that interested me then: Probing the limitations of perception is one of Bishop’s idées fixes. Regardless of whether we are dealing with objectivized narration or an emotionally-colored description, the problem of the sense and aim of observation inevitably returns. The knowledge gained through watching the world closely is always questionable, being a combination of what one sees and what one only desires to see. By recreating visual experience through linguistic means, the poem becomes, out of necessity, also a tale of the act of perception. References to other senses not only emphasize certain characteristics of the object but, above all, expose the limitations of sight, its dependence on memory and imagination. Naturalness and artificiality are therefore present in observation from the very beginning.

I’m glad I used “objectivized” and not “objective,” which settles the Krapp argument tentatively in favor of me being the same person now and then. Sight as Bishop constructed it in her poetry was never “pure,” innocent, or unquestionable. Not all-embracing, not all-knowing. Tricky.

About sight in poetry, she wrote:

Off and on I have written out a poem called “Grandmother’s Glass Eye” which should be about the problem of writing poetry. The situation of my grandmother strikes me as rather like the situation of a poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye.

(Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box 212).

Although this applies to representation of sight, I think it could be extended first to extraliterary representation and then to conceptualizing sight as such. Not that this hasn’t been done, because it has — if it hadn’t, I wouldn’t even be asking about this, because the notion of disembodied objectivity still has rather strong appeal.

I’m thinking of Bishop’s modesty as pitted against the Objectivity of scientific representation. Remember what she did in Georgaphy III? The series of questions that opens that volume creates a skeptical lens through which to view space, distances, places, and phenomena from the poems. Sight according to Bishop is a modest sense. So modest that in “Poem” Bishop cuts it off from visionary pretences–

Our visions coincided—“visions” is
too serious a word—our looks, two looks

Is modest sight too dubious for science? Is vision the locus of objectivity? How can objectivity be questioned?

I could probably turn now towards modest sight as a david to scientific vision’s goliath in Bishop’s poetry, but in this sketchy post I’ll go in the other direction.

Whether scientists like it or not (and I know a few who don’t, because they will insist that linguistic is not a “real” science), language plays with them and their findings. The “objectivity” that is touted as the ultimate truth of inquiry and representation is language pulling their strings (and having its strings pulled to some extent). The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after a bath in champagne. The legacy of sentimental novels, newspaper articles, and political propaganda entering “serious” research (not like the wishy-washy humanities) all the time, quietly, unnoticed. Sic!

Apologies for enjoying the irony so much (with probably more than a hint of a humanities “complex”). Being in language is inescapable as is being in culture, politics, society. An objectivity which claims that this is possible has ulterior motives. It’s an enticing objectivity, with pretentions of godhood, one floating above the mundane in an impossible trick of its vision.

Whatever I could say has already been said in a more cogent and convincing way by Donna Haraway, so I will let the quotes from “Situated Knowledges” do my work for me.

I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. This is the gaze that mythically inscribed all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation. [...]

The visualizing technologies are without apparent limit [...]. [...]Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters. [...]

A tribute to this technology of direct, devouring, generative, and unrestricted vision, whose technological mediations are simultaneously celebrated and presented as utterly transparent, the volume celebrating the 100th anniversary of the National Geographic society closes its survey of the magazine’s quest literature, effected through its amazing photography, with two juxtaposed chapters. The first is on “Space,” introduced by the epigraph, “The choice is the universe–or nothing” (Bryan, 1987, p. 352). Indeed. This chapter recounts the exploits the exploits of the race and displays the colour-enhanced “snapshots” of the outer planets reassembled from digitalized signals transmitted across vast space to let the viewer “experience” the moment of discovery in immediate vision of the “object.” These fabulous objects come to us simulataneously as indubitable recordings of what is simply there and as heroic feats of techno-scientific production. The next chapter is the twin of outer space: “Inner Space,” introduced by the epigraph, “The stuff of stars has come alive” (Bryan, 1987, p. 454). Here, the reader is brought to the realm of the infinitesimal, objectified by means of radiation outside the wavelengths that “normally” are perceived by hominid primates, i.e., the beams of lasers and scanning electron microscopes, whose signals are processed into the wonderful full-colour snapshots of defending T cells and invading viruses.

But of course that view of infinite vision is an illusion, a god-trick. I would like to suggest how our insisting metaphorically on the particularity and embodiment of all vision (though not necessarily organic embodiment and including technological mediation), and not giving in to the tempting myths of vision as a route to disembodiment and second-birthing, allows us to construct a usable, but not an innocent objectivity.

(Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of the Partial Perspective.”The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. 86-87)

At first glance this question might seem slightly awkward. But I find it crucial to ask about perpective and forms of engagement before going on to explore particular issues connected with the black feminist experience.

From its inception, black feminism was by Black women for Black women and the benefit of the Black community as a whole. The communal aspect cannot be undermined, since black feminism has been primarily concerned with praxis: no theorizing without activism.

This much is clear. Yet since its orientation is not solely towards the female individual but the community — of women and women within a larger community — what if we asked about its possible benefits for the society at large?

The black feminist standpoint is exceptional in that it grasps multiple levels of oppression: it’s articulated at the intersection of race and gender, and as such it reveals the ways in which systems of oppression and exclusion conflate. Although in everyday existence this position signifies deprivation and invisibility within dominant discourse, in the light of standpoint theory, it makes for deep insight. Coming from the very bottom of the power hierarchy, the black feminist standpoint is cognizant of the mechanisms and ideologies that more privileged standpoints would either not notice or consider neutral.

It’s knowledge.

The pursuit of knowledge is one of the great human desires.

And — I’m thinking out loud here — this kind of knowledge appears exceptional in that it provides a chance to sever the cords between knowledge and power. It’s not about inventing the wheel or, more accurately, inventing systems of control, but about understanding. Understanding has been increasingly undervalued, since it does not have momentum, does not lead to expansion. Or has understanding never really been valued?… And yet, as I stated above, people desire knowledge, if only for the sake of satisfying desire.

Since standpoints are not inherent qualities, it makes sense to believe that one can access them without being part of the original group, with additional effort, perhaps. Yet how to do that without making it seem like an attempt to steal, and change ideas?

First of all, how to listen and hear? There is no “neutral starting point” for a dialog with a position we do not know enough about. All such attempts fail and, what is worse, lead to more misunderstandings. I found two posts at Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters that clearly illustrate this. In “What Can the White Woman Say to the Black Woman?,” the writer, Ann, warns about disregarding history. Irrational fears of “reverse racism” often preclude necessary openness, without which participating in the project of black feminism is not possible. This leads to isolation and separatism. And while separatism has its advantages, it rarely leads to sharing knowledge and spreading tolerance.

As Patricia Hill Collins warns (critiquing Hazel V. Carby):

Exclusionary definitions of Black feminism which confine ‘black feminist criticism to black women critics of black women artists depicting black women’ (Carby 1987, 9) are inadequate because they are inherently separatist. Instead, the connections here aim for autonomy. (Black Feminist Thought 32-33)

Arguing for autonomy instead of isolation, Collins opens up the possibility for outsiders to be part of the discussion. The question remains: How?

Another one of Ann’s posts, “Shut the Fuck Up,” mentions attempts at placating Black women without asking about the reasons of their anger and discontent. Treating women like children is, of course, nothing new but always a suicidal shot if what one wants is insight and knowledge. The answer is, as Ann points out, to shut up. Not to step in with “but’s” and “however’s” before you’ve heard the argument and thought it over. My next question is where to go from there.

If your objective is to learn and use the knowledge in your experience and, furthermore, to engage with the perspective (which is what I personally want), how do you find your place within the larger project? Which, in the end, boils down to the question: who can become a black feminist?

You do know that feeling when you see a homeless person, a sense of shame tinged with indifference. Not that it’s most convenient to look away, or that like Ben Franklin we have absolute control over what happens to us… But how far does ranting and raving go and just how much love for the world and benevolence is there in our personal reservoir?

I remember a friend of mine who, seeing a beggar by the entrance to the Viennese Hauptuni, got into a long tirade over what this country and our demonic capitalism do to people.

I have my fears about waking sleepwalkers, so I let him dream his marxist dream. Maybe I have a heart of stone, but I didn’t see things as he saw them there and then.

It’s becoming my favorite answer that we are all to a greater or lesser extent bound within our perspective. What you are and what you have directs your perception, structures it, and writes between the lines. Embodiment is tough to oppose. You cannot, try as you might, just float out of your body and stand apart with a sense of complete insight and oneness with the world. Yet our pet theories often give us the feeling that through them we are achieving precisely that. This is my pet theory.

And this is how I make sense of that situation from several months ago. My friend, who was an American exchange student, comfortably well off, and a big fan of Marx, saw in the beggar the proof of great social injustice caused by capitalism and the US impact on world economy. While he struggled with outrage and what seemed to me like a bit of self-disgust (for being American), I was somewhere else on the whole issue. An exchange student like him, but with incomparably smaller funds, and, moreover, from a former people’s republic, I did not conceive of the old man’s desperate condition in terms of capitalist oppression. First of all, because capitalism in Austria is not an exact recreation of American models (so “this country” is not “this country” with the intonation and criticism that automatically came to his mind). And, perhaps more importantly, because the old man was not an Austrian ousted to the margins by the state economy’s cruel machine, but an emigrant, most likely from a former communist state. His mumbling didn’t sound even remotely like German. If it were possible to ask him why he came to Vienna, I imagine we’d have heard a story about how he wanted to embrace the cruel capitalist machine. Where it got him objectively and how evil the world actually is remains beyond anyone’s perspective.

If it’s the homeless who really know what homelessness is about, then there are slight chances that the others will be able to go beyond romanticizing homelessness. It’s an ironic footnote to the standpoint theory. Be it linguistic barriers, madness, or aimlessness of storytelling, whatever the reason, it’s not very likely that we’ll get a comprehensive outcast’s view of the world.

There is a beggar on Heidelberg’s Hauptstrasse that everyone recognizes. The guy usually has a peaceful albeit somewhat blank look on his face and he’s always sitting with his dog. He’s got a piece of cardboard covered in unsteady handwriting (I never read it) and he wraps his dog up in a blanket. Like many people, when I pass them I can’t help to want to stroke the dog. Thank God I never tried to.

This is what I heard today from my classmate Ricardo. As he was walking down Hauptstrasse a while ago, he saw an elderly man approach the guy and try to lift the blanket to look at the dog. The homeless guy quickly leapt to his feet and punched the elderly man, who staggered and fell down cracking his skull on the pavement. A crowd gathered around them, people yelled at the beggar. And Ricardo said that the beggar yelled back something like: “He shouldn’t have tried to touch my dog.”

Whoever knows what that meant. I’m not up to theorizing about poverty nor madness, nor up to stroking anyone’s dog after this story.