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)

Januaries, Nature greets our eyes
exactly as she must have greeted theirs
…

This is where the multiple Januaries come from. All the way back to the year 1501, weaving inaproppriateness, conquest, exoticism, leaves, and lizards in a January rush. I’ve always felt that January was a month running quickly downhill. My birthday is in January and each year I get the impression that the days are rolling towards it faster than I can count, which makes me feel irrationally old (but not wiser).

I got a lovely letter from Wildly Parenthetical, saying she liked the idea of multiple Januaries and I thought it’s worth elaborating on if only by means of random associations. Frankly, I didn’t think that anyone would be interested in my choice of blogging name (more on that later) and so I never bothered to explain it. It is more or less a play of associations: the month, a vague resemblance to my actual name, Elizabeth Bishop’s arrival in Brazil, this song. I’ve never had any ‘effective’ nickname, so I enjoy the impersonality of many Januaries.

It’s a good question, though, how people choose their blogging names and what to make of the choice to blog under one’s real name? Anthony says he’s more reserved towards bloggers who use their real names (Anthony, please write a post about this so I can link here), I would make an exception with fiction writers, because their kind of writing entails an additional degree of distance and play (though does it always?…).

I couldn’t find the poem online, so if you wish to read it in its entirety, I can only suggest you look for The Complete Poems 1927-1979. Bishop is my favorite poet. I admire her technical skill, her use of imagery, and the curious humor. Like in these lines from the final stanza:

Just so the Christians, hard as nails,
tiny as nails, and glinting

Hmm… There is (was?) also an LA band called The Januaries. Not that I’m surprised…

The differences have to be slight. Tiny displacements, changes of scale. I pick up a carton of milk from the fridge and get an Alice-in-Wonderland feeling that everything around me has grown and is stealthily continuing to expand. As for the blueberries — the berries were chalk-like, too. This has, of course, nothing to do with taste. They could seem like a mathematician’s joke; they are larger here. Thick dots.

I am having a great time. My ruminations on kitchen themes seem like research, watching fireflies is a serious study of nature. I think about the first naturalists who came to theNew World and named so many plants and animals after the European species that appeared to them similar — only to discover that there is more than meets the eye. I feel like I can appreciate such kind of misunderstanding.

Back in Ithaca after a few months to enjoy the contrast with winter as I saw it here. I’m counting on those small everyday slips and modest revelations. I do identify to some extent with Zuko, the cat, who gets lost immediately after he steps out of the house but nevertheless tries to get out.

Debbie told me that the Spanish words for blueberry and cranberry make little sense in Latin America. Not only are the fruits fairly unknown, but the names seem to describe nothing. I cannot remember what those words were and I feel that old sense of annoyance that I do not understand. I wish that I could understand that lack of understanding. I looked up “health” in the online Welsh dictionary today and remembered how much fun it was to play with my ignorance, collecting new words like glass balls or souvenir magnets. I wonder what counting blueberries would be like if the word “blueberry” made no sense. And I wonder if Bishop knew about the linguistic confusion when she was writing the poem. Was that in Brazil? Is there any dilemma in Portuguese? If those questions appear silly to you, please remember that I started with amazement at milk cartons. This is as far as I want to go — not straying from the fridge. Here’s the deepest thought that came to me: words like to go for a walk away from the concepts, as the blueberry/cranberry example shows. Or blackberries. Either way, it’s all about fruit.

This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me -
The simple News that Nature told -
With tender MajestyHer Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see;
For love of her - Sweet - countrymen -
Judge tenderly of Me

This way, hiding behind Dickinson, I can slowly begin. I imagine I could go on pretending that I don’t really have any observations and that I don’t scribble all the time. I could put my scattered thoughts in a dusty drawer or the dusty back of my mind. It does seem very appealing in its modesty.

And then I could sigh that the world never writes back… But it’s not the nineteenth century, I am not that brilliant recluse who put together fascicles of poems that keep critics awake at nights. When it comes to sewing, I can only patch up socks. Dickinson hid away in her home to conjure imaginary prairies. I haven’t been home in months and, as things are, I won’t be coming back home at least for a while. In fact, words like “home” and “away” have become questionable. If I’mhere — wherever that may be — why should I assume that what makes me what I am is elsewhere? I remember once having this fear that without the mass of quotidian detail that gathered around me during the past few years I would dissolve. I didn’t. What happened is that I went to Vienna and first understood “Questions of Travel.” On one of the chilly autumn mornings I opened Bishop’s Complete Poems and found that this particular one sounded different.

Perhaps we can’t all just stay home and revel in domesticity. Perhaps, at times, we must dream our dreams / and have them, too just because it’s a more honest solution than renunciation. But I don’t think it’s fair to demand that journeys be epiphanies, expand your mind, elevate the soul. They will change you, nevertheless, through the small annoying particulars and the connections you will be tempted to make. So then, like Bishop’s traveler, you will take a notebook to jot them down.

I might not have made any logical connection to the “letter to the world” idea, but I will argue that it exists in my mental notebook. I don’t know about “home” and “away” anymore. I know that there are friends in the places tentatively labeled “here” and “there,” and that letters get easily lost or remain unwritten altogether. There is no inspiration from the muses in my scribbling. This is just a notebook. Just observations. Not gems of thought sewn together by divine logic. Just patched up socks. Please, don’t judge my inflated ego too harshly. But maybe drop a line sometimes.