On “Elizabeth Bishop and the Management of Distance”
I. Cirque d’Hiver
For about two years I have been not writing “Elizabeth Bishop and the Management of Distance.” It is an essay, some thoughts on how beginning to talk to someone in a low voice from across the room while slowly moving towards them, perhaps in a sidelong manner and while looking at something else, can result in an impression of intimacy—if only by contrast with the seeming coolness and impersonality of the beginning.
Across the floor flits the mechanical toy,
fit for a king of several centuries back.
A little circus horse with real white hair.
His eyes are glossy black.
He bears a little dancer on his back.
The question of purpose hovered at the start, indicating more preparation was needed.
So I read letters written by and to Miss Bishop. I traveled from coast to coast. I read critical studies of her development as a writer (often of a (to my mind) overly psychoanalytic variety). I lost my apartment. I read scholarly analyses of her poems, spent a lot of money, read drafts and unpublished work, read informal recollections of those who knew her, I was unsettled for the better part of two years, I went overseas, left my books behind I was so in love, stored forty-two boxes of books, I so wanted a home, shipped some boxes, lost them, lost a great love I lost then found then lost. . . . Continued to study Bishop’s words.
She stands upon her toes and turns and turns.
Bishop’s poems compel in how they render emotional depths beneath initially unremarkable surfaces, yet also perplex in how they sometimes do so in an oddly disinterested or detached tone.
A slanting spray of artificial roses
is stitched across her skirt and tinsel bodice.
Above her head she poses
another spray of artificial roses.
Under the careful, direct language and almost scientifically precise description, the object of attention is entirely clear, yet the occasion for speaking—the motive behind the speaker’s attention—is, at first, hard to pin down—Why is she telling me this, now?
His mane and tail are straight from Chirico.
He has a formal, melancholy soul.
The thought is hardly original to me—many have remarked Bishop’s oblique strategies in getting to the heart of the matter. But I find her effacements intriguing, attractive—as if she were speaking with her back to me, and I have to lean in and listen closely to catch the drift of her low tones. Of her face I can see only her upswept hair, the line of her jaw, the side of her full cheek, maybe a bit of eyelash.
He feels her pink toes dangle toward his back
along the little pole
Oh that, while Elizabeth busies herself straightening figurines on a shelf, I might sidle behind, re-tuck a wisp of her hair, wrap my arms around her waist, press myself against her, murmur Stay, stay.
that pierces both her body and her soul
She runs a finger along a book’s spine. . . .
and goes through his, and reappears below,
under his belly, as a big tin key.
I love her terribly, resolutely, hopelessly.
*
II. Questions of Winter
It begins to occur to me as I continue to not write this essay that it is a naive optimism to think that anything about distance is at all manageable—for instance, distance from home (not having one),distance from achievement of one’s academic and professional goals (not realizing them), distance from the beloved (four years, and now half a planet)—and, worst of all, distance, at times, from who I take myself to be.
He canters three steps, then he makes a bow,
canters again, bows on one knee,
(Who do I take myself to be?)
canters, then clicks and stops, and looks at me.
Being an otherwise resilient, resourceful and practical woman (this sounds good for the moment, let’s go with it), I am attempting to approach “Elizabeth Bishop and the Management of Distance” in small increments. If I had had the child I hoped for, I would have been very good at breaking down for her into small pieces whenever she was overwhelmed by the large. Don’t worry, I would say, You don’t have to do it all at once. You can start with just this one: the plainest, squarest wooden block of the bunch. . . .
I am so reassuring when I speak of how to handle the blocks. The mother’s voice, like shelving. I am usually alone and I talk to myself.
But now the whole project seems stuck on a bad premise. Didn’t Bishop spend her own life’s work not so much managing distance as suffering it, re-creating it, maintaining it, and, ultimately, aestheticizing its painful consequences?
The dancer, by this time, has turned her back.
Or, seemingly painful consequences—was it always so, for her?
For didn’t Bishop choose to restrain her poem’s affections, choose to delay her visits with friends until they broke down, were sent to sanitariums, married women who weren’t her? Didn’t she dream of drinking alone by the wavering blue flame, in an artichoke-green shack teetering on the edge of the northeastern seaboard, grudgingly connected to land by just one long, frayed extension cord? What did she say to Lota in Brazil, that she could not bring herself to say in any poem? What in that cool breast did Elizabeth reveal, that always was flowing, has flown, will always be unknown to anyone, unknown by
me?
My own confessions of limitation and failure, my self-doubts, my little series of come-to-nothings, are revealed to an unblinking page. It is not especially like a lover, although some receptivity is involved.
He is the more intelligent by far.
I type my come-to-nothings as if gazing into the open face of Love. In him, all my Nothing resolves into delightful, immediate, and concrete presence. This is also known as “text”. The process of making it is much less like lovemaking than I care to admit.
Facing each other rather desperately—
his eye is like a star—
How do I turn such bright absence into small, square blocks? Not much bigger than, say, the space above the seat of an ordinary breakfast room chair. Once my beloved and I sat for hours, silent, holding hands. We were suffused, radiant in the presence of the other. Now, I can’t imagine less light than this. I cannot bear his life-sized absence.
Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Cirque d’Hiver” appeared in her first book, North & South, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1946.