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Elizabeth Bishop and the Metaxy

Voegelin’s exposition of the metaxy (between) in In Search of Order could be summarized this way: the metaxy emerges from the writer’s search for order in experience.  The metaxy and the search happen in language. Language is both resistant and revelatory; the equivocal character of experience in the between baffles the tendency of language to reduce the field of experience; the give and take between technique and inspiration affords possibilities for the poet to overcome the univocal thrust of the autonomous, erotic mind and become porous to the luminous beyond. The narrative is kenotic in the sense that the world of the autonomous self becomes empty in the process of composition; at a certain point only the poem takes over and the poet becomes participant in a reality beyond her.

So it makes sense that close reading of poems in their contexts should disclose the tensions of the metaxy or  between, the structures of finite existence in light of transcendence. This thesis is borne out by our close readings of poems by Heaney, Stevens, Milosz, and Hill. Now we will look at the work of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), whose famously reticent poems, essays, and short stories reveal the resourcefulness of the metaxological narrative. Her discovery of the between in her poetry allowed her carefully watched self, public and private, to attain the insights that spill out of her poems.

Bishop’s youth was difficult, to put it mildly. Her father, a successful builder in Boston, died when she was eight months old, her mother was institutionalized as insane (she once tried to kill Elizabeth with a butcher knife) when Elizabeth was five. Her grandparents made a good home for her in Great Village, Nova Scotia, lovingly recalled in some of her finest poems. She seems to have memorized a lot of hymns in these formative years. But soon she was moved to Massachusetts. Sickly as a child, her formal education began in earnest in private schools to prepare for college. Her aunt introduced her to poetry, mostly the great Victorians. She entered Vassar in 1929, hoping to major in music; stage fright nixed that and she took her degree in English. Essays from her early 20’s reveal a mind both scholarly and aesthetically brilliant. An essay on Gerard Manly Hopkins published in 1934 (see Library of America Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters) reveals her fascination with and her intelligent grasp of his innovations in scansion and rhythm; furthermore, she focuses on the sources of perfection in his work. She offers nothing on haeceitas. (My guess is that Hopkins’s use of Duns Scotus to explain “selfing” had little appeal to her, her sense of self not open to metaphysics.)  But she notes the “emotional height” of Hopkins’s poetry and the “depth of the emotional source from which it arises.” She does not name this “source” but remarks on the “perfection” made possible by the source. Apparently this source is not the conscious mind but outside it. “The poem, unique and perfect, seems to separate from the conscious mind, deliberately avoiding it, while the conscious mind takes difficult steps toward it.”

Her use of “poem” here to signify a perfection towards which the poet strains helps explain much about her poetry. Bishop was a perfectionist, yes, but also defiantly herself, often to the consternation of others. She often passed over in silence parts of experience that would perhaps explain things scholars hanker after. But I think in another, less ideological sense, these silences are a key to her style; they allowed a very self-conscious poet to become expressive in-and-of the search for truth.

Though Bishop won all the big prizes, her poetry remains problematic for many readers, especially the professional ones. Recent academic studies have found her a niche in most of the current research contexts, including a growing archive of gender studies that delve into her discreet but public identification of herself as “gay” (in her poems, she loves to use the old definition and flirt, for her “provocatively,” with the new). In a way, these essays do reveal the complexity of her thought and experience, but there are mysteries that seem to elude her scholars, the mysteries of her sense of her art. Her history as a topic seems secure, but her sense of history needs illuminating.

Desperately shy, Bishop didn’t like the “confessional” poetry that became popular and which her best friend Robert Lowell promoted by teaching and example. One of her best early poems, “At the Fishmarkets” (published in her second book, “A Cold Spring” in 1955), ends this way:

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:

dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,

drawn from the cold hard mouth

of the world, derived from the rocky breasts

forever, flowing and drawn, and since

our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

This is a simile for the sea, but it is also a profoundly felt testimony to the kind of knowledge that inspired her as a writer. It is a vision of the sea as a constant in history.  One is tempted to explain the simile in Freudian terms, but there would be a surplus: the passage bears passionate witness to her muse: historical knowledge.

Such knowledge depends on imaginative grasp of the otherness of knowledge. It is by nature difficult to express. But in the moment of composition, the poet may experience one of those “graces” that Geoffrey Hill acknowledges in his “theology of language.” The language here is exceptional. The phrase “flowing and drawn” reaches phenomenological accuracy for the doubleness of knowledge as both objective and subjective. And as if to underscore the equivocity, she invents a doublet, “flowing, and flown.” Flowing, yes, but “flown”? This last word refers both to the passingness of all things in the metaxy and to the figure of participation, the openness of the language towards what can’t be named.

Her language often opens into such “knowledge.” In her elegy for Robert Lowell published decades later, she wrote:

You left North Haven, anchored in its rock,

afloat in mystic blue . . . And now – you’ve let

for good. You can’t derange, or re-arrange,

your poems again. (But the sparrows can their song.)

The words won’t change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.

Here she describes Lowell in terms of an enduring tension between rock and mystic blue. The argument seems to be that Lowell left the “rock” behind, floated off in “mystic blue.” Or is the rock afloat? What does “afloat” mean here in context? Rocks don’t float. The ambiguity seems appropriate given the topic of death. She uses the ellipsis to leave it open to interpretation. That use of silence is doubled by the parenthesis, this time with a statement about the songs of sparrows as always open to change; Lowell, like Bishop herself, was given to revision. Do sparrow’s revise? Is the sense now lost in confusion, the confusion of grief perhaps?

I think not. The poem approaches the edge of the abyss of history, and the poet avails herself of the extreme reaches of her art. What is reached for is that “source” of energy beyond every finite self. Bishop, however agnostic and “pessimist’ (her word), had ways, as a poet, of acknowledging what she cannot know. Return to “At the Fishhouses.” She writes:

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,

element bearable to no mortal,

to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly

I have seen evening after evening.

He was curious about me. He was interested in music,

like me a believer in total immersion,

so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.

Again, the ellipsis allows for an equivocation, the silence of which introduces an anecdote that leads to resonances that seem inexhaustible. That seal: Like me – a believer: in what sense was she a believer? She believed in “total immersion” (but she will slay in the final section of the poem that even to stick your hand in the sea is to be “burnt”). Somehow the hymns were also a form of total immersion. Art is like physical experience but also different. She could give herself up to the gift of the image of the seal listening to her sing the old Baptist hymns. A silence surrounds such “sacred” memory.

The metaxological narrative followed by Bishop moves patiently through the physical world with its equivocities and silences into the between of all finite creatures. The source or origin that makes that between possible is beyond her powers of description, though she uses many devices to convey the “agapeic being” at the origin.  Her poems start with the univocal in the dry matter-of-fact tone of early experience (which includes the Baptist hymnbook, so there’s that, too). Critics are more likely to focus on the difficulties of the self given voice in the poems than to acknowledge how that self yields to the equivocity of being a “self”; the poems feature shifting points of view and polyvocalism. Bishop’s sense of her own frailty as self allowed her to open her poems to sources of selfhood beyond her own. Art is a resource. The poet struggles to keep up.

Or put it in terms of her personal limits. Her dry tone and optical clarity is only for her a beginning as she builds her poems. She was a great observer of the world, a sort of Herodotus who kept notes as she travelled. And she travelled a lot. Yet she had her limits.  She was at times embarrassingly insensitive to racial issues as they arose in her life. While many readers find the limits of her personal delicacy reason to strip her of her standing as a modernist, her realism has a Baroque openness that is almost surreal.  “Filling Station” is one of her most popular poems.

Oh, but it is dirty!

—this little filling station,

oil-soaked, oil-permeated

to a disturbing, over-all

black translucency.

Be careful with that match!

 

Father wears a dirty,

oil-soaked monkey suit

that cuts him under the arms,

and several quick and saucy

and greasy sons assist him

(it’s a family filling station),

all quite thoroughly dirty.

 

Do they live in the station?

It has a cement porch

behind the pumps, and on it

a set of crushed and grease-

impregnated wickerwork;

on the wicker sofa

a dirty dog, quite comfy.

 

Some comic books provide

the only note of color—

of certain color. They lie

upon a big dim doily

draping a taboret

(part of the set), beside

a big hirsute begonia.

 

Why the extraneous plant?

Why the taboret?

Why, oh why, the doily?

(Embroidered in daisy stitch

with marguerites, I think,

and heavy with gray crochet.)

 

Somebody embroidered the doily.

Somebody waters the plant,

or oils it, maybe. Somebody

arranges the rows of cans

so that they softly say:

esso—so—so—so

to high-strung automobiles.

Somebody loves us all.

First, the massive piling up of details, often with expressions of disbelief. Second, as assumed by the metaxological muse, polyvocalism, often merely implied, but resulting in the sense that Bishop’s observer is always more and less than Bishop the poet. The drift of the poem from sour disgust of the first line towards the hyperbolic conclusion – “Somebody loves us all.”—which I think it would be a mistake to take as mere egoistic irony. The poem overflows with realistic and baffling descriptions—baffling because so real—hyper-real, as we see in Miloszian memory. The tension between epistemological belief and emotional disbelief drives the poem, but the poem never gives in to brute sarcasm or modern irony. The “Somebody” of the conclusion is the one who arranged the cans of esso oil so they will “softly” “say” their name to “high-strung automobiles” who might, perhaps, forget they need more oil? Is that it? This is after all a “filling station.” The words found in the process of composition allowed her to “say” what can’t be said in so many words—she discovered the fullness of the metaxy in the struggle to write the poem.

In that early essay on Hopkins Bishop quotes historian Maurice Croll that “baroque art always displays itself best when it works on heavy masses and resistant materials; and out of the struggle between a fixed pattern and an energetic, forward movement arrives at those strong and expressive disproportions in which it delights.”

Those “disproportions” are crucial to the metaxological understanding, as it spirals away from the univocal through the equivocal and into the dialectic. The original wonder that such a “Filling Station” could ever yield to the universal empty void is renewed by Bishop rather than allowed to “whimper” out in nihilism.

There is no “belief” – no univocal concept at home with itself —  behind the final statement: “Somebody loves us all.” There is the elegant “figure” of the metaxy, discovered in the ongoingness of the open, opening on the beyond. For Bishop, the “poem” remains just outside the reach of the poet, urging her on to fulfill her promise, a promise carried down to her from unknown origins to which she owes her identity.

With the publication of her posthumous poems, readers became more familiar with Bishop’s life as a Lesbian. Her long relationship with the Brazilian architect Lota de Macardo Soares, which lasted from 1951 to 1967, was well-known from much of her most vivid poetry, which drew on her life and travels in Brazil; she also became a fine translator of Portuguese poetry. In terms of reception, the “revelation” of her love life allowed interpreters to impose reductive analyses and make the case for a depressed, repressed, emotionally thwarted albeit resilient woman. But we have seen how her ideas about poetry and the structure of her poems make sense along metaxological lines, along with her vision of history.

Why read Bishop? I’ll finish this essay by quoting her most famous poem, the villanelle “One Art.” I find it a useful and restorative text when confronted by the increasingly popular poetry drawing variously and promiscuously on sources from Rilke to Buddhism. “Don’t immanentize the  eschaton” indeed. “One Art” is rooted in the metaxological understanding of the finite nature of human being, how the wonder “that it is at all” balances the acceptance of the insight “everything flows” into nothingness. Desmond writes, “For love of finite life, the agapeic God harrows even hell. This is the opposite of the self-enclosed transcendence that the dualistic way proposes. The porous between is nothing static, but the ongoing milieu of divine absolving: absoluteness in relativity, relativity in absoluteness” (God and the Between 255).

Here’s “One Art,” Bishop’s gentle harrowing of hell. The tonal complexity of this poem, its “polyvocalism,” its groundedness in every-day experience, its openness both to emotional hyperbole and the acceptance of the demand on the self to “write it!”: we’ve learned to expect this rich intermediations of the spirit in the between from Bishop, and we’ve  only made a beginning.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

 

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

 

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

 

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

 

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

 

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

 

Also available are “Seamus Heaney and the Metaxological Narrative,” “A Late Poem by Wallace Stevens about the Metaxy,” “Czeslaw Milosz and the Metaxy,”  “Geoffrey Hill and the Metaxy,” and “The Question of Literary Form.”

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Tom D'Evelyn is a private writing teacher. He has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Berkeley and, before retiring, held positions at The Christian Science Monitor, Harvard University Press, Boston University Press as well as ran his own literary agency for ten years. He blogs at formmatters.blog.

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