Subtext: Conversations about Classic Books and Films

Taylor insists he isn’t running from humanity but seeking something better than man—a “world elsewhere,” like the one Coriolanus finds when he turns his back on Rome, or the heaven Milton’s Satan thinks the mind can make of hell. Can such a world exist, if every psyche carries civilization’s problems along with it? Wes & Erin take up the ape tribunal that tries scientific heresy while denying Taylor any rights under ape law, Rousseau’s case that violence turns moral only once we can take offense, and the imitative roots of culture, from joint attention to a generation gap among the apes. Upcoming Episodes: Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory.” 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. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Wes: Welcome to part two of our discussion of Planet of the Apes. We spent most of the first part talking about Taylor's misanthropy and the way this little fantasy world that he enters is a counterpoint to his misanthropy and meant to challenge it. But, Erin, you in particular were making a point. Did you want to elaborate on that or say, just remind us of what that is from the end of part one? 0:38 Erin: Yeah, just that Taylor's misanthropy seems to deny, even in a way, his own humanity, any attachments to humanity, including his own history, ancestry, parentage, whatever that may be. And it strikes me in the quote that you mentioned at the end of part one, about when Taylor gives Landon a sort of endless dressing down and says, you wanted to live forever, didn't you? Well, you damn near made it. Except for me and Dodge, you've lived longer than anyone ever born. It just strikes me that this is a really weird idea of immortality. Right? It's immortality in a vacuum. And in a way, Taylor is sort of a man in a vacuum. I mean, he is. He's the last man on Earth. But I don't know, just thinking about it a little bit, one would want immortality for lots of reasons. Maybe acquiring wisdom, experiencing everything that Earth has to offer, not having to face the possibility of death so that in theory, one could continue to learn and create and see, you know, specifically see generations and generations of one's own Family, continue on. And none of these properties of immortality, even just the feeling of being alive for a really long time, apply to Landon. So, yeah, there's something skipped. There's something missing in Taylor. There's something right. This is a conceptual idea of immortality. It's not the, forgive me, the lived experience of immortality. Do you know what I'm saying? Like he's missing something. He doesn't get what it is really to be a human. And part of that, of course, is having human entanglements. 2:12 Wes: Oh, there were women. There was plenty of lovemaking, but not much love. I don't remember how that speech goes. 2:20 Erin: That's probably the most disturbing speech in the film. Yeah. I mean, I'd love to talk about, you know, no woman, like a mute woman, but there's a lot going on there. 2:32 Wes: Yeah. It's funny because Landon says to him, you thought life on Earth was meaningless. You despised people. So what did you do? You ran out. And Taylor responds, no, no, I'm not like that, Landon. I'm a seeker, too, but my dreams aren't like yours. I can't help thinking somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man has to be. Normally, an aspiration like that plays out in political terms in the direction of some imagined utopia. What's got to change? Well, we've got to change our political system. We perhaps have to change our character as human beings. This is a big subject, especially in the wake of the French Revolution, right. Schiller's letters on aesthetic education. The worry was, well, we can't just change the institutions and the political systems. Human character has to be ready for that. There has to be some sort of fertile soil in which to implant those political systems. But someone like Taylor has given up on that possibility at all, Right? The evolution, you know, small E of human character is replaced with something that has to be superhuman. It's a little bit more like Nietzsche. Right? We have to radically change or have to develop into the. Into the Ubermensch, which, of course, in his arrogance, he seems to think he already is that to some extent. But I think Landon's accusation lands because he's fled. And in that sense, this fleeing to other worlds, it reminds me of two characters. One of them is Coriolanus and the other is Milton's Satan. I might be reading a little bit into it because these are just two lines I always remember, but for Coriolanus, right? He's another very arrogant character. There's actually a lot in common with a character like Taylor. But he turns his back right on the Romans when he does that. He says, for you, the city. Thus I turn my back. There is a world elsewhere, and I love that way of putting it. It's not just that he's gonna leave the Romans and go to their enemies. It's a whole world. This isn't my world anymore. There's a new world. Same thing with Satan, right? Space may produce new worlds. Satan himself says, the mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven, which Milton is highlighting how comically delusional Satan's state of mind is, which he does in many, many different places, right? There is only one universe, and it's controlled by God. There are no new worlds outside of it. But Taylor, I think, is subject to this kind of illusion that he's going to find some sort of world which he thinks it's just outside of the human psyche. There's something way more advanced than human psyche, but there are no such worlds, because to have a psyche is to have these problems implicit in it and in one's culture and one's civilization. So you dream of a world which cannot possibly exist. So is he fleeing away? You know, is he just running away, as Landon says, Or is he actually a dreamer who's pursuing something? Well, if he is a dreamer, what he's pursuing cannot possibly be. 5:59 Erin: I love this comparison, specifically to Milton's Satan, though I love the Coriolanus reference as well. But the Satanic parallel in particular, I think resonates because, of course, when Taylor and the others come upon the humans, they're eating of the fruit of a tree, right? And Taylor will. Obviously, the others won't be so effective at this, but Taylor will come in and shake things up with a new form of defiant knowledge. An old, new form of defiant knowledge. The thing I really love. I just. I would be remiss if I didn't mention about Taylor's whole superior speechifying is that it's. The entire sequence of this conversation between Taylor and Landon is shot so that their rear ends are right in the center of the screen. It really highlights the visible panty line that Charlton Heston has going on beneath his space suit. 6:51 Wes: Okay, I didn't notice this. 6:54 Erin: You also see him lift his hands over his head at several points and his spacesuit separates. You could see this, like, undershirt or sweatshirt underneath. Just, like, really shoddy construction overall. So I'm like, is this. Is this a joke? Like, are they. You know, are they punking Charlton Heston, Are they highlighting the fact that Heston is an ass? I mean, I don't know what. What that's about, but it really made me. It really made me laugh. I also, you know, I like what you point out about the fact that this kind of dissension between Landon and Taylor doesn't really indicate that they went through training together in a similar way. Their whole sort of plan for populating some new planets, that also betrays, it really betrays a lack of understanding of human reproduction. Like why. Why would they bring one woman for 7:45 Wes: three women and one man? Not. 7:48 Erin: Or at least two and two. 7:50 Wes: Yeah, you know, but. 7:52 Erin: Yeah, just utterly bizarre. 7:54 Wes: We have to accept that none of it makes sense in the end, but. 7:57 Erin: Well, it made me want to. 7:58 Wes: English speaking apes and all that. Or maybe, maybe we could make sense of that. But that he's not, you know, cued in by that, of course, as you pointed out. 8:07 Erin: Right, right. It made me want to place this, whatever, if we want to call, according to the Ubermensch standards, this, this blonde, delicate astronaut as being something like the height of civilization, then, you know, her immediate death obviously is a harbinger of what is to come. And it also seems to me to be highly symbolic. And the death specifically in the spaceship, the sinking of the spaceship, the similarity of the, you know, again, I saw all of these things on a axis plotting out Stewart, the spaceship flight, the paper airplane, the talking doll, and then speech itself, at least human speech. All these things reflecting something like the height of human civilization, which, you know, the film is critiquing. And I don't, you know, it's uncomfortable to say this, but I suppose I'll have to go there because the movie goes there. But it seems to me that part of what the film is saying by the end is, hey, you know, forget Stewart and the refinement or whatever that she represents and go find hardier stock to start over with because he needs some middle way. So this woman halfway, this mute Nova, who is halfway between a cave woman and some kind of a hippie figure like, you know, who doesn't need SPF 1000. She seems like a better deal and won't nag you. And it seems like there's this. The movie is saying something about the need for a vital infusion, a halfway point for Taylor and for humanity to move forward. So in other words, giving

Taylor has left Earth behind because, as he tells a crewmate, “somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man.” He finds instead a planet where apes enjoy all the trappings of civilization—along with its superstition, bigotry, caste hierarchy, and appetite for violence—and where he himself is taken for “a missing link between the unevolved primate and the ape.” Are these humanoid apes so uncanny because they mirror back origins we would rather forget, or because they suggest that what ails us is our effort to escape them? Wes & Erin discuss the 1968 film “Planet of the Apes,” and whose stinking paws, exactly, are the problem. Upcoming Episodes: Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory.” 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. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Wes: Taylor has left Earth behind because, as he tells his crewmate, somewhere in the universe, there has to be something better than man. He finds instead a planet where apes enjoy all the trappings of civilization, along with its superstition, bigotry, caste hierarchy and appetite for violence, and where he himself is taken for a missing link between the unevolved primate and the ape. Are these humanoid apes so uncanny because they mirror back origins we would rather forget, or because they suggest that what ails us is our effort to escape them? Today we discuss the 1968 film Planet of the Apes, and whose stinking paws exactly are the problems? This is Wes Alwan. And this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, how long has it been since you've seen this movie? Before preparing for this episode? 1:09 Erin: Decades. I think I saw it when I was a kid. 1:14 Wes: I think I saw it when I was a kid, and then I had some kind of dream related to it. And it's always been this kind of film that's just lodged in my. Deep within my psyche and seems to have some deep meaning for me. And I feel like as an adult, I figured out why maybe a little bit, but I might just be rationalizing it, I guess. When the new Planet of the Apes movies came out, I went and rewatched this 1968 original, and then that became the basis ultimately for a talk that I gave at the Brattle in Cambridge. The person who ran that program was a fan of the Partially Examined Life, and they were having a screening of Planet of the Apes, and she asked me to come give a little talk about it beforehand. And then I also gave a talk at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. I suppose the thing that really grabs me about it is just the effect of having all these actors in these ape costumes, which, you know, they're not the greatest by today's standards, but they're not terrible either. And actually, it took a lot of work, apparently, for them to get them to the point where a studio would greenlight this and say, okay, people are just going to be laughing at all these actors in ape suits. An audience will be able to take this seriously. But there's something. There's some kind of uncanny effect to this reversal of putting apes in the place of human beings and human beings in the place of apes. So when I originally started thinking about this movie, I wanted to understand that. I don't know if you have the same experience or if you're just laughing at the people in the ape suits? 2:55 Erin: No, I was laughing more at the puns and the repurposed cliches, especially the hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. There's some interesting things going on with genre in this film, which I was thinking a bit about. I suppose tonally, it's relatively consistent, even though there are these moments that are almost played for slapstick level visual effect, for laughs. I think I. Even when I was a kid and saw this movie for the first time, I knew the twist ending, of course. Right. Everybody knows the image of the Statue of Liberty at the end. Spoiler alert, 3:31 Wes: he's still on Earth. Everybody. 3:34 Erin: What really amazed me this time was when they land in Lake Powell and I'm going, oh, my gosh. I was standing right there. Oh, that's there. Basically every single place I've gone on vacation in the last five years that I've lived in Utah, just fully on display. I know that landscape so, so well now, whereas before it might have worked as another planet. Instead I was thinking of the fact that, oh, there's, you know, the marina isn't there, but otherwise everything is exactly the same. Oh, that's Glen Canyon. I've stood near there. I guess the exact opposite experience that I've supposed to have a feeling that this was an alien landscape in which could reasonably pass as a distant planet. 4:17 Wes: You know, have you read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian? 4:20 Erin: No. 4:21 Wes: He would love the hyper violent, all the violence, but the way he describes the west, it sounds often very quite alien. I think there's something in the beginning of the movie that's very believable. I don't know how many people figure out that he's on Earth before the end and how quickly they do it. I suspect they don't, because I think that Statue of Liberty scene actually hits hard for people. And there's something about the west that, yeah, it's plausible. That would be the alien landscape. Maybe there's something Mars like about it, but I don't know. What did I make of that? Yeah, if they were thinking more about it, they might have wondered about whether they were back on Earth. Although there were some things that were right. There's no moon. There are some things that had changed enough that they felt confident. I mean, Taylor himself says, you know, we're some light years from Earth on an unnamed planet in orbit around a star in the constellation of Orion. Is that close enough for you? He's responding to Landon. That could be Bellatrix. 5:22 Erin: Taylor's people skills are unmatched we should 5:25 Wes: get to him and his arrogance and what's going on with that. But, yeah, go ahead. 5:29 Erin: I guess for me, the biggest plot hole is, how do you not know you're on Earth when there are apes and humans and horses and also the apes are speaking English? I mean, apparently parallel dimension. I would buy more than another planet. 5:50 Wes: Of course, it occurred to me once again while watching this, but it doesn't. Yeah, a plot hole like that would normally completely make me unable to enjoy a film. And in this case, it's something about which I can suspend disbelief. 6:03 Erin: Well, of course there's something invisible about it. I mean, I wondered at the same time that I was thinking about the silliness of the plot hole, if that very invisibility is part of the point, or that the plot hole works or that it speaks to some sort of perception of. It exposes an invincibility that we feel as Americans with little flags being sent out by NASA to conquer the universe. Right. There's a. There's an invisibility to the fact that they would land on another planet and everybody would be speaking English, because of course they would be. You know what I mean? And so much of the film is also about speech that I started to think about it at a little bit more of a meta level. And maybe we as moviegoers just sort of accepting that these apes speak English, are partially being implicated in some of the messaging of the film itself. I also just want to say that in regard to the Forbidden Zone being a Western landscape, I think this also ties in with my sense of the indeterminate genre of the film or that the film might be coalescing many genres. It not only occurred to me that this is a place where many Westerns were filmed. Lake Powell, which straddles southern Utah and northern Arizona, and the Grand Canyon and Glen Canyon. All these places are themselves obviously sites for filming Western movies at the same time, especially not far from Monument Valley, which I think gets a little bit of a glance, or the area right around Monument Valley is seen on film. But also, of course, it's not that far from where the nuclear tests were made. So in a sense, there's always been. Or at least since the 40s, there's been a strange collision between that Western landscape and something aerial. Something. Something having to do with. 7:54 Wes: If not, Is it Area 51 that they landed in? Is that where they. Is that the Forbidden Zone? 8:00 Erin: Right, right. No, I mean, you know, obviously, beyond the fact that there's this Martian landscape, there's the idea that this has been, because of its desolation, a site to do these nuclear tests. And so the Space Age and the Old west, or whatever we want to call it, the Old west obviously has in it an idea of newness as well. An idea in the popular imagination of an untouched landscape, which we can also say is sort of a silly and laughable idea. Of course, people have been here before. Of course it's Earth. Of course, there's a long history here. But, yeah, I mean, that. That genre collision, and the fact that Planet of the Apes kind of feels at times to me like a Western, not only because of the setting, but because of certain plot conventions within the film. It made me reflect just on larger themes. And those themes of whether or not they're so distant from each other, whether or not they actually have to do with the same. The frontier. Right, the frontier. On multiple levels, whatever. However we might characterize the frontier. Then, of course, later on in the film, you also have kind of a courtroom drama. And then you also have these really comedic moments sprinkled through. So genre wise, it's a strange blend. 9:07 Wes: Well, and the protagonist is arguably a cowboy, although he's a strange sort of cowboy because he has

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. Upcoming Episodes: “Planet of the Apes” (1968); Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory.” 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. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website 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 f

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.” 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. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website 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 clos

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. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website 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 W