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.”

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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 some credit to the apes and taking some of humanity with you forward as well. Right. But something a little more down to earth. Something that. Something like the halfway point that the Humans in the tree represent not all the way off the ground, but somewhere close to the ground. I don't know. It seemed to me that this is part of what the film is trying to.

I always make much of blondes on film, especially icy blondes, in this case in more ways than one. They always seem to represent something, right. Aristocratic, hyper, civilizational. And the fact that she just doesn't even speak and immediately dies, just that can't not be suggestive to me on some symbolic level.

10:27 Wes: Well, yeah, you said a lot. And I mean, one of the things that you reminded me of was that if there's one benefit to the sort of ape civilization that's developed, it's the fact that there are limits on technology, which kind of gets at. I think your point about a vital infusion, this is a very real problem with civilization is that they. Technological advancements, which can make life so much better, also have social consequences. They can put a barrier in between us and nature and our natural side, between us and reality. Even language as a technology does that.

And then of course they can also be used. Technology can also be used very destructively. And we today, of course, are facing that more, more than ever with AI. Our own artifacts could end up swallowing us. Technology could be the end of us. So there might be an argument, and people often make this argument for restraints on this sort of technological advancement or trying to do something to put us more in touch with, to remediate, to undo the alienating consequences of technology, including the ways in which they separate us from attachments to tradition, for instance, or to more down to earth ways of, ways of life.

Yeah, so I think I see what you're saying about ape culture being in that position, but it is very creepy. You know, you also reminded me of just that whole doll scene when I was younger. I just think all of it was just so, you know, kind of made my hair stand on end type of thing. Like, you know, especially the Statue of Liberty at the end, but just this kind of post apocalyptic vision looking back on a human society that has to an end, that's been destroyed. And then there's this, what might as well be an alien race of archaeologists looking at us from the distant future.

So I don't know what else to say about that, how to describe the creepiness of that.

12:29 Erin: Yeah, I mean, I think the 2000 years is such an interesting and significant stretch of time. Right. Especially because there's obviously been some sort of new prophet figure that the apes are propping up the presentism that we all suffer from. And then the realization that one day, if we're lucky, and any humans survive for another 2,000 years, they're going to look back at us and go, wow, look at these, like, quaint little people. It's creepy. Or we're going to go into a dark age. And then. Yeah. And it's going to be like ancient Greek and Roman civilization, where they're going to be like, wow, they had better than basic cable.

Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, the other major plot hole for me is simply the fact that if this society is so effective at quelling uprisings from humanity, at quelling efforts to rise above the ground in any literal or metaphorical sense, then why are scientists allowed in this civilization at all? Why are the chimpanzees allowed to do any sort of experimentation? It all seems to be based around brain surgery, which they're, like, weird. Weirdly into. Maybe not advanced at, though they significantly, successfully lobotomize. Yeah. But I don't know how much skill that takes as a brain surgeon.

If we're talking about just, you know, taking a chunk out would pretty much do anybody in. Yeah. So there's an interest in brain surgery other than that, you know, they're shocked by paper airplane. They have this, of course, interesting construction of scientific heresy, dual strand term that comes up again and again in the film, and they have very strict limits on what science one can or cannot engage in. I don't know. It just seems like if the orangutans have this incredible stranglehold on the culture, they wouldn't allow any of these types of experiments to go on at all.

And they wouldn't allow Dr. Zira to do her work or anything like that. But then I guess you wouldn't have a film and you wouldn't have some of these. The whole flipping on its head of the monkey lab concept, which is obviously very effective.

14:36 Wes: What do you think of Dr. Zaius and this whole courtroom drama and all that stuff?

14:42 Erin: There was flab to the film for me, watching it as an adult. You know, there's a lot of back and forth that, you know, like I said, it just. It goes in some weird directions, this film. And it's like, okay, so now it's Inherit the Wind. You know, there's just a.

14:56 Wes: Well, the midpoint of the film is him speaking, Taylor speaking for the first time. And it's a climactic moment that's hard to top. And I think that the Statue of Liberty successfully does that at the end. But as usual, I mean, often Things in film start lagging in Act 2. So it's the second part of Act 2, where. Yes. Now it's like, okay, what are we gonna do with the rest of this film after he's spoken, right. Obviously, he's gotta escape, but then where is he gonna escape to? How do you create a satisfying ending to this film? He can't fly, you know, where he came from, or defeat ape civilization or something like that. He's a stranger in a strange land and he's just one person. Him and Nova are gonna go off on the. On the horse, on the beach and do what? So. So you know what we get.

15:44 Erin: I think we know what they're gonna do, but yeah, yeah, of course.

15:48 Wes: But yeah, you know what we get in the end, right? As far as a climax, it doesn't really resolve action. You know, seeing the Statue of Liberty, it doesn't. You know, it's not like he. There's some resolution to an arc of external action. It's completely internal and psychological and thematic. That's it. So it's powerful in that sense. But as far as the external line of action goes for the, you know, after that midpoint, it's uneven, you know, the same way with a lot of these movies, like Jaws, I thought too, you know, once they go out to chase the shark, it's gonna lag.

And the same thing after the plot of the movie becomes him having to escape, then it's just okay. But I suppose this point, you know, that's really. I guess most of the act three is the escape. And in this interim, we get this tribunal and the tribunal denying Taylor's rights, I guess we're supposed to. It's supposed to be a mirror of our own society in some sense. So do these tribunals and these institutions, they're manifestations of civilization. We can always ask, are they doing something constructive? Are they just. Do they just protect power or protect prejudice or something like that?

So is the tribunal really serving the interests of justice, or does it serve the interests of power? There's a conflation of those two things in this particular ape society, just as there is in our own.

17:16 Erin: You know, I liked some of the points being really cleverly made, obviously alongside the laugh out loud lines like the proper study of apes is apes and God made ape in his own image. Right. To me, it just went on for a long time. But I did like the. I guess the idea that one of the bases on which they're trying, Taylor, even though he's called the accused, and yet he has no rights under ape law, so he can't really be tried under ape law, that stuff. Anyway, is the idea that they have to quiz him. His right to exist in ape society is based on knowledge of ape society.

17:50 Wes: Right.

17:50 Erin: Knowing these articles of faith. Yeah, there's a lot that's kind of packed in there. It's a little bit.

17:55 Wes: The creature's not being tried, he's being disposed of. Scientific heresy that is being tried here.

18:01 Erin: Right, right.

18:02 Wes: Just shoot one corner with Dr. Zaius. But, yeah, he has no rights under ape law. So there's always a scope problem. To any question of justice, you can say we all have inalienable rights, but who's we? Does it include slaves and minorities and fetuses and, you know, there's times when it didn't, of course, in human history when it comes to slaves, especially, for instance. Right. And does it include people in other societies when we're going to war with them? In the background of any claim to universal. Or does it include animals. Right. And animal cruelty? And the background to any talk of justice is this scope problem. Who's included in those principles and who's not?

18:46 Erin: Oh, scope problem. Yeah. I was thinking Scopes. No, it's like the Scopes monkey trial.

18:53 Wes: Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Sorry. Yeah, that's my bad.

18:58 Erin: Well, there were also a lot of

19:00 Wes: first association with it.

19:01 Erin: There are also a lot of visual parallels, of course, that are really resonant in light of, you know, there are spaces in which the humans are housed in the film resemble concentration camps. And obviously there's also, I thought, particularly resonant in 68 with, you know, the assassination of Martin Luther King and the use of the fire hoses, also really visually resonant.

19:24 Wes: I'm inclined to just kind of beat this dead horse that I love to beat about. It's not animality that's the problem. It's civilization that's the problem, which I think this movie is getting at. So that's, of course, an argument that we've seen many times before, most famously in Rousseau, who in his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men. I think others, for someone like Hobbes, the kind of person he's responding to, there's a state of nature in which men are primitive, and then we form a society and we overcome some of that primitiveness.

Right. We suppress our instincts and the negative side of ourselves for the sake of the benefits of being in a society, society. Hobbes calls us giving up rights. Right. So in the state of nature, you have a right to do anything you want. You could kill someone. That's your right. We lose that right in civil society. Rousseau says, au contraire. The problem is not the state of nature. He imagines actually people with a much more natural, instinctive compassion for each other in a state of nature. Rousseau's noble savage. And it's actually self consciousness and the ability to reason and the ability to use language, according to Rousseau, that is a big cause of all our problems.

And one of the big problems is that we become capable of being offended. So as soon as we become creatures who can think about morality and say what right and wrong is, we can become worried about others violating our rights and doing wrong things. And then there's an impulse towards retaliation and cruelty. So violence becomes this moralized civilized phenomenon. It's not like we were just violent in the state of nature. And now civilization stamps it out, but it rears its ugly head because civilization hasn't advanced far enough. Civilization is the cause of this particular type of violence, on this view.

And there are related types of critiques in Nietzsche and Freud, similar sorts of ideas. So this is the aspect of the movie that I've always, you know, once I started thinking about it, that I found quite attractive and I thought it portrayed it quite well, this counter thesis to Taylor's optimism about civilization.

21:43 Erin: You know, one of the things that I think it's. Dr. Honorius, the prosecutor says, is something like, you know, when he talks about the Almighty making the ape in his own image, gave him a soul and a mind and set him apart from the beasts of the jungle and made him the lord of the planet. These sacred truths are self evident. It's funny, but it's also true. They are self evident. The apes have won this particular thunderdome. And so there's also just the element of violence that comes from dominance and you know, these things which are related not to civilization, right. But to one's own animal instincts, survival instincts, desire for resources.

22:21 Wes: You're pointing to the ways in which violence arises out of.

22:25 Erin: Out of. Not offense, out of just simply competition. These Darwinian, you know, if it's like

22:30 Wes: Agamemnon with the trade routes, he's not. Because they have that one or that

22:36 Erin: his brother was or I don't know, two. Two apes fighting over a female ape. You know, one of them is going to be successful and the other will probably be dead, depending on how virulent the instance of this kind of competition is. In other words, there are violences that don't arise out of civilization. The world is animals are violent. You know, there's not murder, but there's still people or animals killing other animals.

23:04 Wes: So now that once you start calling animals people, we really know that this movie has affected you.

23:10 Erin: I know, I know.

23:13 Wes: Yeah. Well, so there are different types of violence that involve some of it. Right. So animal to prey, it's almost. It seems indifferent. Right. The lion's not angry at the. What is it they eat the deer or whatever equivalent of that is.

23:30 Erin: Zebra, let's say zebra.

23:31 Wes: Zebra, yeah. They're not angry at the zebra. They seem to maybe get a little more angry at the hyenas, which they should be. But. But no, there's a certain, certain of aggression between animals that don't have that same quality that there is in conspecific. I think they call it violence. Right. So if you have two lions in competition for female or that's really for the whole. I think it's for the whole harem, basically, then yes, that type of aggression and violence, conspecific violence has a whole different quality to it. Violence between members of the same species.

It's reminiscent of what will become human violence. But of course it's not yet become moralized and it doesn't yet have to do with what I would say is the human capacity for recognition. But it's on the way to that. It's social. It's a violence that has already become social in some sense. So yeah, among human beings you could say, well, some forms of violence are really just about resources or about. That's more animal in a way. It's just about competition for things that have no social, necessarily social significance. And so you could read wars in the history of England.

Is it about land? Right. You could say, oh, it's just, you know, they wanted the English, wanted the French land and you know, the rest is history. Or is it they didn't really need the land. It's just all about glory. It's all about, you know, I own that. I'm supposed to have inherited that. That which is more about honor and recognition and all of that stuff. And so I would say the latter is usually the case. Even. Even in cases where it seems like it's just more about material resources. It's often about recognition and honor and offense. And that includes day to day everyday violence where it's often second degree murder, for instance, is typically set off by someone feeling humiliated or disrespected or something like that.

And then it's always, well, you shouldn't have done that to me. And I'm retaliating So violence is moralized, in other words, for human beings.

25:39 Erin: I want to tie this somehow this idea of offense or humiliation to the idea of something like learned behavior or the elements of civilization which teach us what to do and also what to want, what to be offended by, what to desire that somebody else has or something like that. That's one of the things I really loved about the film and thought that the film was maybe at times winking at, especially through the use of these cliches. The most obvious one being human. See, human. Do you know the idea that Taylor is just, has just merely learned to imitate or indeed to ape the apes.

Again, like there's an equalizing factor to this in the same sense that it's arbitrary which species is doing the talking and functioning and making the rules and exerting power over the other quote, unquote animals. It also seems to me to be an equalizing realization somehow that, you know, we have this word for imitation related to the ape. And we all learn through imitation, through aping each other as we grow and develop. And we also of course, learn through mistakes, which is one of the, one of the reasons why I just wanted to give a little hat tip to, to, to the, the ape civilization for evidently learning from the humans mistakes.

26:57 Wes: Wait, what did they, what did they.

26:59 Erin: They're trying to keep everybody from knowing about the truth of humanity. I mean, again, I'm, I'm, I'm.

27:05 Wes: They're learning that certain things need to be kept secret.

27:08 Erin: Yeah, yeah.

27:08 Wes: For the sake of society.

27:09 Erin: Okay, right. And the forbidden zone and all that. I mean, again, I'm only saying this.

27:14 Wes: We need.

27:15 Erin: Winkingly. Yes, yeah, sure, yeah. That's a good way of putting it.

27:19 Wes: We do need to have this point that. That's probably true. Yeah, we need to.

27:22 Erin: Right, right. The listeners know that I'm not advocating for this. You know, I don't wish that I was living in that ape society, nor do, nor do I believe in the suppression of knowledge and history. I'm sorry, I just. I've been attacked for some weird things in my time. The way that you've already described that this civilization returns Taylor to his origins or to a confrontation with his origins. That suggestion that there's something. It returns him not only to the bottom of a kind of pecking order, but to a childlike state because he can't express himself, he can't make his needs understood. And this inability to do so, which seems partly based on the fact that he just can't really gesture properly. I mean, why doesn't he just. Anyway, it frustrates me to watch him try to make himself understood.

28:14 Wes: Yeah, it is frustrating, but.

28:15 Erin: Yeah. But anyway, it just seems to me another point of commonality that's being emphasized here. We are all like little monkeys at some, you know, at some level. On many, many levels. Right. But. But even insofar as we've associated apes with imitation, we are an imitative people. We learn as children through imitation. And much of our civilizational structure seems to me to be based off of some kind of sense of looking around and seeing what other people are doing and then doing that thing, whether we're children or adults. It just seemed a funny and apt thing to emphasize. Yeah.

28:50 Wes: This thing that I've called identification. Right. It's. It's a more sophisticated version of imitation. Imitation is a big part of this. We just naturally imitate. But also we are creatures with a theory of mind. And part of what's happening is. And this is very important to the learning to use language as well, is that we are imagining another. And their point of view and the view that they have of us. And so even in the case of language, for instance, this is. Michael Tomasello is the linguist who emphasizes all of this. But language begins with pointing.

And it's something no other animal can really do, although this is disputed in some border cases. But when you point at something, the dog just may stare at your hand if you try to point at something. Because pointing involves this. And it's an activity where the technical phrase is joint attention, the capacity for joint attention. So you point at an object, you know, that you're communicating to me your state of mind, your interest in that object. And you have the expectation that I can share your attention to that object. That's a very advanced capacity, and it's a basis for the theory of mind.

And it also becomes a basis for morality where we come to grasp, right. What's expected of us. So when we internalize these norms as children and we begin to behave in certain ways, it's this more, you know, you're pointing to the imitation aspect of this. But beyond that, there's a conformity to what we understand is in others. Minds becomes a more advanced form of imitation. I think this movie is very much pointing to that sort of thing. Because that, of course, is what Rousseau says also leads in the end to violence. We expect others to live up to these norms, to behave in certain ways, to recognize us as having certain rights.

For instance, the rights that under. How does Honorius put it? He has no Rights under ape law or something like that. We expect others to see that we have those rights and we become enraged if they treat us as if we don't. So yeah, I think this is a good point. There's a very. There's this mimetic m e M E T I c aping aspect to culture and it runs deep. And once we start articulating how all that works in its more advanced forms, we start to understand the roots of injustice as being not merely instinctual, but civilizational.

31:28 Erin: And that's interesting that the word conformity too because we also have this really annoying little character at the end. The nephew of Zira. What's his name?

31:38 Wes: Lucius.

31:39 Erin: Lucius. Gosh, that's a. That's an interesting name. And that I have a servant.

31:45 Wes: Right. And Julius Caesar. Isn't that the name of Julius?

31:49 Erin: Well, there are a bunch of resonances for Lucius. There's Lucius the Roman emperor, but the idea of conformity on the one hand and obviously Taylor's non conformist attitude or his desire to separate himself from humanity in accepting this post on this mission. But then we also have the non conformist Lucius and the idea of the generational divide which was really, really funny when. And Taylor says like don't trust anybody under 30. And I was, I was thinking to myself, like, is 30 as much a benchmark for. For apes in their lifespan as it is for humans? You know what I mean? Like does is this a meaningful.

32:32 Wes: But also why is like a, you know, adolescent 60s ape hippie culture. Right, right. And these squares don't just. These squares today don't understand us young apes, you know, know exactly. That line up so perfectly with where he came from. I know, I know it's all satire. It's all, you know, funny.

32:53 Erin: Well but. And I liked it because it punned on the concept as I think I said in part one. It puns on the concept of the man. So here it's the ape and the idea of the capital A ape is like keeping you down and the system. Yeah, Dad's always harshing my vibe, man. That in itself speaks to, I think what you. Or you know the flip side of this conformity thing, which is in itself also a form of conformity. But anyway. Yeah, yeah, you know, just Taylor really has a soft spot for little rebel apes and hippie women who know how to keep their thoughts to themselves just.

33:33 Wes: And if they had in the share their thoughts they not even capable of.

33:39 Erin: Yeah, exactly. So, so laid back. She just, you know, kind of goes with whatever and the ideal woman yeah.

33:48 Wes: People would get along a lot better in general if they just couldn't talk. I mean, I think it would solve a lot of problems anyway. All right, so we are. We're out of time. And next time, I guess we're going to do the Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. What do you think we're going to do after that for a movie? Any ideas?

34:06 Erin: Have to think about it.

34:07 Wes: All right.

34:07 Erin: All right.

34:08 Wes: Have you been watching east of Eden?

34:10 Erin: No, I haven't, but I.

34:12 Wes: Because I know that's on our list. I know you want us to do that as a novel.

34:16 Erin: Oh, I do. I reread it over the summer, so I'm surprised I didn't capitalize on that. Oh, I must have, because I was rereading it.

34:26 Wes: No, I did buy it. You did try to capitalize on it, and I wasn't able to get into it quickly enough.

34:32 Erin: Yeah, I forced myself to finish it, but I thought it was horrible.

34:35 Wes: Okay, so we're definitely gonna. We're definitely gonna do that then.

34:38 Erin: No, there are some elements of it that were great, and there were some elements of it that I just thought, wow, this is bad. It was disappointing.

34:46 Wes: Well, that's. That's the way Steinbeck felt about himself. So he thought he was a terrible writer?

34:52 Erin: Well, no, he thought east of Eden was his masterpiece and thought that it had everything in it and it demonstrated everything. That was the peak of his talent. Really great in certain ways, but really annoyed me in other ways.

35:07 Wes: All right, so scratch that. Find us a less annoying and shorter thing to read.

35:15 Erin: Yeah.

35:16 Wes: All right. Thank you.

35:18 Erin: Thank you.

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.”

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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.

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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 this kind of swashbuckling, arrogant, devil may care demeanor. But at the same time, he has some countercultural critiques. And in particular, he's gone into space because he himself is a misanthrope. You wonder how this guy ever made it through the astronaut screening, Right? So he's a complete misanthrope. And this is the way the movie starts out, interestingly. And then you add the Charlton Heston drawl or whatever it is you want to call it, how he talks on top of all that. And it's quite arresting. So this much is. So this is in his log. This much is probably true. The men who sent us on this journey. I'm sure you can do a Charlton Heston impression. Do you want to read this with your character?

10:06 Erin: I will not.

10:07 Wes: I will not. But you admit that you could do it if you wanted to, right? Erin's nodding for those no comment, she can do it people. So I'm tempted to try, but it would be awful. But anyway, this much is probably true. The men who sent us on this journey are long since dead and gone. You who are reading me now are a different breed. I hope a better one. I leave the 20th century with no regrets. But one more thing, if anybody's listening, that is seen from space, it's, you know, everything squashes man's ego. Because it's boundless. Does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother, keeping his neighbor's children starving?

He's a humanitarian misanthrope, maybe we could. We could say, and his misanthropy has to do with the way human beings treat each other, which we will find out, he equates with a more primitive right, with our origins in the fact that we're animals, the fact that we have these instinctual impulses, the fact that we've evolved from apes. There's little comments later on we'll get to. And he's hoping that we've evolved more, right? So he'll say at one point that human beings as he knew them on Earth, where a missing link between animals, including, presumably, apes and then some higher being, some higher species that he's out to find.

So he's. He's hoping to find something. Something better. And so that's sort of the, I think, the thesis that we get at the beginning of the film, that the film addresses, right, this humanitarian misanthrope who hates human beings because they don't treat each other well enough and is arrogant enough to think that he's better than everyone and should go and find out and find a more advanced species that's just as good as him.

12:07 Erin: I wonder what ultimately, the film wants us to take from Heston's character. Are we supposed to be critical of him, do you think?

12:16 Wes: Yeah, he's quite unlikable through most of the. Even. Even at the end. I mean, he's. He's kind of a prick to the very end, until. Until he gets to the Statue of Liberty.

12:26 Erin: But I wonder how much audiences would register him as a prick, an arrogant. An arrogant because he's Charlton Heston? No, you know, because of the structure of the twist. He never really has to reckon with his own sense of superiority. And even then, maybe he would persist in his arrogance as a human outside of time and thus not guilty of the same sins that he accuses Landon and all of humanity of engaging in. I mean, he gets a comeuppance over the course of the movie, which again, I don't know that an audience, especially a 1968 audience, would register as a comeuppance. Rather, they would see it as an injustice and want to join in with Heston's feelings of, sorry, Taylor Erin, are

13:12 Wes: you siding with the damn dirty apes? Is that what's going on here?

13:15 Erin: Oh, of course I am. Of course I am. He has this claim To a sort of disentanglement from home and family and origin. He, in a way, sees himself as a master of the world and of someone who stands out in his own species, shall we say, to such an extent that he can like get off the ride and go somewhere else. And he just. He leaves. He has no regrets. Obviously, the film returns him to the bottom of the pecking order. And there is an irony about that. And we do see that he does maintain some entanglements. He does have an allegiance to his own species. But because the twist occurs in the last minute of the movie, we never truly see Taylor experience the humility or self awareness that might arise from discovering something like, hey, humanity crashed the car and the apes took away the keys.

14:09 Wes: Yeah. But also the apes. The apes also suck. Right. So we shouldn't forget that.

14:15 Erin: Yeah.

14:16 Wes: I think they're also bigots. I mean, part of the point is they've inherited all of the ills of culture, of course, which is a direct contradiction of Taylor's thesis. Right. It's not the problem of residual animality that plagues us, that we have to evolve beyond with culture. Culture itself is the problem. These, these problems are inherent in civilization and culture. And in a way, the apes have become worse by becoming civilized. Now they can be bigots. There's a whole caste system with the apes. Right.

14:47 Erin: Yes.

14:48 Wes: And that, by the way, there's an interesting effect on all the extras where people who basically, for mealtime and hanging out, people actually ended up segregating themselves by which type of ape that they were playing.

15:04 Erin: I read that. Yeah.

15:05 Wes: Played out psychologically. Yeah.

15:08 Erin: I'm not discounting those obviously negative and sort of parodic elements of ape culture, which Ape. Human culture. I simply mean that insofar as the ape society has established some kind of guardrails so that this kind of destruction couldn't happen again. And they locate what is destructive or what was destructive about human society somehow in things that exist in air or on air. I mean, I have a whole, you know, little chart I sketched out around this.

15:37 Wes: But what do you mean on air,

15:39 Erin: in air, there seems to me to be a connection between the sort of height of civilization or certain advancements with Taylor's age, with 1972, with humanity pre this ape civilization and with the element of air. So air is associated, of course, with the astronauts and covertly with the society that annihilated itself through nuclear bombs dropping from above. Right. I think I'm also tracing this because it exists on air as a case of civilization being Fragile and delicate. You know, we could trace it, say, back to Stewart, the woman in the ship who dies before the movie even begins.

Right. The sort of Dresden Doll, fragile blonde beauty who never gets any speaking lines and isn't even awake in the film. And she goes down with the ship. And the ship is futuristic and white and clean and slick and it has, you know, bears a certain resemblance with a paper airplane later in the film. And the apes, on the other hand, are associated with Earth. They don't have flight, and their buildings are constructed in these organic forms. It seems to me that Heston Taylor is associated with this fragile, delicate, dangerous height of civilization and that this is one of the things that the apes are attempting to curtail or critique.

And I think this reading. I mean, maybe I'm not reading it properly, but it gets complicated. I mean, when we see this, the new race of humans or hominids or whatever they are, you know, they're up in the trees, some of them. Of course, ordinarily, this would be the domain of the apes as well, but we seem to have the movement of apes in response to this human catastrophe down onto the ground. And humans have taken the place of being the ones who are sort of half on the ground, half in the air.

17:36 Wes: Let's see. I had been talking about Taylor's arrogance and his critique of society. Yeah. The relationship between his critique of society and what Right. Ape culture had, on my view, had inherited all the problems of human culture just because these problems are internal to culture. So that there's. It's a direct. Directly in conflict with the. What I call the misanthropic thesis of Taylor. The. The humanitarian misanthrope. Right. The idea that we just need to evolve more. We just need more culture, that we just need to get away from the animal part of us, and then everything will be okay. I think the. The film kind of challenges that. And early on, just to get at some of this characterization of Taylor. It's pretty. It's pretty strong. You know, they really, really play up what a prick he is, as far as I'm concerned.

18:30 Erin: So,

18:33 Wes: Landon, I was thinking about Stewart. What do you suppose happened? Air leak. She died in her sleep. And then. That's Taylor. Landon, you don't seem very cut up about it. It's Taylor. It's a little too late for awake. She's been dead nearly. Yeah, she's been dead nearly a year. I don't know how Charlton Heston would say it, but everything he sounds. Everything he says sounds like mockery. And then he mocks the person. He's planting the flag and just lets out this maniacal laugh. And actually, right after this point where he's blase about Stuart's death, Landon says something about being away from Earth for X number of months.

And then Taylor says, our time, you've gone gray. Apart from that, you look pretty chipper for a man who's 20, 20, 31 years old. We've been away from Earth for 2,000 years, give or take a decade. Still can't accept it. Time's wiped out. You ever knew. It's all dust. So he gets this tremendous gratification out of the idea that everything that he's left has been destroyed and that all of these people that he's. Who have accompanied him, that they're fools for having any sort of attachment to it, attachment to their loved ones, to their planet, to their country.

If they want to put an American. The flag on the. On the. This new alien planet, that. That's a foolish way of thinking about the world in general. And it's a part of the mindset that's they're supposed to evolve beyond. Right. And it's very connected to identity and to group membership. Right. Whether it's family or country or whatever, and to, you know, sort of affectionate ties to other human beings. So he's just that kind of narcissist. He's that kind of arrogant guy where everyone is foolish for their silly humanity. And he's evolved beyond it.

And he's looking for people who are just as evolved as he is. And what he finds instead is a sort of a perfect complement to his. His own flaws.

20:44 Erin: Yeah, I mean, how. How so? I mean, I'm still stuck on this idea that the ape society has somehow learned a lesson from humanity in a way. Therefore, though they have many of the same flaws that human culture has, they've also, you could say, evolved beyond it by. Beyond some of those flaws, by learning from those mistakes. I mean, it seems silly. I'm like, how?

21:09 Wes: Like Western?

21:11 Erin: But by curtailing those elements of human culture that would lead to this kind of annihilation, by keeping the apes grounded. And, you know, a lot of the movie operates on puns. So we could say if they're associated with the element of Earth keeping them grounded, the humans have evolved not to speak because they see that speaking doesn't do them any good. Speech also is something that exists on air. There's not a tangibility to it. So the apes, though, they're associated obviously at the same time with these ideas. Of religion and religious heresy.

And therefore they're not grounded in the sense of being, say, practical, broadly conceived, or only concerning things that they can touch and understand and see and engage with physically. Their culture seems to be a reaction to what happened in human culture. And so I sort of can't get past the fact that there is something that they have over on the humans. I mean, even just from a very basic standpoint, we could say, well, if they survived, they've done something right, you know, and humanity has obviously done something wrong. The evidence is right there.

It's a cruel kind of evidence, obviously. It's obviously very Darwinian. But that remains to me a stumbling block, because I think that Taylor does not acknowledge. I mean, he doesn't know it's Earth right Until the last minute. And this is what I'm talking about. Once he knows it's Earth, would he acknowledge that, okay, evolution has produced this result, and I have to at least tip my cap to it, even if I think that it's wrong, how is it wrong? Right. These are a lot of the questions that the film makes us ask by obviously by flipping the power dynamic and by turning the tables on all of us who are watching.

22:45 Wes: But, yeah, I mean, you're reminding me. In the original, the French novel, the apes actually are just as advanced as. As the society that he left. So they're driving around in cars, for instance. I think they thought. The scriptwriters thought that this would be too difficult to replicate on film as part of the reason they went with this more. Right. Technologically primitive society. So the apes, in a way, they're more technologically primitive, although they do have guns and horses and things like that. And they. They're a conservative society.

And there's. It's an odd hodgepodge. Right? The science. Science and religion are very closely connected to each other. There's obvious interest in science. You know, you have these two very earnest, scientifically minded young chimpanzee scientists who obviously reflect a genuine scientific impulse in the society. But then you also have this religious impulse which is in conflict with it in the way that we saw historically hundreds of years ago. They're playing out exactly that sort of conflict. And they have a caste system and they pose for photos in front of dead, you know, human beings on a.

On a line. And they have lots of things, I think, that are pretty ugly about them. So, yeah, to me, I didn't see much. To me, the ape culture isn't so much. I'm not. Although I might be able to be convinced I'm not sure that there's much to take from it that's positive, except to say that the expectation would be right that the apes would have been improved by culture. And in some ways they have. But there's a lot of drawbacks that have come with it. And again, the problem turns out not to be the instinctual side of us, but the civilized side of us.

Because in the wild, animals don't treat each other the way human beings do. They may do some pretty, you know, chimpanzees do pretty messed up stuff eating other monkeys alive and stuff, but it's not done with the same stun for survival. It's not done out of conscious cruelty or sadism. And in particular, it's not done because of these identity and identification and group psychology features that enter in with human beings. So one of the things that leads to human violence predictably is just the concept of offense or insult, narcissistic injury, where we don't get the recognition that we think is due to us, whether on a personal level or a societal level.

We're not getting ourselves mirrored back. Our norms, for instance, right? So norms and values are a big source of violent conflict in human history. You have one religion, I have another. Let's kill each other over it. The explanation of that has to do with the fact that we are threatened when others values differ, and we're threatened when those values differ. Because the failure to endorse those values is a threat to our identities. Our identity is predicated on those sorts of values. So we want the right kind of mirror for ourselves because it feels existentially important to have that mirror.

And it feels a threat to our very existence if that mirror is not provided to us in the right way. Or even worse, there's the narcissism of minor differences where the mirror approximates but is distorted or cracked in some way. So you are also a Christian, but you're a heretic. So I'm going to burn you at the stake. I might not even do that to someone who just has an entirely different religion, even if I'm willing to go to war with them. So there's something about the being close, close but not close enough that's even worse. And the apes are a lesson in this because their physical appearance, right?

He calls them damn dirty apes. When he can finally speak, they can speak, and they're intelligent and have a culture. But to him they're still damn dirty apes. So his bigotry comes across in the fact that their physical form is different from his. That's what makes them inferior. That's what makes them lesser than these. So the concept inferiority is often predicated on these very trivial differences. Some trivial religious difference, some trivial difference in custom or appearance or something like that. He's living out that kind of thing. The apes are as well.

Right? The apes are just as bigoted towards human beings and towards each other within their own caste system. But I think my overall point is that the lesson here, he finds out the retort to his misanthropy involves a challenge to his assumptions about problems that arise from being unevolved animals versus evolved higher beings, when, in fact, the problems are a product of evolution, not a product of the lack of evolution. The product, the extra violence and hate and all that stuff comes with morality, not because morality has not evolved enough.

28:07 Erin: Yeah, that makes sense to me. I just. I suppose. I wonder if he ever has that realization. That's kind of what I'm ultimately driving at. I mean, obviously, the part of the point of the film is that it's supposed to mirror our own culture. So we're supposed to get this sense of the arbitrariness of this bigoted relationship on both sides. You know, why is it a damn dirty ape at this stage of the Earth's history? And we have. We have the same points being made back and forth, you know, but you're so damn ugly, Zira says to him at the end when he wants to kiss her.

Right. Part of what the film seems to be operating on is this sense of the arbitrariness of these types of differences. And if it is just a mirror, then who's to say that they are more superior or less superior than Taylor himself? As part of my frustration with him, he never gets out of the mindset of damn dirty ape. I mean, he does. I mean, I guess maybe you could say, okay, the kiss with Zira at the end.

29:02 Wes: Yeah, he evolves a little bit, but not a lot. I mean, I think you're completely wrapped myself into it. I think it's an intentional part of the film, though. He does a lot of nasty things at the end of the film towards Zira and Cornelius as well. So he doesn't cooperate with them in various ways, even though they've gone out of their way to help him. He doesn't really express much gratitude. You don't get that? I think it's very intentional. You don't get the sense that he's some sort of reformed, humbled character, even though he's been humiliated.

Right. He needs a statue of Liberty sized lesson before he's gonna fall to his knees and cry like that. So it's important that he. I think that the payoff in the end, because his character doesn't change that much is that that Statue of Liberty scene hits harder. Right. Because then it happens all at once. This arrogant guy is really taken down only in that last moment. And it happens all at once in the beginning. Just to give another example of his character. I've told you where you are and when you are. You're 300 light years from your precious planet.

Your loved ones are dead and forgotten for 20 centuries. 20 centuries. Even if you could get back, they'd think you were something that fell out of a tree. Right. So this is a point where you have this dreamlike quality, as is typical in these types of movies, where it's almost like he's writing the premise of everything that's about to happen to him. These accusations that human beings are missing links and that there's something more evolved and that the humanity as we knew it is already ape. Like, well, he's going to find out that these evolved beings, that the evolved beings are the, are the apes as well.

So. But yeah, I think you're entirely right. Yeah. It's just a matter, I think where we differ maybe you know, is on whether the audience, how much that they would have received him. You know, is he just the cowboy hero? Oh, he's just, you know, he's just a typical self confident cowboy hero. Or would they have had some distaste for him? Which it sounds like you have and I certainly have. Like through the movie. It's an odd sort of protagonist because he's. He's an unlikable protagonist.

31:25 Erin: Yeah, maybe my perceptions are a little off Even of a 1968 audience, though, obviously I suffer from being a little more frozen in amber than the average person when it comes to, you know, I'm thinking a lot about Heston in this particular moment. So one of the things I considered was, well, is it really enough of a comeuppance for his character to have been silenced or even to wear a collar, you know, which is obviously a very provocative image visually. We could argue that's the movie trying to take him down a peg. But we also identify with him as the sole human in this scenario.

We're sort of joining with him in this imaginative little exercise that the film is advancing. And then you have added to that the fact that for me, what it really recalls is Heston and Ben Hur. And so you even more identify with this beleaguered, unjustly treated Heston in light of that visual chime. Right. I like what you're saying and how negatively we are supposed to view him. It makes me, I don't know, I guess, consider the film a little bit more kindly. Not that I'm inclined to be unkind about the film. I just had this issue with, okay, what is it really saying about Heston?

What is it really doing? And I think maybe we could even say that in light of his losing his voice, which is something I want to talk about more, maybe because so much of the film operates on puns, and puns operate on that kind of flip, which we could call a sort of arbitrariness. You know, he never met an ape he didn't like. Or that's not a pun. Right. It's a rewriting of a cliche. But. But say the puns around the man, you know, capital M, man. And the arbitrariness of authority and various other types of visual puns and jokes and the flexibility of language, let's say, maybe that plays into Taylor's own, say, tone deafness.

Something missing in him around language and perception, which has to do with the way that he expresses himself and the arbitrariness of his own expressed superiority. Maybe that plays into his being silenced as well. Even if the moment he gets his voice back, he's immediately putting down all of these animals around him who are clearly in charge of him and, you know. But anyway, maybe there's a reading that could be done around that, which. Which I'm not sophisticated enough in the moment to come up with out of full cloth. But if I thought about it, maybe we could come up with something.

But, yeah, right.

33:44 Wes: To the extent that we sympathize with him, it's just, well, he's a human being and so are we. He's not a nice guy. You know, why don't we take the apes side? Well, they look different from us. You know, they're doing some pretty. Pretty mean things as well. Those poor, voiceless, oppressed human beings.

34:03 Erin: Now, but you immediate. Don't you immediately take the ape side like I immediately take Zira's side?

34:09 Wes: Well, yeah, Zira, of course.

34:11 Erin: Yeah. You know, I just. She's a much easier person in air quotes to identify with.

34:17 Wes: Yeah, absolutely.

34:18 Erin: Than Taylor. Yeah. So I think the.

34:20 Wes: Yeah. Zira and Cornelius are more like his fellow companions on the spaceship who are curious and scientific and kind of soft compared to him. Right. You know, so. So when, you know, after Taylor laughs maniacally and I guess makes fun of Landon. Landon. Landon's like, climb off. And then Taylor says something about a bronze sized statue that they're going to make of him. And Landon responds again, climb off, step off it.

34:53 Erin: Gotta bring that back.

34:54 Wes: Seinfeld reference.

34:55 Erin: Yeah.

34:55 Wes: Anyway, so then Taylor gives, you know, another one of his speeches and there's one last item so he won't climb off it, you know, immortality. You wanted to live forever, didn't you? Well, you damn near made it. Except for me and Dodge, you've, you've never lived long. You've lived longer than any anyone ever born. And with our lovely Lieutenant Stewart dead, it looks like you're the last of the line. You got what you wanted, T. How does it taste? So he's not just a prick, he's actively hostile to all these fellow astronauts, which again makes me think, well, how did this ever work?

These people have had to have trained together and worked together before all this happened. Is he just coming out of the closet now? They're on a different planet. He's ready to unload on every other human beings and on the human race and in general. But yeah, I think we, you know, in the end we still do, we still are rooting for him. And it is, it is a really. For me it was, it's always been an exciting scene when he finally is able to speak and say, you damn dirty apes. And I'm like, yeah, here you go. Yeah, right, Go humans, let's go humans.

36:07 Erin: Totally.

36:08 Wes: But it's a trivial, you know, our identifications and our loyalties are in some sense arbitrary and trivial, even to our own family. We just have to be raised with that family as a matter of chance. Right. There's a non arbitrary component to that too, which is that family is a formative influence. And so we've become like them. We share familial culture and the same thing with a country, the same thing with other sorts of identifications and groups. So it starts out with arbitrary origins and then it becomes non arbitrary to the extent that it affects our character.

And then suddenly we have these loyalties and the question we have to ask our is, how trivial are they? How warranted are they? Is there something deep about them? Taylor himself wants to say, no, it's all bs. All your connection to all your family member, your family members, to your planet, all that stuff, it's nonsense. So Taylor is a huge advocate nominally of this concept of disidentification with any group sort of membership, which of course does reflect the zeitgeist of the time. Right. It does reflect a sort of countercultural progressive zeitgeist where we are supposed to give up those more traditional types of attachments.

And so I think we. Yeah, we learned something from this movie about that by the interpolation of people in ape costumes. And then now how do we feel about all of this? But do you want to have a final word for this part and then we'll move on to part two?

37:43 Erin: Yeah, yeah. And then we'll dive into the movie more closely because I do want to talk about that speech that he makes to Landon in more depth. But just to say that there is an important element of the non arbitrariness of our human connections and our familial connections specifically, which you didn't touch, on which I think is crucial, which is that we're also all mutants. We're all. We're all the product of genetic mutations and we share DNA and genetics with our. With our immediate family. Stop it. I don't know whether or not to hit that T too hard or mutants. Or mutants. The way I say it, I say

38:25 Wes: mutants that you weren't really hitting it, that you're doing a glottal. Yeah, that's what I like thing to do.

38:30 Erin: I know, I'm sorry.

38:32 Wes: We're all mutants.

38:34 Erin: Sometimes I think I'm saying it normally and then I hear myself back on this thing and I go, why did I say that word in such a bizarre way? I didn't notice I had a speech impediment around it. Take my face off. It's just like wires and mutant. So you know, where there's one mutant, there's another. And another is what Dr. Zaius says, of course, echoing. I think it's Dodge's word about life. Where there's one, there's another and another and another. The idea, of course, puts one in mind of evolution. The word mutant puts one in mind of evolution.

Genetic mutation. Of course, the origin of how we evolve is via genetic mutations, which are rare and in and of themselves. So in a way it's rare to be a mutant, but in another way, we are all the products of inherited genetic mutations which are then passed down through DNA. We have more in common with the people around us in terms of our families than just culture or shared traditions or whatever. We have noses and eyes and personalities and a tendency to prefer certain TV shows over others in common. This is, I think, an important element that.

That Taylor is also discounting. And maybe this is what makes part of what makes the apes so distasteful to him, I would guess, if that's. If I could preempt where I think you probably are going to go with the animalistic qualities which the apes perhaps conjure up for him, by which I don't mean anything too suggestive. I just mean the extent to which we can see these types of close resemblances as being evidence of a family structure, evidence of a tie. And maybe Taylor wants to just right what he's done, just float away, just be some sort of free floating, freestanding, disembodied kind of spirit, as much embodied as he obviously is in this film, which I also want to talk about.

You know, there's something aspirational about his desire to float up into the clouds and to actually kind of escape the body in a certain sense. And that would also escape all of these genetic qualities that make him the obnoxious human being he is. Anyway.

40:39 Wes: All right, well, on that note. Yeah. Maybe you can say more about this to begin part two, if you.

40:45 Erin: Sure.

40:46 Wes: So. All right, thank you.

40:47 Erin: Thank you.

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

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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.

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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 flower traditionally associated with weddings, especially royal weddings. Royals always carry lily of the valley at their weddings. Though I think it can also be. It's unclear to me if just white regular lilies, which are actually an entirely different kind of flower than lilies of the valley, which are actually in the asparagus family. I saw. Anyway, white lilies, association with funerals versus lily of the valley, perhaps not being typically associated with funerals. Here they are. But they're typically associated with weddings.

And then we get Arthur's coffin as a little frosted cake. In my mind's eye, this is a white cake, so that's obviously a wedding.

10:06 Wes: It's funny, I was thinking of it as a chocolate cake because I'm drinking chocolate. The coffin is black or brown.

10:13 Erin: I don't know. I don't know if they have other types of. I mean, this would have to be a specially made coffin.

10:19 Wes: It could be a white coffin. It was just. It made me think of that show where they make things out of cake and you have to try to tell if it's, like, the real thing of the cake. First thing I would do is I would see if, is that a coffin or is there actually frosting on there? Dip my finger into it. But, yeah. No, I like this idea that you're introducing that because of the lily of the valley, we might think of this as a wedding cake.

10:45 Erin: I hate to speculate about this. I feel like I'm in a John Mulaney special talking about children's coffins. But would it be more likely to have a coffin for a child be white as a symbol of innocence, just as the lily of the valley? I don't know if in 1915 they were making white coffins or if they were only making white coffins for this specific purpose, or if you could only get one type of coffin in Nova Scotia, I have no idea.

11:15 Wes: It could just be a pine coffin. You know, it could be where it'd be white. Ish. But I like to think if his name is Arthur and he's got kings above him, he's got a nice fancy coffin there.

11:27 Erin: But who knows, right? This, I think, started off the chain of associations that made me realize, okay, we have these two children that are roughly the same age. They're cousins. We have this theme of royalty and of course we know. I mean, this is a stretch, but of course we know that cousins can marry in royal. You know, it's usual for cousins to marry in royal families. And there's a bit of inbreeding in the list of the figures in the chromograph, including King George with Queen Mary, which this might be their wedding portrait, we don't know, but they were of course a married couple.

And we have this idea that the speaker being of the same age, same size, there's just an idea of the pair of the pair of them together. And the wedding imagery maybe highlights that or it highlighted that for me that there was an implied closeness which isn't expressed in the poem, but which seems to come through via these angular means. Also, the idea of Arthur being a page, of joining the court as a page. I did look up in what circumstance? Because I associate royal pages with royal weddings. Right. You have the little boys serving as pages in the wedding.

And I looked it up and that is indeed the most common use of pages in attendance at royal weddings. That older boys in their teens would serve as pages in other types of official capacities, but that particularly young boys. So presumably boys of Arthur's age would serve as pages at a wedding. So just a further. You know, this is mysterious to me. I'm not sure why this is, but it's definitely. It's ringing wedding bells for me.

13:09 Wes: Well, funerals tend to do that, you know. But isn't that what they do at funerals, they throw an article of the dead person behind them and then the first person to catch it is gonna be the next one? Mary.

13:23 Erin: No, I was taking you seriously for a second.

13:27 Wes: You know, it occurred to me while you were talking, because the coffin is a little frosted cake and the red eyed loon eyed it from his white frozen lake. Loons really do have weird red eyes in real life, right?

13:38 Erin: Mm.

13:39 Wes: And the loon is white breasted, but mainly they're black.

13:43 Erin: Right, right. And this is, I'm assuming, the child's interpretation.

13:48 Wes: Right.

13:48 Erin: And so now the child is ascribing a kind of desire or appetitiveness to the loon.

13:54 Wes: Yeah.

13:55 Erin: Being hungry.

13:56 Wes: Yep. So that the coffin becomes something that could feed the living as opposed to something that is just a vehicle for the dead to the underworld or to the royal court or wherever it is you're gonna go.

14:13 Erin: Arthur is like a doll. You know, one thinks of the figurines at the top of a wedding cake. One thinks of the fact that little girls may play wedding with their dolls.

14:23 Wes: So that's it. This is interesting. Yeah. He was very small. So there's these different references to littleness of Arthur. One is the come and say goodbye to your little cousin. The coffin was a little frosted cake. And then Arthur was very small. Right.

14:39 Erin: Maybe he's even younger than the speaker. Gosh. Maybe he's only two.

14:42 Wes: Yeah. So that's. Is that enough cake for everyone? Just kidding, Sorry.

14:47 Erin: Oh God.

14:50 Wes: It's just thinking of the tininess, how tiny the coffin must be.

14:55 Erin: Yikes.

14:56 Wes: Substantial reduction in the cake, the amount of cake. But. But seriously. So yeah, I think we're meant to think of a very small coffin and we have this doll like figure in it who hasn't been painted yet and so is pale. But this is the part I was going to have you to explain to me. Jack Frost had started to paint him the way he always painted the maple leaf forever. All right. Yeah. So I'm getting the image of something like limned around the edges with color or something that's just been something unpainted that's has been painted a little bit. But I don't know what the reference here is.

15:34 Erin: Okay, so this is what I was going to actually begin the episode with. I wanted to ask you about this because I had only ever associated Jack Frost. Tell me if you identify with this with the ice on the window pane, with the frost on the grass or on leaves.

15:53 Wes: Exactly.

15:54 Erin: So I associated him in other words, with just with coloring things white. Yes. Then I looked him up because I was like, wait a minute, I never noticed this before, but he's doing, it seems the opposite of what he should be doing. So he's actually adding color where one would think that she would say, oh, the boy was normal. And then Jack Frost had painted the whiteness on the rest of the body. But in fact, Jack Frost traditionally does both. Paints the leaves red in autumn. So he colors the leaves and he is responsible for coatings of ice and snow, etc.

So this is related to the false warmth or the false promise of aesthetics or aestheticized objects, I should say, because there's warmth here with the red, which is the hot color. But like the glass eye of the stuffed bird, it's a deceptive red. It's not the red of vitality, but it's red as a signal of death. Because the leaves are preparing to fall by turning red and then will be either before or after they fall, coated in white again. So it's a short lived red. And then they're going to turn brown and Then Jack Frost is going to do the second phase of his painting project and turn everything, I guess, back to baseline, just white, blank.

17:15 Wes: What is this painting of the Maple Leaf Forever? What is that again?

17:20 Erin: I looked this up. Maple Leaf Forever, no parentheses, is the title of a patriotic British Canadian song. And obviously the maple leaf is the symbol of Canada. So it's sort of using Maple Leaf forever as they're saying, like, Canada is immortal. Rah, rah, Canada. In context here, it's obviously pointing out that it was kind of an ironic object to associate with foreverness when leaves are quite transient, you know, it's not like plutonium forever or something like that.

17:53 Wes: And then the red strokes on the hair. So that's an odd. Another odd image because presumably his hair isn't white. His hair probably isn't red either. And I considered blood, but that seems very unlikely, implausible.

18:08 Erin: I think that Arthur is a redhead.

18:10 Wes: Okay.

18:11 Erin: That has to be the only thing. And so she's sort of imagining that he's.

18:15 Wes: He has the red hair, but his. Yeah, his skin is white. Okay. That's what it is.

18:20 Erin: Right, Right.

18:21 Wes: That's the only color that's left to him. Okay.

18:23 Erin: Right. And so she's not really thinking. This is interesting. She's not really thinking of Arthur in his former state. She's seeing him as an unpainted doll, not living Arthur, who's now turned white. She's seeing him as a sort of like brand new unpainted doll, Arthur.

18:43 Wes: So it's not that he's just lost his color, it's that he's about to get his color. It's an interesting reversal.

18:48 Erin: Yes. Yeah. And there's an intervention that's been made and then abandoned by Jack Frost to paint him.

18:55 Wes: Poor Arthur.

18:56 Erin: The act of painting itself is this touch, this aesthetic touch. But there's still sort of contact, Right. In this poem's repeated references to the desire to touch, the desire to, in the case of the cold breast of the bird or maybe the marbles, the desire to touch and hence warm up. And so here, the imagination of the child, anyway, tells us that Jack Frost has touched the hair with this red, vital color, but then otherwise abandoned the project. And anyway, the red is associated with a maple leaf. And so this red is actually a signal of death. So there's a dead end, so to speak, for vitality.

19:41 Wes: There's the opportunity to return to color, the color of the chromograph, to the royal court, where they're wearing their red and ermine. Ermine. Ermine. Ermine.

19:52 Erin: Ermine.

19:53 Wes: Ermine. Wow. And warmth again, Right. Feet wrapped up, invited Arthur to be the smallest page at court. Right. So another. Again, another reference to his smallness, his diminutiveness, and I guess to his youth, his age. But he can't go because his eyes are shut up tight and the roads are deep in snow, so his passage is barred. And in any case, he wouldn't be able to see where he's going. And maybe the eyes being shut. Right. The significance of color is not even available to him. He's beyond the ability to comprehend color versus no color. So it's a very poignant image.

Right. So the whole arc of the poem is that, right, in the color of the chromographs, she sees life or afterlife or transcendence of a sort, Right. With the royal aspect of it. And so there's. There's some hope set up for Arthur for what's going to happen to him in the wake of his death, which is cut off at the very end of the poem.

21:00 Erin: The associative logic that I mentioned in the previous part between the stanzas. I especially love it here because she's talking about Jack Frost being a painter and coloring. And then we get the return to the chromographs, of course, which are colored, highly colored on the walls. So it makes her look back up at them, too, as she's sort of realizing that there's nothing bright left for her to look at on Arthur's body, which is plain. And so she drifts up again to the thing that would capture her attention, the colored photographs. And then the royal couples are warm. Here we get explicitly told, you know, that color and red is warm, and

21:40 Wes: ermine is reminiscent of the feathers of the bird.

21:43 Erin: This is a chromograph of ermine. Right. So literally, the ermine may look warm to the speaker, but of course, if you touched it, it would be cold. This is not real ermine. It's an aestheticized ermine that can't offer warmth.

21:59 Wes: If you can't stuff animals, wear them.

22:03 Erin: Right.

22:03 Wes: I just looked this up. There's stoats. It's made from stoats. Ermine. Have you ever seen a stoat?

22:10 Erin: Yes, I've seen ermine, too. Yeah?

22:15 Wes: Have you?

22:15 Erin: What's it like? Ermine? It's very warm.

22:18 Wes: Fabulous.

22:19 Erin: Very.

22:20 Wes: Very.

22:20 Erin: Yes, very fancy. Very. I do not condone the wearing of fur, but I have seen.

22:25 Wes: Oh, you know, real ermine. I didn't know you had a position on that.

22:28 Erin: Yeah, I think it's. It's really? Actually really nasty and horrible. What's. These farms where they. Yeah, I don't even want to think about it.

22:38 Wes: So. Yeah. Something I don't know anything about. All right, so don't do that. People don't shoot loons and stuff. Don't move her. And don't make the mistake of thinking the coffin is a frosted cake, because I did last time and that did not go well.

22:57 Erin: Wasn't enough to go around. I'm sure there was plenty of cake at President Taft's funeral.

23:05 Wes: Wow. I haven't laughed that hard about the 19th century since 19th century. Reference going over. Yeah.

23:17 Erin: Yep. I try to keep all my comedy very au Courant.

23:22 Wes: He's 1909 to 1913.

23:24 Erin: Right, Taft?

23:26 Wes: Yeah, sure. Yeah. Okay. I'm calling it 19th century.

23:30 Erin: It was probably an urban legend that he was buried in a piano case. Right.

23:33 Wes: You know, he was born in 1857. So. All right. No, I'm just. Just, you know, catching myself on saying 19th century, but okay, I know.

23:41 Erin: Yeah. I was like, ah, early 20th century. Same. I mean, he was still reigning in.

23:47 Wes: You gotta reign me in. These bad facts.

23:50 Erin: Sorry.

23:51 Wes: Jump on them.

23:52 Erin: I don't mean to be a. Know it all that, you know. Oh, I know my presidents and when they were around. Anyway, do. Do you agree with my idea or, you know, I don't know if I agree with it, but. But do you think that they invited Arthur to be the smallest page at court is an idea that's been lent her by the mother? Or is this something that occurs to the speaker or that the speaker imagines?

24:15 Wes: I think it's more poignant if this is just a child's imagination trying to deal with death. But what would the adults be explicitly doing?

24:26 Erin: Well, the mother might say, oh, Arthur's going to go. You have to say goodbye to him because he's going to go off now to Never Never Land.

24:34 Wes: Yeah. So certainly a possibility. But even. Even if it hasn't been explicitly stated, I think it is kind of implicit. Right. In the scene and in the. And in the social dynamics. It's certainly that idea that he's off to royal heaven or might be off the royal heaven seems to be implicit, but. Yeah. So you seem to like the reading that she's been told that.

24:56 Erin: I don't know which I prefer, but I think it's interesting that it's so immediately refuted with that. But. So it's almost as though she's been told this and then that's the moment when it kind of hits when the Reality of this hits her as we've been kind of leading up to that. She finally kind of understands that what's gone on here and what's impossible here, she looks out and realizes, wait a minute, this story, right, that she's either invented or that she's been given by the mother can't be true. So, in other words, life isn't a fairy tale. He's not going to be a page at court. This is real life. He's really dead and he's not coming back.

25:36 Wes: Yeah. The royal figures, the couples are. They're inviting Arthur. Right. So there's a call and response here. So she's recognizing them as inviting Arthur. And then her thought is a response to that invitation, which is not to say, you know, she might not also have been told this, but in the fantasy that we have in the poem, she's responding to this invitation.

26:00 Erin: Well, and perhaps this is a stretch, but I thought of the fact that there's this immediate friction here at the end between these competing thoughts. The imaginative fancy that Arthur is going to be a page at court and the reality of the snow on the roads contradict. So within the speaker's mind, there's a kind of. Again, I'm using friction because, you know, I'm thinking that while friction is kind of a warm. It's a warm idea, there's a discursive and imaginative conflict there, or an internal argument between her fantasy and the reality. And this is also the moment, I think, where there's a kind of closeness to Arthur, which is further evidence for my idea that in her mind now, internally, there is this true moment of warmth both from the friction between these two ideas.

And then because she occupies, in a way, the perspective of Arthur in order to put together that he wouldn't be able to go out. And his eyes are shut up tight. I mean, they're partly shut up tight to keep her out. He's in a world. He's in a state of his own. He's not looking at her. He's not. There's no obvious. Of course, there's no communication going on there, but she's sort of occupying Arthur's perspective and then pitying him, pitying the impossibility of this. And that, too, to me, is creating a closeness with him, really, for the first time, because she's.

Because I think prior to this, there's emotional distance where she's not getting it.

27:26 Wes: Absolutely.

27:26 Erin: So there's sort of a redeeming warmth at the end, strangely, with this moment of impossibility and of the tension or the friction between imagination and reality.

27:36 Wes: Yeah, this is a really good point. We really don't have any direct sense of her sentiments until the end. Right. She doesn't say my. My cousin. Right. It's Uncle Arthur, Arthur's father. And she's disassociated maybe a little bit. Right. And there's the movement to the loon. We hear some narrative of what her mother is saying. And the mother calls him little cousin Arthur. And then she picks up that word in the fantasy. Right. The little frosted cake. And Arthur was very small. We get the beginning of some sentiment towards him in this. But otherwise it's very.

Yeah, it's. It's quite distant. Right. For the most. For most of the poem. And then at the very end, I suppose it's in. You know, again, it's not a direct statement of feeling. Right. Of grief or sadness or something like that. But it's such a poignant question. How could Arthur go. It's a great way to capture the feeling. Right. That you might get when someone has died.

28:39 Erin: That's right.

28:40 Wes: Originally, the end of the poem was. And she was sad. And that she rewrote that line many, many times. So finally she settled upon. But how could Arthur go. Anyway. Sorry.

28:52 Erin: No, no, no.

28:53 Wes: Or I was sad. Was it she was sad? Or I was sad and I was sad. Sorry. Yeah. Do you have any. You want to give some last words?

29:03 Erin: No, just. This is such a. Yeah. All speech, I guess, in this. So in this poem is memorial. Yeah. Just the poignancy of the ending and the irregular rhymes. Or even the perfect rhymes. Right. With repeating words. Say in the stanza above. Forever. Rhymed with forever here. It's such a simple rhyme. Go and snow. Which at the same time, like, there's a. There's such a finality with that last rhyme. We get this perfect juxtaposition between the two ideas that we've been talking about.

29:37 Wes: Go.

29:38 Erin: Which is indicative of vitality, movement, aliveness and snow. The frozen and static, the dead.

29:46 Wes: Very good. Yeah. So next time we'll be doing. The logical successor to this poem is Planet of the Apes. Of course.

29:54 Erin: Of course. It's an anti taxidermy movie. Right.

30:01 Wes: That's true. The animals have revolted, just like the peasants. They're revolting. It's 1968. That. That version, as listeners to the show can imagine, it's one of my favorite films. Just because it's 1970s adjacent,

30:17 Erin: spiritually 70s

30:20 Wes: and Charlton Heston, you know. Yeah. So it'll be Planet of the apes and then the power and the glory. Graham Greene.

30:27 Erin: Just more. More logical progression. Okay?

30:30 Wes: It all fits together somehow.

30:34 Erin: We always find it. We always find a connection. All right. Thank you.

30:38 Wes: Thank. You.

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

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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.

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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 close. But as we'll see again and again in the poem, art objects are kind of suspect and maybe they promise a closeness which is in fact really a distance.

9:40 Wes: Yeah. And in this case. Right. It's the. I'm not sure if this is what you're suggesting, but you know, as a Canadian, you might want to say, look, I have roots in the. In the old country.

9:49 Erin: Right.

9:50 Wes: In America we're proud of rebelling. We don't think, let's put royalty on our walls. So maybe some people do. But in Canada, despite the difference and the distance, you know, you could think, well, I'm still connected to the motherland in some important way. I guess I was thinking of this when you said the false closeness that it promises. Right. So this is a connection to ancestry, I guess, and genetic ancestry and cultural ancestry. And arguably it's probably not that important. Maybe I'm overstating that now I'm thinking of, oh, wait a minute, what about English common law and how important it is in the United States?

And I. I don't know. Right. But there's this promise. So the, the heaven parallel that I'm noting that I think comes later, as if the. In death you're right, you're going to return to the court here. You're going to return to this higher up realm. Right. It's royalty. So it's also higher up, like heaven. And it's. There's lots of parallels. We could say to divinity. And they are the royalty, after all, are supposed to be established by divine right. So to go become a page there is analogous to being a little angel and going up to heaven. So. But the picture on the wall is suggestive of a destination for the one who's deceased.

And it's a destination which is very colorful in contrast to the, you know, the whiteness of the deceased, although it has little, you know, he, the little boy apparently has some color in his hair. I don't really understand that part, but we'll get to it. And then the loon has the red eyes and the. So there is. That's. There's a. In there. Limned L, I, M, N. Is that right? Limned with color? A little bit. And maybe it's a little bit painted on in the way it is with a chromolithograph, something like that. But yeah, this is what you made me think of when you're talking about the.

Was it the false promise of the aesthetic object or the promise of closeness that you can't really get? I don't know if this is related to what you're saying.

11:50 Erin: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. The false promise of closeness or the false idea that through the aesthetic object you can achieve a kind of closeness with. With what? I don't know. I mean, I suppose with certain sets of abstractions. Right. Like what you're referring to. Heritage, national identity, you know, in keeping with that too, or in a further, you know, nod to that desire for proximity to heritage in England. The boy's name is Arthur, which, you know, there couldn't be a more resonant English name than that. And obviously the fact that his name is Arthur and he's been struck down, we don't know by what. Maybe the flu. Right, exactly.

12:31 Wes: Also a very royal name.

12:32 Erin: Right. But, you know, the combination of this boy's name with the position that he's in obviously is full of pathos. That seems to me to be a gesture. Not that Arthur isn't a common name already, but there's the fact that his father is Arthur and there's this, like I said, idea of succession that seems to be an invocation of a kind or self conscious gesture that a person who is really into royalty and whose name happens to be Arthur, who perhaps inherited, you know, being really into royalty from his father, names his son Arthur as well. And then, as you suggest with that last stanza, where Arthur goes and imaginatively joins the court as a royal page, the speaker's imagination, or in the mother's imagination, which she has then infused in the girl, the speaker, that is a fairy story.

A further. A further kind of aestheticized or artistic, if you will, kind of idea that's contrasted with the cold reality, which is that they're in Canada, the streets are full of snow. He can't get there. You know, not to mention that he's also dead. And so there's the desire through imagination to give Arthur proximity to royalty and warmth and to all of these values and the reality that these are. That this is a false promise or this is a false association to be making or flight of fancy.

13:55 Wes: Yeah. So also. Yeah. You're making me think the coldness of Canada and the snowiness of Canada further accentuates the being cut off from the motherland, so to speak. And the images of color are like a way of. Like the colorful images are represent an overcoming of that distance, the distance between Canada and England. And in a way, the settlers, the. Is that what you call them, immigrants? They're more than immigrants, though, I guess. They're settlers from England, the people who settled Canada. Any. Right. In a way, they've been cast off and in some cases. Right. They were fleeing persecution maybe. I don't know. It's not like Australia is a penal colony.

14:42 Erin: Right, Right. And it's not. It's not like America either, where the

14:46 Wes: Puritans were trying to get out of there. I mean, some of it is about opportunity, but I don't know specifically the history of Canada, but just feeling of being like an orphaned child, maybe. Right. The death of the child here becomes resonant with the position of someone who's cut off from the. From the motherland and the more colorful origin. Something like that. But I like the way she. Right. We learn of her relationship to him. Right. To Arthur. Without her mentioning herself or the fact that he's her cousin. Right. I have to do the math to figure out if that's right.

15:27 Erin: No, that's right.

15:28 Wes: And that's stuffed by Uncle Arthur, Arthur's father. And I like. I really like that. What is it? Enjambment.

15:37 Erin: Yes.

15:38 Wes: And then also you get the relationship on the other side between uncle and father. Anyway, so we learn of her relationship without any direct mention of it.

15:48 Erin: Let's scroll back just a little bit, though, because I want to dig in actually, just to those first two lines because I think they support your point.

15:55 Wes: Yeah. It's very unusual for us to be past the first two lines.

15:59 Erin: Right.

16:01 Wes: Three minute mark. So you back us up.

16:03 Erin: Right. In the cold, cold parlor, which I've got to Say that this is the first poem that actually induced the realization for me that parlor is a very cold word. And ever since then, I've thought of parlor as a cold word. I want to talk about that with. With loon as well, which is a word which is aerated. You know, it has holes in it for the wind to blow through or something. So parlor is a cold word. And obviously we're going to get several images of the domestic space being quite cold, I think, not only because of the fact that it's obviously the dead of winter, but that there's something going on here because my mother laid out Arthur.

And then the only two living figures in the poem are the speaker and the mother. Uncle Arthur is referred to, but he's not present. The mother is laying out the body of the boy. For obvious reasons, one would think that the parents of Arthur are actually absent from this scene out of grief. Right. But they're elsewhere. Which is, again, I think it speaks somehow to this idea of heritage or this strange thing that's happening with Fatherland Father Ness. You know, there's a sort of. Maybe there's a guilt that is suggested with the loon, but there.

But there's an absence. And so then there's also this idea that grief brings closeness. Right. The mother has to touch Arthur, lay out his body. The speaker is instructed to hand the lily of the valley to Arthur and say goodbye to him, and to speak to him as if he is alive. But then also, of course, the alienation and the distance of grief and death, which is suggested by the absence of Arthur's parent.

17:44 Wes: Well, I want to repeat what I said in the beginning. If I were laying out a body, I might take the stuffed dead animal that happens to be in the room and move it somewhere else. Seems a little bit insensitive. So I think maybe that sensitivity.

18:00 Erin: But, I mean, it's interesting to consider why.

18:03 Wes: Because I don't want to draw any. Draw, like, any sort of comparison between the dead boy and the dead animal.

18:11 Erin: But don't you think that. Very insensitivity. I mean, stuffed, it's used twice. It's quite violent in a way.

18:17 Wes: Yeah. And I think this is the other point I was gonna make is that, well, hunting, it's the sport of kings, right? It's the recreation of royalty. Horseback and fox and, you know, the typical tropes here. Right. And. And maybe I've seen too much Game of Thrones where, you know, it's. Yeah, it's a mark of royalty in the sense, to some extent, if you have that much power and wealth. You've escaped necessity. Necessity, meaning what we have to do to survive. That represents a more primitive condition that we're no longer in yet. The royals can voluntarily return to that and treat it as a form of recreation.

So I think that that's significant. And then the other part of this is that, yeah, the boy is placed in parallel to the stuffed loon who has been killed by hunting. And we get that, you know, Arthur fired a bullet into him, and we have to figure out that it's not the little boy, it's the loon that has to have the bullet fired into it. So I think there's a purposeful confusion or parallel between the boy and the loon. And the effect in the beginning of the poem is to say somehow he's a victim of this royal space or whatever it is, this royal thing, and at the end of it, he needs to return to it.

Or that's what his afterlife might. What might constitute his afterlife.

19:39 Erin: I think you're definitely right. But as you were talking, another reading of why the Loon is There occurred to me, which is that it would be deliberately left there to be. This is a little wacky. But to be in attendance at the. No, no, no, hear me out. I know it's stupid. The loon is the symbol of Canada, one of the symbols. And we also have the royal figures. So it interestingly reverses the ending idea of Arthur serving at court, where here they are in attendance at his funeral, in a way. So we have the British royalty, the symbol of Canada. I mean, it's gruesome and bizarre and very.

20:20 Wes: No, as you said, that I just had this image of me, my own funeral and someone putting my stuffed cat. Oh, no.

20:29 Erin: Well, hey, that's very.

20:30 Wes: In the casket with me.

20:32 Erin: Yeah,

20:34 Wes: right. She could attend. Attend to me for. Be in attendance with me forever.

20:40 Erin: But, yeah, it's also worth saying, and I don't know if I mentioned this before, but there's, you know, with hot and cold polarities in questions of travel. We just had a bunch of poems about Brazil. And obviously Brazilians have gregarious nature, et cetera. The Maritimes, at least, perhaps Canada more generally. I don't know. I only know from, like, Anne of Green Gables that the Maritimes are very strongly associated with a characteristic reserve. So there's also a kind of. Right. Which is very British, obviously. So I think British Canadians would identify with a kind of Canadian reserve. So there's a kind of stiff quality and of course, a coldness. Right. Associated with Reserve as well. Which might think that a stuffed bird has to salute at the

21:33 Wes: dead comrade offending the Canadians. Erin, don't you know there are enemies? So.

21:38 Erin: Yeah, please, please.

21:40 Wes: I love.

21:40 Erin: I love Canadians. I really hope I'm not miscarry. I think this is. I think this is well known.

21:46 Wes: Yeah. Animals at funerals and.

21:49 Erin: No, no, no, I don't. I'm just saying. I'm just saying. I think this is a particularly weird. Obviously particularly weird, formal kind of family. I know plenty of very warm Canadians. It's more of a historical association. The same way that we would associate, historically, the British with being more. More reserved, say, Pre World War II, pre 60s, whatever. Pre Diana's death. I don't know. Anyway, I'm gonna get myself into trouble. Please, Canadians, I love you. I really do. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to truck in these stereotypes if I am.

22:23 Wes: I think Canadians are used to being loved or at least liked because they're so likable.

22:27 Erin: They are. But they're also ignored and wrongfully so because we're just the most obnoxious youngest child on earth. Getting all the attention now.

22:38 Wes: You're just buttering up the Canadians now.

22:40 Erin: No, that's how I really feel. And I feel really bad about. I just feel really embarrassed as an American, obviously.

22:46 Wes: Yeah, sure.

22:47 Erin: Not to get political anyway, so I

22:49 Wes: think it is quite funny, you know, since Uncle Arthur fired a bullet in him. He hadn't said a word. It's funny whether or not you have to stop to think about whether that's the boy or the. The loon. But then there's a turn here to really a great image of the loon keeping his own counsel. So that. That cold temperature. Right? So we get a number of associations here between lack of color and coldness and the frozenness. But also the frozenness of the body, right, that is no longer alive. But now we get an association with that and reserve, you know, the kind of reserve that you were talking about, which can be contemplativeness.

He kept his own counsel. So the. Yeah, the bird hadn't said a word. The bird is the word. No, the bird hadn't said a word. And since it was killed, of course, it never could have said a word. But now that becomes keeping his own counsel, giving this image of contemplativeness, right? There's a depth to the breast that is white and cold and caressible. And then there's a little turn at the end where the. You have the eyes that are red glass. So a bit of color standing out here in something white and then desire, which is another shift right from contemplativeness.

Now this little touch of desire that's been added to that frozen white contemplative image. It's a line that at least, yeah, it was unexpected for me and I don't know. Yeah. What is much to be desired here.

24:26 Erin: I did a little bit of research into children's marble games and the red marbles were highly desired by children. I worked this out. Obviously, if Bishop's mother is in the poem, it has to be before she was committed, when Bishop was 5 years old. So I would estimate since Bishop was born in 1911, that this is taking place around 1915. Say she's four years old and she's. Or maybe she's newly five. I don't know. I think three would be a little young for what goes on in the poem. But we're talking about a four, maybe five year old girl who may be, if not playing marble games because she doesn't have the dexterity, maybe kind of collecting them because they were also sort of desirable, just as collectible objects at this time.

I should also scroll back and say just in passing that if this is dated around 1915, Edward, Prince of Wales, Princess Alexandra, King George and Queen Mary. These represent three generations of royalty actually. So there is kind of a heritage happening even within the chromographs on the wall. There's so much going on here because of this conflict between cold and the warmth of touch. As if cold things are calling out for something to warm them up. So the cold breast of the bird is actually calling out for touch somehow. And the caress would then warm the feathers of the bird.

Obviously cold marbles haven't been touched for a while, are going to get warmed up by the heat of one's hand. I don't know if you had marbles as a kid, but I used to like to run my hand over the tops of. You know, like if you had a bag of marbles, you put your hand in and you like that cold feeling. There's kind of that yin yang there. There's the yin yang of fired and the dead bird. So the act of killing is a kind of a warm act. There's a hot, cold association there. There's the fact that the loon, which is an aquatic bird and of course it's associated with Canada, so it's used to frozen lakes.

Yet at the same time there's an obvious barrier being created by the imaginative frozenness so that the loon can't dive under the water. Or would have to find, you know, would have to break through the ice or find a way to get into the water in order to do its aquatic bird thing. I read online that these loons actually can't really walk very well because their legs are so far back for swimming purposes that on land they kind of like stumble around. And so they really are only made for water. And here we have this, the frozen lake, which is kind of.

Kind of barrier between them and their natural habitat. A cold barrier. And then the red glass, obviously, red being a hot color again. And red will return again and again. But this is the loons real eyes, of course, they've been replaced with glass in the taxidermy process. But loons in real life have red eyes. Very striking red eyes. And these are obviously, you know, these marbles chosen to resemble the loon's eyes in life. So a lot going on here that I think, then kind of coalesces in the rest of the poem.

27:34 Wes: So it's interesting here that death can induce this kind of desire. And I mean, not just death, but the static, contemplative image created by the preserved loon. Right. The frozen, stuffed, dead loon. Right. It doesn't just leave you uninterested. It creates interest and you want to caress it. In that case, it's clear what you want to do with your desire. But in the case of the eyes, it's. That's left vague. You know, they're much to be desired. Although I like your explanation in terms of marbles. Right. We might just want to possess the things that the eyes are made of here.

And they're like gemstones. Can think of that as another royal association. So something about death and frozenness can induce a kind of desire, which is odd, right? Because of killing something or when something is dead for that thing, it's the cessation of desire. But just to go back to hunting and royalty, Right. If you're above necessity and the need for survival, it's an interesting sort of occupation to curate death. Right. To hunt for sport and to then preserve those dead objects. As if to keep them alive forever. But to keep them alive forever in a dead state.

And as if to bring the natural world into the living room or into your home in general. When, of course, to be natural is to be growing and alive truly. So maybe this says something about your talk of the aesthetic object. Or maybe it says something about representation in general and the limits of representation. So we do a little bit of taxidermy, maybe even in poetry, I don't know. If that really works. But certainly whether it's chromographs or other forms of representation, of course they leave the real thing behind and the representation itself is not alive, at least in the same sense.

29:37 Erin: Right. I was thinking actually, as you were talking about the warmth of desire being related to the appetitive, you know, and what you've talked about so often with art and the appetitive. We want to caress the bird, we want to touch the. Right. There's something about these art objects which are, which are, you know, I'm calling the taxidermied loon an art object merely because I think in this maybe middle class home, Right. These are these and the chromographs, you know, not top tier art objects or meant as art objects. But yeah, the heat of desire.

And yet in relation to art, we always come up against a barrier that keeps us from. I think this is. Right. I don't know if I like what I'm saying because traditionally my argument would be art creates closeness or that you can, you know, through. Through the written word especially. There's. There's a way in which the written word can enter you and, and have. Make that connection that way. Or that it actually needs you to warm it up. Right. It needs you. It needs you to read it in order for it to live.

30:38 Wes: Yeah.

30:39 Erin: Say a painting. A painting in fact, is going to degrade if you touch it. You can admire it from afar, but it's only ever going to be a kind of false promise. I don't like this argument either.

30:54 Wes: The Kantian view, not just Kant, but many others, is that there's aesthetic interest is disinterested because it's an interest in the form. So the appetitive involves wanting to do something with the object. So if it's an apple, if it's a real apple, I want to eat it. That's the form of desire that is induced by the apple. But if it's an aesthetic object, I don't have that kind of appetite. Right. The painting of the apple, if I enjoy it, it's not that I want to eat it, it's something about the form, it's something about the representation. And so we can see a clear parallel here.

Whatever kind of desire the loon is inducing, it's not the desire to kill it that the hunters had at one point or the desire to eat it. So that there's something here like the aesthetic, but it's still a kind of desire. And maybe, maybe the. The talk of wanting to write the desirable red glass Eyes. One might cross the line there and say, actually, yeah, I just want to pluck. I just want to pluck the red glass out because that's valuable and I want to possess it. Or the desire to caress. Right. That's not a. That's not an aesthetic relation. Exactly right.

You would want to caress a living thing out of affection. But it may say something. The use of that metaphor may say something about the aesthetic which is a bit warmer. Right. Than the word disinterest would have us think. Disinterest is always a little bit of a misleading word, but so the relationship to the aesthetic object is, of course, complicated.

32:29 Erin: Right. Well, and as I said, I do think there is this. This charge between cold, maybe especially cold, smooth things, and us where we desire to touch. You know, sometimes even a statue that looks particularly smooth, you know, it almost invites touch in that way.

32:44 Wes: What about a frosted cake?

32:46 Erin: Should we have frosted cake? Yes.

32:48 Wes: Yeah, we'll get to that next time. All right?

32:49 Erin: Right, yes. So next time we'll get through the last three stanzas. We're halfway through, more or less. So next time we will finish our discussion of First Death in Nova Scotia. Thank you, Wes.

33:01 Wes: Thank you.

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.

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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 Wes: The ordinary way to write the poem would be to. And a much simpler way would be to put this in her point of view and not try to put it into a collective point of view. But that seems to be what she's doing.

8:59 Erin: Yes. The effectiveness, though, I think is the. And it could just be the speaker's perception of it, but the atmospheric quality, because everyone on the bus is going to share an experience shortly, but already they are sharing an experience and a kind of atmosphere that they're all listening to the hum and having that. You know, when you're in the car and you. Maybe when you're a kid and you put your ear up against, like, the. The car door or the window or something, and you hear orchestral music. I don't know if you ever had that. I used to always hear classical music when I would put my head up.

9:38 Wes: Yeah, I don't think I have that.

9:40 Erin: All kinds of. And I always think, like, I should write this down. But you always have, like, a hallucination of an orchestra playing songs. Different songs. Sometimes like fantastical songs. Yeah. You know, my particular experience maybe doesn't quite get at the. Yeah. The sense that this is shared.

9:57 Wes: Well, you're put into a kind of dreamy state, and yet you're getting at the auditory hallucination part. I mean, for me, I think, as a child, and this, I think, is very evocative of childhood. It's something about being half asleep or falling asleep. You're on a journey and there are adults in the car and there's some. Maybe some sense of safety, I think is very relevant to this poem. But being ensconced in the world of adults and not quite alone when you do this thing, which is potentially very lonely, which is go to sleep. And of course, a lot of kids don't want to go to sleep because that loneliness factor. But it's a much different experience if you're traveling. You're all on the way to something together. And of course, you're with people who are awake and, you know, are going

10:45 Erin: to be awake, maybe because the kids are falling asleep. Their. Their voices are lowered and softer. And maybe that also contributes Right. To the. The way in which. That lulls the children in the back simply because they're aware of not wanting to talk too loudly. Certainly that would be the case on a bus like this, where they're Having a conversation where they're talking in. In lower voices and maybe actually inducing that calm and hum for sleep in the people, the other people in the bus who aren't talking.

11:15 Wes: And the question is, what are the adults doing with their talk? Right. It's not going to work if your parents are just fighting. In this case, it's the grandparents. Voices are clearing things up and I guess bringing certain things to resolution, coming to terms with these losses. But a lot of it does sound a bit gossipy and not necessarily like the most comforting.

11:39 Erin: Yes. Yeah.

11:39 Wes: Sort of talk we could imagine. Yeah.

11:41 Erin: Well, you know, in a situation like this where you might be a child in this car, could be that you're coming back from whatever, like a, like a late night and then the adults in the car are working through whatever has just happened over the course of the night. And. Oh no, she was the one who had that long. Yeah. Who had the criminal record because of that thing, remember where they. Oh, yeah, yeah. That was like 20 years ago. So you sort of get that. But for an entire family history going back ages and ages, talking in eternity. Deaths, deaths and sicknesses.

The year he remarried, the year something happened. Oh, yeah, what year was that? Right. Something about the journey afterwards or maybe away from home. If these people are also. If their home is Nova Scotia and they're departing it, you know, then there's that backwards looking quality where something about the idea of the journey and moving away from the place is giving the opportunity to then take stock and look back. So there's this sort of like dual action happening in the poem where the further the bus goes, the further back they're kind of looking from deaths and sicknesses to then remarriage and then childbirth.

Son lost when the schooner foundered.

12:58 Wes: These are all very blue collar tragedies, right?

13:00 Erin: Yes.

13:01 Wes: He was arrested for insider trading.

13:04 Erin: No, but I mean, you know, there's a reverse order to what's happening, you know, so we get. We have death, then sickness, then remarriage, then dying in childbirth. So there's a rewind is what I mean. Yeah.

13:17 Wes: Well, we come back in the end to death. The way it's all summed up.

13:20 Erin: Insider trading. Sorry.

13:23 Wes: Huh?

13:24 Erin: Sorry, Just insider trading. That really is funny.

13:31 Wes: And he had an affair. No. A sharp indrawn breath. Half groan, half acceptance. That means life's like that. We know it. Also death, you know, and then the question, what does also death mean there? Death knows it, we also know death. But it, you know, it made me wonder at various points I wondered. Well, Is this an element here of a journey to the underworld or to the afterlife? Maybe it's a job not claiming that that's strong thematic part of this, but maybe a hint of that type of thing. Because the journey, I mean, and it does seem like journeys are good places for this or like when I travel, it produces in me a very different state of mind.

And I do find it very calming in a way, you know, especially actually being on the train or something like that, because you're in between two different locations and you maybe you're not caught up in the expectations or the constricting qualities of any particular location. If I'm at home, I have to do this and that work, or if I'm at a destination, then I'm dealing with relatives or I have to be a tourist or something like that. But there's something liberating about being in between two locations. So it does seem like a place for this type of dreamy hallucination or this reflection or this clearing of things up.

It's almost like therapy. Right? That's what all of this sounds like. People are talking through their problems, but where is it that they get to in the end here? The half groan, half acceptance. So it's not fully acceptance. It sums things up with this, maybe a degree of resignation. So yeah, I don't know. What do you make of the stanza?

15:15 Erin: Well, they're traveling west significantly. Right. I do take a lot of this to be a kind of, say, pre figurement of death, even though at the same time the fact that they're in the woods, the fact that not to jump ahead too much, the fact that the moose will come out of the woods and appear notably in the middle of the road, there is a suggestion of middle age or middleness, or midway in the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark forest. So I think it works both ways, or perhaps it's working in several ways simultaneously for the various passengers.

So maybe the speaker is experiencing something more akin to the Dante esque middle of the journey on the bus. And something about the bus journey is also, symbolically speaking, a kind of final bus journey for some of the other passengers. And that intersection seems significant, but I don't know how, just in the sense that there's a retrospective quality happening or maybe even a reversion to childhood that goes on for the speaker and the other people in the bus by virtue of the propinquity to these old people at the end of their life's journey.

Because there is very little about middleness Here, come to think of it, other than the moose appearing in the middle of the road. Right. It seems that the other people on the bus are like children and the grandparents are the adults.

16:50 Wes: I mean, I think part of what's comforting when we're children is that feeling that adults know the answers and that adults know how to cope with all the dangers and have experience doing that and therefore can protect us. The reality, of course, as we realize as we get older, is that that's not true. So what they may have is more of this acceptance that's sort of highlighted in this stanza, which is potentially a good thing, but maybe a double edged sword because it does seem to be a form of dying. It does seem to be a form of the very thing that we want to be protected from.

17:30 Erin: There's also, though, that. What I used to call my mom, the external hard drive. I used to say back before she.

17:42 Wes: She liked that.

17:44 Erin: I think now it would make her sad because she'll say, you know, very openly that she. Her memory is gone. But it used to be that she knew all the, you know, you could ask her who said that at that one. You know, there's that kind of. I mean, that's a sort of jokey, gossipy scorekeeping thing that she would keep tabs on. But there's also just the idea of long memory being the history keeper, the record keeper, the, you know, and there's sort of settling accounts over the course of this conversation. Oh, right, it was that year. Okay. And then this happened and then, then that happened. And that's important too, I think, for, you know, it situates children in a context. Not just say this idea of death that you're referring to, but also how to situate oneself in a life.

18:34 Wes: Right.

18:34 Erin: There's a. There's a sort of frame that the grandparents or the elder relatives have that whole history up until you enter the narrative and where you fit within that. We mentioned in part one a little bit about Bishop's family history just to kind of prefigure the types of story that she inserts, I think very significantly into the poem, particularly about poor Amos who just wouldn't stop praying in the store and had to be. Had to be put away. Right. Of course she does a gender swap, but yeah, we all have family stories like this, of this kind of unruly behavior or madness of some kind or other or some sort of family drama.

19:19 Wes: Yeah. So it's universal. But the way she captures it is very clever with this talk that we don't quite know whether it's just the conversation of the people, the old people at the back of the bus, or whether it's her dream or whether it's both or somewhere in between. They're interlaced, those two things. And that. That interlacing gets at this aspect of universality. Although I think by the time we get to the stanza where she's fantasizing about the grandparents and the featherbed, this, it start. Seems to become inescapably personal, which is why I think of the.

The point of view is getting more and more focused. Right. With. With time. Yeah. And potentially it's still universal, but it seems almost like a personal memory. Right. So talking the way they talked in the old feather bed. Right. The way they. Her. Her grandparents presumably in the old feather bed, peacefully on and on. Dim lamp light in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shaw. Shawl. Yeah, get another. And get another dog here.

20:28 Erin: I love this.

20:29 Wes: The collie, the barking dog. And. Yeah, so this, this stanza is wonderful. And it gets at exactly this thing that you've been talking about, which is the, like, comfort of being a kid overhearing adults talking. It really, despite this talk of death. Right. A reconciliation with death. This is the point. Seems to be the point of view of a child who finds this very comforting. And. Right. She'll say in the next stanza, now it's all right now even to fall asleep, just as on all those nights, the way in which the adult world and the safety of protective figures can make sleep okay to do. And then suddenly that's interrupted.

21:07 Erin: But I love too. I mean, yes, it's so particular, but it also just in this one stanza does so many things in miniature that the poem is doing all along, this telescoping in again to a scene which. Which even as a child, if it were her childhood in particular that she's referencing, she couldn't possibly know or see. She wouldn't be able to see the grandparents in their featherbed. She would have to be picturing them in the featherbed and she wouldn't be able to see the dog in the hall. And also I wonder if this. If the stanza in its operation is kind of doing.

I mean, this is just occurring to me now, but maybe it's doing that kind of hallucinatory work that has prior been described where we actually get a remix of, you know, this is the third dog in the poem. But it's also the elements in the stanza are a kind of recapitulation of the light, the red light swimming, the port Lantern becomes the lamp light in the hall. We get the dog barking now becomes the dog curled up in the shawl. And then maybe even because we also get kitchen, maybe the shawl is even a kind of transposition of the table, tablecloth shook out.

Right. So there's something actually in the stanza which has that hallucinatory quality that she's describing where these three elements swim in the imagination and then become the lamplight and the dog and the shawl in this half asleep kind of dream space. Maybe that's pushing things too far, but it does seem to be. It's the dreamiest stanza perhaps in the whole poem. Maybe the following one. Now it's all right now even to fall asleep. But this gets interrupted that next stanza. So this one, I think is the real depth of the dreamy or borderline dreamy or hallucinatory moment.

23:00 Wes: Yeah, this is great because it really underlines the way deviation creates the capacity for stasis or for comfort. So the deviation of a bus trip or of the dreaming. Right. Which is movement, which is dynamic and has that momentum, forward momentum that we were talking about, sort of underwrites or grounds this ability to. For stasis, for stopping, for going to sleep, for feeling comforted as a child and safe, I think. And I keep repeating that word because of the. What's going to happen. The use of the word that's going to happen in this poem later.

But yeah, I'm not sure if you were saying that explicitly, but that's what came to mind my mind as you were talking. This. The way in which this journey, divagation, motion can ground something that's going to be more static or stationary, which is what we're going to get in the moose. Because it interrupts the. It explicitly interrupts the motion of the bus and the external line of the poem in a way that parallels the comfort that's produced by the dreaming.

24:08 Erin: Yeah. In stanza 22 is where we have that break that you're describing. The moose finally appears. Well, the moose doesn't appear until stanza 23 finally appears.

24:21 Wes: We've been waiting for you.

24:22 Erin: We've been waiting for you. The title has promised that you would come and then here you are. It is foretold of your coming.

24:29 Wes: Comes through the curtains, takes his bow. Right.

24:32 Erin: We get nights, just as on all those nights. And then the moose's appearance, the lights turn on. And that rhyme you get, I mean, it's a very basic, simple rhyme. Right. But there's that sort of sudden jolt which is then also visualized where in the middle of night we have this appearance, this bright because of the headlights on it. Appearance of the moose. And it looms and sniffs at the bus's hot hood, which I'm assuming means that it thinks that the bus might be a boy moose.

25:06 Wes: No. Well, it's a very hot bus, I'll say that.

25:10 Erin: Ow. Ow.

25:14 Wes: That enamel. And it's dented and, you know, depends on if you like bad buses. No, just kidding.

25:21 Erin: Dented from its last encounter with a girl bus.

25:25 Wes: Yeah. It's funny because I wrote in my notes, but was just reading it stanza by stanza. And the previous stanza I'd said, okay to sleep, even with death looming. Looming for all of us, you know, all day one. You know, one day we all die. Looming in that sense. And then suddenly the moose is looming, standing there, looming. And I thought, whoa, that's really interesting

25:45 Erin: that I. Oh, yes, chose.

25:48 Wes: Chose that word before I even got to the next stanza. Not to give some, you know, obvious rote sort of identification of the moose with death or the experience of the moose as having something to do with that. But obviously they're coming into contact here with something quite primal and important. It's not just, oh, look, there's a nice moose, but is he sniffing or she's sniffing the buses hot hood because she thinks it might be another moose. That hadn't actually occurred to me.

26:21 Erin: I must have been infected with that reading at some point that this was a frisky moose, that it otherwise doesn't seem frisky at all. It seems pretty. Like a pretty staid, respectable moose.

26:34 Wes: But frisky and ditzy.

26:39 Erin: That's right. Hello.

26:41 Wes: What?

26:41 Erin: Oh, look, I seem to be in the middle of the road. Pardon me.

26:46 Wes: So, towering, antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house. We're safe as houses, a man's voice assures us. Perfectly harmless. Which you presume, right, that the. The man making that assurance is. Precedes the idea of it being homely as a house and safe as houses. Even though. So. So she interestingly puts the associations before her associative responses before the actual stimulus. Right. I don't think she's the one who is thinking about how they must be safe and. And he's saying something. I mean, as far as I know. I don't know back then.

But you were warned about bison and mooses, right? Or is it mooses or moose? I think we're warned because they don't. They. They seem harmless, but they're not. And so I was quite surprised by this stanza. And I thought this idea, okay, safe as houses. Well, yeah, houses ought to be safe, but they're not always safe. The bus, the moving container of the bus turns out to be, in a way safer and more conducive to reverie and dreaming and all of that.

27:59 Erin: No matter how you slice it, whether you see the moose as harmless, truly, or not so harmless, this has got to be just a little bit of a wink, right? A man's voice assures us.

28:09 Wes: I mean, I think we're definitely meant to be skeptical.

28:12 Erin: Yeah.

28:13 Wes: This perfectly harmless line, it's not there for us to nod our heads in agreement.

28:20 Erin: Oh, yeah, he's right, right, right. I think it's more like, oh, here's another mansplainer.

28:26 Wes: He's moose splaining.

28:28 Erin: Mooseplaining this woman moose to moose splaining. Just out for a good time, having her existence commented upon by another man's voice. Probably a podcaster. One of those male podcasters has a manosphere podcast.

28:45 Wes: Girl mooses are.

28:49 Erin: Then we get these childish again. The passengers are like children and having this childlike response to the appearance of the moose, including. It's awful, plain sad. So much judgment of women's bodies.

29:04 Wes: I mean, they're not good looking creatures. Let's just. They're, you know, put that on the table. Come on. They are in an ugly sort of way.

29:11 Erin: Yeah. I mean, okay, I guess they don't follow, you know, classical proportions. They don't represent the golden mean.

29:21 Wes: They're not into beauty society societal beauty standards. All right.

29:28 Erin: They are like cartoon characters.

29:29 Wes: They're miss Positive is what they are.

29:35 Erin: Well, what I love though, about the description, you know, we get several, I suppose. Yeah. Contradictory descriptions of the moose in a way, because we get homely as a house or safe as houses. We get awful plain. But then she looks the bus over grand otherworldly, so she has some gravitas. She's like a great character actress who. Who may not be beautiful in that leading lady way, but she's Kathy Bates. Yes. Yeah, well, that's maybe a bit insulting to Kathy Bates, who I do think is a very attractive woman, but.

30:19 Wes: Sorry, Kathy.

30:20 Erin: I know, I love her.

30:21 Wes: Come on the show sometime, please.

30:24 Erin: Oh my gosh, I would die. I love Kathy Bates anyway. And then we get curious creatures. Well, first we get the idea that it inspires joy and then we get curious creatures. So there's a. The joy is then immediately undercut by a kind of ambivalence. Right. So there's just all of these descriptions of the moose combine to create a kind of ambivalent portrait, such as it is, of the animal.

30:47 Wes: Are we going to be able to answer this question? Why? Why do they feel the sweet sensation of joy? I mean, I think I would probably feel it.

30:57 Erin: Why? Why do we all feel it? I mean, they have. Well, they've successfully done what I couldn't see a moose in real life. So they're like one up on Erin. Can't wait to go back and tell her we saw moose. Yeah, I've seen certain things. I can't think of a specific example of this, but I've had plenty of instances. Whether it is a wild animal or, I don't know, like a sunset or a really spectacular natural event of some kind or other. You do get that feeling of joy, kind of excitement.

31:28 Wes: Yeah. Unfortunately, most of my encounters with large animals are at zoos. I did see a bear once. I was going to the bathroom. My mom had a house in Front Royal, Virginia, at the beginning of the Appalachian Mountains. And it was up high on a. We called it a mountain, but it was, I guess, more of a hill. But so it was out, you know, it was kind of. There was a bear on the mountain, let's just put it that way. And, yeah, I was going to the bathroom one day and looking out the window. There's a window right. You know, above the toilet. And suddenly there's bear's face looking at me. Wow. What the. So, but that, you know, and. And that was majestic. No, just kidding. That it was. I. It was surprising.

32:13 Erin: Yeah.

32:14 Wes: And there's an element of fear that involved. Even if you're, you know, even if, you know, black bears are harmless and there's a wall between you. Some. Something scary about it. I didn't have time to feel like it's majestic. Yeah. You know, like you have had these experiences in. In nature, but I can't think of a encounter like this. But it. I seem sure that if I had an encounter like this, I would feel exactly the same way. So. Yeah. What is otherworldly about it? What is majestic about it? It's a big, dumb beast. And I say that with love, without any criticism in the sense that.

Right. It's an encounter with something primal. And I think we have to take into account the size of the animal as well. I mean, it is interesting to run into a fox or something like that, but it's also a matter of scale here. But. Yeah. What is otherworldly about it? I mean, I think the most. The most obvious part of this is that you know, we have lost something in our humanity and becoming language using creatures and becoming self conscious creatures. And sometimes when we're confronted with an animal like this, we're confronted with that loss.

We're not as connected to the environment because of the intermediation of something like language, which poetry of course tries to overcome. It tries to put language into a disintermediating. Sorry to use these business terms. I don't know why this is happening. Into a disintermediation.

33:46 Erin: Actualize. Yeah, yeah.

33:49 Wes: When it. Yeah, right. Synergize it's agenda. Often where language might put distance between us and the world. Poetry, I think, can undo that distance. Like I was saying, with the very vivid imagery, I can undo that distance with figurative language. And maybe that distance is also undone to some extent by the dreaming or the half dreaming hallucinatory state that she was in. And the comfort of that, the return to childhood, which is also a simpler time. I don't know. I'm thinking out loud here. But yeah, I wanted to try to get more at this, you know, the otherworldly status of the moose and the joy that comes from encountering it.

34:34 Erin: I was thinking to myself, is the moose's gaze really clearly encapsulated? And then I thought, yes, she regards us amicably. And then I was like, no, no, that's the passenger who gets on the bus.

34:44 Wes: Right. Does the moose have freckles? Yeah, that'd be an interesting twist, right?

34:50 Erin: But yeah, but there is one.

34:51 Wes: Turned her into a moose.

34:53 Erin: Well, I would think that this would be a more garden variety animal encounter and maybe even a more, to use a word, I don't like, problematic poem in terms of its relationship with the animal. If it were to focus on the gaze of the animal. Because I think that is the thing which is often at the core of these interactions with animals in which we project or hope to have a kind of meaningful encounter. You want to meet the gaze of the animal and in so doing understand it. Right. And of course you don't realize that you're just projecting onto it a kind of maybe mutual regard.

She regards us amicably. That you are seeing it and it is seeing you. And there's an acknowledgement and there's this, you know, spiritual encounter that you have with this animal. And all of that, of course, is often quite silly. It's often quite reductive and fanciful and unrealistic. But I am thinking of an encounter that springs to mind is in Utah. I hiked the same trail almost every day. And I Would often hike it late in order to escape the full heat of the desert sun. Which is a little dangerous, right? Because sometimes the sun would be setting and then all kinds of things come out.

And one time I was trying to get back to my car before it got completely dark. And what I thought was a wolf, but what must have been a coyote. And the coyotes in Utah are huge. They look like wolves and completely white. Came out from over a hill, crossed my path, turned, looked at me in the eyes for a very long time, turned and went over on the other side of the hill. I mean, curiously, then, of course, I got to the car and I actually found out that a beloved family member, an elderly family member of mine, had passed away. And I said, I think I just saw her.

You know, I had this feeling of, like. I don't know, the sense of this connection, inherent connection between these two. This woman who was dear to me and this encounter. But, of course, that's all silliness. And the idea that I was having a sort of interaction through the gate. Some sort of reciprocal. Right. Interaction with this animal was also entirely just my own projecting onto the animal. However, I will say that that's an instance in which I felt fear. But then there was also this, like, joy at the encounter, I think fear because it was dark.

Because I wasn't actually sure if this was a wolf because it blocked my path. It was far enough away that I didn't feel as threatened as I might have. But it was definitely a mixed perception.

37:28 Wes: You didn't shoot it and then hang it around your neck. No, because I was thinking. I just suddenly thought of the albatross poem.

37:37 Erin: Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

37:38 Wes: Rime of the Ancient Mariner. And that sort of relationship to the natural world where. I mean, I forget what we said about it, but maybe I said something about envy and wanting to kill the albatross for. Because of its freedom or something like that. I don't. I don't know. But I think it's important because, yeah, this is part of something about the encounter with the natural world. Whether it's a big moose or something else. Yes. Is otherworldly. Strangely enough, it's otherworldly to us, even though it's where we come from. It's uncanny, maybe.

And Freud actually, in the German, I think uncanny is sort of like unhomelike is what the German sounds like. And Freud made a lot out of this. I think it's home, but it's a home from which we've become alienated. We're animals, we're something more than animals. And so that primal encounter brings us back to that foundation, that natural foundation in us, but we can't fully come to terms with it. And I think the other aspect of this, I think the death. Right. So there is a link to death. Just. And I was thinking about that when you described thinking of it as seeing.

As seeing your departed loved one. Because if we could regress to that animal state, it would be a kind of death. I think that the association with the movement to the pre. Linguistic, natural foundation is something like the movement towards dying, but there's something comforting.

39:07 Erin: Yes.

39:07 Wes: Right. And we encounter that when we encounter the gaze. To have a. Have a gaze returned by an animal like that usually like, like our internal. Our entire psychological structure, what makes us self. Self conscious is the internalization of a human gaze. Right. To the extent that we. We get an animal gaze, I think we are returned to that more primal part of ourselves. And it does seem to me to have something to do with being reconciled to mortality. Right. Which is part of what the function of that dialogue between the elderly people is doing.

39:44 Erin: You're leading me into the one, say, reading of the moose that I wanted to get to. And I just want to say that I think the great thing about Bishop and about this poem and all her poems is that the moose is a moose. It's not a symbol. I hesitate to offer any kind of

40:03 Wes: direct reading, but that's her job on this podcast, though.

40:05 Erin: I know, I know. It's. Yeah. In the letters with Robert Lowell when he's writing to her about her poem At the Fishhouses, he says, alas, all my fish just become symbols.

40:16 Wes: Ah, very good.

40:17 Erin: I hesitate to reduce. I think what you've just said makes me think that it's the maternal, the mother.

40:25 Wes: Which also brings us back to the house.

40:28 Erin: Yes, the house. Yeah. It's something that comes like the clapboard churches, like clamshells seem to arise out of the ground, if you will, or are directly compared to these native creatures. The houses are then in turn used as comparisons for the moose, the maternal. The idea that this is something that returns us to nature, that this is the encounter that we would have presumably upon death. It's the loved one that is somehow comforting, maternal, and is a female moose. It's moose mom. I don't know. I don't know. Something going on there.

41:04 Wes: Moose mom.

41:05 Erin: Natural and strange at the same time, not us. And I guess that's why I. That's why I mentioned that the story of my grandfather at the beginning, because I don't know why I wanted so badly to see a moose right after my grandfather's death. But there was something, like, logical about it to me. And I was familiar with this poem, but I very much did not have. You know, it was not something that was the forefront of my mind at all. But I think there is this inherent connection, and it's silly. You know, I kind of can't believe I'm saying this, but I do.

I do think there is this kind of connection between this desire that I felt to see this animal. Like the particular kind of primordial itch that the moose in particular seems to be scratching for me in that moment. For Bishop, in this poem, something that is at once safe and comforting and from another world, natural in that kind of elemental way.

42:00 Wes: Yeah.

42:01 Erin: That all kind of coalesce in that image.

42:04 Wes: Very good.

42:05 Erin: Okay. I think that's it, Wes. All we're left with is the dim smell of moose and an acrid smell of gasoline.

42:12 Wes: Oh, you know, we should have talked about that. Maybe we can start with that on our next Bishop recording. We'll. We'll begin with the smells, the smells and the significance of that image at the end.

42:25 Erin: Nice.

42:25 Wes: That smellage at the end.

42:26 Erin: Smellage. All right. Thank you.

42:29 Wes: Thank you.