On Elizabeth Bishop’s centennial, a reading of The Bight.
Go here for the poem uninterrupted by my commentary.
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THE BIGHT
[A shallow bay. We’re in Key West, where Bishop lived for a number of years, and we’re looking at a harbor. The word bite, and the word blight (Bishop was fond of Gerard Manley Hopkins, author of Spring and Fall), should certainly be floating around in our heads while we read.]
On my birthday
At low tide like this how sheer the water is.
[this. is. low. how. A simple poetic balance, and a calm straightforward assertiveness, express themselves right away. And consider how low we are: Already we’re at a bight; and now the bight’s at low tide. Already a sense of melancholy. Yet she says the poem’s written on her birthday. Not in a very celebratory mood, I think.]
White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.
[As if the fluidity and depth of water weren’t compromised enough by all that shallowness, there’s also morbid skeletal marl sticking up out of the bight; and the anchoring pilings seem sadly pointless, since there’s so little water. Upright, gathered, like sticks, they resemble matches.… Note the assonance throughout: tide, like, white, dry, pilings, dry.]
Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn’t wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.
[Low again. And water like fire? We’ve seen it before, in one of her most famous poems, At the Fishhouses:
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.]
One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.
[Baudelaire could make it sizzle; I cannot. For me, the sound of nature is turned way down low.]
The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock
already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.
[That’s my music: An arid percussive click rather than any tonality; something strange and off the beat rather than something harmonic and measured. That’s what I hear when I look most deeply at earthly life, when I dredge down to the truth.]
The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash
into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,
it seems to me, like pickaxes,
rarely coming up with anything to show for it,
[You see how she’s – what’s Gioia’s word? – slyly awakening emotions in us? Emotions having to do with what — depletion, futility, the contrast between our immense efforts to understand the depths of existence, to get the goods of life, and the paltry products of those efforts: rarely coming up with anything to show for it.]
and going off with humorous elbowings.
Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar
on impalpable drafts
and open their tails like scissors on the curves
or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.
[An elaboration of the effort-and-futility idea: We struggle (man-of-war) toward meaning (transcendent rather than earthly here, on impalpable drafts) until the sheer effort of it makes us tremble.]
The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in
with the obliging air of retrievers,
bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks
and decorated with bobbles of sponges.
[There’s something annoyingly stupid and pathetically messy about the ongoingness of human existence. Although the scene is junky and depleted, eagerly panting little boats still keep coming in, their crappy cargo hanging out of their mouths.]
There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock
where, glinting like little plowshares,
the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry
for the Chinese-restaurant trade.
[A sharp dry eat-or-be-eaten world. No treasures here.]
Some of the little white boats are still piled up
against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,
[Wonderful pun on stove – gas fire, but also the little boats crushed in any old way.]
and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.
[Nothing to show for the boats, relics of the last, not-yet-overcome trauma. There’s something vaguely guilt-inducing about their abandonment and open vulnerability, something of O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this! This is everyone’s messy moral and emotional life, bursting with compromise and unfinished business.]
The bight is littered with old correspondences.
[Since Baudelaire’s been mentioned, we might think here of his most famous poem, Correspondences. But there’s nothing in Bishop’s poem akin to the almost mystical “profound unity” between our subjectivity and the natural world that appears in Baudelaire. “The unnamed correspondences [in Bishop] are not ecstatic, Emersonian revelations of relationship; rather, they are almost wholly negative,” writes Brett Candlish Millier.]
Click. Click. Goes the dredge,
and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.
[The sharp bite of the dredge’s jaw unearths more white marl. Same old shit.]
All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.
[We conclude how? We conclude that, looked at with biting lucidity, the shabby contingency of life is simply awful. A blight. Yet, contemplating another birthday, another setting out into more life, we’re compelled to note also the sheer survivability of it all, the way most of us are in it and what the hell.]
The Worcester Telegram announces a birthday commemoration for the poet Elizabeth Bishop:
On Tuesday, Bishop’s 100th birthday, there will be a gravesite ceremony at Hope Cemetery in Worcester at 4:30 p.m. The gathering will include a reading of Bishop’s poem, “The Bight,” whose last lines provide the inscription of her tombstone: “All the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful.”
(Here’s a charming film about Bishop’s grave, and its inscription.)
There will also be Tuesday readings here and here, and a birthday party at a Halifax restaurant.
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Bishop’s work is a villa of the mysteries; we feel her assuming the full weight of human life; we feel her somehow gently housing that weight in her poems. Because she brings experience under the control of language, because she shapes it poetically, we say she is a powerful poet. Yet she gathers power not through imposing any architecture of ideas or feelings upon reality, but rather simply through offering reality a roof for the night. Shelter here, in these lines. Let me lodge you, look at you.
“The more one reads a Bishop poem,” writes David Orr in the New York Times, “the greater the sense of huge forces being held barely but precisely in check … [One feels] the enormous patience and skill that allowed her to hold the volcanic feeling on exhibit here in the poised vessels of her finished poetry.”
A vessel poised above huge forces – this describes a good deal of the best art. Leonard Bernstein describes Mozart’s G Minor Symphony as “a work of utmost passion utterly controlled.” Brahm’s Fourth, says Roger Scruton, conveys a “tragic feeling that is nevertheless utterly controlled, and utterly in control.” The sublimity of Beethoven, Dmitri Tymoczko suggests, lies not in strident statement and emotion, but instead in the way a passage like this one in the Tempest sonata (click on the image and then zoom in)
symbolizes both desire – in the form of the chromatically ascending chords – and limitation, as represented by the fixed upper note. It is as if Beethoven were suggesting that, while no amount of effort on his part would enable him to leap beyond the limits of his piano, his music demands that he try – as if the world of sticks and wires, the ordinary physical realm in which pianos exist, cannot be reconciled with the world of Beethoven’s aspiration. …[T]his coupling of an exhortation to transcendence (here heard as an inexorable chromatic chordal ascent) with a warning about the impossibility of success (the stubborn pedal point at the top of the piano) recalls Kant’s conception of sublimity. Like the Temple of Isis, the music seems to question its own adequacy, giving with one hand what it takes away with the other.
Passion and a strategic yielding to limitation – this combination gives Bishop’s poems their remarkable soundness, what Anne Stevenson calls “a kind of interior sense of rightness and excellence.” “We see the place, the person or the thing [in her poems] as if we were truly there, and we feel emotions that the author doesn’t state overtly but slyly awakens inside us,” writes Dana Gioia.
Retired from a high-profile career as an academic psychiatrist, Frances now muses on the expensive and destructive medicalization of human experience in America.
In a recent post, I noted what I called his Post-Diagnostic Regret, his almost anguished reflection on his own implication in what another writer calls psychosprawl — the legitimation of so many behaviors as signs of mental illness that thirty percent of the country is now said to be mentally ill. This is great news for the pharmaceutical industry, America’s Fraud Queen.
In this piece, in Psychiatric Times (registration), Frances turns his attention to a recent, much-reported study.
The New York Times of Dec 20,2010 carried an alarming story. It seems that during the past decade, college students have suddenly become much more mentally ill. The rate of severe psychiatric disorder among those seen in school counseling services used to be 16%– now it has reached 44%. Ten years ago, 17% received psychiatric medicine– now it is 24%.
The jump, Frances suggests, is manufactured.
First, it’s far too easy for students to ace the DSM-IV tests for mental disorders. “[T]he severity and duration requirements included in DSM-IV were set too low, particularly in the criteria sets that define the milder forms of the depressive, anxiety, and attention deficit disorders.”
Second, impressionable and sometimes insecure students see endless slick ads encouraging them to palpate, as it were, their moods. “[P]rofit motivated skewing of public information about illness is rightly prohibited virtually everywhere else in the world,” Allen notes. He reminds readers that along with lavishing us with images of our mental fragility, drug companies have long “lavished physicians with industry-sponsored conferences, free trips and meals, free samples, biased research, and co-opted thought leaders. There [is] one drug salesperson for every seven doctors– sometimes outnumbering the patients in waiting areas. Not surprisingly, diagnosis and medication sales have skyrocketed and profits have risen astronomically.”
Side effects, lifelong stigma, insurance difficulties – these are obvious calamities for the wrongly labeled. More profoundly wounding is “the way a falsely diagnosed student sees himself at a crucial moment of identity formation– the reduction in the sense of personal efficacy, resilience, and responsibility.”
In 2000, the University of Florida named Professor Dov Borovsky a Research Foundation Professor, his work on insect control making him among “the best of the best” on that faculty. He’s clearly admired, and well-compensated.
Borovsky has responded to UF’s largesse with conflict of interest and theft. He’s been arrested on grand larceny and fraud charges:
Borovsky took three separate trips to Malaysia that he reported were on behalf of the university, but were actually in connection with his work as a paid consultant, scientific adviser and shareholder in the Malaysian-based company EntoGenex International.
He got the university to pay for his airfare, although EntoGenex had already paid for it. He also denied a business interest in the company.
Wired magazine interviews Allen Frances, a retired Duke University psychiatry professor, and editor of the most recent edition [2000 – it’s currently being revised for a new edition] of the profoundly influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Frances has Post-Diagnostic Regret. He regrets the way his edition of the DSM has contributed to what Gary Greenberg, the article’s author, calls “absurdly high rates of diagnosis—by DSM criteria, epidemiologists have noted, a staggering 30 percent of Americans are mentally ill in any given year.” Francis regrets
having remained silent when, in the 1980s, he watched the pharmaceutical industry [America’s Fraud Queen] insinuate itself into the [American Psychiatric Association’s] training programs. [The APA produces the DSM.] (Annual drug company contributions to those programs reached as much as $3 million before the organization decided, in 2008, to phase out industry-supported education.)
The DSM’s vague and proliferating diagnoses have tended to “[create] … mental illness[es] where there previously [were] none, giving drugmakers… new target[s] for their hard sell and doctors, most of whom see it as part of their job to write prescriptions, more reason to medicate.”
As Greenberg notes, “[F]or all their confident pronouncements, psychiatrists can’t rigorously differentiate illness from everyday suffering.”
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After years of reading, thinking, and writing about the university on this blog, UD has concluded that no division of the modern American university has more potential to do harm to the social fabric than academic psychiatry. The most brutal sports program, the most cynical MBA program – these don’t begin to approach the power to harm that organized, respected, and, in some cases, morally compromised diagnosticians have.
… fees go?
UD‘s friend David Ridpath, along with Matthew Denhart, asks Ohio University students how much they pay in mandatory student fees; he asks them if they know how much of that money goes to athletics; and he asks them how many campus sports events they attend.
They know the answer to the third question — they attend very few, if any — but they’re wobbly on the others.
“On average, how many Ohio University intercollegiate athletic events do you attend per year?” In exchange for receiving student fee money, Ohio’s athletics department allows students to attend home games for free. The average response was 5.8 events attended per year; the median was two, and 35% of respondents reported they attend none. USA TODAY, in a figure cited in the survey’s case study, reported in September that Ohio is allocating $765 of each full-time student’s general fees for the 2010-11 school year to athletics… The survey also asked respondents to rate “how important a factor was Ohio University’s intercollegiate athletics reputation in influencing your decision to enroll at this institution.” More than 78% of the respondents said it was either “unimportant” (24.8%) or “extremely unimportant” (53.7%).
A study much like this one took place at the University of Toledo and had similar results.
Conclusion: Keep ’em ignorant. As long as they don’t know how much they pay in fees, where the fees go, that the fees primarily support athletic events they don’t attend, and that most of the things universities say by way of defending high sports fees are bullshit, all will be well.
Jed Perl considers the ironies of postmodern appropriation art.
[T]he Andy Warhol Foundation [has refused] to authenticate a silkscreen self-portrait that Warhol instructed somebody else to make. Warhol had signed the painting and authorized its inclusion in his first catalogue raisonné, where it was even reproduced on the cover. I am not sure that anybody has actually said that this silkscreen is in fact a plagiary, but the Foundation will not say that it is real, either. …Warhol wasn’t even present; the artist spoke to the fabricator on the phone, to specify the red that he wanted.
Reminds me of Bill Reid.
Perl distinguishes between being influenced by a precursor, and simply appropriating the precursor (in the case of Warhol and Reid, the precursor is yourself):
[S]usceptibility, the sense of emotional connectedness, is what influence is all about as it unfolds in Western art, in the work of Michelangelo, Poussin, Delacroix, Cézanne, Picasso, and countless others. The chill of appropriation, with its emphasis on impersonality and anonymity, suggests not the great tradition but the academic tradition, a calculation about the past rather than an engagement with the past.
The appropriated piece can stage a statement or two — Everything is mass produced, including art. Individuality is a myth. — but cannot express feeling or craft.
This is a tricky sort of plagiarism charge.
The allegation [is] that [the novel] Gold Mountain Blues, written in Chinese [and in the process of being translated into English and published in Canada], plagiarizes the works of well-known Chinese Canadian authors who write in English, including Denise Chong, Wayson Choy, Sky Lee and Paul Yee.
… The key blogger leading the attacks, known as “Changjiang,” and identified on his site as Robert Luo, alleges that Zhang [Ling] has been playing the margins: taking advantage of the fact that Canadian Chinese writers cannot read Chinese, and Chinese readers and critics do not understand English.
The plagiarism obviously can’t involve verbatim lifting.
[The] website accuses Zhang of borrowing the key character of [Denise] Chong’s book — her grandmother May-ying, the hard-drinking, smoking, gambling “concubine” of the title — then fashioning it into a character in Gold Mountain Blues. … [Another book] opens with a powerful narrative of a male Chinese immigrant who finds himself in peril in the western Canadian wilds of the 19th Century, is rescued and brought back to a native camp, falls in love with a native woman, lives with her, and then abandons her to marry a Chinese wife. Later, he learns that his abandoned lover bore him a son. A very similar set of circumstances occurs to a Chinese man in Gold Mountain Blues.
Penguin has held up publication until the controversy is resolved.
