Thoughts on reading and the world I experience
In her book An Absorbing Errand, Janna Malamud Smith writes poignantly about the long and rich relationship between the poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. I’ve already admitted that I’m tone deaf regarding poetry; what really struck me while reading Smith’s account of the poets’ relationship is how they cultivated and nurtured this relationship almost totally in letters. They visited occasionally, but they were never in the same place for any length of time. And yet, as Smith has it, they were very, very close. It’s a moving story.
This afternoon I began reading Sven Birkerts’s collection of essays called The Gutenberg Elegies. Birkerts is a new discovery for me — introduced to me by George Scialabba, yet another new discovery. In the opening essay, Birkerts illustrates a point with “Crusoe in England,” a poem by Elizabeth Bishop. Reading his introduction of the poem, which happened to fall at the bottom of the page, I had a jolt of recognition. “Hey,” I thought, “I know something about Elizabeth Bishop!” I turned the page.
Now I live here, another island,
that doesn’t seem like one, but who decides?
My blood was full of them; my brain
bred islands. But that archipelago
has petered out. I’m old.
I’m bored, too, drinking my real tea,
surrounded by uninteresting lumber.
The knife there on the shelf —
It reeked of meaning, like a crucifix.
It lived. How many years did I
beg it, implore it, not to break?
I knew each nick and scratch by heart,
the bluish blade, the broken tip,
the lines of wood-grain on the handle…
Now it won’t look at me at all.
The living soul has dribbled away.
My eyes rest on it and pass on.
Birkerts quotes the poem to illustrate his point that the meaning of something depends in part on its context; if the context passes, the meaning dissipates. “The densities of meaning once conferred, since leached out.” I see the power of that observation.
But my having read Smith’s account of Bishop’s relationship with Lowell set the poem in an altogether different context for me. I thought of her writing letters to Lowell and reading his letters to her. I thought of how words exchanged at a distance nurtured a profound relationship. I asked myself whether the physical distance between her and Lowell might have informed her thoughts about Crusoe’s distance from the island where the knife was so relevant to his survival. In her relationship with Lowell, did their occasional visits set the context for the understanding of the letters? Or was it the converse? Or both? I wondered how the shift from relationships forged in written letters to relationships shaped by ephemeral emails and terse texts might affect our sense of identity.
I acknowledge that the thoughts are jumbled. Perhaps something more coherent and organized will emerge. What strikes me now, though, is how the world in which I live is shaped by such coincidences as the fact that I happened to read one book a couple of weeks before reading another. Of course, I realize that it’s not the books that I’m reading that shape my world. It’s also my broader experience — the routes that I walk, the people I encounter on the street, the podcasts I listen to.
And also, I’m only beginning to think, the poems that I read.
