[Ed. Note: Betty Bednarski
read her “First Encounter” to those gathered to celebrate Elizabeth Bishop’s
birthday on February 10, 2013, at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia, in Halifax, N.S.]
I’m going to be reading three quite short excerpts –
passages of prose and poetry all very familiar to you, but “found” not very
long ago by me. I’d like to share with
you some of the delight of my still fresh discovery and at the same time
acknowledge my debt to Sandra and all the other people who made possible that
discovery.
It’s true that I have come to the work of Elizabeth Bishop
more recently – and later in life – than most, if not all, of you. It was
through the different events of the Elizabeth Bishop Centenary that I was able
to finally get to know this writer. Until that point, she had only been a name
and a reputation to me. Until then, I had not read a single page – a single line – by her.
There’s my “confession”!
But I’ve made up for it since. It’s hard to imagine now that
time when I didn’t have her words inside me – because that’s where they have
been ever since 2011 – well, 2010 to be exact: inside me. I can actually remember the circumstances of the very
first contact….
The homecoming
It was summer. I’d just come home to N.S. after several
months of travel in Europe. Sifting through
the piles of mail that had accumulated, I came across a colourful brochure – a
small leaflet (from the Elizabeth Bishop Society, I presume – you’ll know the
one I mean) – announcing the events of the upcoming centenary year. I read the
leaflet carefully and came in due course to the quotation of a brief
descriptive passage from the story “In the Village” – a passage long familiar
to you all, I’m sure. But to me it was a revelation,
because never before had I read words that so perfectly captured the visual
impressions made on me by a particular kind of N.S. landscape – the Minas Basin landscape. Many, many times I had tried
myself to describe to people in other places, people who had never seen it, the
spatial organization and the colour values of that landscape. And
always, always, words had eluded me – in
particular words to convey the subtlety of coloration that results from
the coming together of red mud, shifting tidal water, and luminous blue sky. Where
I had failed (and concluded that there were no words, that language was
inadequate), someone else had succeeded. I sensed here, in writing new to me, a
supremely painterly vision (although
I had no idea at that point that Bishop had actually painted). I recognized my
own landscape at last perfectly rendered in the words she had written. That tiny paragraph was a gift to me – a confirmation of what my
eye, from childhood on, had registered, and at the same time a confirmation of
the power of words to render visual impressions, to make landscape present, to
capture its essence. I read the passage and reread it, committed it to memory –
and, in that moment of return, in my joy at being back in Nova Scotia after
months and months in distant places, I lived
it – lived this passage that I’m now going to read to you – like a homecoming.
1. “In the Village” (i)
“There are the tops of all the elm trees in the village and
there, beyond them, the long green marshes, so fresh, so salt. Then the Minas Basin, with the tide halfway in or out, the wet red
mud glazed with sky blue until it meets the creeping lavender-red water. In the
middle of the view, like one hand of a clock pointing straight up, is the
steeple of the Presbyterian Church. We are in the “Maritimes” but all that means
is that we live by the sea.”
“…the wet red mud glazed with sky blue” – colour, then, not
just mixed or overlaid with another colour, as I had always thought (“red”
mixed or overlaid with “blue”, for example). No, nothing quite so opaque, so
fixed, so solid, but colour overlaid with “glaze”
– in other words, covered with a shining transparency, in which is reflected, from
above, that other colour. Simple. Perfect.
Water
Water was one of
the things that struck me most forcibly in that prose passage. And it was the
presence of water that would strike
me again and again as I came to read and hear Elizabeth Bishop’s poems (particularly hear them, because it was quite a while before I purchased my wonderful
2 volume complete works and began pouring over the pages myself, and in the
early stages of the centenary, it was through the voice – the singing voice
of Suzie LeBlanc and the reading voice
of Harry Thurston – that I came to know Bishop’s poetry). At the Symphony Nova
Scotia concert of poems set to music by contemporary Canadian composers there
was the ocean water of Cape Breton,
so different from that of the Minas Basin:
“The silken water … weaving and weaving”
-- from the poem “Cape Breton.”
And, from a memorable evening at the Maritime
Museum of the Atlantic,
“… the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly, as if considering spilling over”
– that’s from the
poem “At the Fishhouses.”
And throughout that marvelous poem, the evocation of the contact
of cold, clear rhythmically moving water and dark, hard stones.
But there is of course so much more than the visual or even the merely physical presence of that water,
powerful though these are.
“[E]lement bearable to no mortal,”
that water becomes associated with something else. Listen now to this surely familiar excerpt, and try
to discover anew, as if for the first
time, as I did listening in 2011, Bishop’s association of ocean water flowing
over rocks and the dark, flowing, fearsome, cold yet burning mystery of knowledge:
2. “At the Fishhouses”
… The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
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.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing and flown.
So, not just an evocation of the ocean water at a rocky
shoreline as it appears to our eye,
but as it is given meaning in our
human consciousness.
Something else
Now, to end with, I’d like to return to that story “In the
Village”, because, there, too, there is so much more than I could at first
tell, reading my brief passage in that little leaflet, reading it innocently, out of context. At that point, I’d
assumed it to be the opening of the story, when in fact, as you will know, it
appears about midway through. Seeing it for the first time in isolation, I’d
been sensitive above all to the visual,
the painterly qualities. I’d read it greedily, gratefully, in a kind
of euphoria. It was a long time –
about a year, probably – before I actually read the whole story, and discovered
the real opening paragraph and its dysphoria.
Here was the same Minas Basin landscape and
its exquisitely rendered palette. But little had I known that hanging over that
landscape, pervading it, “heard” in its colours, was the “scream”, that “primal”
scream that would forever be a part of it in Elizabeth Bishop’s consciousness.
3. “In the Village” (ii)
“A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over that Nova
Scotian village. No one hears it; it hangs there forever, a slight stain on
those pure blue skies, skies that travellers compare to those of Switzerland,
too dark, too blue, so that they seem to keep on darkening a little more around
the horizon – or is it around the rims of the eyes? – the color of the cloud of
bloom on the elm trees, the violet on the fields of oats, something darkening
over the woods and waters as well as the sky. The scream hangs like that,
unheard, in memory – in the past, in the present, and those years between. It
was not even loud to begin with, perhaps. It just came there to live, forever –
not loud, just alive forever. Its pitch would be the pitch of my village. Flick
the lightning rod on top of the church steeple with your fingernail and you
will hear it.”
“[T]he pitch of my
village”, or to “[f]lick the lightning rod … with your fingernail”– what
extraordinary notions these. What an extraordinary merging of sight and sound
there is in the “stain” left on the sky by that scream. And then, is the
darkening blue really at the edge of the sky, she asks, or at the rim of the
eye of the beholder? What a startling confirmation this is of the power of the
subjective to alter the very perception of colour. Colour changed by a scream. Landscape and something else, landscape infused with – coloured by – the memory of trauma.
I was grateful to Elizabeth Bishop, in my first ever – innocent – read, for her ability to make
visually present through words – and thus reaffirm to me – elements of my own much-loved,
familiar landscape. I am grateful now for so much more – not least of all for her
painfully beautiful fusion of landscape with subjective experience. Her Nova Scotia – its pain and its beauty – is
forever part of mine.
Thank you, Elizabeth Bishop. Thank you, Sandra. Thank you,
John, Thank you, Suzie. Thank you, Harry… and thank you everyone who played a role in the wonderful celebratory year that
introduced this writer to me.
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