Subtext: Conversations about Classic Books and Films

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.

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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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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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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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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.

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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0:11 Erin: A poem about a map opens north and south, the first collection of the great 20th 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 handheld, 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.

Over the next few episodes, we'll 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. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. Wes, have you ever seen a moose in the wild?

1:12 Wes: I have not, but I have seen Instagram videos of them and people getting too close, and I've heard that they actually are quite dangerous.

1:23 Erin: Oh, perfectly harmless.

1:24 Wes: As cute as they look. So not safe as houses. Which is a very surprising line, unless you think that houses maybe aren't as safe as they seem or ought to be. But that's something we'll talk about later. How about you?

1:38 Erin: I have not. And I actually, it's become a running joke among certain friends of mine that I haven't seen a moose because I long to see a moose in the wild. This is my dearest wish.

1:52 Wes: Is that the first time anyone said that in history? I long to see.

1:56 Erin: I don't know.

1:57 Wes: It's a good first line for a poem, actually. Why do you long. Long to see a moose in the wild?

2:03 Erin: Really? Maybe because of the poem. I don't know. I just really want to, but I. Maybe this will become significant without getting too personal or maybe with getting too personal. With apologies to the listeners. Ten years ago now, when my grandfather passed that summer, my grandmother wanted to go up to Maine and revisit certain places that she had been with him. And we ended up going to Acadia. And I was so excited to see. Am just. I got it into my head that I had to go to Acadia and see a moose. And I even bought a sweatshirt. I'm not wearing it right now. I looked down to see if I was wearing it. It's the same size and shape as this one. This is a Yankees, 1996 World Series sweatshirt.

2:42 Wes: It's not a Rocky and Bullwinkle sweatshirt, is it?

2:45 Erin: No, no, no. It's an acadia and it has a. It has a moose on it. And so I bought it the first day that I was there and I was like, this is my sweatshirt and it has a moose on it. And I'm gonna. I'm gonna see a moose. And I did not see a moose. And then I. I bought a moose sweatshirt in, I think Grand Teton, and I was like, I'm gonna see a moose. And I did not see a moose. And then I lived obviously many years in Utah, and things would happen. Everybody knew I wanted to see a moose. And I would go to these trails where you could see moose. And I would like be going up a trail and someone would be coming down saying, there are moose up there. We just saw a moose. You just saw baby moose. I'd get all excited and I would. I would run up and it was gone and people would taunt me.

3:32 Wes: So you don't want to see like a magic white hart or something like that?

3:38 Erin: No, no, I just want to see him. Even the garden variety moose? No, no. Just a humble moose will hide itself from me when. When it knows that I am after it.

3:49 Wes: Because they are a goofy, right? Are they majestic? Are they goofy looking? Are they both?

3:55 Erin: I think they're both. And I think that kind of qual quality is really well captured in the poem. No, I mean that quality of if not being then looking safe as houses or being a gargantuan size, and yet having. I know this is a female moose, which I believe is called a cow, as opposed to a bull. Right. But the bulls, even their horns have that hand like quality to them. You know, it looks kind of like an outstretched hand.

4:22 Wes: Interesting.

4:24 Erin: Yeah. They're not majestic.

4:25 Wes: Yeah, I think that's important to the poem. It's not some obviously majestic creature, although it is large and there is majesty in it in the poem, but it's not the typical majesty that you can just get from, oh, look at this beautiful animal.

4:41 Erin: Yeah. And this is kind of why I brought up my grandfather. There was some connection for me as I think there is something quite personal going on with the moose at the end, other than the shared experience of everybody in the bus, all of that. Like there's something bigger than us, more than us, and yet familiar in a way. And it's magical in a sense, because to see it is kind of a rare thing. Yet it also comes out of the landscape that she's that she's grown up in and that she's part of. I think there's a. Yeah. A lot of interesting dualities going on.

5:17 Wes: Okay. So maybe you can read the whole thing and then you could give a little bit. Or we could give a little bit of the biographical background because this is a bus trip she actually took. Right.

5:26 Erin: Yeah.

5:27 Wes: The significance of Nova Scotia, which is where she's departing from in the poem and all of that stuff. But. Yeah. Do you want to start by reading?

5:35 Erin: Sure. The moose from narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea, home of the long tides, where the bay leaves the sea twice a day and takes the herrings long rides where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay. Coming in the bay, not at home, where silted red sometimes the sun sets facing a red sea and others veins the flats. Lavender rich mud and burning rivulets. On red gravelly roads, down rows of sugar maples, past clapboard farmhouses and neat clapboard churches, bleached ridged as clam shells, past twin silver birches through late afternoon a bus journeys west, the windshield flashing pink, pink glancing off of metal, brushing the dented flank of blue beat up enamel, down hollows, uprises and waits patient, while a lone traveler gives kisses and embraces to seven relatives and the collie supervises goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dog.

The bus starts. The light grows richer. The fog shifting, salty, thin, comes closing in. Its cold round crystals form and slide and settle in the white hen's feathers in gray glazed cabbages on the cabbage roses and lupins like apostles. The sweet peas cling to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences. Bumblebees creep inside the foxgloves and evening commences. One stop at Bass river, then the economies, lower middle, upper five islands. Five houses where a woman shakes a tablecloth out after supper. A pale flickering gone the Tantramar marshes and the smell of salt hay.

An iron bridge trembles and a loose plank rattles but doesn't give way. On the left a red light swims through the dark. A ship's port lantern. Two rubber boots show illuminated, solemn. A dog gives one bark. A woman climbs in with two market bags. Brisk, freckled, elderly. A grand night. Yes, sir. All the way to Boston. She regards us amicably. Moonlight as we enter the New Brunswick woods. Hairy, scratchy, splintery moonlight and mist caught in them like lamb's wool. On bushes in a pasture the passengers lie back, snores some long sighs. A dreamy divagation begins in the night, a gentle auditory slow hallucination in the creakings and noises, an old conversation not concerning us but recognizable somewhere back in the bus, grandparents, voices uninterruptedly talking in eternity, names being mentioned.

Things cleared up finally. What he said, what she said, who got pensioned. Deaths, deaths and sicknesses. The year he remarried, the year something happened, she died in childbirth. That was the son lost when the schooner foundered. He took to drink. Yes, she went to the bad when Amos began to pray, even in the store and finally the family had to put him away. Yes, that peculiar affirmative. Yes, a sharp indrawn breath, half groan, half acceptance. That means life's like that, we know it. Also death talking the way they talked in the old featherbed, peacefully on and on, dim lamplight in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shawl.

Now it's all right now, even to fall asleep, just as on all those nights. Suddenly the bus driver stops with a jolt, turns off his lights. A moose has come out of the impenetrable wood and stands there, looms rather in the middle of the road. It approaches, it sniffs at the bus's hot hood, towering antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house or safe as houses, a man's voice assures us, perfectly harmless. Some of the passengers exclaim in whispers, childishly, softly, sure are big creatures. It's awful plain. Look, it's a she. Taking her time.

She looks the bus over, grand, otherworldly. Why. Why do we feel. We all feel the sweet sensation of joy? Curious creatures, says our quiet driver, rolling his Rs. Look at that, would you? Then he shifts gears for a moment longer by craning backward. The moose can be seen on the moonlit macadam. Then there's a dim smell of moose, an acrid smell of gasoline.

11:05 Wes: Thank you. Very nice. It's really great to hear it spoken out loud. Spoken is the wrong word. It's the word read, performed. Do you want to say anything about the form of the poem before I ask you about some of the autobiographical background?

11:22 Erin: Yeah. Short lines, six line stanzas, 20, I believe. 28 stanzas in all. Irregularly rhymed, should we say? Kind of like a lot of bishop, you know, we get A, B, C. Then sometimes not rhymed where you might expect. So the rhymes peek their heads out and then. And then recede. Chatty a little bit in places, lots of repetitions of words. But that. That's something we could talk about More. But, yeah, kind of. Kind of mysterious form. One of the best things I've ever heard or read, I guess, about Bishop was by Michael Hofmann, who wrote quite a bit about her.

And he said that it seems as though every time Bishop is writing, whether in form or in a kind of nonce form that she's creating, that she seems to be just inventing every form, like from scratch. You know, there's no blueprint. She doesn't have a familiar style in which she writes or particular kind of verse form that she seems to gravitate to. And when she writes, you know, a sestina or a villanelle or a sonnet or something like that, it seems like she's almost inventing the form as she goes along. And in this instance, there's a real. I keep wanting to say homemade after Crusoe in England.

But, yeah, I think that's maybe what he was trying to get at, that homemade quality, that sort of bespoke kind of quality. And in the places where the rhyme goes in and out, I think that's really exemplified.

12:53 Wes: Well, it better be bespoke. She took forever to write it.

12:55 Erin: Yeah, that's right. She started this in, I think, 1946.

13:01 Wes: And then she finished it when this

13:04 Erin: was published in Geography III. So she finished it in the 70s.

13:07 Wes: Okay.

13:08 Erin: Geography III came out in 1977. And this must have been published before then, individually, perhaps in the New Yorker, I think. Oh, Geography III is 76. I would say maybe 72 is the date that comes to mind. Don't quote me on that.

13:24 Wes: Do we know why it took her so long? Obviously, she put it down for a couple days here and there.

13:29 Erin: It was the July 15th issue, 1972. So close to the day that we're recording. Why did it take her so long? She just worked on things forever and ever and ever. You see it, if you read. I highly recommend to listeners that they Get Words in Air. A very, very thick book of all the letters between Bishop and her friend Robert Lowell. You see her bringing up things or even mentioning in a description that she's writing to Lowell in a letter, a line that will later show up in a poem. Yeah. Low rate of productivity is great to.

14:08 Wes: You know, I can relate to that.

14:11 Erin: I take it as my model, honestly. Like, you know, live. Live Large and die with a slim Collected is kind of a.

14:19 Wes: Kind of a great Monroe Doctrine. But call it. What's another name? Bishpro.

14:28 Erin: That's right.

14:29 Wes: Is it right that she was forced to complete it because she agreed to read it this is something for deadlines. Right. At Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa ceremony.

14:38 Erin: I didn't know that. I know she read it at that ceremony, but I didn't know that that's what. The impetus for completing it. But that doesn't surprise me.

14:45 Wes: Yeah. So deadlines help every once in a while.

14:47 Erin: Absolutely, absolutely.

14:49 Wes: And then biographically. Right. This is based on a trip that she actually took, and she. She'd been to visit relatives in Nova Scotia and then came back on this bus trip. And the. There really was a moose. There really was a collie. Seven relatives for the rest of it. Yeah, yeah. Seven else.

15:11 Erin: Yeah, yeah. The specificity and all of it's. You know, there is a kind of like a photo realism, not just in the style, but in the. You know, we could sort of be certain that these things happened the way that she is recording them somehow, and yet she's spinning it into something more than just reportage.

15:30 Wes: So she was raised partly by her grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia. Right. Her. Her father had died in infancy and her mother was institutionalized.

15:41 Erin: That's right, yeah.

15:41 Wes: She aged at. When she was 5.

15:43 Erin: That's right.

15:44 Wes: So it's important just because. Yeah. The bus is leaving Nova Scotia, but go. Go ahead.

15:48 Erin: Yeah, it is important. She was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and she's buried there. I've seen her grave up there. It has a line or two lines from The Bight on her tombstone. All the untidy activity continues. Awful but cheerful. Yeah. So she was born in 1911. Her father died, I think, of Bright's disease when she was 8 months old. And then her mother was institutionalized when she was 5, and she never saw her again. She didn't die until the 30s, I think, while Bishop was at Vassar.

16:23 Wes: Do we know what she was institutionalized for? Mental illness in general?

16:28 Erin: Yes. I don't know exactly what. In a short story of Bishop's, she describes as her. A scream coming from her mother. And whatever was wrong was exacerbated by her husband's death. And so then Elizabeth was left to be raised by her grandparents in Nova Scotia who were quite poor. And I guess she was kind of running around barefoot on the farm and stuff like that. And her father's family were very wealthy, and so when they came up to visit Elizabeth, they were, I guess, horrified by the fact that she was just like, you know, running around, hanging out with farm animals.

And they took her to. Back with him to Worcester, and she was very unhappy there. Very ill child. She had asthma and eczema. And really, like, I think almost died of both at one time or other, very unhappy. And then eventually she moved to an aunt's house in, I want to say, in Revere, Massachusetts, and she was a little happier there. And then she went to Vassar, and I've been to the Vassar campus to see various buildings associated with Bishop and also to see. They did a really fabulous exhibition of her postcards at the Vassar Library a couple of years ago, which I really loved, seeing her hand and her little.

In jokes and asides and really amazing to see. Anyway, at Vassar, the librarian there set up a meeting between Bishop and Marianne Moore, who became a mentor to her. They were very close. And then also over the course of her life, she was very close with and had an important friendship with Lowell. Hence the enormous book of letters. I have it here. It's so heavy I could barely pick it up. But this is a great book. It's kind of like an epistolary novel. Yeah. And she was. I think it's important to say, too, that she was a lesbian who had a very long relationship with a Brazilian architect named Lota de Macedo Soares, who was her partner in Brazil for 15 years.

She lived down there, known for travel. A lot of her collections, whether it's Geography III, which is the most obvious one, or north and south, have. There are a lot of Brazilian poems. There are a lot of geographical poems. The first poem in her first collection, north and south, was the Map, which is often read as a kind of ars poetica. She's known for these types of, you know, sweeping landscapes that the moose begins with, and an interest in landscape and in this kind of bird's eye view. But then also you get these telescoping details, like a cinematic close up interspersed.

Much is made of that in Bishop, of that kind of vision of hers, and specifically of, I don't know, the idea that she creates these. These beautiful miniatures, which is true, but maybe sometimes can be a little. I mean, she's revered, as she should be, and she's one of the most popular poets and she also has a great ear and she has so many other great things going on. So I don't want to exclusively focus on that kind of visual element, though it's there and it's very rich.

19:43 Wes: So from narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea. That's a very good opener. Why are they narrow provinces? And what is the. What are the fish and bread and tea doing? Fish and bread sounds vaguely like it could be a biblical reference, but maybe it's not. But you add tea. Right. There's something mundane here and perhaps restricted, provincial. And that's what she's going to be departing from. I mean, well, begins with the tides, but.

20:12 Erin: Yeah, right. Yeah, that's right. Narrow in a few kinds of ways. Because there's a strange. Because of the Bay of Fundy, there's almost that like U shaped corridor of land around it. So Nova Scotia is kind of narrow. And then up into. Then there's the narrow isthmus. I don't know, I don't know if I'm using that word correctly. Up into New Brunswick. Yeah, so there's something maybe a little, I don't want to say spiritually narrow, maybe somewhat limited or like practical. Practical and, you know, just the necessities and a place we learn that that is. That maybe has to be stalwart in response to the vagaries of the water around it. The Bay of Fundy, I was reading online, the tide, over the course of just one tide, can rise and fall 50ft because the bay is like a giant funnel. When it goes out, it just leaves this vast, open, muddy plain basically behind it.

21:16 Wes: She portrays this very beautifully. We get the image of the tide retreating and then the flats that are being illuminated by the setting sun as burning rivulets. And then there's almost a transition into the bus ride when she says on red gravelly roads, eventually the subject of that is going to be the bus. Although in the beginning, before we get to the bus, it looks like the rivulets have almost become roads. So you almost get the sense like the tides come in and it's going to go further inward, it's going to go all the way to Boston, but it's going to become the inhabitants of the bus who are much like the herrings. Right. In the first stanza. The herrings on the tides take herrings on long rides. So it's almost as if as the tide comes in, she is caught in the tide and brought along with it towards her destination.

22:08 Erin: That's right, yeah. And the bay itself, the water itself is also like a traveler, you know, you might go to visit it and find it's not at home, it's gone out for on a trip or something. So there's also that connection as well. Whereas the roads are part of this more solid and dependable and the water being fickle and not always depended on to be there.

22:31 Wes: Well, I was going to say there's something very poignant about the way she describes the tides and whether they're in or out. And I can't put my finger on it exactly. It's almost. It's this idea of. Right. Where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay. Coming in the bay, not at home. If the tide is in or coming in the river clashes with it in a wall of brown foam. Is that the idea now? And what's the image there? Is it always a wall of brown foam? Well, either way, I just. Something about this idea of. It depends on whether the bay is at home or something like that. It's a poignant image.

23:12 Erin: It is. It's that sense of just. Of disappointment or just missing someone, like a missed opportunity. Seems kind of surprisingly emotionally resonant, considering that she's talking about a tide.

23:25 Wes: And we. You know, it introduces the idea of home and. Which I think will be significant. And later on we'll talk about whether the moose is safe as houses and the reflections of the elderly and all that stuff. But.

23:40 Erin: And boundaries, too, right. You have very slippery boundary between the bay and the. And the sea, between the rivers and the bay that feeds them. And I think that boundary very much plays into the idea of home. And you could say that the bus seems to be a part of that too. Right. Like the bus becomes the home. So there's a little bit of the slippery idea of this transposition of home life into the bus, or the people on the bus all becoming the. We like a family within it. The way that it can literally cross national boundaries. It's going to Boston across the border.

24:18 Wes: Yeah. And then they'll be observing provincial life, I guess, from within the bus. And. And, you know, a woman shaking out an apron, for instance, or home life. But, yeah, I had the same thought to you. The bus. The interior of the bus becomes its own kind of mobile home, I guess. I guess the wall brown foam part. There's that push and pull, or it's a matter of who's doing the pushing. Right. In one case, the brown foam. The wall of brown foam is caused as. As the river pushes on the retreating tide. And the other case, it's the tide pushing back against the river as it comes in. But in either case, there's a clash there.

24:58 Erin: Then there are places, though, where there's blurring of boundaries. Like one of my favorite lines in the whole poem, the idea of the churches as ridged as clamshells. She always takes that. This is much remarked upon among scholars of Bishop. Where you get the thing that's. That's really big, suddenly reduced in size to the handheld, but coming out of the same idiom. You know, both the clamshell and this clapboard church are in a way equally native to Nova Scotia. The brilliance of connecting those two things and fishing being an industry in the area, you know, sort of springing out of the fishing industry.

25:42 Wes: Yeah. And shells are what's left as the tide retreats. Right. As it's as if the houses are just the natural residue of a retreating tide.

25:52 Erin: That's great.

25:52 Wes: From the beginning of the poem, there's a sense of momentum, and almost like you, at least in my case, I felt like I'm on a camera moving over the landscape, and it starts with the tide, and then it moves to the burning rivulets. Right. So now we're hovering over. I don't know what you would call it, a. A tidal plane. Anyway, she calls it the flats. Right. So all the silt, and we're moving along there, and then suddenly we're on a gravelly road. So the sun takes over from the sea. The redness of the sun. And then the bus takes over from the sun. But that's the momentum of the poem is from sea to sun to bus.

26:37 Erin: Yeah. The bus flashes pink. We get lots of pairs of the same word, creating a kind of chime with each other. So we get the windshield flashing pink. Pink glancing off of metal. And we wonder, I suppose, because part of the reason why the roads are red is because of the clay content. Right. Of the road itself. So we get that combination of, like, something red in the road or in the composition of the soil and rock of the area.

27:07 Wes: Laterite, I think, which I only know because of Graham Greene, who I've been reading. Oh, and what heart of the matter. He's talking about laterite houses, like. So from the red clay, you can make, you know, homes from as well, and common in Sierra Leone. So he used the word like a hundred times before he finally looked it up. All right. There must be something that's going to not know what he's talking about. I'm like, oh, okay, now I get it. Yeah.

27:41 Erin: So that's the mineral, the.

27:44 Wes: It's reddish. Yeah. Reddish clay type of soil, topsoil or something like that. I should know more about this because I used to write about this, too, when I was writing about transportation and engineering.

27:56 Erin: Right.

27:57 Wes: It's important what kind of soil you're building on. But anyway, I remember nothing about that. But, yeah. So it could be the right word. Who knows? But. But, yeah. So you're getting at the. Yeah. The way the redness of the sun is interacting with the.

28:12 Erin: Yes, it's coming.

28:13 Wes: The redness of the soil.

28:14 Erin: Yeah. And that kind of redness coming from below and above to glint off of the bus. The windshield is flashing pink from the sun and the metal is flashing pink from the road. They're both brushing the dented flank of the blue beat up enamel from one direction or the other, it seems. Yeah. Sort of tunnel of red in which the. In which the bus is traveling.

28:41 Wes: Such a vivid image that she gives us. It made me think, you know, sometimes it's almost better than film. It's more vibrant or more. Don't know how to say it, but I was thinking about this because in some of the philosophy podcasts we do, there are philosophers who deny that we have imagery in our head. Exactly. Or we can never. Which seems true. Right. We can't imagine anything with the vividness that we would have if we actually saw it. But it makes me think when I read a poem like this, but also. And also reading some of the novels I've been reading. Well, there's a special kind of vividness to figurative language that perception can't capture. In some ways it's more. More vivid, definitely.

29:26 Erin: I think the sonic quality of the word, the repeated. Right. It's on the one hand a repeated image, but then it also creates that kind of just the soundscape, makes them feel somehow more synesthetic to say, but somehow more picturable or more tangible or more. I don't know, the pink glancing off metal, the dented flank beat up enamel. You know, there's just. It's like. I think that's contributing to it, to the vividness of the image. And yeah, you talked about momentum, too. I mean, this entire. This whole first sentence is six stanzas long. It ends with.

and a collie supervises. So there's also that kind of. Yeah. Locomotive propulsion of the camera work, so to speak, Zooming in and then following the road into the bus. And then the bus arrives to sort of catch again, quite cinematically the scene that's actually happening or the place where the eye, if there is an eye in the poem, actually is the lone traveler embracing these relatives with the collie watching on. So there's a sense in which the I eye of the poem doesn't actually catch up with the speaker until stanza six and the end of this first sentence until we get goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dogs.

So there's kind of lamination at that moment of the I eye and the capital I.

30:49 Wes: We seem to be gradually getting more of a point of view. Right. It's very omniscient in the beginning, hovering over the landscape. And I think gradually we're going to be getting a her point of view in the bus and then a we. But also just to note, this is one. I think this is the first of three pauses. Right. There's gonna. It's gonna pause here, the bus. The momentum is gonna stop as the bus lets on the lone traveler, which I presume is her. Right. Her saying goodbye. And then there'll be a pause when the amicable freckled woman gets on. She's there because we need everything to be in threes. And then we. Then we're gonna pause for the moose in the very end. I didn't miss anything. Right. There's not other places where we stop?

31:32 Erin: No. I mean, there are, of course, stanzas that end some more definitively than others and stopped with a period. There's a stop at Bass River. Right. So there is a little bit of that kind of start. Stop syntactically. But I think you're right that those are the stops where there's content.

31:49 Wes: Content goes.

31:50 Erin: Yes. And where there's a very particular. Yeah, the content of the bus, except for the moose obviously doesn't get on the bus. But there's a stop that's motivated, let's say, rather than just being described as various stops along the way where we don't know who got on and who got off or whatever. Certainly there's also a movement toward that more personal experience of the speaker. But then there are also things that the speaker couldn't possibly know or you know, because once she's said goodbye to everyone and gets on the bus, then we also get the sort of nature show close ups.

The crystals of fog, the lupins like apostles, the sweet peas clinging. One of my favorite parts, clinging to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences. Again, we get two uses of white right next to each other. Bumblebees creeping in the foxgloves. All things you really can't see from certainly from a moving bus.

32:43 Wes: Yeah, the point of view gets focused very, very gradually, maybe through the whole palm. Maybe it's not fully focused until the very end, but. Yeah. So you're pointing out something important which is at the sort of omniscient point of view is still here in these very. What do you call it when you take a close up with your phone? Macro, ironically. Yeah. These very close up pictures of flora and fauna and very Beautiful.

33:12 Erin: Yeah. They compound and then they get more and more loaded and mysterious. And just when we're about to maybe go over the edge, we get recalled back a little bit. That's at least how I'm reading, for instance, stanza 12, about the ship's port lantern and the boot and the bark of the dog. And then suddenly a woman climbs on the bus. And so we're sort of stopped from going off into some sort of train of thought that you could follow there down a rabbit hole. But I love that stanza on red light swimming through the dark. It reminds me of the last stanza of disillusionment, of 10 o'. Clock. Do you know the old sailor, drunk and asleep in his boots, catches tigers in red weather? I think that's how it goes, the Stevens poem, because we get the boots and the red light in the ship, so they're probably. No. No real connection there.

34:07 Wes: So all of these little intricate descriptions that she's giving, right. It begins with the light growing richer, which I take it mean, means we're approaching dusk and evening, or we're in dusk and it's evening is approaching and a kind of mini winter, Right. Something. It's a diurnal cycle, but there's a bit of a parallel to something seasonal. Right. So we get crystals forming and the images like sweet peas clinging and the bumblebees inside foxgloves. As evening commences, it's almost like. I don't know if this is true, but it's almost as if we're getting the response of the animals and flora and fauna to the commencement of evening.

That's our first indication of it. So I was surprised to see, okay, it's still light out enough for us to see a woman shaking a tablecloth out after supper. And that is beautifully described as a pale flickering. Right. Almost as if that's something like the light reflecting off the enamel bus, or not pink anymore, but just a flickering of pale light and then gone, I suppose. Does that mean that we're now without light? Is that sort of the way nighttime is ushered in by the end of the next stanza? And it's in the next stanza that we see a red light in the dark.

Now we have a ship in the dark. So it's almost as if. Yeah, the shaking of the tablecloth is like a magician. Abracadabra. Now it's nighttime, Right?

35:39 Erin: Yeah. I love that. Yeah. You're making me realize how many connections there are to Keats in this poem. Right. There's something Keatsian about it, very. To Autumn, you get the sweet peas clinging on the fence. You get that image of fecundity things on top of other things. You know, the mossed cottage trees and the late flowers for the bees. And then the shaking out of the tablecloth is like the hair lifted by the winnowing wind. Right. Because there's. There's wind, there are flowers and bees. And then there's also, of course, redness and that image of, you know, like the evening.

Autumn. Evening redness. And maybe this is. Yeah. Rows of sugar maples. Those could be red as well. If we're in an autumnal landscape, can't be too late because everything is, you know, it's got to be like August, maybe because we have this. Or. No, I guess maybe not. Gray glazed cabbages. I don't know enough about cabbages to know at what point in their development.

36:40 Wes: Yeah. Whatever season it is. I just think that the evening is almost like a mini winter. It gets colder and we see the.

36:46 Erin: Definitely.

36:47 Wes: We see the effects of it. But, yeah, maybe autumn is probably the logical season for.

36:53 Erin: Right. Yeah. And that point. Or that point in the transition from summer to autumn where, I mean, even on a summer night in Nova Scotia, the evening temperature is quite autumnal regardless. And so when the woman climbs on with the market bags, we get.

37:09 Wes: Shall we take a. Shall we?

37:12 Erin: Oh, yes.

37:13 Wes: Let's let the freckled amicable woman on in part two.

37:17 Erin: She'll have to wait.

37:18 Wes: Let's not let her on the bus yet.

37:20 Erin: You have to wait for everyone else to get off before you can get on. It's one of the cardinal rules of public transportation. Okay, we will continue in part two. Thank you.

37:29 Wes: Thank you.

The very apparatus of the mummy’s tomb—his body locked in box upon box, his organs apportioned to canopic jars, hieroglyphic inscriptions on every surface—suggest the complexity of the undertaking. What might these two strands of the mummy’s DNA—in Shakespearean terms, part-Antony, part-Cleopatra—reveal about the relationship between colonizer and colonized, and about our own desires, fears, and guilt? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1999 film, “The Mummy.”

Upcoming Episodes: Elizabeth Bishop poetry, including “The Moose”

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

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0:12 Erin: Welcome to part two of our discussion of the 1999 masterpiece, The Mummy, directed by Stephen Sommers, who is obviously, you know, the Orson Welles of the 90s

0:25 Wes: and also known for such movies as Van Helsing.

0:29 Erin: That's also a movie.

0:30 Wes: I like the Mummy Returns and Odd Thomas and GI Joe.

0:38 Erin: Oh, there it is.

0:39 Wes: Rise of Cobra.

0:41 Erin: There it is. Yeah. That's probably the greatest. That's probably his Magnificent Ambersons. Just to say a little bit more. Also in defense of this film, I think it's just fun. Right. You had fun watching this, I'm assuming. Yeah. There's something about it, to me that. Not just because we're talking about origins and stuff like that, that is a kind of, er, movie or the ultimate movie in terms of the fact that movies are just. There's something about them that is fundamentally silly and they're in a certain respect, like the silliest art form. And of course that makes me want to say something also about mummies as the ultimate representations of film itself, which has, I think, been a point made by people like André Bazin and, you know, all sorts of.

Susan Sontag in On Photography talks about this. Right. Just the idea of the photographic image as the preservation of dead people is. Is often the case.

1:35 Wes: And it's. You know, the chemical processing of film is like embalming.

1:40 Erin: Yeah, exactly.

1:41 Wes: Lots of parallels.

1:43 Erin: I'm just. I'm trying very slowly to construct a justification for why we are covering this on subtext. No, but I. But also. And I should. I should have said this at the beginning of the last one. This is my Gimme. My. My summer fun. In the same spirit of doing Elf at. At Christmas, I think I wanted to do a silly summer blockbuster. And of course they're also doing another. Another Mummy film soon with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. Finally. She'll be back. So it's also in honor of the resurrection of the career of Brendan Fraser.

2:16 Wes: He's going to be £300 in this one.

2:18 Erin: That'll be great.

2:19 Wes: Rachel. Rachel Weisz has to roll him around. I'm sorry.

2:23 Erin: So mean. That would. That would still be fine with me.

2:28 Wes: I just going to be called Beached.

2:35 Erin: So mean.

2:36 Wes: The I love the whale.

2:38 Erin: Yeah.

2:38 Wes: I cried, like, audibly at a theater.

2:44 Erin: He's so great.

2:45 Wes: Yeah, he's great.

2:46 Erin: But anyway, back to the conversation here about what? Did I say something about Picnic at Hanging Rock. Oh, this film is kind of like the inverse of Picnic at Hanging Rock. I thought in that Picnic is about the victory of the colonized over the colonizer that you eventually get destroyed by or defeated by the forces that you try to control. You get defeated in your attempts to fashion a narrative. Yeah. What is unknowable overtakes you and destroys your efforts at a kind of mental containment.

3:19 Wes: And again, it's contact with, like, a primal origin.

3:23 Erin: Exactly.

3:24 Wes: So in a way, it's the origin of your high level of consciousness, in a way. But it's primal. And so it can defeat that.

3:30 Erin: Yeah. And this is why the Mummy is. It's almost like a fantasy that you can feel secure as a colonizer, that you will eventually figure it out, that there is something to be figured out, that ultimately all of this has a logic that you can solve the puzzle. In fact, solve it twice over.

3:47 Wes: Right.

3:48 Erin: Because you have the first. The puzzle is about bringing the mummy to life, even though it can sometimes be accidental. There's an effort of piecing something together when the mummy comes to life. And then one has to also finish solving the puzzle or solve a second puzzle in order to then kill the mummy or send it back to the underworld or whatever the. The explanation is. And along the way, one also has to at least avoid, if not defeat, the fallout of the curse. So, yeah, so it's a fantasy about overcoming all of that. And I think the idea that makes this very psychologically suggestive is just that this, the mummy, is the puzzle that comes with its own kind of solution, in the way that Picnic at a Hanging Rock is the opposite of that, in that it's stubborn and it can't be solved.

And I think the Evelyn character seems to embody this herself in that she has this maternal figure who's Egyptian, her father is English. So whatever drama is taking place with the mummy is also internalized somehow. Again, this is played with more in the Mummy Returns, which makes it stupid and weird. It turns out that Evelyn is actually the reincarnation of the pharaoh's daughter. So there's this whole Elektra dynamic thing that ends up going on. It's really, really, really ridiculous. But the female figure in the original 1932 Boris Karloff mummy, as I already said, she also has this dual heritage, this dual nature.

And so the implication of that seems to me to be the idea that we have the desire to understand our own origins. So she's both puzzle and puzzle solver, and we want to figure ourselves out in order to resolve something that in us is unresolved. I think the curse, too, operates on the same logic in a way. Like I was thinking about how the curse is kind of like a conspiracy theory. You know way more about this than I do. I know this is an interest of yours, but you're applying a kind of faulty abduction to what you think is the fallout of something that has, rather than a sort of conspiratorial, systematic explanation, it has a magical explanation.

So this idea of logic and mystery, or logic and magic, or the known and the unknown being sort of right next to each other for the purposes of one solving the other and therefore making you feel at peace and no longer cursed, no longer suffering under some lack of knowledge or understanding.

6:13 Wes: Right.

6:13 Erin: You figured it out. You've defeated these forces in yourself. That seems to be the kind of psychological underpinning in talking about abduction, which

6:21 Wes: I'm actually reading about right now. We're doing the philosopher Peirce on our show. So inference to the best explanation. You're making me think about her first reading of the spell. Is it a spell? That we would call it. Right. She's a curious seeker of knowledge, really. Really. She's not trying to give a theory of anything literally. Right. She's just out of curiosity, reading what's in the book. But if you were to make a comparison to abduction, it's almost like it produces its own theory in reality. And the theory is the. Is the backstory.

So what it does is it raises something from the dead. It's almost like breathing life into some theoretical entity that comes back to haunt you or something like that, that attacks me. And in the case of the conspiracy theory, Right, the theorized entity is a intelligent designer of a sort, but a malicious one, a persecutory one. And you get that in this case, right? There's a persecutory entity is aroused by one's curiosity.

7:25 Erin: Yeah. Just another complication to this is the fact that the mummy has been cursed to go after whoever awakens it by some sort of overarch. I mean, in this film, it's the idea that Imhotep has violated the pharaoh's mistress and he's sentenced to the Hom-Dai and all that stuff. But the mummy itself wants to be found. So that's why this is like a perfect little puzzle box for a colonizer's self Exoneration, because the mummy wants to come back to life. So it's a curse that wants you to trip the tripwire and it wants to play itself out. So it almost has this self fulfilling prophecy or self determinism element to it as well.

8:06 Wes: Right.

8:07 Erin: It's just another way I think of twisting such a thing. I mean, it's an angle that, that the films get at which the actual Curse of the Pharaohs, as it was publicized in the 20s, that angle wasn't there. But it seems like this is the further twist to get it to make Americans and, and British people and all that like, feel, feel like they're not responsible somehow or that this has some, some will to get a toehold in the human world again, that you're almost being used as a pawn in their scheme.

8:36 Wes: It's interesting that Imhotep, he's sentenced to the worst possible punishment, but there's a real like escape clause to that, which is if you're resurrected, you get to have. Be all powerful and destroy the world and get your girlfriend back. Is that the deal?

8:54 Erin: Because you got your girlfriend?

8:55 Wes: Maybe it's worth, maybe it's worth a try. Okay, I'll take that bargain.

9:03 Erin: Right.

9:03 Wes: It's an odd sort of curse and it's an odd sort of risk to take. And it speaks to the perils of vengeance. Right. If vengeance goes too far, it can, can come back at you with a vengeance. Sorry, that was another aspect of the movie that I thought was really interesting. This, which I thought you were kind of getting a little bit there, which is the oddly risk of risky form of punishment. Right. Absolute pain, but with the risk of absolute destruction of the entire world. And again, I think it's not unrelated to the perils of romantic love where, you know, again, where the world can get blotted out by a fused or codependent, let's say in modern parlance, relationship, the same thing.

You know, few parallels of fusion with a maternal object, which we've talked a lot about on this show, in relation to a failure of a paternal authority, which in this case is the pharaoh. So there's something here about not being able to mourn an object or the maternal, the ultimate beloved, and try to maintain that object high at all costs, which can lead to this kind of destruction. The reading itself bothered, you know, when she read from the book so casually and started this whole thing off, that really got to me. And she didn't get really all blamed all that much for it, like.

So it's like, oops, just got a Bunch of people killed.

10:23 Erin: She doesn't have parents, so.

10:27 Wes: Did I do that?

10:28 Erin: Yeah. I mean, when we first see her in the. In the Museum of Antiquities, and she knocks down the bookcases, which I would say is a really, like, a missed opportunity, because I had a memory. I've seen this movie so many times, and I had a memory of her doing this at Hamunaptra, that she knocked down all the columns, but that's actually not in the movie, so they never do a callback to the bookcase gag, which I think is. Anyway, would have worked well, but she knocks them all down. And then the curator, who's actually a member of the Medjai, says, give me frogs, flies, locusts, anything but you.

Compared to you, the plagues would be a joy. So, yeah, she's the Mummy. She's a tool of the Mummy. She is the mummy. She's an extension of the Mummy. She herself is a plague. She can read and write ancient Egyptian, as she says, and she can decipher hieroglyphics and hieratic. And she knows it all. She knows all about. All she needs is field experience.

11:26 Wes: Yeah. Underneath all of this is that kind of nerds fantasy that, you know, hey, reading books is going to make me powerful after all, like Prospero and the Tempest, because it's going to be magic. Right. There's a spell in there which I think is kind of partly unconsciously beneath for people who have given up worldly power for the sake of a life of the mind. Let's say there's this, I think, maybe unconscious temptation to an unconscious fantasy that there's some kind of power in this that just transcends the power of knowing. Right. Transcends the power of being a professor.

Whatever it is one. Or a writer, or whatever it is one does. One can transform the world, cast a spell. Maybe writing is supposed to be like that. Maybe. I suppose that is the writerly fantasy that you're gonna affect other people in some way, but in this case, it becomes grandiose. Right. It's all powerful, all destructive. But yes. The kind of shy librarian out in

12:22 Erin: the field, as you were saying, not too shy.

12:24 Wes: Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Cause she's not really that shy.

12:27 Erin: She's sheltered a little.

12:28 Wes: Yeah. Sheltered, okay. Yeah. But they don't really play up that part of her character as much as they could. Right. She could be more. She's bookish, but she could be more nerdy than she is. She's goofy. They do make her goofy. Yeah.

12:42 Erin: Yeah. My favorite moment in the whole Movie is her drunk. I'm proud of what I am. I am a librarian, which is really.

12:52 Wes: Hear me roar.

12:54 Erin: Yeah.

12:55 Wes: Yeah. That is great. She says, look, I may not be an explorer or an adventurer or a treasure seeker or a gunfighter, Mr. O', Connell, but I'm proud of what I am. And he says, what is that? I am a librarian, and I'm going to kiss you, Mr. O'. Connell. Call me Rick. Doing his best Harrison Ford impression, she, of course, passes out before they can actually kiss. I should have let you read that.

13:19 Erin: No, no, no. It's way better that you read that.

13:21 Wes: Yeah.

13:24 Erin: She does say at one point explicitly, I think, that no harm ever came from reading a book.

13:30 Wes: Oh, yeah.

13:31 Erin: So this romance between o' Connell and Evie is, I think, part of the lasting appeal of this film, which I literally saw a car a couple years ago that had a bumper sticker on it, and I looked up the bumper stickers. Honk if you'd rather be watching the 1999 cinematic masterpiece, the Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. This is a real bumper sticker that I have seen in the world.

13:56 Wes: Does it go the whole bumper? It's a long one.

13:59 Erin: It's yellow and kind of fat. I didn't really give much thought to this, but does it have a parallel or a. An origin somewhere that we could think of? He's sort of. What's the term that people use? Like a himbo. You know what I'm talking about? I mean, he's intelligent and resourceful, right? But he's definitely the brawn and she's the brain. I guess it's just like a Beauty and the Beast thing, only he's also beautiful. So. Yeah, but, yeah, bookish girl and big, brawny guy who is sort of antagonizing her, but also who inherently respects her and does whatever she wants.

14:35 Wes: Sort of like Harrison Ford in Star Wars. I mean, even though this film is often compared to Raiders of the Lost Ark, the attitude of Rick is more like, I think, Harrison Ford in Star wars, where he's sort of Han Solo is kind of cynical, and I guess the Rick character. Could you call him cynical?

14:52 Erin: I mean, he's willing to go back there, and he's. For a guy who almost died by hanging, he bounces back pretty fast.

14:58 Wes: He's worldly and not idealistic, practical in certain ways and all that stuff. So he is above love in that sense. He's not explicitly that he made out to be a womanizer or something like that, but he's the bachelor par excellence. And he's in a very different position than Imhotep, who is consumed by love to the point of risking everything, not just his life, but being eternally cursed.

15:27 Erin: You're making me realize how much of a nerd Princess Leia is. I wouldn't have thought of her in that way, but that's basically what she is. She's kind of nerdy.

15:37 Wes: Yeah. With those buns, you know, she belongs in. But she's much more feisty than Evelyn, I think.

15:45 Erin: Yeah. She's angry.

15:46 Wes: Yeah. Her and Han Solo, really. Yeah. Annoy the shit out of each other.

15:52 Erin: Yeah.

15:53 Wes: In a way that. There's some of that in this, but it's much more benign, I think.

15:58 Erin: Well, I mean, we could talk maybe about the three Americans. I don't know if you have anything to say about them. They're kind of just there to be caricatures of Americans and then to get their flesh sucked off their bodies. Yeah. It does give some funny opportunities for a comment by Jonathan, for instance, which Rick seems to sort of escape.

16:19 Wes: What does he say?

16:19 Erin: You know, they're all holding. Holding a gun in each hand and shooting all the Medjai when they come on the boat. And all Jonathan says when he looks at them, he sort of looks with disgust and says, americans, you know, because they're all, like, hooting and saying, yee haw. I don't know. It just makes us look like badasses. But not for long. They're kind of fun. And I guess it occurred to me, too, in making the connection between the Mummy and the vampire, which I suppose I still haven't talked about, just the fact that you have the. In Dracula, you know, you have the three.

They're not all three Americans. Only one is American. But you have the three guys, you know, that each proposed to Mina, or whatever her name is. I haven't read this in a long time, but they're the trio that fight Dracula. So it almost seems like that's something that the movie is explicitly playing with, because these three figures, it doesn't quite line up with the figures in the 1932 mummy, so they seem to be bringing in more Stoker. But my favorite character in the movie is Dr. Bombay. Winston, are you a Bewitched fan?

17:21 Wes: I did watch Bewitched a bit as a kid, but it's been so long. Yeah. I can't call myself a fan.

17:28 Erin: Yeah.

17:28 Wes: But I did watch quite a bit of it on reruns as a kid, so.

17:32 Erin: Good. I love Dr. Bombay.

17:33 Wes: Yeah.

17:34 Erin: And I love Winston. I love that character. I was initially thinking about him as a kind of. Obviously some sort of ultimate figure of colonialism, but he's actually kind of the opposite of the Mummy.

17:46 Wes: How do you mean?

17:47 Erin: He's not at all about being obsessed with a single woman. He seems both completely uninterested in women and also interested in any woman at any given moment. He's seen with a woman on his arm and he's just getting drunk all the time. So he's this figure of dissipation and doesn't seem particularly attached to anyone. And his lack of attachment makes him just the perfect figure to want to sacrifice himself for some cause. His only attachment seems to be to die some sort of glorious and heroic death because he feels guilty for being a survivor and he just wants to go out with a bang.

So no attachments in this world. No desire to get back to some sort of past of his? Well, there is actually. Okay, now that I'm talking through this, it's interesting, right? There is a desire to sort of undo the past, to undo the fact of his survival, but it's about pressing the eject button and just getting out, getting out of this world entirely. His desire for this glorious death is about being useful and then disappearing. As the oldest maybe character in the film, he's an interesting counterpoint to the truly old characters in the film. Like Imhotep.

19:05 Wes: Yeah, he says, I just wish I could have chucked it in with the others and gone down in flame and glory instead of sitting around here rotting of boredom and booze. Yeah, well, they give him his glory in the end.

19:18 Erin: Yeah, he's just, yeah. The perfect opposite, I guess, to the Mummy. Where the film, if it does fall apart in any locatable place or if the whole thing is just kind of a silly. A silly mess. Lovable mess. Perhaps it's when the Mummy transports both Benny and Evelyn back to Hamunaptra in some sort of self created sand tornado, he becomes sand at one point to go through her keyhole. That sounded dirty. Just saying that. I regret that. Yeah, I don't know, but best not to look at that too closely. But maybe I should just use that as the way into talking about the vampire thing for a second.

The thing about the vampire is that the vampire is rapacious. Much more a figure of, say, sex rather than love. And someone who wants to constantly make new conquests. As opposed to this pharaoh who seems to only be, or not pharaoh. As opposed to this mummy who seems to only be giving his attentions to Evie as a way to secure her as some human sacrifice so he can get his girlfriend back. He still only has one woman in mind. I thought of you the whole time. I guess. Also another difference that occurs to me. So we have him sucking the life out of these American guys.

So obviously there's something vampiric about that, but it's in order to reconstitute his

20:43 Wes: own, just add American flesh.

20:46 Erin: Yeah, it's very, very Silence of the Lambs. But yeah, it's, I suppose, kind of about stealing the life force, but not really. And then I was also thinking about the vampire as being just alive forever and therefore not tied to a particular time, sort of to a place, but not really. You know, he has his castle and he does sleep in a coffin and stuff like that. But he's not really specifically identified with a particular culture. Whereas the mummy is obviously more rooted in a historical context. So it seems as though the mummy is more about both through this constant love object and through the particular culture out of which he comes. Much more about history and the past in a specific sense rather than this sort of sexualized undead threat that can appear anywhere and overtake you.

21:40 Wes: So what's our taxonomy of the undead? We have mummies, vampires, zombies, Is that it? Are there any other major undead categories in films?

21:53 Erin: I don't know if Frankenstein's monster is enough to be a category unto itself. That's a zombie, right?

21:59 Wes: He's a category unto himself.

22:00 Erin: Oh, okay.

22:01 Wes: He's not really a zombie. He's, you know, he reads Milton, right? Come on.

22:07 Erin: He's an electrical man.

22:09 Wes: Also, he's part very, very sensitive guy. Yeah, he's not very good looking. Actually. He's really good looking in the movie. Did you see the.

22:20 Erin: I haven't.

22:22 Wes: The recent movie. Yeah, they make him. No, he's a very good looking actor, which I thought was like, all right, he's still stitched together, but, you know, you got a good face and he's very tall. But any case. Yeah. So I think he's in a category of his own. Zombies. Yeah. I'm just thinking about my different feelings of the effectiveness of these different. I guess none of them really do it for me.

22:44 Erin: Vampires do it for me, really. But yeah, I maybe have to have a blood disorder to really.

22:50 Wes: Oh, yeah. Well, there you go. Yeah. Have you tried that for your blood disorder? Yeah, exactly, you sod. About zombie films. I don't. Philosophically, socially, it interests me because it's about the collective. What is the zombie? I think it's about old people, really, but stumbling around trying to Eat us because they envious or the dead.

23:14 Erin: Yeah, but that's also what vampires are about to a certain extent. Yeah, yeah. Basically this is all. They're all mummies is what you're saying. They're all the past trying to.

23:24 Wes: Yeah.

23:25 Erin: Trying to feast on the living and

23:27 Wes: the envy of the past for the living. So we, you know, of course, you know, we, we live by their rules. Right. All of our norms, as I was saying. Right. So the civilization is. Right. Has its formative origins and influences in these ancient civilizations. And then our dead ancestors, often the norms, at least their packaging. Right. Was determined by those who live before us. And we just sort of adopt their ways so they continue to live on in us. And sometimes we live on in very zombie like ways. It's like, well, I'm living by this code of ethics or these desires and things that I'm supposed to want and I, I don't know why I want them and I don't know who put this into me, you know, my parents or my culture or whatever.

And so we do stump, you know, sometimes stumble around in the zombie like way in the state of pseudo desire. Right. The zombie is enough, I think in that state. Can't really desire. It doesn't. I mean it's animate, but not animate anyway, you get the, you get to get the picture. But you know, we, we can feel norms, the norms given to us by the dead as persecutory. But also I think there's some sort of fear of like the guilt, survivor guilt, you know, that produces a persecutory fantasy like the dead are going to come back for us.

24:44 Erin: Hmm.

24:44 Wes: It's not enough for them to persecute us with our harsh super in the form of a harsh superego. Right. And strict mores or values. They've got to come back in person and take life back from us. So those kinds of thoughts I find very interesting. But a bunch of zombies stumbling around like I think I could get away. It doesn't do it for me. I know. They make them faster now, I guess in some movies. What's it called? The Z. What was it called?

25:13 Erin: World War Z and then the Walking Dead.

25:16 Wes: I just. Yeah, I can't explain why. It just, it has no emotional effect for me.

25:21 Erin: Yeah, I feel the same way. The key with the zombie is that it might get you and then you become one of the undead too. And you. And I think this goes to your reading of these. The idea that the zombie is the victim of large cultural forces seems to be reinforced by the fact that the zombie is always part of a larger body of people. Whereas the vampire and the mummy seem more cult of personality, like they seem more. More individualistic and they have their own specific thing that they're after or about self employed. Right, right. Where. Where in the vampire it's maybe more appetitive and in the mummy it's more about. It's more intellectual, you could say, because it's more about memory and the past.

26:02 Wes: Yeah, there's more association of lust, I guess with vampires and with zombies it's a lack of, you know, again, like a pseudo desire. And desire. Not desire to do anything except to spread the. They reproduce, but they reproduce themselves by biting. Right.

26:19 Erin: It's not.

26:19 Wes: Not sexual reproduction or reproduction through love. So. And then in the case of the mummy, I think it's more about love. Right. We have lust, we have the aggression, at least in this story. Or maybe it's about knowing, maybe it's about knowledge, you know, the kind of things that you've pointed to. We're curious, but then we're greeted with something incomprehensible. This also makes me think of Peirce because he's kind of pointing to the ways in which knowledge is grounded in the incomprehensible. Right. Because at some point some kind of raw data comes in.

It's unconceptualized and unknown. Kant calls this the manifold. And it's. Or it's the thing in itself. The alien unknowable thing in itself. Behind the manifold, perhaps. God, we have this weird situation where you're trying to cross the gap by knowing. But the very concept of knowledge implies something unknowable and alien and perhaps even persecutory. So again, once again, the curiosity, and the kind of benign curiosity of being in a museum looking at ancient artifacts could become fraught in some way.

27:24 Erin: I knew we'd get to Kant. I knew we'd be justified.

27:26 Wes: Sorry.

27:27 Erin: In choosing this film. No, I love it. I love it.

27:30 Wes: Yeah. It turns out Peirce was a big Kantian and Hegelian and it's just shocking to me how little I know about him and how profound he is. But. But anyway, final words.

27:40 Erin: I just. I hope I've proved to you how profound this film is.

27:45 Wes: I will. I will take it under consideration. No, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it.

27:52 Erin: Okay, well, thank you. And careful what you read.

27:57 Wes: Thank you.

As a cinematic monster, the mummy seems less an embodiment of revenge against colonial forces than a figure invented by colonialism itself. On the one hand, the mummy represents mystery, romance, magic, and the East. His wrappings suggest to the imagination that he’s not just dead, but wounded—ripped from a lost time and a broken narrative. Conveniently for the colonizer’s psyche, the mummy actually longs for someone to violate his tomb and wake him—not least so that his curse can lay systematic waste to its victims. And that brings us to the other hand: the mummy as a scientific and historical artifact, an ancient puzzle which requires anthropological, archeological, and linguistic knowledge to solve. The very apparatus of the mummy’s tomb—his body locked in box upon box, his organs apportioned to canopic jars, hieroglyphic inscriptions on every surface—suggest the complexity of the undertaking. What might these two strands of the mummy’s DNA—in Shakespearean terms, part-Antony, part-Cleopatra—reveal about the relationship between colonizer and colonized, and about our own desires, fears, and guilt? Wes & Erin discuss the 1999 film, “The Mummy.”

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0:11 Erin: As a cinematic monster, the Mummy seems less an embodiment of revenge against colonial forces than a figure invented by colonialism itself. On the one hand, the Mummy represents mystery, romance, magic, and the East. His wrappings suggest to the imagination that he's not just dead, but wounded. Ripped from a lost time and a broken narrative, conveniently for the colonizer's psyche, the Mummy actually longs for someone to violate his tomb and wake him, not least so that his curse can lay systematic waste to its victims. And that brings us to the other hand, the Mummy as a scientific and historical artifact, an ancient puzzle which requires anthropological, archaeological and linguistic knowledge to solve.

The very apparatus of the mummy's tomb, his body locked in box upon box, his organs apportioned to canopic jars, hieroglyphic inscriptions on every surface suggest the complexity of the undertaking. What might these two strands of the Mummy's DNA, in Shakespearean terms, part Antony, part Cleopatra, reveal about the relationship between colonizer and colonized and about our own desires, fears, and guilt? Today, we're discussing the 1999 film the Mummy. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I have two questions to start us off today.

The first is, is this the silliest thing we've covered on the podcast to date, or was elf sillier?

1:41 Wes: That's a good question. It depends on what you mean by silly. Elf is sillier, but this is the most frivolous choice we've made.

1:54 Erin: I'm trying to figure out if you're mad at me for selecting this or if our listeners are going to be mad at me.

2:00 Wes: I hadn't seen it, except it might have been on in the background when I met my father when I was around 22, and he had hundreds and hundreds of VHS tapes of various movies that he had pirated. And there was always a movie on in the background when I was hanging out with my siblings. And I vaguely remember scenes from this because they were on in the background, but I had never actually seen the movie, and it didn't. I like mummy film. Horror films in general don't appeal to me, but mummy films especially, for some reason.

2:28 Erin: Oh, no.

2:30 Wes: So, yeah, it's not the kind of thing I would end up watching on my own, but it's an interesting. I could see, you know, I started. I saw immediately why it would be up your alley. Because of, like, screwball ish comedy. Right. It operates in two dimensions, so that was interesting.

2:45 Erin: This came out when I was 8 years old. We had this local video store that I used to go to to rent movies. When you walked in the door, there was a huge cardboard. I guess the technical term for it is a standee. You know, those big cardboard displays that they'll have in movie theaters or wherever to publicize a film? There was a huge display of the Mummy with different characters and right when you came in. So to me, it's sort of the ultimate summer blockbuster film because that was the thing you saw whenever you came in. And more often than not, you know, I was suggestible enough to think, oh, I could go for watching the Mummy again.

Super fun to watch at a sleepover or on a summer night. So I love this film. I mean, I'm gonna try to expand our conversation to talk about the mummy in general, which I do think is kind of an interesting concept. And maybe we could talk about why you find mummies particularly uninteresting. But that leads me to my second question.

3:41 Wes: You can analyze me a little bit.

3:43 Erin: Leads me to my second question, which is, are mummies scary? And maybe this is why you don't like them. Because I think I have an answer to this, and I think yours is going to be the same. I don't know.

3:53 Wes: Yeah, I don't know. I was thinking about this film in relation to other horror films, including Alien, because we did that one. And. And I think it's a great film. And also the Exorcist, which I think is a great film. I was thinking, well, I'm not entirely opposed to horror. I'm not into horror films, but I'm not entirely opposed to it. And those two films have, like, a solid thematic essence to them involving relationships like, you know, Regan on the verge of puberty and an absent father and then an alien. The relationships between the ship members kind of alienated.

And then this lack of a paternal authority. Just. Just like there is in the Exorcist and the ship computer called Mother. There's always a mother thing going on. It's hard not to think of that with the Mummy as well. But. So I was thinking. I'm not into jump scare films. I don't get. Although, you know, I guess I went to see it. Is that what it's called? The Clown?

4:52 Erin: Yeah.

4:53 Wes: Terrifying movie. And I actually did enjoy the. You know, because the audience would jump and then we'd all laugh at being kind of taken in. So. So maybe I do. You know, this is not. It's not very. A very fruitful analysis. We're conducting here. I'm too conflicted. But. But mummies in particular. Let's get to the point. Are mummies in particular scary? I don't think so. Horror movies used to scare me as a kid, big time. The Exorcist scared the crap out of me because even though I wasn't religious at that point, part of me believed in the devil just, just in sanctuary and I couldn't deal with it.

And then other horror films, it like got into my bones in a way they just can't do as an adult. So in general, I don't think I can be scared in the deeper way that I used to be scared when I was a kid. And then this, you know, because this is also romantic comedy, I find it hard to be. To find any of it scary. Exactly. So, yeah, say more what you mean about scary and whether mummies are scary.

5:48 Erin: I just don't think they're scary. And that's one of the reasons why I like this movie. Right. Is because it's not scary. I mean, I don't like horror movies either. Right. But I like that. I like the Mummy as a concept. It's interesting to think of it in the Universal monster movie context and the Mummy as a monster. You could approach that from a lot of different angles. It's, you know, it's a dead body come to life. I mean, I think there's elements of the zombie in the Mummy. There's elements of the vampire and the Mummy in certain ways much, much closer to the vampire.

But maybe we could tweeze that out a bit. I think the Mummy as a monster figure is scary, if you really think about it, which is a way of saying that it's not scary. So that's why you need, you know, the accompanying curse. Though maybe you can't really separate the Mummy from the curse, but you know, the Mummy that can unhinge its jaws and become sand and at some point Imhotep's little mummy army is climbing on the walls. That becomes a bigger part of the Mummy Returns, which is a truly bad film. I love it, but it's a truly bad film. So I didn't make us do that.

Peeling the flesh off of people's bones and then also you have to throw in the scarabs. So you basically need this entire cast of supporting scary things, I think, in order to make the Mummy work as a horror film. I don't quite think of this as a horror film. I mean, part of it is also just the way that the CGI has aged Technically, of course, it has horror tropes, but it's just not that scary to me. Maybe what's kind of scary about it, in a thinky way, is related to the main reading of mummies that I'm interested in exploring, which are. Which is something like the mummy as a colonial fantasy.

The colonizer goes into a place that doesn't belong to them, and then they start literally and metaphorically exhuming the culture that they've entered, either to leech off of it or destroy it. And then there's this curse idea. So they awaken this curse, which it seems anti colonial, like it's payback for disturbing the mummy. But in fact, it really kind of serves the colonizer in a way, because the mummy actually wants to come back to life. It actually wants you to disturb it. It wants you to fall into the trap of the curse. So the colonizer is kind of, in that sense, exonerated from the act of meddling in the first place and from colonizing in the first place by the psychology of this curse or the psychology of the mummy wanting to return to life.

And then the colonizer has to also kill the mummy and restore order. So they cause the problem, sort of, but it's really more the mummy's fault or the mummy was asking for it. And so they caused the problem, then they themselves are the solution. And I guess that's a scary dynamic in itself for what it reveals about the colonial or the imperial psyche. But I also think that this dynamic can be extended in all sorts of directions. So it might reflect something in each of us about our own relationships to the past. Something silly like maybe we're all colonizers and we all have mummies inside of us that want to come back to life, and our job is to kill that part of ourselves and that desire to reenact the past or something like that.

And maybe that. Maybe there's something scary about that, that element, whatever you want to call it, from something as. Maybe as simplistic as the return of the repressed to something like giving up on previous versions of ourselves or whatever the case may be. I mean, in this, in the mummy movies, it's a lost love that has to be ultimately abandoned or. Yeah, I don't know that that's scary, but that's the best I could do.

9:28 Wes: Well, I think once you start relating it to relationships, whether it's between colonizer and colonized or whether it's a love relationship, then it becomes scary.

9:36 Erin: Yeah, exactly.

9:37 Wes: Relationships are scary. But I think the key word There is preservation because the mummy, obviously, is a preserved. And I guess for the ancient Egyptians, it had something to do with preservation into the afterlife. Right. Why did they do it? Do you have firmer knowledge than me about this? Our research team was on vacation this

10:02 Erin: week, if I remember correctly. And see, this is. The other thing is, of course, I'm sure you had. Didn't we talk about this? You had an Egyptology phase, didn't you, as a kid?

10:11 Wes: Yeah, my grandmother was very into it and there were lots of books around, so I was very fascinated by it. And even today, one of the first thing I do when I go into a museum is go to the Egypt section. And the sense of being in contact with things that are that old and ancient, just crossing that gap is just very powerful for me. And you can look at the signs and it's, you know, this is 2500 BC, and yet these artifacts are so well preserved. And so you can think of. Try to place yourself back then. But the pictogram writing is so weird and alien. It almost is like aliens. And even I think some of the alien aesthetic. Right. Is in films from actual aliens is borrowed from ancient Egypt. So there's something about. Yeah. That combination of preservation and of artifacts and alienness that. That is really powerful.

11:07 Erin: Yeah. When I was a kid, I took a. I don't know if I ever told you this. I took a correspondence course on hieroglyphics from the Oriental Institute.

11:14 Wes: Oh, wow.

11:15 Erin: But, yeah, I was really into it, so another reason why I loved this movie.

11:19 Wes: Are you still. Are you fluent in hieroglyphics?

11:21 Erin: No, I can. I can recognize some things.

11:25 Wes: But apparently they did. They did speak actual, you know, reconstructed ancient Egyptian in the film. Yes, that's what I saw. Yeah.

11:33 Erin: You know, just one of the many great things about this masterpiece.

11:38 Wes: That kind of attention to detail.

11:40 Erin: Exactly.

11:41 Wes: You know, really lends itself to verisimilitude of.

11:46 Erin: The thing that always bothers me is

11:47 Wes: they say waking up and running around. Yeah.

11:49 Erin: The. The five canopic jars. And he's like, there are only four. That's such a basic thing to get wrong. But anyway, if I remember correctly, and I did not look this up beforehand, I'm sorry, but I believe that the Egyptians thought that you had three souls and that the preservation of the body involved needing a place for all of these souls to meet for you to become reincarnated.

12:12 Wes: Oh, right.

12:13 Erin: So that's funny.

12:14 Wes: We actually did a little bit of ancient Egyptian philosophy on the show. I'm part of, The Partially Examined Life, recently.

12:21 Erin: Was there anything interesting there?

12:24 Wes: Some stuff about. Yeah, there's these different souls. So we read something called the Instructions and one of the things we read was a dialogue between a man and his soul. One of the souls, the soul that was supposed to carry it off to the afterlife, I think. But it's just stuff taken from fragments of papyrus, basically. And I was surprised that so much writing survived.

12:49 Erin: I have some book on the Book of the Dead somewhere packed away in my. I have a lot of my library packed away right now. But, you know, a lot of the stuff like you can. You can read what's in there. And it's a lot of spells and a lot of protection type. It's not quite as interesting as it sounds. And of course, this is one of the controversies about, I think about the curse of the Pharaohs is that a lot of the supposed warnings about disturbing the body or else the curse will come for you were actually invented by newspapers in the 20s as a result of the fervor around King Tut's tomb.

And the idea back then. Right. You know, I didn't. I didn't get the chance to actually research this further, but I was also reading that mummies were ground up and they were kept in people's like, medicine cabinets and they were actually. Yeah. And they were actually used. So. No. Another reason why I inherently love mummies. They're actually used as a coagulant. So Which I find so interesting. I don't know what the psychology of that is about or what that's about, except that they think that mummies are dried up bodies. So it'll dry up your cut or.

I have no idea. But gross. It's also, you know, further like vampire connection, I guess, sort of.

14:04 Wes: Yeah, it's a good point. And now that, you know there's a preservation element in vampires too, right. Also to the point of eternal life. I mean, with preservation, I think we're gonna. We'll talk a bit about the love element, right? To this idea of everlasting love. I think that this movie brings in with it Imhotep and Anck Su Namun. How do you pronounce it?

14:27 Erin: Anck Su Namun.

14:28 Wes: Anck Su Namun. Anck Su Namun.

14:31 Erin: Or Marta, you can call her either one.

14:34 Wes: Oh, yeah. I know. It took me a while to figure that out.

14:37 Erin: But it's always an arrested development connection for us in every episode.

14:41 Wes: The thing that the Egyptians did with mummies is weird and gross. Right. We all know that.

14:46 Erin: Sort of. I mean, it's also kind of just Kidding.

14:48 Wes: Yeah.

14:49 Erin: Okay.

14:50 Wes: But it lends itself to the idea, okay, what are they being preserved for? Yeah, okay. The afterlife. Sure. But maybe they were being preserved for us in our museums. But also, I think, like the wrapping up in bandages, like a burn victim type thing, you know, it lends itself to the idea that, okay, well, maybe they could come back to life. And it connects to certain, I guess, folktales about the dangers of preservation. Right. Or fairy tales. I wish I could live forever, but then I live as a rotting corpse.

15:22 Erin: Or like, death becomes her. Have you seen that?

15:25 Wes: No, I haven't, actually. I know.

15:28 Erin: It's related to this idea. You live forever, but then you become disgusting and you have all these problems. Yeah, right.

15:34 Wes: It's like. It's like the. You know, the fairy tales where you have a wish and it's, be careful what you wish for. Because there's always a downside. Right. The wish is misinterpreted in some way or comes with a downside you didn't expect or something like that. But anyway, so, yeah, so there's the wish for eternal life, and then there's also the wish for eternal love, which I think this movie plays on.

15:55 Erin: It's interesting how the movie coalesces a lot of different things that are. I mean, it's almost a compendium of different symbols that the Mummy represents. So a really old idea about the Mummy is that they're a figure of pathos and a romantic figure, and they're actually a bunch of Victorian stories about people having romances with mummies or the Mummy being a figure of unrequited love. And I take this to be a really suggestive part of the Mummy's appearance, that the bandages suggest that he's somehow wounded or that he comes out of a wounded or incomplete or somehow interrupted past, or a narrative that he wasn't able to.

To carry out and sort of wrenched out of that narrative. Right. So the wrapping seemed to suggest that interrupted life or that unrequited love. That was kind of where people's minds first went with the Mummy, this idea of the romantic lover separated from the beloved by death. And in the 1932 Mummy, that film also has the unrequited love thing with the Anck Su Namun figure and then Boris Karloff. I was really surprised by this when I went back and rewatched it. It's a really boring film. The beginning has a lot of interesting ideas about colonization, that the film then drops.

But Karloff just kind of walks around, you know, trying to pretend to Be some normal guy even though he has really bad social skills. And he kind of hypnotizes the female figure in the film, the one who sort of lines up with Evelyn. He's almost like a Mesmer figure or very similar to the vampire where he hypnotizes her and draws her to him. And she is somehow. It's not really explained very well in the film, but she's somehow the reincarnation of Anck Su Namun, much like evelyn in the 1999 film. Something is made of the fact that she might be some sort of distant ancestor because she's also half Egyptian and half English like the Evelyn character.

17:54 Wes: So I think if some of that had been preserved, it could have made for a more powerful emotional content to the film. Right. Because in this case the threat is all just external to Evelyn. It's not like she is being possessed or seduced or something.

18:11 Erin: No. Well, he does kiss her at certain points and he does confuse her with Anck Su Namun. So I think they're trying to make that connection.

18:17 Wes: She kisses him too, I think.

18:19 Erin: Oh yes. To distract him.

18:20 Wes: The only completed kiss is she kisses him.

18:24 Erin: That's right. I don't want to know what a completed kiss is. Anyway.

18:30 Wes: He does get his tongue though back by then, I think. Sorry.

18:34 Erin: No, but she's supposed to be the human sacrifice for Anck Su Namun. Because one of the things that I guess I figured out about the the economy of this film is that Imhotep needs several men to become fully reincarnated. But I guess Anck Su Namun only needs one. It's just a one to one ratio for. For a woman. I really wonder about a lot of things in this movie and the logic. Like stealing the blind guys eyes and then the fact that the mummy doesn't need glasses.

19:01 Wes: But anyway, how about all you have to do is carry around the cat and you'd be good.

19:07 Erin: Oh yeah, exactly. Yeah.

19:09 Wes: And they don't. I mean the first thing I do if I found that out is round up a bunch of cats, go to the shelter.

19:17 Erin: Exactly.

19:19 Wes: So that bothered me a bit. There's some few plot or in the beginning when like does she have to kill her? I guess she's trapped. So she does have to kill herself. Like that's the. That's the logical plan for him to resurrect her. Why couldn't they just escape together?

19:36 Erin: She so believed that he. See, this is like a perfect example of oh what, what do they say now? The opposite of he's just not that into you. Like, if you. If you. Oh, if he. If he wanted to, he would. That's the. The. The current dating advice. Right. So she was so assured of his love for her that she knew that all she had to do was kill her would find a way.

19:57 Wes: Oh, she's playing hard to get. Okay.

19:59 Erin: No, no, no. She's not playing hard to get. She's expressing full trust in his ability to overcome death, to rescue her. He's devoted.

20:09 Wes: You know, it's a love that's supposed to transcend everything. And as we know, that kind of love, there's a danger to it. Right. It can kind of blot out the world. And in this case, it could literally blot out the world once it's resurrected. So I think that's one of the ideas here, whether it's well thought out, is that this level of intensity in love can be destructive. And that's offset, of course, by the relationship, Rick and Evelyn, where they have a healthy level of antagonism. This is going back to Much Ado or screwball comedies. Right? The healthy level of antagonism that prevents you from trying to mummify and resurrect and get into all that creepy stuff. You know, keep it. Keep some boundaries. A little antagonism.

21:05 Erin: Well, they're together against the forces of death. Yeah. So in a way, they have a. They have a joint project of trying to. Trying to resurrect each other.

21:15 Wes: I'd like to see what happens if they. If Imhotep had succeeded and then 20 years into their relationship. I'd like to, like, a window in on that. He's sitting on the couch watching tv, and she's yelling at him about something. No, she's like, bandages on the floor.

21:34 Erin: Yeah, it's really good. No, no. She's like, I'm going out. And he's like, where. Where are you going? Just. God, I'm just getting drinks with my friends.

21:42 Wes: Leave me alone.

21:43 Erin: I'm allowed to spend some time away from you.

21:47 Wes: There you go. Ultimately, she ends up getting a restraining order on him. I resurrected you. You belong to me.

22:00 Erin: She gets half the contents of the tomb.

22:04 Wes: Yeah, there you go. So, you know. Yeah, it's all good until you succeed. Until then, it's tragic and eternal.

22:13 Erin: I like this idea that you're maybe the claustrophobia of this kind of relationship or this idea of preservation because it' related directly to the mummification ritual. You know, the loading up the tomb and trying to create the perfect conditions whereby you can survive. And somehow the effort expended on this is fruitless. One of the ideas behind whether or not there was actually a curse of the pharaohs specifically involved in King Tut's tomb. Whether or not people who entered the tomb were more susceptible to illness had to do with the fact that they would put food in the tomb, assuming that you would have to eat once you were reincarnated or after death or whatever.

And so that food eventually, of course, went very, very, very bad. And there was bacteria found in the tomb that could cause a bunch of. A bunch of problems, including pneumonia and some of the people who entered the tomb. Yeah. But I think the idea is that there was this bacteria in the tomb, but that it wasn't enough to infect you or that it couldn't have survived for that long. You know, they found, like, the dead bacteria, something like that. But anyway, it was decomposing over thousands of years, releasing all of these acids and chemicals, and also the bugs that were eating these, you know, all of the.

The fish and the. All those things that were in there, then those bugs themselves decomposing and creating really gross things inside this little lockbox. So, yeah, there's something, I don't know, maybe accidentally, metaphorically putrid. Right. About. About that whole concept of trying to preserve something unnaturally beyond its, you know, say it's sell by date.

23:56 Wes: Yeah. Like in Frankenstein, which we'll do eventually with. Right. He's reassembling, taking pieces of corpses and putting them together. And you almost say. Reminds me of high school when we did dissection, which I hated with a passion, in part because of the formaldehyde smell you get all over you. That you couldn't just do anything about this, you know, beyond the grossness of doing the dissections themselves. But it's, you know, I imagine, like the body of Frankenstein is sort of like a. Yeah. It's preserved, but it's not preserved in life.

Right. It's preserved in death somehow. It doesn't decay. And you can do things with it, and maybe if it's your body, you can do things with it, but there's something dead about it at the same time. So the intention of seeing someone off into the afterlife, and I suppose it must have been largely symbolic, or maybe there was a. You know, did they literally believe they needed to eat? Or maybe it was a big controversy. Did they really eat the food or did they just symbolically eat. Right. The transubstantiation.

24:57 Erin: Yes. Yeah, they really believed that. Yep.

25:01 Wes: And there were factions and wars and. No. So anyway, yeah, the attempt at preservation, I think that, you know, your point is well taken. Can preserve something at the cost of its putridness. And then going to your colonialism idea. 19th century Egypt is a very different place than ancient Egypt. It's already been colonized, right, by a completely different culture. So the relationship is between the modern Egyptians of the time and that ancient culture, which is alien and also exploiters and, you know, like Napoleon and colonizers and conquerors who have that relationship not just to the local culture, but also to this ancient culture, which I think serves as a object of at least two impulses.

One of them is just for the treasure and the other is this curiosity. And maybe there's a morbid curiosity there. What is it about our curiosity when we go into a museum? What's so fascinating about all of this stuff to us? And is there something a bit pernicious about it? Right, so there's something about the incredible preservation of a culture that's so ancient that is exciting and fascinating. But then we have to think about our relationship to that and what that's about, I suppose. Is it entirely well intentioned?

26:24 Erin: It seems to me. On the one hand, part of the intention is to feel a lack of difference or to feel some connection with this ancient time, with this culture that's really different from one's own. One wants to feel a connection to this. And that's a big part of the motivation for, say, going to the museum. But then also you want that difference preserved as well. You want to feel that this is thrilling and exotic and different from you. So you want to relate to it on the one hand and also don't want to on the other, or you don't want it to relate to you. You know, that push pull is also in the figure of the mummy. I don't know if I'm characterizing that in a way you would agree with.

27:06 Wes: We're looking into the past in a way. I think we're looking at our own origins. The origins are supposed to explain something about us, right? In a way they've given. They are not just our predecessors, but our progenitors. Right. Our ancient culture, you know, you remember in history class, it's kind of taught as if these ancient cultures were sort of the right. They're giving birth to everything that follows. We are who we are as civilized, supposedly people. Our civilization is built on top of those civilizations. So we look at those origins.

It's almost like the fascination with parentage in a certain way. But also we can't overcome the alien ness of those origins. It's not unlike a relationship to deities and religion, where it's something about focusing on an origin. But also the concept of the alien is. Is ever a problem, or at least according to certain philosophers. Right. Hegel thought he was kind of solving that problem. Like faith in the Kantian sense leaves God too much of an alien presence because he's unknowable. And Hegel wants to say he's. Well, actually, he is knowable.

So in this case, it's the unknowableness of the. Of Egyptian culture. Culture because it does remain really weird and alien. It's like it's hard to get your mind. It's hard to. Just hard to imagine what it would be like to be a person back then in that kind of society. Maybe this feeling is superficial. Maybe, you know, maybe we shouldn't look at hieroglyphs and various other artifacts and the strangeness of mummification and think that it's all that different. Right. These are people who are just people and have the same everyday concerns as we do.

But I think part of it has something to do with this idea of feeling like we're trying to come to terms with a kind of origin that is nevertheless alien to us. It's no coincidence that people want to say the pyramids were created by aliens and that in a way, it's another sort of creation myth. They want to. Alien style. Where did human beings come from? Well, from aliens. You know, never mind the theological questions that arise from that. Where did the aliens come from? Why don't we just go straight to the source? We really need the middleman.

29:23 Erin: But anyway, yeah, what you were saying, even before you connected it, I was thinking, oh, yeah, this sounds. You're exactly right. This sounds just like aliens. And that, I think, is something that we also covered in our podcast on Alien. The idea that this is maybe part of what the film was exploring was obviously was sex itself or something about the sex organs themselves. And therefore also this idea of parentage and who our progenitors are, and the Egyptians are sort of filling that same role. The aliens that placed us here in some way. Yeah.

So I think that's interesting. I had thought about, you know, Mummy versus Zombie, Mummy versus Vampire, but I really think Mummy and Alien are really the closest relatives. And I should have thought of that because I was also thinking about this film in relationship to Picnic at Hanging Rock, or maybe even a mirror image of Picnic at Hanging Rock and the kind of lessons of colonization that that film has. Maybe we could start with that in part two and Then maybe transition to looking at the film a little bit more closely. Though I still have a lot to.

I feel like, to say about just the figure of the mummy itself, but we'll. We'll try to dive into it a little more.

30:29 Wes: Yeah. And get into the romantic comedy aspect too.

30:32 Erin: Sure. Thank you.

30:34 Wes: Thank you.

Who is Godot? Whether God, objet a, or an abstraction from any object that is supposed to resolve dramatic suspense, it is clear that Vladimir and Estragon imagine him to be an agent of salvation (even if they can’t remember exactly what it is that needs saving). Perhaps the name is meant to satirize any states of expectancy—aspirational, libidinal, political, or religious—insofar they seem to be a means to a kind of spiritual completion that is impossible. Except, arguably, in the imagination, including its refinements in the products of the arts. If Samuel Beckett is too cool to provide us with ordinary entertainment and edification, does he mean to bore us, berate us, or do nothing at all? Erin & Wes pass time by discussing “Waiting for Godot,” and whether frustrating expectations is sometimes better than either violating or gratifying them.

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0:11 Wes: Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of Waiting for Godot. Erin, you wanted to say something about the typical characterization of them as tramps.

0:24 Erin: Yeah. Do you think they're as characters gaining a little bit from the association with, you know, as I've already talked about Laurel and Hardy, but also maybe Chaplin.

0:34 Wes: Yeah, I think that's meant to be an association. Yeah. Beckett actually talked about them. Right. As tramps, even though it's not referenced in the play itself. But he was involved in the production where he. I think. I think he gave some guidance on this, on their appearance and what they were supposed to be. But.

0:53 Erin: Yeah, I see. Yeah. I mean, again, I want to just argue that the comedy read is really the best way I've found to understand this is the trajectory of the Tramp. Often is this sort of dilation of time and funny business. I mean, you have in the figure of the Tramp the idea of someone who is always going, always moving and yet going nowhere. The ending, such as it is, you know, the famous idea that Godot never comes or that nothing, nothing amounts to anything in the end, is actually predicted in the Tramp trope, in which Tramp trope.

1:35 Wes: I was going to get a tramp stamp, but I decided on getting a tramp stamp.

1:38 Erin: I decided on the Tramp trope. But at the end of these little escapades, you know, these little serial adventures in the life of the Tramp, what happens? Nothing. Right. He might have a delusion of grandeur. Something might happen to him. You know, there'll be a little bit of a plot for the 20 minute silent film or whatever that he's engaged in. And then usually at the end, disappointment, back on the road, back where he began. No salvation, no social climb, no actual progress, but just movement. So movement without progress is kind of the life of the Tramp.

2:16 Wes: So at this point, right, they've just talked about, had an absurd conversation about whether to commit suicide and who should go first, you know, depending on so that the branch doesn't break for the second one and then leave them alone. And Estragon says, don't let's do anything. It's safer. And then Vladimir says, let's wait and see what he says. As if Godot is going to tell them whether they should commit suicide, or in what order they should commit suicide. Or maybe whether that there's some reason not to commit suicide. Estragon. Says who? Godot. Estragon. Good idea. Let's wait till we know exactly how we stand, says Vladimir. Do you want to go back and forth for a second here?

3:00 Erin: Sure. On the other hand, it might be better to strike the iron before it freezes.

3:05 Wes: I'm curious to hear what he has to offer. Then we'll take it or leave it.

3:09 Erin: What exactly did we ask him for?

3:11 Wes: Were you not there?

3:12 Erin: I can't have been listening.

3:14 Wes: Oh, nothing very definite.

3:16 Erin: A kind of prayer.

3:19 Wes: Precisely.

3:20 Erin: A vague supplication.

3:23 Wes: Exactly.

3:25 Erin: This is funny. And what did he reply? That he'd see that he couldn't promise anything.

3:32 Wes: That he'd have to think it over

3:34 Erin: in the quiet of his home, consult

3:36 Wes: his family, his friends, his agents, his

3:41 Erin: correspondence, his books, his bank account, before taking a decision. It's the normal thing, is it not? I think it is.

3:52 Wes: I think so too. All right, so that's fun.

3:58 Erin: These are really, really fun to read out loud.

4:01 Wes: Yeah. So strike. Yeah. So you can see all the comedy in here. Strike the iron before freezes instead of while it's hot.

4:11 Erin: The anticipation of the end.

4:15 Wes: Yeah. What did we ask him for? Nothing very definite. A kind of prayer. Precisely.

4:22 Erin: Right.

4:22 Wes: So it's not definite, but it's precise. It's vague, but exactly.

4:28 Erin: Will he come tomorrow, Surely.

4:31 Wes: Yeah. That he couldn't promise anything. But anyway, so we. We get the idea that they don't know what exactly they're waiting on. What's. It's. It's very vague. And they. They even use the word vague. And the word prayer is used. And other times the word save is used. And savior. So there's some religious association here as well.

4:51 Erin: What's funny too, is in the middle of all this, it strikes me, on page 11, Vladimir says, your worship wishes to assert his prerogatives. And prior to this, I think on the very first page.

5:02 Wes: Yeah. Where did your worship sleep tonight? Or something like that.

5:05 Erin: Right, your highness? Yeah. And because of what happens with the stickiness of language with Vladimir, he starts calling even before they decide to play at Pozzo and Lucky on day two, or in the second act, he has already started calling estragon pig, a use of the term that Pozzo uses for lucky. So one wonders if, you know, the day before this they were. Vladimir was contaged by someone who was calling someone else your highness and your worship in a. In a sort of sarcastic way or something like that.

5:41 Wes: Interesting. Yeah.

5:42 Erin: We intuit in Act 2 that he picks up on some turns of phrase from Pozzo, but. Yeah, but it's funny that it comes up in the midst of this theological conversation which doesn't occur in Act 2. So those words, I think, aren't used at all in Act 2. But maybe from the beginning, Vladimir has come into this conversation already ruminating on this idea of the thieves being saved. And that's what suggests the sarcastic your worship phrase to his mind, rather than some other characters that we haven't seen in act minus one.

6:16 Wes: It seems to me to sort of reverse their roles a bit, because Vladimir is actually the one more in charge. And he has a name which is more. There's more half to it. Right. There's actually been princes, Russian princes named Vladimir and Estragon. Again, it's a name of an herb. Yeah. You get a sense Vladimir is more in charge. So it's a weird inversion to. Suggests that Estragon is in charge. But of course, you know, there is a sense in which the person who doesn't seem to be in charge is in charge. And in fact. Right. The diminutives that they have for each other.

Gogo and Dee Dee. Right. Estragon, Gogo. And of course he wants to go all the time, but he can't, because they're waiting for Godot, which is almost like a combination of their names. Go and D. Go DD sounds like D almost sounds like this. It's like this, this, or here. Here versus Go. Go. Stasis versus motion and what Freud would call secondary process, and the kind of fixing something in one's attention and rational thought and planning, which certainly Vladimir has, versus just impulse, which is what Estragon seems to have. So to sort of say your highness or your worship is to raise the question of who's in charge.

Is it executive function that's in charge, or is it impulse and instinct that's in charge?

7:42 Erin: To give maybe credence to your idea that Estragon is maybe secretly the one in control or in charge. Pozzo's name is confused with Godot. And Gogo certainly sounds more like Godot than Didi does. Though I like your idea that the name kind of combines the two in a way so that we could say that, you know, Pozzo is the more obviously dominant one of that pair. Godot, say in the pair that he's A part of. With the boy is certainly the dominant. And then Gogo, Estragon would be along that axis. Though, of course, these dynamics shift in Act 2. I mean. Yeah. From the beginning, Vladimir is saving Estragon, or trying to save Estragon from these people that apparently beat him up all night.

8:25 Wes: Right.

8:26 Erin: Which is, like, really sad, but also

8:28 Wes: really funny because he transgresses in some way. Vladimir suggests he's doing something to.

8:33 Erin: To antagonize them.

8:34 Wes: Yeah. So the idea that there's something impulsive about Estragon that gets a natural response. So what happens when Pozzo and Lucky arrive? Well, it's kind of a relief. Okay. You know, it's like, okay, something interesting is going to happen in this play. And it's kind of a traveling vaudeville act. It's more pronounced than the vaudeville act that we've already been witnessing and more extreme. And in a way, Pozzo and Lucky seem to be exaggerated versions of Vladimir and Estragon. So, Right. There's a kind of a bit of a master slave dynamic, maybe with Vladimir and Estragon, but it's very pronounced with Pozzo and Lucky.

Lucky is literally his slave. And you can think of Pozzo as a harsh superego or as a. If you're thinking about it intrapsychically or on a social level as, you know, feudal lord or master. There's been lots of readings of this in terms of Hegel's master slave dialectic and all that stuff. So it's really quite. Quite a striking scene when they show up, right, with. So, you know, enter, Pozzo and Lucky. Pozzo drives Lucky by means of a rope passed around his neck so that Lucky is the first to enter, followed by the rope, which is long enough to let him reach the middle of the stage before Pozzo appears.

Lucky carries a heavy bag, a folding stool, a picnic basket, and a greatcoat. Pozzo, a whip. And then, of course, the way he treats Lucky is quite, you know, quite extreme. Calling him pig and all that and having him give him the whip that he's gonna use to whip him. But from reading, I understand that the very first performance of this, people walked out. And I wonder where it is that they walked out, where it is that this became too objectional. Well, and I suppose maybe it's with Pozzo and Lucky, but you would think that would be the thing.

Like, okay, actually, this is getting really interesting now, but I don't know.

10:31 Erin: Well, they've been predicted. I mean, very often, Estragon is the one who's introducing New elements to the dialogue, surprising twists in the dialogue. And one of them that he introduces, the question we're not tied, which he then raises again right before Pozzo and Lucky. Come on. Estragon also has the idea of the necessity for testing the branch to determine their weight before they kill themselves on it, because he doesn't want the branch to not be able to hold whichever of them is heavier and have the heavier person go second so that they don't successfully kill themselves.

Something which it takes Vladimir a second to catch up on. Which is a surprising moment because Estragon makes sense and thinks logically about something before Vladimir can intuit it. But both of those instances are about being tied to each other or to Godot in terms of their fates and then being sort of weighed in the balance, maybe like scales connected, like the two thieves, maybe on the. On the. The crosses on either side of Christ. And then we get Lucky and Pozzo coming on to tied together by this rope. Yeah, I like this idea that they're an exaggeration of Estragon and Vladimir.

And there are some of the same elements that recur in the Pozzo Lucky dynamic, though twisted. So we get the turnip that Vladimir gives Estragon and then Pozzo with the chicken bone. I don't know. I guess maybe it doesn't really work. Erin, it's a carrot. Sorry.

12:07 Wes: Right. Accidentally gives him a turnip, but he doesn't. Estragon doesn'. I bring that up because Vladimir really does care about Estragon and is feeding him.

12:17 Erin: Yes.

12:19 Wes: Whereas Pozzo's abusing Lucky and Lucky gets the bones. Right. So the.

12:25 Erin: Right.

12:25 Wes: Right. Pozzo takes out the chicken and eats it himself instead of, you know, whereas Vladimir was offering Estragon food. And then Estragon gets the bones that usually Lucky gets. Usually gets the scraps, gets the leftovers.

12:39 Erin: Right.

12:39 Wes: Pozzo is much more imperious and pompous and condescending than Vladimir, and he's a rich man and they're on his land, except the road is free to all, which is a disgrace and blah, blah, blah. So I think that Vladimir thinks he's Godot at first, Right?

12:56 Erin: Yes. Well, they're not sure, or they hear the sound first and they think that sound is potentially Godot coming. Right?

13:03 Wes: Yeah. Vladimir Godot. Estragon says yes. And then Pozzo presents himself as Pozzo and Estragon says he said Godot. So I guess Vladimir realizes quickly that he's not Godot.

13:17 Erin: That's right. And it's in the second act. That I think they say that they're saved. And when they first hear Pozzo and Lucky coming, I think actually the two of them cower at the sound. Yeah. So you're right. He actually does think he might be Godot.

13:31 Wes: So Pozzo accuses him of Pozzo, says, you took me for Godot. And Vladimir says, no. Oh, no, sir. Not for an instant, sir. So, Lyon, who is he? Oh, he's kind of an acquaintance. Estragon? Nothing of the kind. We hardly know him is Vladimir. True, we don't know him very well. But at the same time, Estragon, personally, I wouldn't even know him if I saw him. Pozzo, you took me for him. So. Yeah. What's this insistence on the idea that they took him for Godot? You know, it may have something to do with what I was talking about early in the first part, which is just this.

Godot could be representative of dramatic resolution or suspense or a plot point. It could be representative of some aspect within a play. So it's almost like saying to the audience, you took me for some item of significance in the play or some plot development. Well, when this play doesn't actually have a plot, or you might say, on my reading, having to do with the foolishness of being so invested in the future, or perhaps even invested in one's ambitions, which are very future oriented. You took me, the rich man, as the thing that you wanted to be or the thing that you're waiting for, expecting.

But of course, Estragon and Vladimir, too, I don't think they're not organized enough to give content to Godot in that way. If they're mistaking Pozzo for Godot, it's simply right. It's more a function of this idea that they really. Godot doesn't have any content for them, except that he might save them from something which doesn't have a lot of content either.

15:10 Erin: Right. Yeah, that's sort of suggested by the. To take something for something else. There's a sort of interchangeability or like a displacement, I suppose. But then also there's inherent in that maybe, you know, the colloquialism. What do you take me for? Yeah, I love Vladimir saying, personally, I wouldn't even know him if I saw him.

15:31 Wes: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

15:32 Erin: Pozzo seems incredulous at the thought that he could be taken for someone else because of his singularity or something. You know, he says disparagingly, of the same species as Pozzo, made in God's image. Yeah. The idea that other people would be the same Species as him seems like something distasteful. And so he repeatedly refers to Lucky as a pig and a hog, but says he cannot go for long without the society of my likes. Even when the likeness is an imperfect one.

16:02 Wes: He's gonna deign to, right, to hang out with these guys and, you know, have this feast in front of them, chicken and wine, without offering it to them. So at least they're, you know, they're lesser than him. He's a rich man who owns all the land. But they're. No, they're not. Lucky levels the road is free to all. Yeah. Which he then says is a disgrace. Right. So again, if we were to read this intrapsychically, we might think of it in terms of this relationship between some grandiose aspect of ourselves and then something that's been disavowed.

Lucky is the disavowed shadow self that we want to cast off. Or maybe it's the part of us that's being beaten up and abused for being less than. But I think the dynamic of that is to put Pozzo in a position. Why isn't he in his manor, right, with the Stein. He mentions the Steinway. That's where he left his watch. Why isn't he in the manor with the piano entertaining him? Well, he's off to sell Lucky at the fair, right? But he could have someone do that for him. But anyway, he gets put into the position of being a wanderer through a desolate wasteland, which is not quite what we would expect a nobleman to be doing.

You get the sense that he's right. He says it himself. What he's really looking for is company. But it's hard to have company if you are that pompous and high up and unaware of the well being of others. Right. Have company in the truest sense.

17:39 Erin: The other element or the other dynamic in his relationship with Lucky is one of the parasitism, I suppose, or as if the rope is an umbilical cord that has allowed Pozzo to leech off of Lucky. Right. Is that the implication that Lucky has previously been able to think and speak and that Pozo has learned things from him or acquired things from him until Lucky becomes hollowed out and unable to make any sort of coherent statement.

18:12 Wes: Yeah, it's quite Lucky, actually. He starts weeping because of what. What Pozzo says here, right. Which is that he's learned so much from. From Lucky. They're inquiring why he doesn't put his baggage down, right. And Pozzo ends up saying he wants to Impress him and mollify him. And then Vladimir is surprised by the idea that Pozzo would want to get rid of them. You know he's going to bring him to the fair. Then there's the whole scene where Estragon gets kicked and Pozzo gives that great speech about the tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else, another stops, right? Lucky's tears go to go to Estragon.

18:50 Erin: Underneath, Pozzo says, guess who taught me all these beautiful things? My Lucky. But for him, all my thoughts, all my feelings would have been of common things. Professional worries, beauty, grace, truth of the first water. I knew they were all beyond me. So I took a knook and Vladimir says, a knook? And I looked that up. I couldn't find anything about it, except for stuff about Waiting for Godot and where the origin of that word might be from.

19:16 Wes: Maybe it's like a niche profession.

19:19 Erin: But yeah, that was nearly 60 years ago. Yes, nearly 60. You wouldn't think it to look at me, would you? Compared to him, I look like a young man. No? So, also implying that he's physically sustained himself on the deterioration of Lucky. And then Vladimir says, after having sucked all the good out of him, you chuck him away like a. Like a banana skin.

19:40 Wes: Vladimir abuses him for the way he treats Lucky and all that stuff. And Pozzo ends up collapsing, right? Well, Vladimir even uses the word crucify. He's crucifying Lucky. But. But Pozzo's claim is that Lucky is killing him. He used to be so kind, so entertaining, so helpful and entertaining, my good angel. And now he is killing me. But anyway, I guess I wanted to kind of lead into that twilight speech that he gives. So it's another great speech. And then we'll probably have to talk about Lucky's speech as well. Let's read the whole thing. Just kidding.

So everything seems black to him today. Except the firmament, says Pozzo. But I see what it is. You are not from these parts. You don't know what our twilights can do. Shall I tell you? And then he makes sure that everyone's looking at the sky, including Lucky. Will you look at the sky, pig? Yikes. What is there so extraordinary about it? Qua sky. It is pale and luminous like any sky at any at this hour of the day in these latitudes when the weather is fine. An hour ago, roughly after having poured forth even since say 10 o' clock in the morning, tirelessly torrents of red and white light, it begins to lose its effulgence to grow pale, pale, ever a little paler, a little paler, until poof, finished, it comes to rest.

But behind this veil of gentleness and peace, night is charging and will burst upon us. Pop. Like that. Just when we least expect it. That is how it is on this bitch of an earth. Yeah. So what is that doing? What's the function of that speech, if there is any? You get the sense that it's another bit of parody of something that we might expect to see in a. In a play, right? Some sort of crescendo, emotional crescendo, along with a great speech. So maybe it's a parody of a great speech, but it also points to the concept of death, right? And the coming of night, which seems to be the alternative to the coming of Godot.

Or somehow coupled to it, maybe.

22:04 Erin: I take it also to be this expression of balance that. That I've already talked about, the pairs expressing half of a dynamic. So in Night and Day, you have the two sides of the coin. Maybe one thing that I didn't mention, or maybe that we just alluded to, is Vladimir's obsession with his hat versus Estragon's, as we talked about with his boots. Right? And then not too long after this Night and day speech, Estragon will tell Pozzo, he, meaning Vladimir, has stinking breath and I have stinking feet. So there's a sort of heads and tails, night and day. Night and day thing is kind of like a one damn thing after the other. But it's also yin and yang balance, the cyclicality of that or whatever.

22:53 Wes: So what do we make of Lucky's monologue? So they. Yeah, they have Lucky think, right. Given the existence is uttered forth in the public works of. Is it Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God? Kwa kwa kwa kwa with the white beard. Kwa kwa kwa kawa outside time and extension, who from the heights of divine apathia Divine athambia Divine aphasia loves us dearly, with some exceptions, for reasons unknown. But time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda, blah, blah, blah, for a long time. And apparently Beckett and the production he was involved in, he wanted this to be read very, very quick, as quickly as possible.

23:32 Erin: Well, this is the most Joycean part of the play to me. Yeah, I do. I really enjoyed, actually, the Lucky speech part of the 2001. That was the only one that I saw performed. I liked the fire and brimstone kind of element of it because I think of this, or I thought of it on the page and perhaps still do as being a parody of an academic kind of treatise. So I wasn't expecting the lucky performance in the 2001 adaptation to be so preachery from the pulpit. Kind of air to it.

24:06 Wes: Yeah. So again, another evocation of religious questions and perhaps academic thinking about the existence of God or something like that. But it's all become fragmented, much like the play as a whole. Right. Maybe it's like someone took a play and took a bunch of phrases and Scrabble tiles and shook the bag and then put them back out on the board. And this is the play. This is the play you get with

24:37 Erin: the repetition of, for instance, the names or the different turns of phrase left unfinished. It is established, you know, the KWA KWA quas and all that. It somehow performs in this really absurd way, these themes of. It's like an expression of ellipses or something. Like the ellipses are somehow being contained within the words or the expressions with which he's sort of extending the time. Again, it's like this dilation. Some of the things that I just teased out that I was writing in the margins,

25:15 Wes: I have.

25:15 Erin: Waiting, uncertainty, time filling, suffering, irrationality, inability of speech. But, yeah, I don't know. Something like what you get from a lecture if you're kind of falling asleep, or maybe what you remember from something several days later. Something that was long and boring and you only caught snatches of it because you were only half paying attention. Something like the. The result of having heard a highfalutin and incomprehensible and maybe kind of boring lecture. You know, since we were on the Pozzo portion. Pozzo pulls out his pipe and smokes one.

And then. And then he decides to have another. And he says, the second is never so sweet as the first. I mean, but it's sweet just the same. It occurred to me that this was a revision of the carrot idea that Vladimir and Estragon talk about. On page 13 in my edition, Estragon is eating the carrot and says, funny, the more you eat it, the worse it gets. Vladimir says, with me, it's just the opposite. Again, it. It two different. It's there. In other words, Estragon says, Vladimir, I get used to the muck as I go along. And then Estragon says, is that the opposite?

Vladimir says, question of temperament. Estragon of character. Vladimir, nothing you can do about it. Estragon, no use struggling. I don't know. I really love this. The change in the carrot versus the change in you as you eat the carrot?

26:47 Wes: Yeah. The more he eats, the worse it gets. And Vladimir gets used to it. Estragon's question is getting used to it. The opposite of things getting the more you eat it. Right. Because you might think the more you eat, the better it gets. Right. That's the joke. The opposite would be the more you eat, the better it gets. Not getting used to it. And then. So why is the response there? Question of temperament and character.

27:15 Erin: Because it's still possible to get used to something. You get used to the muck as you go along. So you're just getting used to it, getting worse. So the question isn't whether or not the carrot has changed. I suppose the carrot is going to get worse. That seems to be the assumption. But it's just a matter of whether or not you can get used to that quality of it.

27:33 Wes: Yeah. I mean, the suggestion is that depending on one's character, one might get used to things or get more sick of them with time. And then there's the, you know. Right. If it's character, it's fate. If it's character, it's essence. The essential doesn't change and there's no use in struggling to change. There's no use in trying to be different. At Estragon, there's nothing to be done, so you can't change yourself. So this is, you know, this is the opposite. This is sort of the foil to existentialism. Right. Existentialism is predicated on the idea that existence precedes essence.

So existence, as in the foundation to our free will, that we can freely choose something and aren't just reducible to some essence, to some deterministic essence that forces us to be one way or another. I did it because that's my character and there's nothing I can do about it. This is kind of an explicitly anti existential statement.

28:32 Erin: Well, I just took it as our way of a roundabout way of talking about Act 2 without actually having to go there. Second is never as good as the first.

28:41 Wes: Related to the pipe again.

28:45 Erin: Yeah, he says the second is never so sweet as the first. I mean, but it's sweet just the same. So he has a slightly more tinged by privilege, a more positive view of the repeated activity. Still having some savor.

29:01 Wes: You know, you can be eating raw carrots and have them go from bad to okay or bad to worse. Right. Bad to worse. Is Estragon bad to okay? Is Vladimir? Or you could be eating really good chicken and wine and having a pipe. All these things that are much better to begin with than A raw carrot. And the pleasure degrades a little bit as you go along, but it's still much better than a raw carrot.

29:31 Erin: Right.

29:32 Wes: It helps to start our heart. Start from a good height so that when you come down, you're not hitting the ground.

29:39 Erin: That's true. That's true. But I like the idea of the. The entropy inherent in repetition, which seems to be like a. Like a meta joke about the play.

29:49 Wes: So, speaking of repetition. Yeah. Things repeat in the second act and we get Pozzo and Lucky arriving again, but this time Pozzo is blind and the rope is shorter. Yeah. What's the point of repetition here?

30:03 Erin: I love when Vladimir says reinforcements at last when they come on stage Again, very much to your point, that we're. We're sort of relieved to see them.

30:12 Wes: Exactly. Yeah. He's speaking for the audience at that point.

30:15 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. This time, again, I'm really intrigued by the. Either side of the scale. So. So there's a.

30:21 Wes: By the way, there's a lot of tedium. To my mind, before they arrive, they do a question and answer routines.

30:28 Erin: They insult each other for.

30:30 Wes: Insult each other. Yeah. They try all these different things to be interesting, but it's really just boring. They exchange insults, do their exercises.

30:39 Erin: They do the hat business because there's the third hat.

30:43 Wes: Yep. Speaking of logical routine. Yep.

30:46 Erin: And the idea of the boots, whether or not the boots have been replaced, which also kind of is a recapitulation of the worst carrot, in a way. There's sort of shades of the worst carrot in that.

30:58 Wes: Right. And then there's a suggestion that someone for whom you know, has come along, whose boots are too small for their feet, and then taken Lucky's boots, which means that, you know, Estragon's boots must be. Sorry, Estragon's boots. Which means they must be bigger than that person's boots.

31:17 Erin: And yet somehow that they might fit Estragon. Right. So. But they will have simply gotten smaller. So there's.

31:23 Wes: They must be smaller and yet they fit Estragon. Yeah. So.

31:26 Erin: Right. So again, there's a. There's an entropic quality. Yeah.

31:31 Wes: It's a failure of what kind of. Maybe in math is transitivity or something like that. If A is smaller than B and B is smaller than C, then A

31:41 Erin: should be smaller than C. Exactly. And one of the things also that I just wanted to point out about the ways in which maybe the play behaving in absurd ways even extends to the scaffolding in the text of the play, the stage directions. Reading it, I Think is a really important experience in addition to seeing it. Seeing it bring something, obviously, to the text. It's meant to be seen. But also, if you were only to see it, then you would not have the experience of discovering that the characters sometimes contradict the stage directions or don't seem to acknowledge the stage directions. So if we were just to see this play, we would. Or we wouldn't know, or maybe we would question the fact that these are, in fact, just Estragon's boots from the day before. We're told in the stage direction that they are Estragon's boots, but the characters argue over whether or not they are.

32:34 Wes: And they're said to be a different color. Yeah.

32:36 Erin: Estragon and Vladimir argue over whether or not the tree, you know, the instructions that were given them, I suppose, is that Godot was gonna meet them by the tree. Then they argue over whether or not it's actually a tree. But of course, it's called a tree in the stage directions. There's another example of this, or even just the way that the tree kind of acts in a strange way that it's supposed to be the next day, but it has all these at least a handful of leaves on it now overnight. Or that Pozzo is blind overnight and Lucky is mute overnight.

That's another undermining element or an unruly element of the way that the play is working, which makes it doubly absurd or even more questionable, ultimately. Whether or not we could read this allegorically, for instance, is that even the stage direction sort of seek to undermine any kind of stability in the text. Back to Lucky and Pozzo. Now we have Pozzo being blind. And so the interesting dynamic, which is granted, made more obvious or more. More definitive in Act 1 by the fact that, of course, Lucky is loaded down with all these bags and Pozzo has a whip, is complicated.

Or maybe the. The complication that was already there in this image of the two of them yoked together by the rope is just more apparent in Act 2, where Lucky is actually preceding Pozzo, right. Going before him. And so now we can say that Lucky is leading him around in Act 2 because of Pazo's blindness. So again, there was already kind of an uncertain. I mean, it's on the one hand, very clear power dynamic between them, of course, but on the other hand, something interesting is happening visually on stage, even in Act 1, where, again, this idea of balance, or either side of the scale where they're tied together, the power dynamic, obviously, then shifts really definitively in the second act, where Pozzo is being just led around by Lucky.

34:34 Wes: Basically, we get. In the end, when Pozzo arrives, he asks what time it is. And then there's some question of whether it's, I think, evening or dawn, right? Estragon and Vladimir argue. You know, Vladimir says it's evening. But, well, Vladimir actually says something very, very interesting. It's evening, sir. It's evening. Night is drawing nigh. My friend here would have me doubt it, and I must confess, he shook me for a moment. But it is not for nothing I have lived through this long day. And I can assure you it is very near the end of its repertory.

How do you feel now? So, right, we're coming to the end of the play seems to be the suggestion, and he knows it. And then we get the stuff with Pozzo claiming that the blind. Oddly. So here's how he puts it. Don't question me. The blind have no notion of time. The things of time are hidden from them, too. Vladimir says, well, just fancy that. I could have sworn it was just the opposite, right? So that he should be a Tiresias if he's blind, right? He should be a character who is prophetic, who can tell us what's in the future. But Pozzo doesn't even want to be, you know, he gets very irritable later on.

And Vladimir says, dumb. Since when? Right? They keep asking them these time questions. Pozzo says, have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time? It's abominable. When? When? One day. Is that not enough for you? One day he went dumb. One day I went blind. One day we'll go deaf. One day we were born, One day we shall die. The same day the second. Is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave. The light gleams an instant, then it's night once more. And then on jerks the rope and says on to Lucky. It's reminiscent of the Twilight speech, right?

Which also ends with night. But it's much more staccato. It's briefer. It's got the staccato quality. It's more impassioned and maybe authentic, less pompous. It doesn't come across as the same sort of parody. It's heartfelt and it's almost like a reduction, like in cooking, right? It's reduced more to its essence. But once again, night, Right? Yeah. Night person. And then distance between morning and night has been collapsed in Pazo's original speech, I think, right? There's. He sort of hesitates and fumbles around the idea that the light has been going all day long.

And you get some sense of some expanse of time. And here all of time is collapsed, right? You give birth astride of a grave, as if nothing happens in between. Or there's not time enough for anything to happen between. Everything is the same moment.

37:22 Erin: That's right. And then Vladimir will take that and expand on it in what I think is maybe the most Shakespearean speech. Yeah, he does dilate that a bit. So he says. So here's. Here's the full little paragraph. Was I sleeping while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do? What shall I say of today? That with Estragon, my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot. That Pozzo passed with his carrier and that he spoke to us. Probably. But in all that, what truth will there be? He'll know nothing.

He'll tell me about the blows he received and I'll give him a carrot. Astride of a grave and a difficult birth down in the hole, lingeringly the gravedigger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old, the air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. At me too, someone is looking. Of me too, someone is saying. He is sleeping, he knows nothing. Let him sleep on. I can't go on.

38:28 Wes: What have I said with Pozzo? It's as if birth and death are happening in the same moment. But as you. As you point out, Vladimir dilates this, so to speak, with the forceps. Right, so. But. But it's the gravedigger is there lingering, you know, doing things lingeringly. Right, so. So it actually takes a lot. The birth takes a long time. And the whole process of birth is the duration of our lives. And we have time to waste them, to be bored, to not do anything, to kind of live a death in life, which is much worse than the thing that Pozzo was talking about.

39:07 Erin: And habit is that death. This is the second, I think, use of the term. In the play a few pages earlier, Vladimir says. All I know is that the hours are long under these conditions and constrain us to beguile them with proceedings which. How shall I say? Which may at first sight seem reasonable until they become a habit beguiling the time tomorrow, sleep. All this stuff is, you know, very Macbeth also, of course, very Hamlet. But.

39:35 Wes: Yeah, you're right. Yeah, I noticed this too. Yeah, the tone of the speech. Yeah, it's very high.

39:40 Erin: Yeah, right. Yeah. So he becomes Vladimir, becomes Really quite profound over the course of Act 2. So maybe that's one thing that sort of pushes against the entropy reading. This idea of habit, I think, is introduced rather late. It's an interesting characterization of what's gone on. Is it habit that they've been waiting for, Godot?

40:02 Wes: Well, there's something passive about habit, right. Because we're not deliberating and we're not taking conscious action. We're just, you know, we're doing what we do out of. Out of habit. I mean, it sort of. It speaks to that whole thing with the carrot. Right. And getting used to something. Right. As a matter of habit. If you eat enough, you get used to it. And it'd be inert to whether, you know, it might be the habit of eating the carrot sort of blinds you to something that's better, something that's more tasty. And the same thing in life. You sort of get into death drive mode. And the parts of life that you know would involve more vitality, you are habituated out of. Out of seeking that, out of inhabiting that. Because you're in sort of inertia mode, I suppose.

40:52 Erin: But they don't eat the carrot out of habit, right? I mean, everything they're doing, they're doing out of a kind of desperation. And they're eating the carrot because they don't have anything better. And when they have something better, even if it's just scraps, they'll take that. Or Estragon will.

41:05 Wes: Well, they're waiting, you know, they're desperate because their attention is on. They're in expectancy. Right. To use that word that Seneca uses, a state of expectancy. And the expectancy impoverishes the present and it leaves us with carrots and turnips and raw.

41:25 Erin: Oh, I like that.

41:26 Wes: Carrots and turnips. Yeah. And as opposed to something richer, you know, all the richness is put into the future. And people really do this with their lives. Obviously, they. They're holding out right for. For the big right for the prize that will only come if they. You know, it might be the asceticism of just working hard, but it. But. But sometimes it's just neglect, self neglect. Because, you know, one is focused on one's ambitions or some other form of salvation. It doesn't have to be ambition.

41:57 Erin: Drink the wine today, people. Eat the chicken today.

42:01 Wes: Carpe diem. Yeah. You know, I gave some classical quotes from Seneca about expectancy.

42:09 Erin: Is it Horace? It's not Horace, because that's. No, I think this seems too late. To be.

42:15 Wes: No, I think you're right. But my notes seized up. Yeah, it's Horace seized up.

42:23 Erin: Good one.

42:23 Wes: All right, so. Yeah. You want to give any final words, or is there nothing left to be done?

42:29 Erin: I was going to say, shall we go?

42:34 Wes: Yeah.

42:35 Erin: No. Used to say, yes, let's go. But then we're not gonna. But then there's gonna be five minutes. Five full minutes of just dead air, and then eventually it will end.

42:44 Wes: What are we waiting for if we can't go? We must be waiting for something.

42:52 Erin: Wake me up before you go. Go.

42:55 Wes: Yeah. All right. Thank you.

42:57 Erin: Thank you.

Who is Godot? Whether God, objet a, or an abstraction from any object that is supposed to resolve dramatic suspense, it is clear that Vladimir and Estragon imagine him to be an agent of salvation (even if they can’t remember exactly what it is that needs saving). Perhaps the name is meant to satirize any states of expectancy—aspirational, libidinal, political, or religious—insofar they seem to be a means to a kind of spiritual completion that is impossible. Except, arguably, in the imagination, including its refinements in the products of the arts. If Samuel Beckett is too cool to provide us with ordinary entertainment and edification, does he mean to bore us, berate us, or do nothing at all? Erin & Wes pass time by discussing “Waiting for Godot,” and whether frustrating expectations is sometimes better than either violating or gratifying them.

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0:11 Wes: Who is Godot? Whether God objet a or an abstraction from any object that is supposed to resolve dramatic suspense, it is clear that Vladimir and Estragon imagine him to be an agent of salvation, even if they can't remember exactly what it is that needs saving. Perhaps the name is meant to satirize any states of expectancy, aspirational, libidinal, political or religious, insofar as they seem to be a means to a kind of spiritual completion that is impossible, except arguably, in the imagination, including its refinements in the products of the arts.

If Samuel Beckett is too cool to provide us with ordinary entertainment and edification, does he mean to bore us, berate us, or do nothing at all? Today we pass time by discussing waiting for Godot and whether frustrating expectations is sometimes better than either violating or gratifying them. This is Wes Alwan. And this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, I had suggested this just because I thought it might pair with Withnail and I, which we just did. I didn't think about it very carefully. It was just an association.

And then I thought, well, also, it's something we should do, because my mom wrote her master's thesis on this at Trinity in Ireland, and for some reason she was fascinated with Beckett. I've always been afraid of doing it. Just vague associations of the avant garde and boredom. You didn't sound super excited to do it. What's your experience with the play?

1:51 Erin: I didn't like it when I was younger, I'll admit. I was recalling the other day that I was taking a class. It must have been on 20th century lit. And the final was a, you know, Blue Book exam. And we had covered a bunch of plays, and the question required us to choose one of three plays to analyze. We had to pick one and then write about it. And after the exam, just in talking with people, you know, when you're all kind of staggering out of a room, I discovered I was the only one who didn't choose Beckett.

2:28 Wes: So is that because it's. Yeah. Why is that?

2:33 Erin: I think I thought in my ignorance, or maybe in my perceptiveness, I thought it was both too easy and too difficult to write about, because I think that probably what everybody else did was they were smart to choose Beckett, and. And they did an allegorical reading which was maybe a little bit more straightforward. Is that the right way to go in terms of a really deep understanding of the play? Probably not. Was it the smart thing to do in a three hour Blue Book exam. Probably I wasn't perceptive enough to see the comedy in it. And I think the extent to which this is played for humor, I think really determines the extent to which I'm going to appreciate an adaptation of it.

So the version available online from 2001 I find to have some moments of greatness, of course, and the performances are great, but mostly dour and really difficult to get through and really bleak. And the little glimpses that I've seen from the Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen Broadway adaptation from 2013, and I think they also did an earlier one. That one seems to me like a version of Godot that I would really enjoy because I think ultimately it is sort of a black comedy version of Laurel and Hardy or Chaplin, and the humor makes it work. So probably when I was in college, I didn't understand how funny it was or how funny it could be.

4:00 Wes: Yeah. And so this 2001 version, this was Barry McGovern and Johnny Murphy and Alan Stanford, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg. And was it BBC? Is that.

4:12 Erin: Yeah, I think so.

4:14 Wes: Yeah. So, yeah, I really like that. It's, it's. I thought it was very good. You know, Rainn Wilson was recently in a. They did a production in la. There's no video.

4:23 Erin: Yeah, yeah, I heard that.

4:25 Wes: But they have some little teaser videos that are really interesting.

4:29 Erin: Did you take a look at any of the videos from the McKellen Stewart?

4:33 Wes: No, no, I wish I had. I didn't know about it. I didn't really didn't look at. I looked at the, you know, the one BBC one, but I didn't do a lot of research into different productions because I spent so much time with the play, which I think benefits a lot from being produced. It's not the most satisfying reading experience. I know you've taken an acting class because I know you've done some acting, right? And you can get. You do an acting class and they give you an exercise and they say, say one word over and over again, but with different emotions.

You can do a lot with little. I was going to say Beckett's giving us very little, but that's not true. Famously, they say it's the play where nothing happens twice. Right. Because everything is repeated in the second half. But quite a bit does happen. It's just that a lot of it is verbal and it's wordplay and it's unclear. I don't know. How do you capture this? How do you capture this quality of the play?

5:37 Erin: It's routine based it's like vaudeville act. That's why I think comedy works for it.

5:43 Wes: It's like who's on first for the whole.

5:45 Erin: Yes. I mean, very much so. Very much so. It's Abbott and Costello, it's Laurel and Hardy. I mean, there's also quite a lot physically that is done in the play. Physical routines, the hat, the boots, falling down, trying to hold themselves up, falling down again. You know, there's a lot of business, comedy, business. Anyway, I ultimately, I think in spending a lot of time with the play, I came to a much greater appreciation of it than I had expected. And I also found it far funnier than I was expecting to find it primed, as I was sort of halfway through by looking up some of those clips from the McKellen Stewart adaptation which people said was too funny.

You know, they were making it too funny and it should have been sadder or bleaker or something. That seemed to be at least one wing of the critical consensus about that adaptation. But I started to think, really, unless you want to be punished severely in your theater going experience, really, this should be, I think, done in a comedic way. And that seemed to be the heart of it.

6:48 Wes: Absolutely. There's plenty in the wordplay and stage directions to suggest that, yeah, you should play it up. Do a lot of this with humor. Yeah. And play it up. And you can do, you know, with much of the dialogue, you can make decisions that play it up even further. And I would say, yeah, I agree with you. The way to go is to play it up and try to breathe some life into what is otherwise potentially very sparse. Right. Put a few leaves on that tree, so to speak. In a way, it is a. It does enact desolation. Right. And it enacts timelessness and placelessness.

Perhaps you can read it. Perhaps it's just allegory, which means the characters are, in a way just ciphers for something else, which is another form of desolation. There's not enough plot for the average person and there's not enough investment. You're not induced to enough investment in the characters to have some strong emotional reaction for them or to be induced by them. Right. So there's a lack of pathos, maybe, is the way to put it, Unless you go for the comedic element. But it's interesting. Yeah. Is it an allegory?

8:05 Erin: I hope not. I hate allegory.

8:08 Wes: Why do you hate allegory?

8:10 Erin: I don't know. A one to one relationship doesn't interest me. Or the allegorical reading has infected so much of art. There's this idea, I think, that people have increasingly, with, I don't know, maybe we're contributing to it with the podcast. I hope not. But people are out there trying to retrieve information easily. The CliffsNotes version of something. They want to know, what is this really about? And this is particularly pernicious in. In poetry, you know, what is the poem really about? As though everything is just these two levels. There's the veneer and then there's whatever is underneath it.

And that's the level that you have to access. And you can ignore the veneer entirely and just sort of capture the meaning underneath. And that's the way that you have of rather, that's the way in which you can master the material. So suddenly you figured it out. You have the secret knowledge. And I think increasingly, no matter how complex or interesting or multivarious the potential interpretations of a work of art, people are looking for that sort of snappy way to get their arms around something. So people are trying to boil things down to a sort of an allegorical or something that looks like an allegorical read to me.

And so that's. I think it flattens it, I think, to say that this play is allegorical on the one hand is probably true in a way. I mean, you know, it can be allegorical. But I think it's also. It's more than that. And insofar as I think what Godot maybe ultimately represents is something like the impossibility of an easy reading or the impossibility of settled meaning itself, even if that is, say, the allegorical answer, that immediately also complicates that one to one ratio. If you. The meaning is that there is no meaning, or if the meaning is that meaning is absent, then that automatically kind of complicates that one to one ratio that allegory would seem to suggest.

10:19 Wes: Well, as you know, I unapologetically read with a view to finding out what it's about. That's why, like, Subtext is the name of the book podcast. And I do it, you know, and. And so I'm.

10:32 Erin: But you don't do it in that way.

10:33 Wes: And I think there is. Right, well, I'm about to elaborate on that. So it's. So I do think there's something, you know, that. That works of art are about, even if they don't know they're about that, or if the. The creators don't know what they've written about, and it doesn't even require attribution of some unconscious intent or something, something like that. I just Think that the material itself has a certain dynamic and has a layer of manifest content, but there's something underneath and. Or there's something that's being expressed, a sense that goes beyond the mere reference.

But in analog, right, that doesn't mean. So in other words, we can read. You know, we can read anything we want with a view to some sort of symbolic element or with a view to the thematic. It doesn't have to be symbolic or a view to the effective truth, the emotional truth that might underlie what's going on. But now, allegory, I guess, is a little bit more rigid, right? So you have the literal level, and there's this really systematic coordination between that literal level and some other. Right. So the literal level, characters and action and setting, and then what they're supposed to represent some conceptual level.

So, for instance, you know, the allegory where warriors are fighting and the warriors represent virtues or something like that, it deadens the surface layer. It kind of saps it of content, makes it desolate, Right. Much like the setting here in this place. So perhaps he's speaking to the fact in the desolation of the setting for this play. He might already be speaking to the fact or warning you that if you read this allegorically, you're. You are sapping it of content and perhaps participating in this very thing that's going to be associated with waiting or expectation of a certain kind.

So then. Yeah, then the question is, how do we read the play? I think it invites allegory, right? It certainly invites it. It strongly invites it because we get. Give me a few biblical allusions up front and. Right. It invites it because it's so sparse. It invites it because we're not learning necessarily a great deal about the inner lives of the characters and invites it because of the sparseness of the plot. I think we are tempted into simply reading it in an allegorical way. So what does Vladimir represent? What does Estragon represent? These are very suggestive names, right?

Estragon is just French for. For what is it? Tarragon for French herb, Bernaise sauce and other things. Vladimir sounds Russian, and maybe there's some kind of regal aspect to it. Vladimir is more coherent and directive, maybe like an ego or a superego. Estragon is much more disorganized and can't remember. In fact, it's not even clear that he's actually waiting for Godot. In a way, maybe it's just Vladimir because estragon can't remember enough and has to be reminded constantly by Vladimir, that they can't leave because they're waiting for Godot, so he could be assimilated to the id, or at least to some aspect of the psyche which is not rational, maybe what Freud calls primary process, something more primitive and associative and dreamlike.

And you can do that all day long with this play and do it in various different ways. And I think there's some worth to at least taking note of those parallels. Right. But if you get stuck in a Freudian reading or a social reading or one reading or another. Yeah. It quickly becomes a bit barren and unrewarding. On the other hand, how do you read a play in which. Right. Vladimir and Estragon, it seems like there aren't even full people. They do seem like psychological moments or moments within a psyche representing different psychological functions.

But on the other hand, they're not just that. So I just want to reinforce your point that it's. And I know it's a point that's been made by critics as well, but it really does put you in an odd position as a spectator or reader. Right. Is it an allegory? Isn't it? How should I receive it?

14:58 Erin: I purposely didn't look at any secondary literature because I didn't want to be. I was familiar with it way, way back when I read this in college. And of course, I'm familiar with some of the pervading allegorical readings of the play, but I was really cautious to not be contaged by anyone in particular. You know, you said it invites allegory. I think at the same time, it disinvites it for the reasons that you've already outlined. You know, the play is not really. It's not, to me, very systematic in its symbols or its series. Right.

15:33 Wes: It invites you only to confound you because it's so disorganized. But you.

15:39 Erin: You know, the biblical allusion that you talk of is also immediately toyed with, deconstructed in a way by the characters who, as you've already said, have no. You know, Vladimir also has a very limited memory. Pozzo has a limited memory. Lucky we can intuit sort of from his speech, also has a limited memory. So the fact that they're so disengaged even from their own history, and then you have the repertory quality of the play itself in that Act 1 and Act 2 are simply recapitulations of each other, but maybe with something like entropy, a bit of entropy that has happened in the second replay or what have you.

You know, this idea of a play in which nothing happens twice, or this idea of nothingness, or this idea of maybe having it both ways, allegorical and anti. Allegorical is reflected linguistically in the play quite a bit. I did a lot of tracking of words across the play. My big obsession for a while became pronouns, specifically the pronoun it and how squishy and unlocatable the referent sometimes is for for it. Which made me think a lot about nothingness and ultimately led me to a reading of the play which was almost mathematical. I started to think that the play was a lot about math and a lot about zero and nothingness.

But if we want to start, for instance, with the first line of the play, Nothing to be done. The concept of nothingness, I think ties together a lot of where we're already going. I mean, in a way that's sort of comedy. Like the question of what actually goes on in the play, whether things actually happen. They do in fact happen. One of the things that we could say happens is simply these routines of speech which ultimately don't really lead anywhere. You know, these are things which in comedy would be like vamping or distraction maybe from whatever the structure of the plot is, would be a comedy routine sort of inserted into a film.

Like the who's on first Routine.

17:50 Wes: Right.

17:50 Erin: If you've ever seen the film, which that is, in which I have seen several times and I can't think of the name of the film right now, but you know, obviously there's a scene with a baseball game and then they. They basically pause the action of the larger plot to do that who's on first routine. So it's as if the entire play is made up of those types of vamping comedy vamping moments where you do these verbal routines or these physical slapstick routines which would be a break from the plot in any other plot based film or play or whatever, but here make up the entirety of the plot, more or less.

I started thinking a lot about nothingness and idling or vamping or of some kind of stasis or looping back on yourself. Returning the song that Vladimir sings about the dog having a kind of cyclical structure to it and the cyclical nature of the entire play and whether or not the whole play is an expression of this kind of circular rather than of nothingness as negation and cancellation. The nothingness of idling and stasis, which I take to be a sort of different kind of nothingness.

19:04 Wes: The work that nothing here is doing in the beginning of the play involves estragon trying to take off his boots and not being able to. So it's nothing to be done. He's giving up. Although I think at various points in the play. I mean, okay, so this is repeated several times in the play. Vladimir says it, Estragon says it. And in fact, Vladimir says it shortly after. It's actually, it's not much further into play that Vladimir says it. He says, sometimes I feel it coming all the same. Then I go all queer, how shall I say? Relieved. And at the same time, appalled, Appalled.

Funny, Nothing to be done. And he's referring to that line that I mentioned before, which he says, prior to that, the last moment, hope deferred maketh the something sick. That's a reference to Proverbs. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. But when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life. And so, of course, he leaves out the more hopeful second part. Although, of course, the tree of something or other is right there on the set. So what is it? You know, what is it he's referring to when he says I feel it coming? I think that's one of the questions that the play invites us to answer.

What is it they're waiting for? And there's some obvious invitations, right, Godot. God. But we might think more generally that they're waiting for some sort of salvation. They even say it, something to save them. And that salvation, right, it can be God. But people seek this in a secular way as well. Sometimes it's just associated with grandiose ambitions. Hey, when I'm a great such and such, I will be saved. I was reminded of the saying by Seneca, the fool's life is empty of gratitude and full of tears. Its course lies wholly toward the future.

He is always, and he says elsewhere, he's always getting ready to live. And the greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. We are arranging what lies in fortune's control and abandoning what lies in yours. Seneca, of course, was stoic. So that's a very stoic sort of idea. That kind of idea recurs through ancient classical literature. This idea that a focus on the future can kind of denature the present, that it can devitalize it. It can take you out of the present and prevent you from enjoying life, prevents you from appreciating what you have.

So I think when he says, you know, sometimes I feel it coming on. I mean, what do you. What do you think of that? Sometimes I feel it coming all. All the same. What is it referring to?

21:51 Erin: Well, I wonder that myself I, you know, it could be hope, it could be sickness. I think ultimately it is plot, really. Any kind of plot. They are waiting for the plot. That's as close as I'll get to an allegorical reading of the play, I suppose. So they're stuck waiting for something to happen to move things forward. So sometimes he feels the whatever coming to relieve him from the position that he's in of kind of not having anything to do. What you read of the Seneca also, I think speaks to that in a way. Right. You're sort of in the anteroom of action. And action is ultimately what plot is made of. And their anxiety and their heartsickness over this waiting and anticipation, their depression is over the fact that they are stuck in this anteroom before the action can commence or something like that.

22:53 Wes: Yeah. I think of them as living in the setting of the play is almost representative of the state of expectancy that Seneca talks about. I think that the sexiest way to read the play is make it self referential about playwriting. And it's the least. It's the most. Every other reading can be attacked as sort of reductive, maybe, but there's something. If it's become self referential, it's less reductive. But I'm also, I think also the sort of. The psychological essence of it, it gets at something worthwhile. So they live in a place. They don't live there, but they are in a place that is.

Right. It can't be located. It's sort of barren that There's a timeless quality to it. It's without memory. So the word utopia literally means no place. Right. The. The utopia that one might expect or might yearn for in a state of expectancy can't come. And so the shadow of that. Right. Is the. Is the sort of no place that you find yourself in that you might find yourself in psychologically. If you are oriented entirely towards a utopian future or towards a, you know, conception of the object of desire, which as something that might complete, you know, when nothing can really complete us.

Right. Just sort of these unrealistic expectations about life, they produce a desiccated present on the reading where in a way it's self referential. The state of expectancy maybe is a little bit of teasing about the state of expectancy of the audience. Right. We are kind of teased for the possibility that we might be bored in the way that Vladimir and Estragon often seem to be bored. And they're often contemplating, well, what comes next. And is this entertaining enough and, yeah, Estragon will say, yeah, that's the idea. Let's insult each other now as if they themselves are the playwrights.

But playwrights without any real memory figuring out how it is that they're going to produce some interest in the audience. And that usually is the goal. At least one of the goals of a storyteller is to introduce some element of suspense or pathos or whatever. But here we're not getting that sort of satisfaction. And so that kind of breaks down or deconstructs the typical experience of a theater audience, maybe, and speaks to, I don't know, their state of expectancy as an audience.

25:26 Erin: You're making me think about what dialogue normally, let's say, amounts to. The interiority of character. Maybe something in the past that is revealed over the course of a conversation. Maybe some conclusion. Because, you know, one of the things that I'm thinking of is that how much does really happen in a play? You know what I mean, as opposed to a film, say, how much really happens in a play at the level of action versus, say, of dialogue? I don't know. I'm going off the track of where my train of thought was originally taking me.

26:00 Wes: But, yeah, it depends. But usually it's quite confined in terms of time span and place. Not always. There are Shakespeare plays in which the. Yeah, there's a lot of different settings and scenes. And a lot he conveyed, just like a film would. There's the. The scope. That sort of background scope feels much bigger than what we actually ever see on stage. You know, we get a sense of time passing and big events going on and a world beyond. But usually we are getting restricted, quite restricted to some very local space and time.

26:39 Erin: Right? That's true. There are murders on stage. There are all kinds of things. But also, I think a lot. A lot in plays is, say, moved out of the realm of physical action and inserted into speech. It's put into speech. You know, an obvious example that springs to mind is Oedipus, where everything that he's done really kind of precedes the action of the play. And in the play, through dialogue, we're watching him come to the realization of the significance of events which predate, you know, the start of the action of the play. So, I don't know, it just occurs to me that maybe rather than doing something insanely different from what we come to expect from a play or an experience in the theater, Godot is radical for leaning into an already present phenomenon all the way.

So that the action of the play really Just does become word games, circular types of constructions where we're waiting for one or the other character to get back to their original train of thought or to think of the thing that they wanted to say, or to finish the other's, or give a counterpoint to the other's idea. In other words, maybe it's just an exaggerated. You know, it's not doing something different. It's just doing something sort of metatheatrical. Maybe that's just an obvious point and I've taken the long way to get there. But in this opening line that you've already pointed to, where Estragon is saying nothing to be done, and he's talking about the difficulty of pulling off his boot, I thought about this sentence quite a bit and the implications of it.

Nothing to be done. So, you know, it's a passive construction, obviously. It removes the actual subject from the sentence and takes the object and puts it into the subject position. So not we can do nothing, but nothing to be done. It got me thinking about, because of that, that passive construction, this difference between the idea of doing nothing and the idea of being nothing, the nothing that is idling and stasis and just sort of, say, vamping, for lack of a better term, since that's kind of a comedy word or a vaudeville wor. And then the nothing of cancellation or negation, the nothing of being.

I think with idling and vamping, what sustains the doing nothing is a kind of circularity rather than the canceling out of the being nothing. Obviously, you can't do a play about being nothing because it would just be. The curtains would open and there would be nothing there, and then you would go home, which I think Beckett, like, almost did something like that. Didn't he just do a play where there was just a mouth talking on stage and that was it.

29:29 Wes: Ye.

29:30 Erin: So he almost got there. All of that to say that Estragon starts by saying nothing to be done. It actually has a kind of application to the boot. Even though the boot ultimately leaves him nowhere, his efforts leave him nowhere. But the action of trying to pull that off and repeatedly failing, the result is ultimately nothing. And then Vladimir's words which follow. I'm beginning to come round to that opinion, hint at the circularity inside the nothingness, the sort of tempest in a teapot quality that I think recurs over and over again in these bits throughout the play.

And then the longer speech that he begins with, you know, all my life I tried to put it from me saying, vladimir, be reasonable. You haven't yet tried everything, and I resumed the struggle. So that too, I see often in Vladimir's speech a kind of circularity in it. And so in this he's describing, like, trying to get his arms around something and then ultimately failing and he's back at the beginning.

30:36 Wes: Yeah, it really reminded me of the myth of Sisyphus a bit.

30:40 Erin: Absolutely.

30:41 Wes: A lot in this. And of course, there's a lot of, you know, existentialist readings of the play.

30:45 Erin: But, yeah, I'm interested in all of these various expressions of nothingness, which ultimately are about traveling quite, quite a ways to get back to the beginning. So to get functionally nowhere versus in almost like a taxonomy of nothingness, a sort of more negative view of life. An idea of total negation that one would think would be suggested by some of this language. One of the most famous lines, certainly from the play, about giving birth astride a grave, that seems to me an expression of the idea of being nothing or of nothing being right.

The play doesn't end in a death or anything like that. Instead it ends in this sort of perpetual vamping and dilation of time. Maybe another way of putting this is they're not being metabolized in the play, though the play exists in pairs of characters. The two are not canceling each other out. They're persistent. They refuse to be defeated by the play. Neither of them ends up dead. Neither of them ends up saved either.

31:58 Wes: If you're trying to write a scene in a play or movie, you're told there's gotta be some element of conflict and struggle in order to elicit the attention of the audience. And that you're right. And that attention is very picky and discriminating and not easy to hold. And then in scenes that are very dialogue based rather than action based, right, you might introduce an element of something, some sort of visual struggle, like people might be, or even just activity. A character might be doing something while talking to another character just so that there's something happening, so that there's some sort of action.

And I think there's a kind of gesture to that, right? With Estragon trying to take off his boots in the beginning and not being able to. That's a perfectly fine premise for an entire scene, especially a slapstick scene, right? You could bake as much of that as you want. And then he gives up. And then Vladimir sort of picks up on that and thematizes it or dramatizes it. Makes it more about life, right? Assimilates it to the idea that he's been struggling and he's tried everything, but here they are again. And of course, what he actually says is, so there you are again, Estragon says.

Am I right? He seems to speaking to your concept of nothing. He seems to have forgotten whether or not he even exists or at least whether he's standing in this particular place at this particular time. You're given a little bit of hope in the beginning that, oh yeah, maybe this will be about some well defined significant life struggle, as it would be in an ordinary play, and it'll be resolved tragically in one way, or there'll be a happy ending or something like that, but it's never going to be given any content except for the waiting for Godot.

And so Godot is. The whole. Is a little. Right. The whole concept of it is a bit of a parody of suspense and dramatic resolution. Godot is just the stand in. It's a way of referring to plot structure in a way. And instead of being told the content of suspense, we are just given something, a name, something very hollow, and asked to be curious about that, whether you know, who Godot is and whether he's going to actually show up and all that. But none of that is ever going to be satisfied.

34:25 Erin: Yeah, I love that. The boot sort of being transformed in speech into life itself in Vladimir's misapprehension of Estragon. So we have something material then transposed in language into something abstract, which is then commented on for its own meaninglessness. So it's almost like the boot disappears and goes out into the ether over the course of that little exchange. And that routinely, I think, happens over the course of the play, another place maybe where we can go and sort of talk of this pronoun thing. Nothing to be done, you know, has a sort of maybe implied pronoun like nothing to be done about it, which later, Vladimir will supply.

All my life I've tried to put it from me, as we've already said, but then on page two in the discussion of, you know, maybe of suicide, which you don't really understand that it's about suicide until part of the way into it, Vladimir says, when I think of it all these years, but for me, where would you be? You'd be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the present minute. No doubt about it. Estragon says, and what of it? And Vladimir, it's too much for one man. On the other hand, what's the good of losing heart? Now? That's what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago.

In the 90s. So the. It just keeps being. It's so actually difficult to track. It keeps being changed or displaced. But, you know, at first, when I think of it, the it there is the abuse, I guess, that's being visited on Estragon every night. He's getting beaten up, and then he says, no doubt about it. Which is. I guess you'd call that a situational pronoun where you're just referring to kind of a whole circumstance rather than any one. One particular thing. And then it's too much for one man. Again, situational. We should have thought of it a million years ago in the 90s.

And the it. We learn later when he says, hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, that it is actually suicide.

36:29 Wes: Yeah. So what is. And they wouldn't even let us up. They tried to go up and commit suicide, but weren't let up.

36:35 Erin: Yeah. Now they wouldn't let us up. He's imagining that they wouldn't be let up. Yeah.

36:41 Wes: Yeah. I was wondering if the suggestion is that again, we're being invited to give these symbolic readings, but these guys, they're in purgatory or hell because they've committed suicide. I think that seems to be the suggestion.

36:54 Erin: Oh, I see. No, interesting.

36:57 Wes: Or they were thinking about it. They're caught in the situation where they're constantly thinking about suicide. Isn't that. I may be misreading this. Isn't that the suggestion? Hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, among the first. Among the first to jump off in the 90s. When was the Eiffel Tower built?

37:13 Erin: Yeah, I think in the late 1880s.

37:16 Wes: We get almost no proper name, references to places. We get this, and then we get Macon.

37:24 Erin: Yeah, I never thought of that.

37:26 Wes: Those sort of transcend this weird world that they're in. Right. It's almost like they pierce the veil and speak to some previous concrete, richer realities. So I want to point that out, even though I think you're right. We're meant to sort of reject, ultimately, an allegorical reading or a symbolic reading or it's supposed to fall apart at some point, but we certainly are invited to it in various ways, especially in the beginning, and then we'll get to this in a second. But the talk of Christ and all

37:56 Erin: that stuff, I'm really intrigued by that. I never saw it that way. So you're saying, in other words, you could take the purgatorial reading of this even more literally by assuming that they have already done this, but that they are in fact dead.

38:09 Wes: Or. What's the alternative reading of this?

38:13 Erin: We should have thought of it a million years. So we should have killed ourselves before it got to this point. So we should have killed ourselves long ago. And now we've been vamping ever since. So they're in the sort of afterlife of their usefulness.

38:27 Wes: No, I think you're right about this. And I was confused because. Yeah, I mean, literally. Right. We should have thought of it. We would have been among the first, I think. Must be what it meant, what it means. Now it's too late. They wouldn't even let us up. Yeah. So they had the opportunity.

38:42 Erin: Okay, Right.

38:44 Wes: Which is the way I initially read it. And then I thought, well, if they're in purgatory, maybe they actually did it.

38:48 Erin: So anyway, yeah, that's really interesting.

38:50 Wes: But I think, yeah, the reading that they had the chance to do and didn't, I mean, that is, you know, the reading that's more faithful to what. To what the text actually is saying. So. Well, thinking about suicide's a sin too. Just kidding.

39:01 Erin: Yeah. So another rich moment for pronouns is when they start to talk about the thieves. So we should get into that parable. This is getting alarming. Vladimir says. And then he says, one of the thieves was saved. It's a reasonable percentage, I suppose. 50% is the meaning of it. And it's a reasonable percentage because there are two thieves. Suppose we repented. I'll tell you the truth. These lines. Suppose we repented. Repented what? Oh, we wouldn't have to go into the details. Our being born is maybe the weakest part of the play for me. I'm not convinced by this part at all.

The idea of repentance. I don't know what they would have to repent for. And they don't know either, since they can't remember anything anyway. Vladimir asks Estragon, did you ever read the Bible? Estragon says, the Bible? I must have taken a look at it. Do you remember the Gospels? Vladimir asks. Estragon replies, I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Colored. They were very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That's where we'll go, I used to say, that's where we'll go for our honeymoon. We'll swim. We'll be happy.

Vladimir says, you should have been a poet. And Estragon says, I was gesturing towards his rags. Isn't that obvious? Anyway, so Vladimir says, ah, yes, the two thieves. Do you remember the story? No. Shall I tell it to you? No, it'll pass the time. Two thieves crucified at the same time as our Savior. One estragon cuts in our what? Vladimir says our Savior. Two thieves. One is supposed to have been saved and the other damned estragon. Saved from what? Vladimir? Hell, I'm going. Vladimir. And yet how is it this is not boring you, I hope? How is it that four of the evangelists, that of the four evangelists, only one speaks of a thief being saved?

The four of them were there or thereabouts, and only one speaks of a thief being saved. And then a bit later, one out of four of the other three, two don't mention any thieves at all. And the third says that both of them abused him. So it seems like good odds at first. Basically, one of the thieves is saved of the two. But then it occurs to Vladimir, actually the numbers are not as promising because one of the two is saved. In one of the four of the stories and in the other three evangelists accounts, in the other three gospels, the thief being saved story is not mentioned at all.

So this, I guess, erodes his coin toss faith in salvation and turns it into more like less than an eighth of. An eighth of a chance that you would be saved. Something like that.

42:04 Wes: Right. I think we're meant to wonder perhaps whether they are thieves or, you know, that's again, what they're doing in this purgatory like place. And what they're waiting for perhaps is salvation. I mean, they even say it's to be saved and it's salvation is what they're waiting for. They'll be saved if only Godot comes. But there's also an element to this which seems like a crisis of faith, Right? Based on testimonial evidence. Is the testimonial evidence reliable? Is the Bible reliable? In other words, are we actually. Is the thing that we're waiting for, does that actually exist?

Meanwhile, estragon is not even attuned to that function of the Bible. For him, it was a vacation brochure and a very ironic one because I don't think the Dead Sea is supposed to think that you're going to slake your thirst. Right. So what are the associations of the Dead Sea in the Bible? Sodom and Gomorrah. How's that related to the Dead Sea? The Jordan Valley is once lush and fertile, and the Dead Sea is kind of the result of God laying waste. I think that might be true. I think so it's at the border of the. I mean, it's east of Eden Right.

It's on the eastern side. And I guess the prophecy is that there are prophecies concerning the sea, that it will come alive or something. I think the association is to some sort of desolation. Right. And they're in a desolate place themselves Right. Now, maybe they are at the Dead Sea, so to speak. But for Estragon, it's the fact that the maps were colored and therefore that because the Dead Sea was in blue, he took the signifier as the signified. Right. So if it's pale blue on the map, then it must be something that's going to slake my thirst.

And as usual. Right. Estragon is very attuned to this. Right. His. He's hungry or he's thirsty or this or that. He's very attuned to satisfying various bodily needs or whatever. Whereas Vladimir can get more abstract and philosophical. So here they just. As usual, they just talk past each other. I don't know why Vladimir thinks this makes him a poet. I guess that's a way of giving a very generous reading to what it is that Estragon is saying.

44:23 Erin: You don't think it's. You don't think this moment is lovely?

44:26 Wes: Yeah.

44:26 Erin: I think what Estragon says is really nice.

44:28 Wes: They do, you know, they do have a lot of affection for each other.

44:32 Erin: Yeah. Is this their honeymoon? I know it's not, but.

44:35 Wes: Yeah. Well, the word honeymoon is also an odd. Right. We'll go there for a honeymoon.

44:40 Erin: Yeah.

44:41 Wes: Lovers.

44:42 Erin: One can imagine. Yeah. That he's talking about his prior life, his prior existence. But this too makes me think of. Makes me think of Laurel and Hardy expressing a sort of male female dynamic, often in the two Men comedy routine where they're kind of in a marriage, and often one or the other of them, but primarily one will express more of the feminine characteristics of that pairing than the other, which then, of course makes me think about estrogen. But, yeah, you know, I'm sure there are lots of readings of that, but it is in Laurel and Hardy.

45:18 Wes: Yeah. With regard to estragon. So. Yeah. Meaning tarragon, which makes me think of tarragon. So it's like a, you know, very commonly used French herb or commonly used in French cooking, including in bearnaise sauce, which I immediately associated to. Just because we read it recently, Julius Caesar and Casca. Right. Brutus thinks he's dull, and then Cassius says, well, he gives sauce to his wits or something like that. By basically being like a common man and speaking the way the common people speak, almost like a Politician sauce to his wit so that it'll go down easier.

And I thought, well, maybe the idea is that Estragon is supposed to balance out the wit. He's supposed to, in a way, be sauce to the wit of Vladimir. In other words, he's much more concrete and much more focused on the body and much more. That's the kind of concreteness that you need in writing or performance to keep it too interesting. If it gets too abstract, then you lose interest. But of course, he's not very saucy. He's not rich enough to actually rise to the level of the sauce. So he's just stuck being tarragon. He's not balancing out. He's not balancing out Vladimir's wit or Vladimir's sort of rational consciousness very much.

He's just being stuck in. Or maybe he is, but I prefer Estragon.

46:49 Erin: I think he. I'm just. I don't know.

46:51 Wes: Yeah, well, I mean, I prefer neither of them, but.

46:54 Erin: No, I was gonna say. I'm just making that up.

46:58 Wes: I think the second part of the play is a bit boring. The first part, I think, is quite entertaining, actually. But to see it redone and with that entropy aspect that I think you mentioned. Right. To see it fall apart even more, there's something a bit painful about that and tedious. So I enjoy. You know, I especially enjoyed the first act and I enjoy these two characters and their relationship, but I can't say that they. Right. Are they fully fleshed out? Are they not? There's actually. That's a difficult question to answer. Again, so it's not just allegory.

They're not just symbols. You know, it's not like Vladimir is just ego and Estragon is ID or something like that. And they don't have any. They don't have a life of their own. They do have a life of their own. They are characters. It's just that they are caught in this timeless, memoryless place. Right. There's not much content that they can use to give to their characters. So, for instance, they can't really. We get the one Eiffel Tower reference and a couple of other references, but otherwise there's no memory. There's no talk of what they did in the past.

We don't know what their jobs are. If they were. Maybe they're tramps, as they're usually a bum anyway. Tramps.

48:07 Erin: Yeah. Wes, maybe we can talk just a little bit about the tramp at the beginning of part two. I do think that's an interesting element of These characters, something that helps them to maybe take on a bit more shape as characters or gives them a little bit of a history in the cultural imagination that they can use to sort of get along in our minds. That helps to advance them as characters for us a little bit.

48:33 Wes: Lucky and Pozzo.

48:34 Erin: Yes, Lucky and Pozzo. That's right.

48:36 Wes: All right, thank you.

48:37 Erin: Thank you.

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the cult classic “Withnail and I,” and whether our capacity for sublimation suffers less from the crisis of modernity than from our attempts to transcend it.

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0:11 Wes: Welcome to part two of our discussion of Withnail and I. We just got done discussing Danny and some of his commentary and the parallel between the end of the friendship between Withnail and Marwood and the end of the 60s thought we'd move on to the character of Monty and ultimately to a little bit what I want to discuss about romanticism and the urban versus the rural divide. But I thought maybe we should just start with Monty, since he's such a great character. They go, so Monty's with Nail's uncle and they go to his place to get the key to the cottage.

Their solution? They're going to solve everything by going out into the country. Little do we know, but behind the scenes, Withnail has actually kind of sold marwood to the uncle, who's promised him some action if they can get the key, which sets up Monty's coming out to the countryside to intrude on them. Yeah, every scene with Monty in it is just fabulous. And some of the dialogue, his pomposity and then, as you mentioned before, double entendre. So, for instance, do you like vegetables? I've always been fond of root crops, but I only started to grow last summer.

I happen to think the cauliflower more beautiful than the rose. Withnail mentions geraniums. Monty says, little traitors. I think the carrot infinitely more fascinating than the geranium. The carrot has mystery. Flowers are essentially tarts, prostitutes for the bees. There is, you will agree, a certain je ne sais quoi, something very special about a firm young carrot do help you anyway.

1:55 Erin: Yeah, what I love about his place is you look around the room and you realize that there's cauliflower in a vase rather than flowers, and then other vegetables are decorating the room in various places.

2:07 Wes: So.

2:07 Erin: Yeah, and it's very old fashioned English looking. So it sort of combines the brocade and the tapestries and the medieval looking England with gardening and having all these vegetables around and stuff. So he's sort of a synthesis of these wonderful English cultural touchstones in this one room. I think that when he says little traitors to Withnail's idea that he grows geraniums, I think he's calling Withnail a traitor for growing flowers.

2:39 Wes: Oh, I thought he was calling the geraniums traitors.

2:42 Erin: I wasn't sure about that. Yeah, the way that he said it, I thought it could be that. That they're traitors for growing geraniums. So there's something traitorous to one's sex about being interested in women.

2:54 Wes: Oh, yeah.

2:55 Erin: You know, that was the symbolic implication I took.

2:58 Wes: No, I think that's a good surmise.

3:01 Erin: One Withnail is going to be a pimp of Marwood just as he's a pimp, you know, over his geranium patch. Or whatever. But there's a lot about root vegetable. You know, I was thinking there's a lot about peeing in the film. There's a lot about time. We've covered all the. All the other drugs and stuff like that. But then there's a good bit about carrots. There will even be a marijuana carrot of sorts. Yeah. And he's cooking onions. He ends up killing the rats with onions. So more root vegetables.

3:29 Wes: Didn't think of that. Yeah. So when Monty comes out to the country, Right. So initially they hear him outside and they're afraid because they're worried about the poacher at this point, little do they know Monty is, at least for Marwood, the one that they should actually be afraid of. And then, of course, the, you know, they find out it's Monty ultimately. And then the next morning, our sense of what the cottage is, is transformed. I think it is almost like a rebirth because when they first get to the cottage, they've come from their squalid flat in London, Camden Town.

And of course, they're telling everyone they're, you know, in the. And the boondocks that they're not. It's not the boondocks. That's not the right term for it. But anyway, in the countryside that they're not actually Londoners, so that they won't be hated for being Londoners. But what I think they would get, thought they would get out of that has turned out to be very disappointing. You get some scenes where Marwood can appreciate the countryside, but that's a very small part of it. They end up at a cottage that there's no heat and there's no water and they're burning fire furniture to get by and they don't have any food.

And ultimately the farmer brings them a chicken they have to kill and then cook in the oven seated in a seated position.

4:48 Erin: But like unaccommodated man.

4:50 Wes: Yeah.

4:51 Erin: Poor bare forked animal.

4:54 Wes: Yeah.

4:55 Erin: This is. Again, they're a little shrunken down person. They can deal with it seems they could strangle a chicken.

5:01 Wes: Right. Although Withnail fantasizes about having shot it and then is very fond of the gun while they're there and they go out fishing to shoot fish. It sort of becomes a right. Survival's once again at stake. You get the sense in the beginning of the film it's desperate and their very survival is at stake because of the condition of the flat and the fact that they have no money. And then they get to the countryside and it's the same thing. Although the contrast with how things go once Monty's there. Making them breakfast in the morning gives you the impression that, okay, this is self imposed.

They just bring the squalor and the deprivation with them. They're at a perfectly fine cottage. It is what it is. It's in the countryside. But the sense of it having been so dire is really about them. So in the morning, there's Monty making up a really nice breakfast. And they, of course, could have just gone, I guess, grocery shopping at any time.

6:00 Erin: Well, that's. That's the one thing. Yes, definitely, and certainly they could do much better. But I also wondered how much of it had to do with the lack of money and preparation, not understanding what was in the cottage or what wasn't in the cottage. Monty's come up with a bunch of things in the car, it seems, but, yeah, they're just. They're just sort of hopeless when Monty's there. Just immediately becomes really cozy and lovely and. Yeah. And I think there's something too, about. As I mentioned, Monty's apartment in London is. Or his house in London, I guess, is a fantasy of Englishness.

And then they come up to the cottage and the cottage has portraits of George V and Mary of Teck on either side of the fireplace. So there's a. It's an older England that they've gone into. They go into the Crow and Crown, I think it is. It's the pub where they meet the. The poacher and the old English army man, who himself is, you know, very much a type similar to the. The guy I love in the Brendan Fraser Mummy, the 1999 mummy, which we should cover on the podcast at some point. It's one of my favorites. You know, the old guy, the old military man who's living out this fantasy, still believing that he's engaged in a war or something like that, who lies

7:12 Wes: about having been in the military.

7:14 Erin: Withnail with nail. Yeah.

7:16 Wes: And he says, oh, yeah, I could tell. And then, yeah. Asks where he's stationed. He's like, Ireland. He's like, oh, crack at the Mick.

7:24 Erin: Crack at the Mick. Which I take to be, you know, there's, you know, Withnail's stories, which he repeatedly invents, do show tremendous aptitude as an actor. He's always playing a role or putting on a kind of a disguise. But then also, the way that Withnail sort of advances the plot or the improvised plot twists that he comes up with do seem very associative. I took that to mean that he or I took the Ireland idea as being Adopted from the Irish guy that had confronted them in the pub in Camden. So that he's getting back at the Irish somehow by imagining this military past where he used to just. Right. So there's a wish fulfillment element to all of his little improvisations, no matter how ridiculous they are. He also says he's currently a journalist and that they're doing a story on the. On the town and small town life.

8:20 Wes: Right, right.

8:20 Erin: And then later he says that they're going to set a movie there, which is, you know, kind of more on the nose wish fulfillment.

8:26 Wes: But we are multi millionaires.

8:29 Erin: We're multimillionaires. Right. Which maybe Withnail is. He just can't access any of the money because his father's alive, withholding it from him.

8:38 Wes: Yeah. We get the sense that he's going to end up all right financially if he's still alive. And in a way, like his uncle. Right. His uncle had aspirations as well when younger and now he's fine, he's gotten his money from somewhere, but.

8:51 Erin: Yeah, that's right, that's right. Yeah. So maybe Monty is more psychologically, perhaps, just as threatening to Withnail as to Marwood. Not quite, but almost. Oh, yeah. So in the crow and crown, there are pictures of Elizabeth and Philip on the walls and there's an image of her coronation garb. So that would be the 50s. It is like they've stepped back in time. So there's something. If they're flat is the 60s and they have to escape the flat in order to find someplace that hasn't been destroyed by them in some way.

9:24 Wes: And I think that's pre modern. Right. So this is part of the romanticism. It's modernity and the urban are alienated and I'm going to find less alienated situation in the countryside with the simple folk and in being connected to nature and in a way going back in time. Which sounds like the point you're trying to make. Yeah.

9:50 Erin: It's as if the fantasy of the 60s, we're sort of seeing the reality of it. I mean, it could be that this is representative of 69 and therefore the failure of the promise of the 60s. Or this flat represents the entire decade and the fact that it's actually been downhill from the social fabric. And yes, the sort of fanciful or the loose grip on reality that the military guy represents, but still functioning and connected to real life in terms of just active, practical things like farming. That the 60s are being represented maybe as some kind of aberration in all of this.

10:29 Wes: Well, I think that the countryside doesn't turn out to be such a great thing after all. And partly, as I mentioned, I think they bring their problems with them, of course, but also we get the sense that the natural, which is supposed to be better, turns out to have its own sinister undercurrents. So, right, the bull, there's the randy bull. So it's not all great being out there in nature. There's a sexual power to nature which can be persecutory. The natural is about what grows and ultimately about the sexual. Monty is interested in carrots not just because they represent penises and not just because he's obese and likes to eat, but.

Right. He's interested in the romantic connection to nature, which is also a kind of connection to sex, I think. So they're going to be just as fearful of, say, the poacher, although he turns out to be more benevolent and initially afraid that the poacher is trying to break into the house and all that stuff. But what I'm trying to say is that. And in the figure of Monty himself, I think you get romanticism as representative as having the sinister exploitative undercurrent. So just to give an example of some of Monty's great speeches, where right in that breakfast in the morning, it seems like everything is now coming up roses.

Everything is transformed. It feels like the vacation that they wanted might be coming together because they have a nice breakfast. But then we start to get Monty's stuff. He says the old order changeth, yielding place to new. And God fulfills himself in many ways. And soon, I suppose I shall be swept away by some vulgar little tumor. Some vulgar little tumor. I love that. Oh, my boys, my boys. We're at the end of an age. We live in a land of weather forecasts and breakfasts that set in, shat on by Tories, shoveled up by labor. And here we are, we three, perhaps the last island of beauty in the world.

Sounds a little bit Matthew Arnold esque.

12:34 Erin: Let us be true to one another.

12:36 Wes: Right, Right. Yeah, exactly. And he's going to hit on Marwood. What else from the countryside? When they're walking in the countryside and he's talking about they do their thing where they want the finest wines known to humanity of a grapevine. So later at dinner, surrounded by trees in nature, one feels a glorious stirring of the senses, a rejection of the poisonous inhibition and a fecund motion of the soul. All the glorious trials of youth, dear boy. Because Marwood makes a comment about the fact that the squalidness of the cottage interferes with the pleasure.

He's like all the glorious trials of youth, dear boy. When I was a lad, I'd rocket off on my tandem with Wrigglesworth and we'd just ride and ride and at night we'd find some barn and fall asleep with the perfumes of nature sighing on our skin. Yeah, just great, great stuff. But in the end, right, all of that, what does Monty represent? He's given up on ambition, he tells us, but he looks at it with a certain kind of nostalgia and resignation. He's nostalgic also about the loves of his youth and he's representative of what might happen to Withnail after giving up.

But also I think he's representative of the sinister undercurrent of romanticism and the countryside, which is that it's not all just carrots and roses, carrots and geraniums.

14:08 Erin: It's also stick.

14:09 Wes: There's, you know, the natural world is dangerous, it's violent, it's driven by sexual instinct. All of that stuff comes out in Monty.

14:18 Erin: He's a bit sad, you know, the way that he leaves and all of that. I mean, he's been humiliated kind of because of Withnail. But, you know, when I say, let us be true to one another, he does have a kind of. His singular moral code seems to be faithfulness and so lets Marwood off the hook because he doesn't want Marwood to be unfaithful, untrue.

14:38 Wes: I mean, he does try to rape him, essentially,

14:44 Erin: but he has stopped.

14:45 Wes: I mean, he does have some burglary,

14:48 Erin: he does have some, some more than natural, you know, he has some guardrails. Yeah, I thought, I thought a little bit about, about the fact that they're in the Lake District and what role Capital R Romanticism is playing here. Because one would think that this is a place which historically, for the last couple hundred years anyway, hasn't been totally devoid of artistic types. You know, I love the moment when Withnail yells up at the sky in that kind of Caspar David Friedrich beautiful vista, where he says, I'm gonna be a star. So I don't know what to make of all of that or that, that particular moment where rather than appreciation of the grandeur of nature, he feels defiant and he's going to be part of the cosmos in a purely self serving way, which then the idea of a star comes back in the Hamlet soliloquy at the end of the film where it turns sour for him.

But yeah, he has a delusion of grandeur in this moment. That he's going to get the better of all of these men who have been oppressing him, you know, as if, like, you could fight a bully with this idea that you're gonna be a famous actor. But, yeah, I don't know. I was trying to reconcile all of that, what Wordsworth and Coleridge have to do, maybe with Marwood and Withnail, if the two of them are like a degraded version of Wordsworth and Coleridge, who themselves were friends living in the Lake District, who ended up having, you know, sort of difficult at times, artistic relationship.

The King Henry in Penrith is another great pub name that they go to. Another historical English emblem of masculinity. If it's Henry VIII or some other Henrys, but especially Henry vii, they've gone into town to buy Wellington's. But then, of course, they take the money and immediately squander it on booze, which seems, you know, really. They really seem beyond help to me in that moment because I realize they want to get away from Monty and just be without him for a while. But he has all that great wine back at the cottage, so why they would need to immediately squander this money on more booze is.

It's a frustrating moment for me. So anyway, they go to this pub, the King Henry. They get kicked out. They go into the Penrith Tea Rooms. And then it's just old people. It's just all these old people that are having tea and want them out and they're trying to stay, saying that they're multi millionaires, that they're working on a film up here. The owner wants to call the police on them and says, we'll keep them here until they arrive. The police arrive. Marwood and Withnail just then just walk out. They just get away because they can't possibly be held back by these old guys.

So Monty shows up in the.

17:38 Wes: In the car.

17:39 Erin: Yeah, in the Rolls, which, you know, maybe they are multi millionaires. Maybe you should have given them some cakes.

17:47 Wes: Withnail says, we'll be back.

17:49 Erin: Yeah. Have you been to the Lake District?

17:52 Wes: No.

17:53 Erin: I've been to some towns like this in England and in Scotland, and if you go into some of these places, there is. It is just like an older clientele.

18:01 Wes: Dodgy older.

18:03 Erin: They're great for that reason, but I never came roaring drunk into one, so I never had a bad time.

18:10 Wes: Have you ever gone roaring drunk into a stodgy establishment where you shouldn't be roaring drunk?

18:17 Erin: No.

18:18 Wes: Yeah. I can't remember if I. You know, I probably did, but I can't remember.

18:23 Erin: That's a great thing about these things. They take care of themselves. The embarrassment just goes away.

18:29 Wes: I know my friend Lebec and I used to quote that bring us the finest wines known to humanity. Frequently.

18:38 Erin: Yeah. And then this interesting thing with Monty happens where he admonishes Marwood, which I think must be for squandering the money, you know, it must have been.

18:49 Wes: Yeah. Monty's very upset with them.

18:51 Erin: Must be because they're so drunk.

18:52 Wes: Wellingtons and. Yeah, being drunk.

18:54 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Because they were going to tell him the story that. Oh, don't worry, we'll just tell him there was a farmer's conference and there was a run on these Wellingtons or something, so. So we couldn't buy them, so we had to squander the money. But I think when he picks them up, they must be so drunk and so out of it that he could tell what's really gone on. And so, yeah, so the suggestion is that Marwood is leading Withnail astray, which made me wonder if Withnail was leading Marwood astray throughout the film. He's certainly getting him into bad situations because of his big mouth.

19:23 Wes: I see Withnail as the bad, bad influence.

19:26 Erin: He's causing problems for Marwood. But is he actually. He's not successfully leading Marwood astray? I wouldn't say.

19:34 Wes: Well, Marwood says, what about the Wellingtons? And he says, bollocks to the Wellingtons. Right. So, yeah, there are many instances where Marwood is sort of. There's a bit of a survival instinct and you know, from the beginning of the movie to the end. And it's reflected in the fact that he actually gets an acting part. He's the one who comes to realization they can't keep going on this way. And he's going to go out and get tea. And there's a funny. When they get to the cottage, there's a funny point where he's like, okay, we're going to separate into fact finding groups.

Groups of one. You'll deal with the water and I'll deal with the fire. Something like that at least has some interest in practical problems and in solving them. But yeah, he frequently just. It seemed to me he'll just do. He's very fearful. And that terror, as I mentioned, comes across from the very beginning of the movie. And you see it. It's a great comic effect in both the them. But like with the guy, the Irishman who calls them ponces, just the level of fear that Marwood gives off in the bathroom looking at the graffiti, worried about being raped ultimately.

But, yeah, it seems to me he operates from the position of fear and is being carried along by Withnail's libertine, debauched attitude towards life, which is something Withnail can probably afford, as you mentioned, in the long run, more than he can from a financial perspective. He's got to do something, right? Withnail, in a way, can go on to be his uncle. Right?

21:13 Erin: Yeah. But I think there's something about Marwood which is really, despite Withnail getting him into scrapes and things, which is constitutionally impervious to Withnail. I mean, remarkably so. And maybe that is ultimately down to the class difference, too, that Marwood has to be more practical, has to be more scientific word he uses, or is more keyed into reality. The thing I really don't get about Marwood is why he smiles so much at Monty, which seems so unnecessary and needlessly encouraging from the beginning, when Monty is reaching around him to get into the bags. Why he doesn't just step away out of Monty's way instead of physically allowing himself to be put in this really compromising position is very.

21:59 Wes: Yeah, Withnail calls him out on this, right?

22:01 Erin: Oh, yes, yes. Yeah.

22:02 Wes: Marwood says, I got a cramp in the mouth from grinning. Stop smiling at him. I can't help it. I'm so uptight with him, I can't stop myself. But he does a lot of that. When the Irish guy comes up to them, I think they both give off. They do that smile of terror, like this terrified smile thing where they're just deer caught in the headlights and they don't know how to do anything but smile.

22:25 Erin: Well, Withnail's way of dealing with that kind of terror seems to be to out submissive himself out, you know, like he's going to go all the way in the submission direction and sort of fawn, like when he says he has a heart condition, you know, he's going to make himself into the wimpiest wimp in the world, you know, to try to get the guy to leave him alone. And then I think Marwood learns from that. He learned something about that tactic, maybe from Withnail, but one would think that he would be a better actor and he would understand. Obviously, Withnail has created a situation where Monty believes something about Marwood, which isn't true.

And in the end, Monty's humiliation is all on Withnail's head. And yet, at the same time, Marwood has also been needlessly encouraging him with this, like, weird smiling throughout the entire every single one of his interactions with Monty. And he doesn't just step out of the way. He doesn't just act as though it would just be a normal thing to step out of the way. And so it's a little frustrating to see his resignation or passivity or when he's complaining about being too high and he gets kind of whiny. It's a moment where, again, I kind of break sympathy with Marwood.

I think that for somebody who has gotten an acting part as a. No, I guess not as a soldier. That was the part that he originally went for, was the soldier, but instead he's gonna be the lead, which maybe is, you know, head soldier. But anyway, somebody who was able to successfully get this part, one would think that he would have a little more gumption, is what I'm trying to say. And yet ultimately his passivity doesn't stand in the way of him getting the part.

23:56 Wes: Well, it sounds like. I mean, he wasn't necessarily passive in that aspect of his life. From my point of view, I don't find either of them sympathetic except in a comedic sense throughout the movie. I'm not. They're both so absurdly terrified of everything and everything's an emergency, you know, running out of wine. You know, as Withnail says, we've got some very distressing news. We're out of wine. As he's pouring himself the last cup of wine.

24:26 Erin: Well, but Marwood is the one we're supposed to identify with to a certain extent. Right. We get his interiority. We.

24:31 Wes: Yeah, a bit more. But I think your point is well taken. It's kind of hard to. He's got some of the seeds of more of a more realistic orientation towards the world and towards a bit of a survival instinct and something that's working against self destructiveness. Right. Withnails is a force of pure destructiveness and self destructiveness. And Marwood seems to have been very induced by that and is almost as bad in many ways. Not as angry, not as envious and more passive than. Than Withnail, but in a similar psychologically abject state. Right. We don't see Marwood transformed as a character.

We don't get to really see the arc. It all happens behind the scenes. He's planted the seeds with an audition, and in the end he gets the part and cuts his hair and leaves. And so that's the moment where he actually does something that's not completely passive. He's going to leave with nail and he's not going to even let him walk him all the way to the station. That's the first time I think he really genuinely asserts himself in the film.

25:41 Erin: I think there is a slight moment of transformation when Monty leaves and leaves that note for them and Marwood reads it and feels quite sorry for him.

25:50 Wes: Oh, yeah, yeah.

25:51 Erin: He tells Withnail, you'll suffer for this. What you have done will have to be paid for. And then it is immediately paid for by the knock on the door, because it's the telegram telling him, Right. That he's gotten the part.

26:04 Wes: Good point. Yeah. When he tells off. Yeah, that's the big.

26:07 Erin: Yeah, yeah.

26:08 Wes: It's a big deal. When he really, really tells off Withnail. Yeah, that is a big change.

26:13 Erin: Yeah, you're right. Then he cuts his hair and refuses the drink, says that he doesn't have time. Right. This is another return to the time motif because Withnail has been driving furiously to get to London. He keeps saying that he's making time over and over again. Again, this idea that if he speeds in the car, you know, this connection to speeding. But of course, as always happens, you have to pay for it. Just like the description you read in part one of Marwood talking about speed, that eventually it catches up with you and seeps through your pores or something like that. In this, in the same way, Withnail is stopped by the police. And then ultimately, of course, getting arrested takes a lot more time, so you might as well have gone the speed limit or something.

26:57 Wes: Richard E. Grant had never. I don't know if he had never had a drink, but he had never been drunk and was a teetotaler.

27:03 Erin: Oh, no way. That's so funny.

27:06 Wes: Yeah, so Bruce Robinson, the director, writer and director of the movie, had him, insisted that he experienced being drunk. And so they got him very drunk until he vomited. You can see there's a little 20 minute documentary online if people want to look at it and see the actors talking about all of this. Yeah. So Robinson, in that documentary, talks about what a great job he thought that Grant did, pretending to be drunk and then pretending to be drunk, trying to pretend to not be drunk. Like when they get stopped by the cops. And he gives that look to the. Just the look on his face that he gives to the cops. And when he says, I've only had a few ales, they open the door and he practically falls out of the car because he's leaning so heavily in the door. So sorry to interrupt you, but I wanted to put in that little tidbit about. And Richard E. Grant is so great in this.

27:55 Erin: Yeah, he Is. Yeah, yeah, he says, you know, Marwood says, I'll be late. You know, I have to go to the station. I'll be late. And Withnail says, there's always time for a drink. This is the final part of the film, and Marwood insists that he doesn't have time. So he's gotten out of the tractor beam of. Withnail squandering time or, you know, wasting time. He's been able to not. Not waste time anymore and get out of this cycle or whatever. And then with Nell, ends with a Hamlet soliloquy which begins, I have of late, but wherefore I know not lost all my mirth.

So there's this idea of lateness and having run out of time inherent in the beginning of that speech. And then he talks about the roof fretted with golden fire and how that's all nothing, so that he seems to have lost his. This is almost like his parting speech where he, like Monty, knows that he will not play the Dane. And being a star, being the golden fire and the hanging firmament is not going to be possible for him or no longer meaningful to him.

28:54 Wes: It seems man delights not me. No, nor women neither. Nor women neither. Speaking to your point about the lack of women in the film and any romantic interests for that matter, I don't

29:06 Erin: mean to make too fine a point of that, but I think there's something really sinister about that. The lack of interest in women or discussion of women at all.

29:13 Wes: Well, it goes along with drinking lighter fluid. There's a whole collection of related sinister things.

29:20 Erin: Right. What goes along, too with, I think, creative stagnancy. I wanted to talk because him saying this speech, I guess, to the wolves reminds me of the various. Just of the names in the film. So we never get Marwood. Right. It's just on. I looked it up. How come the character's name is Marwood in this script that you sent me and it appears on a telegram. That's the only way that we know that his name is Marwood.

29:47 Wes: So the original screenplay has Marwood as the name, but I don't know if they put that in after the fact. But as you can buy it, like, if you buy the original screenplay, it'll say Marwood. It was on movies and materials related to the film during promotion. I don't know. But, yeah, it's purposefully. It doesn't come up in the movie. Is it really on the telegram?

30:08 Erin: I don't know. It just. That's what AI thinks. So take it, you know, for what it's worth.

30:14 Wes: Yeah, I think that might be a question. But anyway. Yeah. Purposefully. Right. Yeah. We don't. He's just I. Not Marwood.

30:21 Erin: Right. Well, you know, it's interesting because it is a. Like Withnail. You know, it's kind of a compound name. And so it got me thinking about names because the M is, you know, Withnail is, in a way, that upside down version of Marwood, just with the m and the W, I mean to say. And they're both. They're both compound words.

30:40 Wes: And then nail on wood and.

30:42 Erin: Yeah, right, right. Yes, that. And then also the farmer. Remember when they're trying to say, oh, don't you know, Montague Withnail, who lives in this cottage? And he's. He says, no, that guy. I think his name is French. And he calls him Adrian de la Touche, which is really, really good. But anyway, I looked up all of this because I was just interested in. So Montague means pointed mountain. And the transliteration, even in the closed caption on the Criterion Channel's version of Withnail and I, which is how I watched the movie, the transliteration of

31:21 Wes: Sisters with your captions.

31:23 Erin: No, no, I turned. No, I don't watch anything with closed caption. I turned it on to make sure that I got this right. And so he says, I. I seen a fat man, London type, queer sort. I think his name's French, or summit. And it transliterates his accent as S U M M I T. So his name is Montague. Right. Which means pointed mountain. And then the transliteration is Summit, which is really apt and then I looked up De la Touche. Touch. What would. What's that about? So it means of the touch and touch, or Touche means small patch of trees of the small wood or thicket.

So Marwood and Adrian de la Touche. And, you know, there's some clever things going on with Marwood's relationship with Withnail and with Monty, even this imaginative name that the farmer has given Monty. It seems suggestive of what's going to happen, but only if you know what Marwood's name is. So it's kind of like a little in joke, maybe in the movie. Oh, and the other. Sorry. The reason why I brought this up is because Withnail is also experimenting with different stage names.

32:33 Wes: Oh, yeah.

32:34 Erin: He says at one point, he suggests that Desmond Wolf. And I thought that was indicative. Again, because there's so much symbolic masculinity going on in the various root vegetables and other things that Woolf was a desire to maybe put on A more. More masculine identity, more aggressive, perhaps. Marwood tells him it's too like Donald Wolfit, who was a famous English stage actor. And then later he suggests another name. So he seems to have borrowed Marwood's Donald and suggests Donald Twain. But then I just looked up, I was like, what's the origin of the name Donald?

And it turns out that means world ruler, which, there's a lot to be said about that, that I prefer not to go go there. Who knew that Donald Duck, for instance, had to take one, had such a. An imposing meaning to his name. But, yeah, in the end, he's Desmond Wolf would be. Desmond Wolf is giving his soliloquy to the. The caged wolves in the zoo.

33:37 Wes: So in spite of all his rage, he's still just a Desmond Wolf in a cage. To almost quote one of my favorite songs. Are you Smashing Pumpkins fan?

33:49 Erin: I. I appreciate Smashing Pumpkins. I wouldn't call myself a fan. It's not really my cup of tea, but I've had a lot of people try to get me into it, so I've listened to a lot of Smashing Pumpkins, but.

33:59 Wes: Yeah, yeah. Had to be able to embrace your melancholy side.

34:03 Erin: No, I do not by smashing any type of gourd, though, in my own ways.

34:11 Wes: What's the difference between a gourd and a root vegetable?

34:14 Erin: They don't grow underground. They grow on top of the ground.

34:18 Wes: Okay. All right. Well, on that note, that's a suitable place to end the well, to quote Withnail. We can't go on like this. We'll have to stop. So.

34:31 Erin: All right, thank you. Thank you.