ABSTRACT
Three days shy of her seventh birthday, Elizabeth waits for her aunt who has a dental appointment. Bishop’s matter-of-fact description of the place, time, and occasion provides all the “fixed points” to which one can attach thought and existence lest one be seized with dizziness. For halfway through the poem, reading National Geographic, Elizabeth suddenly exclaims how strange it is to be “an Elizabeth.” It is as if she had suddenly stumbled upon what Bergson calls “the precise point where there is a certain intuition to seize on.”1 As she finds herself among things, “grown-up people, / arctics and overcoats, / lamps and magazines,” Elizabeth’s reaction exemplifies the sudden clairvoyance of the waiter who realizes the astounding particularity of her self in the dizzying movements of duration:
The critical word here seems to be the indefinite article “an,” which points to Elizabeth’s sense of the gratuitousness of her own appearance among arctics and overcoats, lamps and magazines. Grown-up people are indefinite articles as well; they are listed among objects; their subjectivities, cut out from the whole like lumps of sugar, dissolve into:
Elizabeth’s eye here recalls Benjamin’s camera, whose intimate perspectives allow the “lowerings and liftings . . . interruptions and isolations . . . extensions and accelerations . . . enlargements and reductions” by which these objects and body parts appear as the strange “unconsciously penetrated space” that opens itself to the gaze of the waiter. The whole within which they have suddenly been cut out is the whole that “held us all together / or made us all just one.” Elizabeth encounters the whole in National Geographic, whose illustrations of overflowing volcanoes, horrifying breasts, a dead man on a pole represent the primordial reality of duration within which one may appear accidentally as a pair of hands, or as an Elizabeth.
