Natural history and epiphany: Elizabeth Bishop's Darwin Letter

Darwin's topic--the origin of species--is that moment when, as a product of countless random variations over countless generations, a new species can be said to come into being. A great deal of what Darwin is arguing against is the position of natural theology--that all species were created at one time and that species is a fact, not an idea. In this sense his work is about the origin of species in the abstract singular as well as the origin of species in the concrete plural, and his work shows that the idea of species is essentially an enabling fiction: "No one definition [of species] has as yet satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species" (Origin 122). Species is merely the point at which enough random empirical fact (variation) has accumulated to give birth to a new abstraction (species). Random variation is as "perfectly useless" as the concentration of the natural historian, and yet it still leads to the abstraction of species, just as what Paradis calls the natural historian's "moments of perception" (94) lead to "an abstract physical scheme" (101).

And this process continues up the chain of taxonomical being:

     Thus the small differences distinguishing varieties of the same
     species, steadily tend to increase till they come to equal the
     greater differences between species of the same genus, or even of
     distinct genera. (Darwin, Origin 175)

At the end of his chapter on natural selection, Darwin likens the natural world to a tree, the individual twigs of which represent variations, the larger twigs species, the branches genera, and so on. The "great branches" that stand for the classes and orders of the natural world "were themselves, once, when the tree was small, budding twigs" (176). In drawing this analogy Darwin goes beyond denying the simultaneous creation of all species and calls into question the idea of classification as a whole. Species, genus, family, order--all become little more than arbitrary stops on a continuum that begins with random variation of the smallest kind. In this way the origin of species (or genus or family or order) is an oddly satisfying metaphor for what Bishop is trying to say about the conscious and the unconscious. Variation is to species as observation is to abstraction as conscious is to unconscious. There is no split. Rather, there is a continuous spectrum, and there is the moment when a buildup at one end of the spectrum brings about a click at the other end, when accumulated observations trigger, in some mysterious way, a giddy epiphany. To read the world through Bishop's letter, the origin of species is in that moment when nature, her eyes fixed on minute details, sinks or slides "giddily off into the unknown."

Like Darwin, Bishop treasures a working interrelation of the conscious and the unconscious mind, a division of intellectual labor. Their work is done, according to Bishop, in sequence: the conscious mind begins with a "perfectly useless concentration" on "facts and minute details," and the unconscious mind follows behind with that "sudden relaxation," the feeling of "sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown." Crucially, Bishop seeks to replicate this process in her reader, insisting that "What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same things that is necessary for its creation." Implicit in the Darwin letter, then, is both a statement of what she seeks in her own poetry and a guide for her reader. Her goal is to craft a set of particulars engrossing enough to draw the reader further and further into the poem so that, once entranced, the reader can be pushed out, half-conscious, into the unknown. She asks the reader simply to read with Darwin's rapt attention, to achieve a "self-forgetful [...] concentration." Ideally, by the poem's end, such careful scrutiny will have transcended itself, and like the speaker of "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance," we will have "looked and looked our infant sight away" (Poems 59).