4 - The Journey of Lines
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2014
Summary
You and Me Among the Kites
Newly established in the house in Petropolis in Brazil in 1952, Bishop recorded a ‘strange’ incident in her notebook:
The other day we saw something very strange. I suddenly noticed what looked like a thread, or a drawn line, in the air, up in the vast gorge, or steep valley behind the house – about ¼ of a mile away, apparently. It stretched right across, from mt. to mt. – it disappeared against the rock but was visible against the green – about ½ mile of it, slack; like a slack-wire artists wire(?)
Commenting on the fact that it took a while for other people, including Lota, to believe her and see the phenomenon with their own eyes, she goes on:
The next day it wasn't there. The only possible explanation is that it was the string of an escaped kite that had somehow blown that far & caught on one side, with the string on the other – it was an extremely long string, if that is what it was.
(I kept thinking of Klee's ‘take a walk with a line’).If this struck Bishop as an odd thing to see from her remote mountain home, the fact that she noticed it was not, since it seemed almost magically to allow her to describe, in a different landscape, many of her artistic passions: wavering lines, appearance and disappearance and kites. She was also able to make a link with the painter Paul Klee, whose work she particularly admired.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Elizabeth BishopLines of Connection, pp. 144 - 171Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013