“Her smooth skin, her little gondola. How he wanted to climb into her little gondola.”
– “Beatrice,” Karin TedbeckThe titular character
Beatrice isn’t a human, but the ‘character’ is given qualities of a human woman. It, or rather she, is a prototype airship Franz Hiller sees in a Berlin fair. The attraction Hiller feels for Beatrice is remarkably human and borderline sexual. For example, a quote that describes Beatrice: “Her body was voluptuous, oblong, matte skin wrapped tightly over a gently rounded skeleton” (15). To Hiller, the airship isn’t just a simple airship prototype, but a real woman.
The personification and objectifition of the airship Beatrice don’t stop there. The very first quote at the top, which states that Hiller wants to climb into her little gondola, sounds a bit too intimate to be considered normal behavior. He wants to express his physical attraction through touch, like for example going into the cordon or by climbing into the gondola. Also, it is interesting to note that at one point, Hiller steps into Beatrice and smells musk, a scent that can be associated with sex. The line “how she dipped under his weight” may also recall images of sex, of how a man presses down into a woman.
In the later pages, Beatrice is described as having a cold and distant attitude towards Hiller. Later, when Hiller shows Beatrice Anna’s baby, Hiller conveys ‘approval.’ Toward the end of the story, we are given the confession that apparently Hiller ‘raped’ Beatrice. Therefore, Beatrice is no simple airship, nor a simple technology. She is a real woman in the eyes of Franz Hiller, and she possesses a sexuality and personality as if she is organic.
This obsession with an inanimate airship might in part be due to Hiller’s crumbled psyche, in which his attraction (or lack of) to a real woman becomes superimposed onto an airship. The damaged mental health Hiller suffers from persists even when another character enters his life: Anna’s baby Josephine. Despite being a real human, Josephine is treated like an engine. Her mouth is referred to as a piston; she is eventually fed coal-water; and the noises Josephine makes are described as whistles and tweets. It isn’t until Josephine actually talks that the reader realizes that Josephine is an actual human being, and not a delusional fantasy of Hiller’s creation.
Tags: Beatrice, Karen Tidbeck, Tidbeck
This poem is full of remarkable metaphors: a house “far out at sea all night,” the woods “crashing through darkness,” the “skyline a grimace,” the house ringing “like some fine green goblet in the note / That any second would shatter it.” My favorite image from this poem, though, is in the two lines above, a “black- / Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly.” The exaggerated alliteration of the b sound combined with the staccato rhythm of the short syllables seems to conjure the brutal strength of the wind, a tension that is released in the very different sound of slowly. Every time I read this poem I feel as though I can see the gull straining and straining against the storm’s winds, its wings extended, and then, when its strength is finally gone, its form slowly bending before it is swept away.
I remember when, years ago, I would read Donald Justice’s poem “Men at Forty” with a kind of anticipatory nostalgia, imagining the sweet melancholy I would feel when I left my thirties behind and joined the legions of men who must, as Justice puts it, “learn to close softly / The doors to rooms they will not be / Coming back to.” I imagined what it would be like to stand before a bathroom mirror and encounter my own image in precisely the manner that the poem describes –
As for the photos I have of my father, they have begun to look – not more like me than him, not that, but more of me, as if they were taken as sly predictions or gentle warnings (to which I was, of course, always much too young to attend) that this is what I would become, the expression I would bear, the lines and folds that I would wear as though they were etched there, as indeed they were in a way, in some act of ritual scarification.
I don’t snicker any more. I don’t snicker because I know what I didn’t know at thirty or even forty, what even Donald Justice may not have known when he wrote this poem. He was, after all, only just past forty himself when the poem appeared in his 1967 collection Night Light, and so perhaps he was still caught in the sweet pleasures of its sad embrace. I know now, a man at fifty, that even our mundane earthly debts acquire, as time passes, as the scale dips further down, their own spectral grace. We begin to sense that these too – and not just our mortgaged house but the spindly trees we planted, the weedy beds to which we seasonally attend, the dry leaves spilling from the woods’ edge, the sputtering car with its cracked windshield, the flat-tired wheelbarrow, the unwieldy unreliable rake, the vines creeping around porch rails and above doorways, the wasp-infested birdhouse, the nest spilling twigs and cloth from its perch, the carpenter bees’ tunnels of mud and spit, the aching joints, the calloused hands, the cloudy eyes, the stacks of bills in their leather folder, the empty bottles and cans in the kitchen cupboard, the unsprung mousetraps and garbage bags and dryer sheets and wicker baskets and clothes yet to be ironed and nearly spent candles and loose change on the counter – all of this, every bit, are merely the notes composing the grand elegiac hymn, a million and a million more droning voices. They are all, all of them, that twilight sound I hear. It is immense, unceasing, terrifying, as haunting and beautiful a sound as anyone would ever hope to hear.