#365

Scroll down: http://medusaskitchen.blogspot.com/2005/09/im-afraid-youll-find-me-out.html

I did the math: Had B. been born on the same day as me, he’d have killed himself 24 days ago. I’ve outlived him by 3 weeks and 3 days and counting, assuming I make it through the night, which I have every reasonable expectation of doing. Not that this is a competition. It’s just that it’s New Year’s Eve, just past 9:30, one of those moments when you stop and assess. The upcoming year is filled with possibility, and life, and good work. I’m not famous yet, have a couple smaller prizes to my credit from pretty long ago, but nothing major, and a few things published. Small accomplishments, but they’re real and they matter to me. But my life is throbbing. I wouldn’t trade a minute of it for fame and an attenuating reputational immortality. But I’m as tired as Henry feels, having driven home today from a visit in Canada, after two nights of little sleep. But I don’t feel close to 900 years old.

I’m not old. I don’t abuse my body with drink, too much food, drugs, and I don’t abuse my psyche with behavior that drags it down and wears it out. I have friends who love me and a family who loves me, and I love them back and mean it. I’m learning how to work. There is so much more to come.

I’m also bone-tired tonight for another reason, having donated a full year of conscientious attention to a talented major poet who pretty much admits in his work how and why he was such an abject failure as a human being. Sometimes he has felt like the proverbial drunken uncle in my year: It’s Thanksgiving, and at halftime of the Lions game, here come Uncle Filbert’s pronouncements on “the Negro question,” “limp-wristed queers,” “hot ladies,” and just lately the 2^nd Amendment, a big fence on the border to keep them damn Mexicans out, and Islamic Sharia law. No sense arguing with him, just let him air his stuff then move on as nimbly as you can. You still love him, because you have to, but you do. Uncle Filbert is from Detroit, a big Lion’s fan with a runny tattoo of the team’s blue rampant lion logo on his upper arm. The Lions always lose on Thanksgiving, which you secretly count on, and which makes Uncle Filbert’s ignorant ideas somehow easier to swallow. He’s your mom’s half-brother, but Uncle Filbert is a loser and a fraud, and around ten years old is when you began to figure out what everybody else had always known all along. What B. figures is that while he’s actually a pretty accomplished and famous poet (he was) eventually he will be exposed as a life-fraud, à la Uncle Filbert. He was exactly that, though B. might have been surprised that it wasn’t such a secret. He certainly published the news in his work, if anyone pays attention. (Many still do.) That, and he had nightmares and he drank a lot and he imagined enemies out to get him. That’s what’s going on in this DS 365.

#364

[No online link available.]

Ubu Roi was a play by the French writer Alfred Jarry, first performed in Paris in 1896. The response to its opening was riotous. William Butler Yeats was present in the audience, and is reported to have commented, “What more is possible? After us the Savage God.” Wikipedia describes it as “a precursor to Dada, Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. It is the first of three stylized burlesques in which Jarry satirizes power, greed, and their evil practices—in particular the propensity of the complacent bourgeoisie to abuse the authority engendered by success.” So, the infamous play opened the door to modernist absurdity, and appears to have been instrumental in the modernist deconstruction of the dominant metanarrative of the value of success. Success in orthodox cultural systems that are unethical, corrupt, broken, or absurd themselves is thus absurd and corrupt and unethical. The fragmented, fractured, colliding elements of The Dream Songs ought to recognize the play’s ancestral relationship to B.’s poetic cycle, but it also makes sense that B. would avoid it, invested as he was in the recognition of his success in the orthodox cultural system of the literary tradition. The literary tradition has always had cultural critique built into it—think of Swift, for example, one of B.’s literary forbears. But it was critique as cultural corrective, guiding change, trimming excess, dispensing with absurdity by exposing it, with the ultimate aim of safeguarding the dominant cultural paradigms in the long run. Some modernist and much later postmodern work developed a more anarchic approach, with deconstruction as the goal. The assumption was that old cultural systems were so worn out, so corrupt, so decayed and rotten that there was nothing left to save. Get rid of it. B.’s poetic approach is right in line with this: His obsessive narcissistic focus on the disintegration of the addicted persona is founded first on an egoistic self-absorption, but there are broader implications: His addiction can be read as a metaphor for something larger, but it is also a direct consequence of the decay of the systems he critiques. It is both a literary statement about cultural disintegration and a real-world enactment of the cultural disintegration it exposes. The bind for B. comes in that at the same time, he is invested completely in the ongoing validity of the literary culture that he sees decaying and whose decay he is fostering even as he participates in it. This is postmodernism. But B. also has a foot in the old ways, in that he reads everything, has read everything, was thoroughly literate, and by all accounts this is not an empty boast. He read constantly, giving himself as thorough a grounding in the literary tradition as anyone ever. That’s what much of this poem is about. Henry was a reader, is a reader, exhausts libraries. Thoroughly grounded in the tradition he’s helping to destroy.

In the end, of course, the tradition is vastly, incomprehensibly greater than any single writer. Whatever a Berryman or a Jarry can dish out, the tradition is vital enough and resilient enough to absorb it. Modernism and its preordained offspring, postmodernism, has worked its way into a death spiral, following the absurd fragmentation and corruption of the broader cultural systems they follow and that ultimately support the literary tradition they are part of. These “broader cultural systems” I’m referring to are corrupt, civilized, mainly Western. But the human is far, far broader and deeper even than that, and there is much more of life and the human to come, so there will also be a new literature and a new tradition that follows from that. The decay of postmodern civilization is just another phase in the human pageant. As long as the planet itself makes it through this present ecological crisis, human beings will continue their cultural production in response to their lives on this planet. Nature will be there as the ultimate and final guidelight. B. wasn’t equipped to see that, and would never have thought in these terms. He became death obsessed. But individual human death as a metaphor for the disintegration, the death, of cultural systems doesn’t work that well. There is a lot of life throbbing, latent, underneath culture and civilization, and that will be much more difficult to kill off. We can do it if we really try, by killing the planet. But the planet is resilient. I think there’s much of an ecological future left, and our cultural systems are beginning to adapt themselves to it already. Should be interesting. God, in the end, is not Savage, as Yeats feared.

#363

[No online link available.]

All right, begin by imagining George C. Scott and Shirley Jones (as she was presented in the cinematic musical production of Oklahoma!), moaning in bed… Wait, do I have to? Skip it…

It gets better: Here’s a segue, right into a profound pronouncement for you, about the geopolitical state of the world, after B./Henry declares himself a “potent” Communist:

                                    —as we all know,

            the peoples in the East

have no sexual problems, have no problems

but housing & food & ideology:

Um…Really?

So Lenin crossed the border and took on the Revolution in Russia, and we all know the result of that little junket. Ideology, no food, etc. But there’s compensation for us back here in the West.

            But the issue of Miss Jones & Mr Scott

            comes at us lovely & sane.

Perhaps I’m missing something regarding the loveliness and sanity of this “issue.” It took me awhile to make something out of the Spanish Armada poem, DS 361, and that paid off. This?

            God bless our fate in the West.

Now, maybe there’s some kind of sarcastic criticism here of Western mass media’s exploitation of sexuality, its cynical tapping into base-level psychological drives in order to sell its product, and “God bless our fate in the West” drips with irony. We in the West are consequently so loaded down with psychological insecurities that it’s a wonder we can ever pair off and have sex at all. (Maybe, fifty years on, that explains those Viagra commercials and all those Cialis emails that flood my Inbox!) But no. The poet is really saying, if those movie stars “should not prove hot”—the West’s last, best go at a valorizing public eroticism—then I’m moving to the USSR, where people there (as they say) with no hang-ups “f*** like minks”. (That’s a phrase that circulated widely during my misguided, misspent Western adolescence.) Them Soviets, you know, raised a lot of minks, both as models and guides to uninhibited weasel-like fornication, I’m thinking, and as a reliable source of fur for ladies’ coats and those cool fur hats with the ear flaps and big red stars on the front the men wear when it’s forty below zero in Siberia.

Maybe. But whatever its true object in the poet’s mind, I rather tend to think this poem slips on the ice and falls flat on its face. Likely it’s a drunken poem, fantasizing as the bedroom ceiling whirls, just before that inevitable confrontation with the toilet, that Scott and Jones are getting it on, lovely & sane in all their pro-Capitalist XXX hot moaning. (Geez, I swear, some days, this project takes a practically inhuman commitment…)