My doctoral dissertation included an analysis of Peter
Matthiessen’s intense and necessary novel, At
Play in the Fields of the Lord. He is my favorite writer. In that novel,
Martin Quarrier is an Evangelical Protestant missionary who travels to the
depths of the Amazon to try and convert the warlike Niaruna to Christianity.
When he and his wife, Hazel, step off the plane, she proclaims to the few gathered
stragglers welcoming them and to the thousand miles of unexplored rainforest
before them, “The Mart Quarriers have arrived and they mean business!” As the novel unfolds, it
becomes clear that business is
exactly what she means. The missionaries themselves are out to make a profit in
souls, and while Martin himself is not aware of it, they were also invited
there by Peruvian officials to tame the “savage” Niaruna in order to clear the
way for timber and mineral extraction on the Niaruna lands. Religion,
government and business link up to achieve a common purpose, and that is partly
responsible for the eventual destruction of the tribe.
“God’s Henry’s enemy. We’re in business.” Riiight… The thing
about religion, as opposed to spirituality, is that it’s at least partly a
human political construct. It follows then that it’s sometimes pretty screwed
up. God, it should be clear, is not
Henry’s enemy. Religion is the enemy, and more specifically, the authoritarian
impulse in religious institutions. The poem from yesterday (#12) is about
that—its presence haunts and watches. Here, it gets linked with commerce,
which exerts a tyranny. (I love the double meaning in that phrase “a cornering”:
It refers to both an existential entrapment, but also the aggrandizing of
commercial control.) Let’s see, do we see still see religious precepts linked
up with business and politics, ever? Of course we do! All you have to do is
listen to contemporary conservative rhetoric where Christianist fundamentalism covers
for corporate influence almost constantly. Rick Santorum is one obnoxious
example. The crusader for values also advocates that we “cut the corporate tax
rate for domestic manufacturers from 35 percent to zero”, and I do not believe
that he has the welfare of workers in mind. But there are hundreds more. John
Kasich was sworn in yesterday for his second term as Ohio’s governor. It’s not
too much of a partisan political stretch to observe that he has been stridently
anti-labor and anti-environment in his policies (he intended to open Ohio’s
state parks to fracking until the general outcry forced him to pause). The Toledo Blade from this morning reports that, “The inaugural
address that launched Gov. John Kasich’s second term on Monday leaned more on
moral, even spiritual, precepts than on the presentation of a detailed policy
agenda.” My point: The undoubted integrity of concepts like “spiritual values”
and “faith” get coopted as rhetorical tools that further a radical conservative
political agenda, and that’s all about “economic growth” and an upward
redistribution of wealth. In short, it’s still all about power.
One of the many reasons I’ve taken on this project of
responding to the Dream Songs is that they, and Berryman’s political undertones,
resonate so loudly with this political moment 60+ years down the line. I
want to understand the immediate now, because I’ve been having trouble with it;
I want to try and find a way of coping intellectually and spiritually with the
injustice that is so nakedly apparent right now. Mario Salvio, in his famous
speech on the Berkeley campus in 1964, proclaimed, “There is a time when the
operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that
you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put
your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the
apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the
people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the
machine will be prevented from working at all!” This was Berryman’s moment too,
1964, and while as a personality I tend to suspect he was probably a bit too
self-involved, his Henry is emerging as the illustration of what happens when
the machine isn’t resisted, or more likely, as Dream Song #13 claims, when it
simply overwhelms. When you’re not free. The poet asserts that Henry tried. Now
he is Berryman’s passive, victimized alter-ego, what might have become of him
had the writer chosen to not fight back—to write back. To illustrate and to
witness. Broadly, I get the point of Henry already, and I have some 370 more
Dream Songs to go to drive it home if I haven’t. But, the ins and out, the details,
are fascinating—and it’s still very early. If there is redemption to come,
thank you. If there isn’t redemption, then I intend to more fully
grapple with why not. As Thoreau told us, if life turns out to be mean, then he
would publish its meanness to the world. There is at least a measure of
redemption in that.
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