#19

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-19

There's a story here. A momentary triumph, and some measure of financial success. Henry gets a check. That's far enough for today. 

"John Berryman," was actually the alter-ego/pen-name of John Allyn Smith, who changed his name after his father's suicide. His mother had been having an affair, his father found out, and coupled with financial trouble, this prompted the father to take his life. He shot himself outside of his son's window. This devastating psychological shock led the boy eventually to a career of major literary achievement and much other trouble--constant affairs, serious alcoholism, erratic bahavior, depression, eventually suicide. He was by all accounts an amazing, inspiring teacher. Still, it's not a happy story. I got interested because some of the Dream Songs truly grabbed me, and because I was sure there are parallels between the psychological anxieties of 60 years ago and today. In casting about through the criticism on B. this morning, looking for a way into #19, which will yield some meaning without a background story, but not enough to satisfy me, I ran into this, by the critic Adam Beadsworth: "They [The Dream Songs] bear witness to the latent psychological damage caused by the combination of repressive state policies and the epistemological uncertainty that plummeted into American consciousness with the detonation of nuclear weapons in Japan. The instability of his gnarled syntax and ruptured grammaticisms, combined with the anxiety, avarice, guilt, and depression endured by his protagonist Henry, allow Berryman to forge a metacommentary on 1950s and 1960s political and cultural ideology that testifies to the latent pathologies of containment culture without naming the names of its promoters or exposing its author as seditious." Well, I had figured as much. It's satisfying to see my conviction validated in critical terminology. (This is fairly light as far as that stuff goes.) The idea is that societal pressures on the individual prompt a resultant, tormented syntax in response. John Berryman, actually, is as much a fiction as Henry House. They flicker into one another in the poems, their faces exchange, they're mixed up in a complex, half-mirrored funhouse, and behind the whole scene is the real man, who doesn't show himself directly, but glimpses flit in an out. This all strikes me as a tormented but sophisticated and literate response, and it fits its time. John Barth's short story, "Lost in the Funhouse," is offering me some metaphoric guidance here. It also uses the funhouse as a model for the mid-century's existential predicament, and it proposes as well that flatfooted earnestness will always lose its way through the bewildering complications of the postmodern condition. There's nothing flat-footed about the Dream Songs. But I cling for now to the hope that something genuine--earnest--will be revealed. It's always there, actually. But I've heard already from a couple of close friends following the blog here, that they don't really like the poems--too opaque, too difficult, and when some meaning does finally glimmer through the tormented syntax, it's not very interesting. (Others, to be fair, are totally fascinated.) My defensive response to those who don't like the Dream Songs--it's not about Berryman or the Dream Songs, really. It's all about what I do in response to them. And what you do. They're triggers. Some days will be better than others. Today, I'm just feeling reflective because the poem itself leaves me cold. This is going to happen now and again.

Nature writing, the branch of literary study that caught me from the very beginning of my study of literature, can be lots of things--earnest, furious, frightened, dreamy, and plenty more. But it doesn't seem to have to deal so directly with accusations of sedition, and that permits it to speak more directly. (Whether anyone listens is a different matter.) I think that's because the issues of power that it critiques, and the arrangement of the adversaries, offer it a way of stepping aside. The Cold War didn't offer that. In the immortal words of George W. Bush--not a sophisticated nor elegant thinker on his best of days--regarding a subsequent world-encompassing conflict: "You're either with us or you're against us." That doesn't leave you an out. Critique the dominant power and you're automatically the enemy. Environmentalism, on the other hand, of the literary or any other kind, is always about engaging with or protecting the ecological systems that support everything else, including ones enemies and including the power that is devouring those systems. Environmentalists have been successfully marginalized and branded as kooks, and while still a potent force, for every victory you can name off, five or fifty defeats undermine their victories, many of them completely out of the public consciousness. It's a difficult time. I'm only interested in the Dream Songs insofar as they tell me something universal about the human condition--they're doing that--or can shed a light on our particular moment, now. That's really why we study history in the end. Just some wanderings here today. Plus, my computer is going haywire and will need to be reimaged. I'm writing this in an email to myself, in a ridiculous tiny font. 

If you have any thoughts, let's have them! Tomorrow's Dream Song looks like a good one.