Here is Berryman reciting his
poem. It is brief, but it’s intense and maybe even a little bit disturbing. It’s well worth a look, but be
warned:
This is one of the best-known
Dream Songs, and I think it has gained the attention because it turns in such a
shocking direction in the last stanza. It’s not an easy poem to think about
because it opens a difficult question. But it’s as representative as any poem I
can imagine of what the “confessional” poets strived for, which was to mine
personal experience and the psychological torments that are always an aspect of
the human condition and expose them, with all their complications and
contradictions, and then refine expression of that experience through poetic technique.
In that process the poet can uncover strange and disturbing complexities. So Sylvia
Plath’s “Daddy,” for example, the relentless attack on the father of the poet’s
imagination—“Daddy, I have had to kill you”—“The boot in the face, the brute /
Brute heart of a brute like you”—is as much a love song as attack, and I’m not
referring to “Every woman adores a Fascist.” The narrator’s image of the lost
father is being destroyed, which implies the opportunity for the subsequent
growth of a new, better image, with the whole process founded tragically on an
absolutely unappeasable grief. He’s dead; he’s never coming back. It’s ever
only this disturbing process of imaginative creation and demolition.
DS 29 starts with that same
unappeasable grief that Plath built her famous poem on. B.’s father killed
himself, and the references to the funeral are heartbreaking: “Henry could not
make good. / Starts again always in Henry’s ears / the little cough somewhere,
an odour, a chime.” Watching B. read this, you can almost see that his grief in
adulthood is still right there. The loss he feels, though, is expressed in the
poem not as an absence, but as a presence. It’s not about emptiness or lack or
the space left by something missing; it’s about the imposition of something
actual. The middle stanza makes an oblique reference to the face of Jesus, the
human response of Jesus at his betrayal portrayed by some Medieval or
Renaissance painter, and then the memory, I think, of finding his father’s
body—I think the two images are kind of superimposed. Then the poem turns,
maybe even courageously, toward something very difficult: “This is not for
tears”, which is to say, nothing is ever going to appease the shock and the
loss. What arrived as “loss” at that moment never goes away, and it’s permanent,
and it’s terrible.
Then, the poem makes the plunge,
and in B.’s reading, his demeanor totally changes. “But”—uttered with such emphasis,
as if to say, get ready. The poem
finishes with reference to several things. One is that B./Henry is aware of
long stretches of total insensibility, and we know that he drank himself into
oblivion routinely. This is how he tried to forget that “loss” so relentlessly
present, that torments and that will not let up. There is no record, that I’m
aware of, of actual instances of misogynistic violence, but there was
intolerably crazy behavior, that got him fired on occasion. But the potential
is there in the narrator, and there’s this sense of relief that he’s done a
careful count of all his acquaintances, checked the news, and yep, it’s pretty apparent
that no one has been hacked to pieces yet. No
woman has been hacked to pieces. It’s not really necessary to point out
that well-adjusted men don’t need to spend a lot of time on this kind of
reckoning. But in B. there is an incredibly potent—but also latent—propensity
for extreme violence, and it’s directed toward women. I do not understand it. I
acknowledge where it came from, I grant that it’s there, I’m grateful that it
remained latent all his life, I admire that he coped through art rather than
physical violent action, but I do not understand why an unappeasable
psychological wound—as hard and violent a wound as it was—urges to express
itself through violence against women. And in no uncertain terms that is what
he’s telling us it did to him, because it’s the thing he fears.
This matters because it is very common. Nearly 1 in 6 American
women will be raped in their lifetimes. It is an astonishing fact, but there it
is. Partly this is due to a tacit societal acceptance (at some level) of this
kind of violence, but I’ve been convinced for a long time that broad societal
patterns often have their origins in profound, personal psychological patterns
that as human beings we share. The personal and the societal reinforce one
another. Jian Gomeshi, the talented, sophisticated Canadian radio personality,
has plummeted into disgrace because his uncontrolled violence toward women
destroyed him once it became widely known. I have no idea what drove him, but a
tendency toward self-destruction had to have been in the mix. For sure, any man
who rapes risks destroying himself as well as the woman he attacks. I don’t
mean to take the emphasis off of the plight of those 1 in 6 women (and all the
rest who are forced to constantly be on guard) who bear the brunt of whatever
is at work here. It’s only that the poem, with the wounded male psyche speaking
and confessing to fantasies of violence, or a fear of the propensity toward
violence, prompts this approach. We know that B. ran from self-destructive
impulses, and eventually he destroyed himself outright. Before then, there were
these struggles, and they’re appalling.
I’m wrestling right now with
whether or not I think discussing this kind of thing in art is even healthy. I
think it probably is, but I’m not very confident. So, I dropped this and ran to
talk to a colleague about it, and she assures me that when art leads us into
these disconcerting, uncomfortable spaces it is doing what it is supposed to be
doing. Of course, she’s right. And as I wrote here a few days ago, it’s B.’s
wrestling with the undeniable cultural racisms and misogynies that surface in
him that makes The Dream Songs
valuable and that rescues them. I’m thinking that the problem for me comes from
a couple directions. For one—pin me down and tear my face off, and I’ll have to
confess that I recognize the impulse. In me.
It’s weak, it’s old, I outgrew it long ago, it doesn’t haunt me, but it was
there, and it’s not because I was all that terribly wounded in my childhood,
but because I believe it was a cultural and psychological bequest that I had to
find, address, and only then was I empowered to reject it. But I still feel
disconcerted if I return to it, and I think that’s probably a healthy thing at
this point. The poem has prompted that return. Very early in my writing, still
a youth, I wrote a story that ended with a symbolic image of violence involving
red lipstick and a woman’s closed eyelids. I think I was heartbroken and angry
over some girl and gave it form in a story. I sent the story to a former
teacher, who wrote back and told me she thought it was weird and disturbing.
Well—it was. And honestly, that was all it took and I was done with it. Last
year, then, one of our latest crop of mass murderers left a note or a Facebook
post or something, revealing how outraged he was that the women of his
acquaintance wouldn’t sleep with him. Therefore, he killed as many of them as
he could before shooting himself. Destroying himself was his ultimate aim, but
along the way, there was collateral damage to be inflicted. So all I’m saying
is that even healthy people have those impulses, sometime that are nothing more
than a legacy. We don’t talk about them, and they don’t usually emerge into
outright psychopathy. But they’re there. I’m not comfortable with that.
Does dragging this kind of thing
into the light help heal it, or at least contain it? I think a therapist would
wholeheartedly agree that it does. And I also think the therapist would agree
that uncritically burying this kind of thing promotes its festering. I’ve seen
much art that deals with violence from the victim’s perspective, sometimes in
incredibly graphic detail. The ethics of that make sense: It invites empathy,
which will ideally lessen this kind of impulse’s societal virulence. A novel
like Lolita works because the
sustained attention to the child rapist’s confessions and desires is shot
through on every line with irony: We see Humbert as a monster, always, right
from the novel’s infamous first line, because he freely accepts his criminal
impulses. That he’s articulate and sophisticated only underscores the irony
that he is still a monster. The problem with this DS 29? The criminally
misogynistic impulse is simply a given, and we know why it’s there. Henry fears
its consequences, but he is powerless to undermine it. I admit that I
understand such things as a sometime given in the human psyche. That it
threatens the consequences it does, and that it’s so entrenched and obstinate
that it can’t be moved—that’s tough.
It’s all rescued in part by the
recognition that the violent outrages that the narrator fears have actually
never taken place. He’s guilty or terrified by something that remains
potential. But it’s the potential that is appalling, not the acting out of the
potential—which would simply mean game over, disaster for anyone touched by it.
And also, it’s that the potential for violence is given its power in the first
place by B./Henry’s descent into an altered consciousness unreachable to his
healthier academic, artistic and sober self.
God only knows what the oblivious, drunken Henry is capable of, because who
knows if he’ll successfully resist that drive that can’t be shaken. So far, so
good, he’s saying, but the thought of it is terrifying, and that’s what makes
this poem great and so disturbing.
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