While Henry and John Berryman
(both fictions to varying degrees) are two different entities, the line
separating them is not fixed. “I missed his profession” completely blurs
it—either “I missed my profession” or “he missed his profession” would be more
correct, but of course the real point would be lost. Behind them both lurks the
furtive John Smith. “Mindel-WΓΌrm” are two glaciated periods in
Earth’s geological history.
“Hell talkt my brain awake.” In a
different world, had things fallen out differently, he might well have become
that archeologist—calmer, patiently building a scientific understanding,
quietly taking satisfaction from the slow accretion of bones and facts,
building them carefully into a system of understanding. Instead, he winds up a
famous, prize-winning alcoholic, some manic tormented artist. He could have
spent his career imagining the first wandering Asian peoples, clad in furs,
superbly fit and culturally adapted to hunting, exploring southwards into a
world utterly untouched by human beings, populated with mastodons, dire wolves,
giant sloths, sabre tooth cats, and all the other magnificent beasts of the
Americas that passed on long ago. The archeologist has one of the best-equipped
minds to recreate that amazing moment. The poet and storyteller has another.
I’ve never felt much of a philosophical difference between science and art. I
studied them both, walking across campus from a microbiology lab, folding up my
white lab coat on the way, and arriving at a poetry workshop. I’ll be thankful
till the day I die that I did that. Scientists and poets are both explorers and
reporters. I just didn’t immerse in the world, the modes and mechanisms, the
details of the sciences in the long run, and I didn’t pursue that set of
credentials. I like to think it’s latent in me, though, and I keep my awareness
as sharp as I’m able.
B.’s not acknowledging the
correspondences between art and science. It’s one or another, because rather
than being a sleepy “respectful peaceful serious” scientist, he’s a crazed
poet. Being in hell waked him up, he says, and got his pencil scratching, and
that has made all the difference. But the implication that hovers around the
poem is that the sensibilities of artist and scientist are kin. His style of
poet generates more fire than his style of scientist, but the calm archeologist
doesn’t burn up either. That’s the main difference. The warmth of his attention
melts a path through glaciers, creating those open spaces where one can imagine
his way, calmly, forward into a new continent in peace and wonder, like we’re
supposed to. No world, to that person, is ever lost.
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