A parnel is a priest’s mistress,
and here’s something I dug up online about an “Egyptian black”: “How can a
modern practitioner approach Egyptian prosperity magic? Simply put, light a
black candle… For the ancient Egyptians, black symbolized fertility and
abundance.” It had to do with the fertile strip of black soil along the Nile in
the otherwise barren yellow desert.
One of the things that worldwide
communication and trade has given us is exposure to worldwide culture. It
broadens experience, but can also trivialize it. The mock-Russianized Henry “Hankovitch”
with his Spanish guitar, sitting on a Japanese mat in the Tibetan Zen lotus
position pulls an Egyptian candle out of his Italian leather case, lights it,
all very spiritual and priestly, and gives his “parnel” a French kiss. It’s pretty
funny. “Woofed” looks like an oblique reference to sex to me, and it’s all
quite internationally playful and happy. But then the poem turns as it notes
that the flame of the candle rises “like despair”—uh oh. World culture offers riches,
but there are troubles in the world too—Pakistan and Sudan, for example. Then
Henry, with his guitar, “did a praying mantis pray.” There’s this funny sort of
half-pun at work. A mantis has “praying” in its name because of the way its
front legs fold, as if praying. But of course it’s not praying, so for Henry to
“praying mantis pray” is to pantomime prayer. That’s what has been happening
all along anyway. It’s an odd turn toward the insect, but its name provides for
it. It has been set up with the praying imagery from earlier, and it ends up cutting
apart the images of prayer. They’re not just cute any more, they’ve shaded
toward the ridiculous. Then the poem uses the mantis to move right into the
political. Insects are mindless, and mantises are solitary anyway, so they would
have no social organization at all like bees or ants, and the poem uses this to
set up the real kicker line, the moment the poem has been aiming for: “who even
more obviously than the increasingly fanatical Americans / cannot govern
themselves.” So it’s all about a dig at American fanaticism, self-directed,
foot-shooting McCarthyist aggression and bumbling political foolishness. The Swedes,
world-renowned paragons, along with the other Scandinavians, of a peaceful,
democratic sensibility, might as well not exist as far as world-culture models
of decent behavior.
It’s almost a joke to compare the
now to the then, except it’s not funny. There is fanaticism, paralysis, corruption, and
cruelty infiltrating our governing system right now, especially in regards to addressing
our most pressing worldwide threat. Here’s a response to that. Not a new sonnet
of mine, but apropos to the sentiments of DS 31, I do believe:
Only
One Word (An Apology)
I watch the great green mountains
disappear.
Arctic wells nose down like
roots, drilled So tankers slide through melting ice, filled
With oil, and oil, and oil, and oil. I hear
The frackers’ injections, that crack shale
Till burning gasses rise like burning wind.
The green of hillside forest cut and skinned
Away, blasted, scraped, sickly, and pale.
Murder burns the language used to fit
My thoughts to word, when forms bubble like spit
From a dusty throat, like gas from shattered grounds,
And superegoistic caution sounds
Like shame: Puts finger to lips and warns me to quit…
Goes quiet...(…shush…)…but there’s only one word for…(…shhh…)…it…
KZ
A bit of a stretch in your reading, I think. An "Egyptian black" here refers to a kretek, that is a clove cigarette. The kind one would "flick a zippo" to smoke, and a less eerie and more grounded pretext for smoke rising than Henry performing an ancient prosperity ritual. Berryman himself was fond of them, and not very surprising, Henry also appears to be. As for politics, they are usually thick with irony, as these are. He is juxtaposing the nature of Swedes and Scandanavians to American culture to lampoon the oafish jingoism of Ike's America (c.f. "The Lay of Ike"), and even the character of Henry who seems more obsessed with (ostensibly) sophisticated Orientalized modes of style than to any sort of Eastern enlightened perspective, & not so much to any sincere critique of models of decency. The Song is more sardonic than sincere.
ReplyDeleteLooks like you're right about the candle--it's a black clove cigarette. Which figures. It has been awhile, but I remember puzzling over what it might be and lit on the candle reference in some obscure source and went with it. I know it's usually safer to side with sardonic rather than sincere in a Dream Song, but we do see him being sincere often enough, especially when he's commenting on politics. This line, "The International flame, like despair, rose / or like the foolish Paks or Sudanese"--has that image of a flame, which kept me fooled, but much more importantly, it leads to a bitter reference to a couple genuine political calamities, and he doesn't just let it sit on its own. He follows it with the comment about Americans, which I still see as his real point. Whether he's being sardonic or a bit more bitter than that--hard to say, I think. But I do agree that he's more sardonically evoking modes of style in the worldwide references than any more enlightened perspective.
ReplyDeleteThink there’s a bit of a spoof of Wallace Stevens in this too. Man With a Blue Guitar, right? But I think he’s also playing with how Stevens lent a sort of mystical import to other cultures, esp Asian cultures.
ReplyDeleteI am reading a Dream Song a day and your blog is a wonderful accompaniment. After reading each poem a few times and looking up words I don’t know, I look forward to reading your take.
So I just went and read "Man With a Blue Guitar" for the first time. I know Stevens's major works well enough, but had never taken that one on. I'm not up to commenting yet on whether B. was spoofing Stevens. In reading the Stevens poem, I keep going back to "The Idea of Order at Key West" and that line, "She sang beyond the genius of the sea," which I've always read as a comment on art vs. the order of natural systems. So in the back and forth of "Blue Guitar" I'm wondering if the blue guitar is a metaphor for nature, the earth, and things as they are. Not at all sure, though, just a sleepy Sunday morning first crack at it all. More importantly, it's just great to know that the blog project still resonates like it's doing. You'll see, I think, that blogwise, some days were better than others! But I'm still proud of the project. Read on! I hope that Berryman's inventiveness and desperation are as inspiring as they were for me. If so, as you probably realize, you're part of a vast company.
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