#9

http://genius.com/John-berryman-dream-song-9-annotated

The point of this blog has always been that it’s meant to generate more energy in the writing than it costs—a bit of psychic economics, there. So far, so good, by a broad profit margin. But I had underestimated a few things going in. One is how obscure and fragmented these poems really can be. I can deal with that, and I’ll communicate what I gather from them as best I can. I don’t need to get it all—no one does. It would take too much weirdly obsessive energy. Another thing I’m just dawning into is the monumental scale of this work as a whole. I’ve taken on big projects before. One day at a time gets you through it. The main thing I underestimated, though, is just how abject a character this Henry is. I got fed up with it yesterday and had some fun at Henry’s expense. Berryman, I’m seeing already, will hit a theme three or four times from several angles before he lets it go. That’s something you only see in reading the progression like a story; it doesn’t show in an individual reading of a single poem. Lusting after young women was one motif, and there were three of those poems in a row. This trope of middle-aged men lusting for younger women is real enough and there’s no use pretending. I doubt illustrations are necessary to support the point, but my casual online reading over just the last week turned up several perfect examples. My theory is that it’s a way of men reclaiming something squandered when they were younger. For the young women, perhaps there’s material gain involved, an entrance into power structures, and is Henry Kissinger’s dictum that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac more than the infuriating bullshit it sounds like? Whatever. Castration followed, and I hope we’re done with that for now. The symbolic significance of it is powerful enough, though, and there’s a point to it as well. Henry, here at first, is being systematically desexualized. Neutered. I think we never find out explicitly what happened to him, but we don’t have to. I’ll watch for subtle hints. What we know for sure is simply that he’s an everyman schmuck who is being victimized by power, and all we really need to know is that most of us are in one way or another; that’s why he’s relevant. Men are victimized, women are victimized, the land is victimized, animals are being systematically wiped out, and lately, the political and social structures we worked so hard at establishing as a corrective to historical tyrannies are being deliberately and systematically deconstructed—as we stupidly sit there and watch it happen and even vote in favor of it. Thus, Henry’s relevance to our historical moment has some potency, if you will. Henry is being crucified by his author, to put it bluntly. Out of the depths of his pain and humiliation, one should then expect something redeeming to arise, if the symbolism of crucifixion is to hold. (The Romans certainly never had that kind of symbolism in mind, and except for one monumental exception, and a number of lesser martyrings, their meaning of crucifixion is the one that held sway.) We’ll see, but whether Berryman sees us living in an age that provides for this kind of redemption from an everyman schmuck is going to be a problem. It won’t be the story of Christian redemption retold, that’s for sure.

In this poem, #9, Henry is fantasizing. It’s not such an attractive fantasy to be cornered by the SWAT team, but as a fantasy it offers what Henry doesn’t have, a momentary, even if doomed, influence on events in the world. You’re the reason power mobilized! They even found a young woman to beg you to give up. They use her love for you as a weapon. This means you’re more for that moment than inconsequential schmuck! You’re human after all! —Well, okay, but it’s still just a fantasy. “He slipt & fell” is a line that connects this poem in particular to the broader themes of the whole, a reiteration for the 10^th time of whatever that something was that dropped him into his existential predicament. The poem then moves quickly into a characterization of his fantasy as an act, and he tells himself, or is told, to knock it off. The last lines are important and introduce something new: His fantasy is driven by a remaining desire for power, a reclamation of influence, where even the fantasy of it feeds the desire for it. “Let go.” This is a command, the imperative injunction from author to his character: The only way forward into life is to accept your status as a nobody in that life, absolutely and without reservation. The ego finds this impossible to accept, so it creates fantasies of power to compensate. The insistence here is to let go of all of that. Better to live in a world of genuine abjection than to fantasize some fulfilling replacement, which ultimately will destroy whatever wounded mote of the self is left.