#46

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-46

[Long post here. I’ve always planned on not holding back on Dream Song #46—which in my opinion is among the truly great poems ever written in English. If I’m guilty of self-indulgence, so be it this time. But I hope you’ll settle in, if you’re game.]

 I’m reading this morning that Phillip Levine died yesterday, a much loved and well-respected poet. It’s a sad loss, but he lived a good long life and made a brilliant contribution through his art and his teaching. Isn’t that what we hope for? He attended the Iowa Writers Workshop and was a student of Robert Lowell and John Berryman, who were both teaching there at the time, before the first of Lowell’s series of devastating breakdowns and Berryman’s getting fired for some kind of loud and drunken public incident that embarrassed the university to the extent they couldn’t tolerate him any longer. In an interview circulating on YouTube, Levine recalls an incident from B.’s class. B. held up a copy of The New York Times. It was during the McCarthy hearings in the 50s, a moment of ascendency of the darkest, meanest, most atavistic and sordid tendencies lurking in the depths of the American psyche. B. remarked, holding up the newspaper, “You see these fools? These thieves and fools and liars? Ten years from now they will be replaced by other thieves and fools and liars. Public crooks.” And then he picked up a book and read John Keats’s poem, “To Autumn”, saying “if this language survives a thousand years, this poem will be as beautiful as it is at this moment.”

Poetry still thrives because enough people agree with Berryman at some level, that in the long run, art and language are immeasurably more significant than public thieves and crooks. Levine was affected by Berryman’s pronouncement, and it affected his work and his life every moment after. But there is still a tension between the long-term significance of art and the momentary influence of legalized public criminals, who can do tremendous damage in their short stays of ascendancy and even destroy the legacy of art and learning. Think of Cromwell’s Roundheads wrecking the priceless stained glass of England’s cathedrals, ancient temples in the Middle East dynamited by some dystopian theocratic regime or another. Book banning and book burnings are attempts at this same kind of thing. Some insufferable blockhead politician in Texas hit the news lately because he tried to push through legislation that would force the teaching of the bible in conjunction with the Founding Fathers in all American history classes. Here in Kentucky, the Creationist Museum had a model of a dinosaur—with a saddle on it. I’m also thinking of Scott Walker at the moment, governor of Wisconsin, but he is just one example of a whole bevy of contemporary public thieves and liars—he cuts taxes on the wealthy and on corporations in his state, which causes severe budget shortfalls, then he uses this manufactured budgetary crisis to justify slashing the budget of the state’s public universities. It is an outright attempt to destroy what one of our great public universities stands for, and enrich and further empower his handlers in the same move. It is thievery and destruction in Wisconsin, on a massive scale. These examples are all variations on the same theme. The list of further examples is depressingly long.

Why this little rant? DS 46 takes on this problem of the legacy of planetary public crime. This was the poem that got me started, and a whole constellation of political, religious and existential understanding came to me from it in a flash. I’ve only had a handful of these moments—you only ever get a few—but they’re crucial ones in anyone’s life of the mind. One came in front of a painting by Gericault in the Louvre, “The Charging Chasseur”, where I had this flash of understanding of the relationship between warfare and propaganda: It was something about the exciting great dappled fighting horse on the ten-foot canvas, the splendid uniform, and especially the leopard-skin saddle blanket in the midst of atrocious carnage—which is deliberately kept off the canvas. Another moment came listening for the first time to Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark, specifically the song “Trouble Child.” For those who know the song, it’s somber and intense and gorgeous, and there’s this haunting moment, “breaking like the waves at Malibu.” As her voice extended along that last syllable of “Malibuuuuu”, I had this uncanny sensation of a door opening, and I walked through it into a whole new world of artistry, beauty, and complex, subtle sensation that I had had no conception of, and I never looked back. One other I’ll mention: I was watching a PBS program of American Indian dance on some pleasant, uneventful Saturday afternoon. Most of the dances were contemporary, quite lovely and compelling, but there was this one dance by historical re-enactors—the wild turkey dance. It was interesting enough, the one-one-two-two dance steps to the rhythmic drumming, the loud, uninhibited wild singing, the costumes in all natural-materials, skins, feathers and fibers (no vivid chemical dyes on these), and then this moment, which had been building: The dancers crouched low to the stage, heads up, vibrating in place with tiny, rapid steps of their feet, and they fanned the great round tails that had been there all along but innocuous, and they became turkeys! Even over the TV screen it was an astonishing sight, and for me it was an instantaneous breakthrough of two understandings simultaneously, both of American Indian culture for one, taking me way past the dopey stereotypes we’re generally handed, and of the communicative potential of dance as an art form for another. I’ll never forget any of these.

DS 46 begins with a lively description of that moment when intolerable darkness gains ascendency: “I am, outside.” The comma there is full of meaning, establishing the persona’s existence beyond its mere placement outdoors. “Incredible panic” is the situation he finds himself in, and while it’s a metaphor, it’s also not. “The worse anyone feels the worse treated he is.” Consider the deliberate contemporary shredding of our social safety nets. Why? Because we can’t afford them. Why not? Tax cuts, proposed through a deliberate lie as a way to grow the economy, when all evidence has ever shown is that this flows wealth upward. The people without much wealth are stolen from, and if they suffer, too bad. The ones empowered at the top of the heap are insulated, except that it’s to the point now where they actually seem to take a positive malicious glee in inflicting even more suffering. “Fools elect fools”? Do I even have to elaborate?

 The poem then takes a remarkable turn: “A harmless man at an intersection said, under his breath, ‘Christ!’” It’s a common enough epithet, “Christ!”, especially enough in response to the mayhem just described, but in the poem it triggers a pronouncement, essentially on the veiling tendencies that organized religion can have. That word affects the vision of shopkeepers who were fitted with glasses. “Enjoyed they then an appearance of love & law.” The key word is “appearance.” We know from the first stanza that the appearance of love & law is only a rosy coating, metaphorically triggered by the word “Christ.” There is no love & law; there is only incredible panic. So what does that word mean here? I don’t believe it’s a reference to genuine spirituality. It’s a reference to the role that church can play in the political gamesmanship that triggers all the mayhem. Have any doubts? I doubt it, but if you do? This is a reference to the kinds of movements we still see unfolding all over the globe: The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), for example, is a vicious group of terrorists sanctifying their murders through an appeal to Islam. Boco Haram in Nigeria is no less vicious, if not quite as widespread. Well, but these aren’t “Christ”, so they don’t count. We see the same movements here. Lynchings and Jim Crow were subject to attempts at sanctification through spurious appeals to Christian ideology. The Constitution of the Confederate States of America makes mention of the God-ordained position of the white race as dominant over the subjugated black race. There is a linkage right now among ultra-conservative radicals grabbing power all over the US which promotes both a plutocratic takeover of American democracy with a fundamentalist Christian agenda. It’s not “Christian” in any sense of my understanding of the word, but it nevertheless claims the mantle with a genuine ferocity. Whether one believes this is indeed the case, or is enraged on the other hand by such an accusation, Berryman had no doubts on that score, and I am politically and theoretically inclined to sympathy with him on that. I was taken to the Creationist Museum once, and I gained some understanding of how fundamentalism bends Christian scripture to its cultural and political ends, consequently destroying scripture as it does so. Fundamentalism kills scripture and preserves it in a jar of formaldehyde, then worships the jar’s contents in simple idolatry. The point is that the goodness of Christian belief is co-opted, used for cover over much darker, more banal, and probably evil intentions—if one considers uninhibited greed or racial discrimination evil, which I do.

“Millennia whift & waft”—this whole business is not of a moment, and it isn’t necessarily American; it is a universal phenomenon in human culture. “Their glasses were taken from them, & they saw”—what did they see, once the sanctifying lie of rose-colored fundamentalist glasses were taken from their eyes?: “Man has undertaken the top job of all, / son fin.” Well. This is big.

When I first read “son fin,” I made a mistake in interpreting it. It’s French and translates to “his end” or “his ending.” It sounds in French exactly like sans fin, which would mean “without end,” and that was how I momentarily took this: Man had undertaken the top job of all without end, which might have a somewhat positive spin. Whatever the “top job” might mean (since it’s not characterized in my mistaken reading), we are engaged in an endless process of struggle and growth. Magnificent! Look, I have a naïve and optimistic streak, especially when I was younger, and that’s what I wanted to see. But that’s not what the poem says. The top job of all is man’s own destruction. In B.’s moment, fresh off the nightmare of two massive world wars, a collapsed economy in the 30s, and with the Cold War hanging over everyone with its tremendous arsenals of nuclear missiles on a hair trigger ready to incinerate the planet, this was an enduring anxiety: son fin. His own destruction. If the Cold War in our moment has subsided, and the nuclear arsenal doesn’t feel as ready to rock as it was 50+ years ago, we have other nightmarish eventualities that engage our fears just as terribly. More wars, wars, wars, terrorism and theocratic dictatorships, the threat of the rise of corporate Fascism in the West, and hanging over all of it, extreme climate change, which dwarfs all of the other nightmares.

“Good luck” has that tone of harrumphing snark, and sets up that brilliant rhyme, but first, “I myself walked at the funeral of tenderness. / Followed other deaths.” Whatever is coming has died—the narrator has walked at its funeral as well as the funeral of tenderness, and that thing, “like the memory of a lovely fuck.” That lovely fuck is only a memory, this real enough but still now only vaporous and insubstantial memory. What was it? “Do, ut des.” This is what has also died out in the world. It’s a Latin phrase, and translates to “I give so that you can give.” The meaning is pretty complex. For one thing, it strikes me as what sex is ideally about, a reciprocal giving that simultaneously engenders reciprocal receiving, and the more one partner is able to give, the more he or she gets out of it. Beyond that, the phrase was meant to go up to the Roman gods accompanying a sacrifice—I burn this valuable goat so that you will send rain, something like that. So the overtones are religious as well, and this resonates with the religious associations from earlier in the poem. The reciprocal giving—even the true Christion doctrine of “love your neighbor” has died, giving way to…it’s not mentioned by name, only implied, and I think strongly implied: That thing that replaces reciprocal giving is greed. Here is the evil doctrine that replaces the grace that has passed away. It’s the reason behind the social ills, the political malfeasance, the class inequalities, and the fear all around. The hatred in even thinking that someone would get something you desire, and that desire, in the absence of the grace of Do, ut des, grows and grows and grows.

This is what I see in the poem, and while I believe the world is a less reduced, more complex phenomenon that what this reading of the poem allows for—Do, ut des lives on is what I’m saying—Do, ut des is also not ascendant. It doesn’t thrive at the top. It didn’t then, and does not now. Greed pumps fossil fuels at the cost of the planet’s atmosphere, greed squanders people and devours land, greed destroys equity and justice, the greedy sociopaths of the world struggle bitterly for total wealth and the attendant benefit of total control. Do, ut des can be learned in a thriving university, which is precisely why someone like a Scott Walker, the Koch brothers’ walking, talking meat puppet, installed in a powerful political appointment, elected by fools who bought the bullshit that came out of his moving lips, will try to destroy it.

It angers me. But I do mean this, this is not the whole story. There is meaningful counterforce against this timeless movement. The critical first step in fighting it is to see it. The poem still teaches me this. It’s why I stick with teaching.

This poem is important to me as well because I didn’t understand at first. It was just a poem, gobbledygook, but I was a kid. I bored in and stuck with it, and it opened up.  “Deacon Blues” and a few other instances aside, this was the first time I read a poem. If you dare the struggle to pass through that door, you don’t go back.