#53

 http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-53:-He-lay-in-the-middle-of-the-world,-and-twicht

Sparine is a drug once used to treat schizophrenia and as a tranquilizer, no longer available in the US except for veterinary use. Pelides is another name for Achilles, Greek warrior hero with a vulnerable heel. In The Iliad, he was one of the leaders of the siege of Troy. I think “Tiny Hardy” must refer to Thomas Hardy, one of my favorite writers, an early modernist who wrote of the “growing sense of the disparity between the enormous universe and tiny man.”

Scene from college days: Student drops coins in vending machine, presses buttons, his yellow bag of M&Ms gets hung up in the machine’s workings. He swears, swats the thing a couple times, shakes it, stalks away, out of luck, grumbling and humiliated. Two professors observed the whole scene. One remarks to the other, “Can you imagine what Achilles or Odysseus would have done in a situation like this?” I take comfort in that remark to this day whenever a vending machine rips me off. Achilles would have run a javelin through the glass front, put his foot on the dead thing as he pulled the spear out, and then passed out the spoils to his troops, and most importantly, he would not have had a moment’s hesitation and the thought that he had might have done something wrong would not for a flickering instant have crossed his mind.

This is not a world that privileges the warrior/hero mode of Achilles so directly, unless you count victories in how many billions of dollars you can amass, and then we’re full-go with our Greek warriors, except that most of us find the whole notion despicable because we’re not all on the same side any longer. For a Greek, the enemy was over there. For most of us now, he’s up there, unless we’ve bought the “over there” propaganda that turns us.

 Honorable Possum Henry, the antithesis of anything resembling a hero, except ironically as the alter-ego of a hero poet, prefers to stay home because the stimulation of a movie is enervating. Even the newspapers ask too much.

Thomas Hardy said that the response he received from his last novel, Jude the Obscure, was such that it cured him of the desire to ever write another novel. He wrote, in the preface to the second edition, “After these verdicts from the press its [Jude the Obscure’s] next misfortune was to be burned by a bishop—probably in his despair at not being able to burn me.” In other words, it’s getting too dangerous sticking your head out. Achilles had the cultural prerogative to pretty much run a spear through anybody who crossed him. Try that today and there’s a whole system poised and eager to crush you. Our systems are stronger than our heroes, which convinced Hardy to keep quiet eventually. To his credit, he had his say.

Berryman strikes an interesting pose: Henry, the poet’s alter ego, crawls away, cowers, shrinks, diminishes to nearly nothing, and even dies a couple times through The Dream Songs, but it’s all a ruse. Through him the writer has his say, quite compelling and clear: The systems are brutish, punishing and inhuman all right, but by showing them for what they are, you gain a measure of power over them. The problem with reading the papers, I think B. is saying, is that they teach you the injustice at the same time they’re teaching you to shut up, because you learn that you can’t win. Once we see we’re papering our hovels with our own skin, we can stop it. Turns out that’s easier said than done.