I’m not sure if “good nature is
over” has a double meaning or not, but I see something. The whole poem has a
pissy, irascible, even bitter tone, so there’s that. But “good nature” can also
mean something like the embeddedness in nature, that some of the other poems preceding
refer to, with the potential for pleasure and meaning that come from being of
nature and in nature by virtue of a body, which of course now is lost or over,
or at least falling apart. One interesting thing: Henry looks to be speaking
not from the Great Beyond, the timeless realm of spiritual eternity, etc., but
from his actual grave! So, maybe not fully dead? “Do not do” is obviously a
reference to Plath’s great poem to her father. “Perché” is likely the Italian,
for “why” or “what for,” spoken at the end by henry’s Death-chorus-conscience.
Henry’s not in a good mood today.
Regarding religion: “We was had.” Regarding fathers: “Do not do.” Regarding the
accolades in response to his art: “Maskt as honors, insults like behaving
missiles homes.” They didn’t fool me, in other words. So we’re bitter in the
grave? I suppose I’m sympathetic.
I think and write a lot about
what has been lost. We live in times of such rapid change, and despite the
advances that supposedly drive such movement, change ensures that something
will be lost. Lost is a sense of cultural and community continuity, and a sense
of a place in nature. Also probably lost is a sense of the inevitability of
fate, awareness of the narrowness and limits of one’s world, so that’s to the
good. I look back on the life of flowing creeks, abandoned farm buildings,
pastorality in the countryside, and trees and trees and trees as the markers of
my childhood. But I remember as well that I also played a lot on bulldozers and
excavators and the trenches and holes and mounds of dirt they dug up. We were too
close to expanding cities. The abandoned buildings that so fired my boyhood
imagination were abandoned because their usefulness at their locations had
decayed before they were quite physically gone. I played in that brief space.
But at 10 and 12, there is no sense of overarching cause. An abandoned log
cabin simply is and simply should be, and when I played there, it and I were
timeless. When they finally succumbed, it was tragic, a travesty, and I make no
apologies for that even now. I played in Kentucky in a deserted village, built in
the late 1860s by a community of newly-freed slaves. A century later, the
cabins and barns were empty, but the spirit of the place was my teacher—though I
didn’t know at the time that I was a student. The village, abandoned as it was,
should still timelessly remain in its place, and the Home Depot dropped like an
anvil on its place, and that stirred up a great boiling cloud of dust in its
landing, will be forever a monstrosity. Later, having moved on, the barn I played
in, built on the estate of a successful and wealthy industrialist, taught me that
that particular pastoral aesthetic is precisely how we should inhabit an
American Midwestern countryside. Never mind that the place was conceived in a
wealthy, aristocratic spirit of image-making in the '20s, by a rapacious and
image-conscious industrialist whose wife convinced him that gentleman farmer was a role it would
be advantageous for him to play. I absorbed the lessons folded through every
shingle and nail in the architecture without understanding what I was learning
or why. Now, because of my having absorbed the lessons of that timeless boyhood
space through a kind of existential osmosis, I know in adulthood that
aesthetics are every bit as critical as utility, and I am sure that the dairy
barn in all its stuccoed splendor was worth infinitely more than the expensive
travesties of the houses that landed in the hole left when it was demolished.
It’s what was bequeathed to me by the accident of showing up then and there, at
that moment of my life, and frankly I haven’t absorbed anything since to
convince me I’m wrong.
So, I understand Henry’s looking
back on his life with bitterness. Changes are always wrong, you see. The
hottest circle of hell is reserved for real estate developers, and I do not
mean that as a joke. Those changes for Henry include the changes that come when
your father kills himself, and the changes that come from success and the
struggle against grief and the unassailable knowledge that things should never,
never have come to this pass. Never. Just lie there pissed off in your pit and decay.
I do so totally get it.
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