#121

http://www.best-poems.net/john_berryman/dream_song_121_grief_is_fatiguing_he_is_out_of_it.html

I so get this poem. I remember as a youngster when I would run into some new pretty girl, or she had been there all along and I just noticed her, and uh-oh, here came the crush, and all I could think was, “Oh noooo. Not this again. Nooooo.” I absolutely dreaded it. There was never any stopping the emotional train bearing down, me tied to the tracks by the ropes of my stupid merciless feelings. I hated it, and I really, really hated it. I resented it. Had I been a bit more confident or experienced, this might have been something to revel in and enjoy. It seemed to be—sometimes—for other people. Girls did not seem much interested though. When they grew into women, everything suddenly changed, and it was baffling. But that’s another story.

That’s what’s going on here. Henry falls half in love with one of his students and “the sad process continues to the whole / as it swarmed & began”. Here it comes. Shit. And that’s the grief of the first line that is so fatiguing to the speaker—unrequited or inexpressible desire always morphs to grief. It’ll wear you out.

But here’s the thing: When you’re thirteen or fourteen, crushes lumber along out of nowhere and devastate everybody. They’re like giant meteorites, they just come streaking out of the blue and obliterate whatever they crash into. That’s part of being a young teenager. It comes with the territory. But when you’re fifty?

I’m already close to end of this episode of Romantic soul-baring, but I need to add this. You do notice your students. They’re young and beautiful and smart and lively, and you have eyes. What’s not to love? And since we’re all 13 years old down deep, the same old potential for a wounding crush lurks in the depths of anyone’s heart. But the accumulated layers of maturity suppress all that, and there is more control as well. It’s not that we don’t have the same passions in our fifties, it’s that we have more safeguards and more controls, we’re wiser and nimbler and more solid. This business doesn’t break the surface and gain control. We have families and people emotionally dependent on us being present, and that's who we care about and who we want to care about. Our responsibilities matter more. So you shrug it off. This is what’s called being well-adjusted. The only reason I would even talk about this now is because John Berryman threw it out there, and I’ve set myself the task of responding to whatever shows on a given day. Some days are easier than others.

Well adjusted? He wasn’t very well adjusted, was he? Maybe. Actually—of course he wasn’t  very well adjusted! Not by the definition I just laid out, as having the ability to relegate one’s renegade feelings to the dungeon of societal expectations where they ebb away, dying from leprosy, starvation and loneliness. I did write about this whole thing in a story once, and the main character, talking with his beautiful young niece about what one does with inadmissible feelings, tells her he that he wraps them in duct tape and stuffs them into the back of the bottom dresser drawer. That’s what a middle-aged man is expected to do. You can’t have creepy old geezer professors mooning in the open over their students. Most of them would run away to puke anyway, but some are too fragile, unsure, vulnerable. They’re young, they need space to screw up and develop, find their own foolish way with other clumsy young people and figure it out. They depend on the freedom to be awkward.

In practice? It doesn’t always work. Some can wrap up those feelings and tuck them away, but sometimes they jerk open the drawer from the inside and splinter the whole damn dresser to flinders. Age’s experience and the expectations of propriety are powerless to suppress it. The harder you try, the more thundering the eventual explosion. Other times, here they come oozing out from under the dresser, making a mess on the floor like an oily puddle of greenish-black petroleum that you can’t just wipe up. We all know this. So I’ll give the poet credit on this poem for something. It’s a poet’s job to engage with this business, as icky and uncomfortable as it might be to us well-adjusted folks. He takes the risk. Wrinkled, nostrils stuffed with hair, never loved his body anyway—hardly the virile young Romeo his lovely young students are probably pining for—his heart still pulses and oozes, because living hearts always pulse and ooze. It’s a real fucking mess, too. But there it is. Credit for artistic courage on this one, not grotesque exhibitionism. It’s not to say he should have permission to act on these flowings of love and desire for girls too young for him. The societal reasons for keeping this business out of the actionable everyday window seem valid. His act is to write about it, shunt the business off in a less inappropriate direction. It’s not a crime anymore, it’s art. It’s safe now, and we can finally admit that even as sensible adults we know exactly what he’s talking about.

(Addendum, added May 7: It’s almost unbelievable how I got 121 so wrong, and it happened because I missed the reference to Randall Jarrell on the first line of the 2^nd stanza. Kind of hard to miss, but I did it. Some are thinking, “I don’t like Berryman and don’t read the poems anyway,” and others are thinking, “I’ve haven’t yet understood more than a dozen lines anyway, so what does it matter?”, and others are thinking, “This kills your whole project. The blog is invalid. What a bonehead maneuver.” It was like Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”, where there is this critical piece of evidence in the form of a letter hidden in a Paris flat, which the police can’t find because it’s perched right there on the mantelpiece in plain sight. They’re looking under carpets and behind the wallpaper, but they don’t see the letter on the mantel. Yep. I knew I would probably miss a few things along the way, but this one is big, and a bit embarrassing. Oh, well, nobody’s watching… I have half a mind to go back and do 121 over, and I may just do that yet. It was a pretty spectacular rant, though, but totally spinning out of control. I can’t believe I missed it. Oh well… What worries me now is that the topic I hit on, in my misreading of the poem, says too much about something in me I maybe should have kept to myself? I need to put a paper bag over my head for a day and then try to forget about it. But, you know, take out that reference to RJ, and my response adds up to a consistent, persistent, focused, coherent, incisive, and insightful wrong reading! A brilliant screw up! Magnificent malarkey! Astonishing!!! [I think I’ll just tack this onto 121 and forget about it.] Feeling sheepish.)