Monday, May 11, 2015

#130

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_130_When_I_saw_my_friend_covered_with_blood_I_thought_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

On a vision from a dream, one of those dreams that teach us what we really think. The dream vision is of a friend covered in blood, and it’s a wish that he would move on. It’s about success, apparent and real, about the relationship between the appearance of outward, worldly success and a life that more substantially makes somebody happy. I guess the spectacle of the miserable success is common enough. That’s what the “large strain of moving” means, I think—out doing what you do, book coming out in paperback (symbolic of successful life and career activity), but the activity just stretches him further on that rack of his own making. B. wishes all that quickening, life-supporting blood would flow away, leaving him “crisp.” (From the point of view of language and words? “Crisp” is a bull’s-eye. Wow. Nailed it. The image invokes dryness through loss of blood-moisture first, but also with an undertone of having been burned: He’s burned out.) He wishes the friend would bleed out, get it over with and dry up, which would actually be a mercy to someone whose life is a torment. You only wish this on someone if a) there is no hope of change in life, and b) you believe that the dying is not an end, but a change in itself, a continuance. But does maybe faith in an afterlife allow someone to abandon hope of change in this life a bit too easily? That’s the reason for the religious taboo against suicide, which has been religion’s way of addressing this issue. Your religious duty is to stick it out at all costs, play this life out to the last drop of blood.

B.’s not addressing that taboo at all, though. There’s a desire for death lurking here, and the final “spring up & go” is an ironic twist on what death often seems to be. Not an ending, a ceasing of life’s activity and motion; it’s the moment where you get up and finally start moving. It’s a faith in an afterlife all right, but I also can’t help seeing it as a rejection of life’s possibilities, a confirmation of despair. A poem like this, a dream vision, and an instructive one, is teaching, but it’s also doing something else: It looks like a preparation for suicide.

I’m not judging. Our whole society is edging slowly away from the orthodox Western taboo against willfully ending life—death with dignity, doctor-assisted suicide, unplugging the machines. Hospice. Disease, age, substance abuse: one of these will put each of us to the question. Facing that fact can ennoble death by leading us away from the fundamentalist fetish of clinging to life with absolute, unbending conviction, denying or enduring the torment of living if that’s what it has come to. On the other hand, it’s also wrong to make it too easy. Is this poem pushing for that? I only slightly suspect it, just a bit. But I get it. When the time comes to let go, let go. Still, dreaming that wish for someone else, in the end, may not only be a wish for his pain-releasing death. It may actually be a wish for his growth and change, yet, while there’s still time. So is this poem a death wish or a desire for growth? Doesn’t have to be one or the other. It’s both.

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