Written, obviously, after the
notorious mass murders committed by Richard Speck and Charles Whitman, both in
the summer of 1966. Speck killed eight nurses in a hospital, Whitman climbed a
tower at the University of Texas and started shooting; he killed 16, wounded over
30. These are names that should best be forgotten, but of course we know that
infamy is as effective as fame in service of the common good as far as the
immortality of one’s name goes, from Hitler and Pol Pot to Gacy and McVeigh,
and scores more. If their names are known, it’s nevertheless due to their
legacy of villainy and disgrace. Not a pleasant topic on my last vacation
morning at the beach, but I don’t get to choose.
The first stanza is the only one
with any complications. There is at first a desire for company that for the
moment goes unfulfilled, which we’ve all experienced—it’s unremarkable to have
an immediate desire for company and everyone you know is out of reach or busy.
Happens. “Shall I follow my dream?” At first, this would seem to be the broad
dream of pursuing one’s art and resultant fame, again, pretty level stuff,
considering. Maybe it changes some in the stripping that happens, but really,
again: Unremarkable. When alone, it’s entirely within the realm of normal
behavior to take one’s clothes off and assess the beauty as well the ravages,
as pocked and weird as the vision may appear as we age away from the smooth and
gleaming youth we so took for granted when we were young. The real turn and
complication in the poem comes because this weird, aging and lonesome vision
naked in the mirror leads to the stories of Speck and Whitman, with horrifying
details. Time ravages our bodies and eventually kills them just as dead as any
murderer can: Time/age has proven itself the greatest and most effective of all
history’s mass murderers. There’s that. But there’s also this sneaking arrival
of a new reading for “my dream” planted in the poem. “Who is what he seem?”
indeed. The potential for a false representation of the body and the persona to
the person is not necessarily easy to
spot, though if one is indeed responsible for one’s face (which I do more or
less believe), then the correlations are there to mark. But it takes time,
experience and wisdom to see, and danger can be quick in arriving. John Wayne
Gacy affected clown makeup to lure the children he murdered, living out a terrible
and demented twist on this: If the intent is indeed apparent there in the face,
then it is best hidden under makeup.
It comes and goes in the poem,
the evil dream vision of the horrible self rising then sinking away again, at
least how I see things. The disturbance gives way to the overwhelming reality
of actual murder. Look, we all have criminal urges lurking in our depths like
psychic barracudas in the colorful, beautiful wonders of a coral reef. They
stay hidden when we learn to recognize them and chase them off. There’s nothing
at all sick about acknowledging this. In health, revulsion in the contemplation
of satisfying these urges wins the day. So it does here, so the details of the
knife in the eye and the fusillade of bullets into the bodies of innocent
strangers are actually a necessary component of psychic health. Urge? Fine.
These things do rise from our depths. Now take a sec to think of the
consequences, and that gives us the power to right ourselves. That’s this
poem’s motive, a snapshot of what weird loneliness or rage can lure into the
open, and a comment on how we deal with it. At the end, the poem also takes an
appropriate turn to what we would now in the current political moment call
Second Amendment Rights, which has become all about claiming the “rights” of
people to arm themselves so that the weird, violent but natural urges we
normally experience are given the opportunity to explode into an immediate and
unnatural violence that can’t be recalled. (That it’s in reality driven by the
profit motive of gun manufacturers is actually a different issue. The
consequences of gun marketing [the
NRA] feed a gun culture.) Gun culture,
the consequence, is profoundly, profoundly and fundamentally sick because of
this unnatural acceleration it provides for of normal urges that bloom into
scarlet stains of violence—that cannot be recalled. Whitman and Speck did not
represent that: They were psychopathic monsters who acted with deliberation.
But their presence in the mind of the poet (and which thus find their way into
the poem) triggered an engagement with the id-driven violence that fleetingly
bubbles up from time to time, which smells like sulfur for a moment but blows
away eventually as long as we don’t have weapons in easy reach, when for just
the briefest of critical moments “respect for guns” outweighs respect for
people, the consequences of which are permanent and will never just blow away.
As hard as it might be to swallow, this poem is okay.
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