I once toured the Creationist
Museum here in Kentucky with a friend who was writing an article about it. We
saw such wonders as a model of Noah’s Ark with an Ornithomimus dinosaur curled up napping in one of the stalls, a
life-sized model of another dinosaur with a saddle on it, Adam and Eve hanging
out in Eden with a vegetarian tiger, and a life-history timeline that stretched
back just over 6000 years to the seven days of creation. One exhibit had a representation
of a filthy graffiti-smeared alleyway with gunfire and sirens blaring over
hidden speakers, and descriptions claiming that the nightmarish urban violence
(it was completely understood that black urban ghettoes are at issue) being
depicted arose as a result of humanity’s not listening to the literal
admonitions of scripture. It was all such utter bullshit of the most ridiculous
order, yet there it is, taking in umpteen hundreds of thousands of patrons who
pay admission to a well-designed museum in order to try and learn something about
their history and their faith. Talking about it afterwards, I made a comment
that made its way into my friend’s article, that fundamentalism essentially strips
the life out of scripture, which to be relevant and alive needs to be
continuously reinterpreted in light of ongoing changes in social norms,
scientific discoveries, etc. We do this with Shakespeare all the time, and as a
result, Shakespeare is alive and well and as relevant as ever in the over 400
years since his plays were written. I’ve since gone further and now see
Christian and Islamic fundamentalism as a form of idolatry. As I might have
noted here before, you crush the life out of scripture then preserve it in a
jar of ideological formaldehyde. Then you worship the jar’s contents, a
variation on the “graven image” the Ten Commandments or Ten Statements found in
the Bible and the Torah warn against.
When Henry calls himself a rabbi,
he is joking. I imagine he probably did talk about the Torah in his teachings
since it’s such a critical foundation of Judeo-Christian and thus Western philosophy,
and anyway, he claims he teaches around the fringes of the Torah and there’s no
reason to doubt it. This poem has nothing to do with Judeo-Christian
philosophy, however. It’s all about the fundamentalist urge to fix scripture, to kill it and pose it in
other words, like the Creationist Museum does or like a butterfly collector
does with his butterflies. I used to collect butterflies when I was a
fundamentalist child: Net them, kill them, mount them, then line them up in
rows to hang on the wall. And let me assure you that in certain dorkish young
heads like mine was, that urge can be fierce.
(Charles Darwin had it. While collecting beetles as a boy, he ran into three
new species at once. With one in each hand the third was getting away. He
popped one into his mouth. Unfortunately it was a bombardier beetle, which has
a defense mechanism of shooting some blazing hot noxious chemical at its attackers.
Darwin gagged and choked and the beetles all got away. Late in his life, Darwin
chuckled at his youthful enthusiasm. Let me add here that I totally get it.) For
the collector, whatever the dead butterfly has lost as far as liveliness and
its literal embodiment of the vitality of nature, it gains in the collector’s
sense of control and rigid, easy-to-comprehend order. This matters with
butterflies: They are aesthetic objects when mounted, granted, but some of us
who study butterflies go through an unsettling period when the bizarre mystery
of metamorphosis is so disturbing in its incomprehensibility that we are
motivated to reduce the butterfly to an object which can be owned and arranged
in order to alleviate that sense of alienation the mystery of the butterfly as
living strangeness causes. This is precisely what the fundamentalist does to scripture
and the mystery of faith.
But B. is not talking about scripture
in the form of the Torah. He’s talking about suicide, and further, one
particular suicide that has arisen in his life as his own personal scriptural
passage, in which he is indeed “an expert, deep & wide.” B. is holding up
that suicide as “scripture,” and his invoking the Second Commandment against
graven images is important. He knows the dangers of what he’s been doing all of
his professional life, and he calls attention to it himself. It falls into this
pattern he’s been doing all along. Can you say racist things as long as you’re
deliberate about it and aware that it’s racist? Sure! Can you be a sexist jerk
as long as you’re being ironic and funny and saying, look at me, I’m being a
sexist jerk? Of course you can! Can you make an artistic fetish of your father’s
suicide? I guess you can. I think of early Steve Martin comedy routines, with
an arrow through his head, playing a banjo, making jokes about his “funny
comedy gags.” He acts so smarmy and arrogant about it, an act, and it is
hilarious because there’s a calm intelligence underneath that you can sense. He’s
not smarmy at all. Push it to an absurd extreme and it becomes great comedy and
a commentary on how we use irony to mask bad intentions. Back it off a bit, and
double down by living it, and now it’s art? I wonder.
Actually, I question it. B. does
too, and he questions it here, but what happens is that there’s this layering
of meaning that arises. It looks real but it’s not but being aware that it’s not legitimizes it
anyway. Thomas Mann’s great novel, Doctor
Faustus, is a modernist take on Goethe’s Faust, which of course has ancient roots. It has a variation on
this kind of movement. Adrian Leverkühn has sold his soul to the devil for
24 years of musical genius and fame. He has this encounter with the Dark One as
his day of reckoning approaches, and tries to talk his way out of the bargain
by invoking God’s infinite capacity for mercy. From what I can remember, the
argument goes something like, I sin and reject God, but he forgives me because
he’s infinitely merciful, which allows me to sin further and greater, which he
also forgives in an even further and greater fashion, on and on, and his
forgiveness is always that much greater than my capacity to sin. Satan responds
with what for me became one of the great memorable lines in all the millions I’ve
read in my day: “Let me assure you that Hell is filled with just such heads as
yours.”
When you’re dealing with a
confessional poet, you unfortunately have to deal with the person, in this case
someone who in life I likely would have absolutely nothing to do with. I don’t
even like him now. But I’m also partly held in check from really going after
the guy because I do acknowledge and feel sympathy for the fact that his life
was real, it was his, and he suffered in it, probably more than most people suffer
in theirs—though obviously that’s a judgement fraught with peril. Many people
suffer in their lives, and more often it’s not through bad choices they’ve
made. It’s to his enormous credit that he took his suffering and transformed it
through this great art of poetry. But there is also something fishy about it,
and I think he’s totally aware of it. That suffering was partly a construct,
and the art became a complex, high-concept rationale for simple bad behavior,
irresponsibility and bad choices. It was a dynamic that fed itself, a dynamic
analogous in its way to Leverkühn’s damnation and Steve Martin’s hilarity. And
there’s something else: His father’s death was almost certainly not a suicide.
There were no powder burns, which means he was shot from a distance. B. had to
have known the details and their implications. But he steadfastly refused to
ever acknowledge them. Yes, the psychology of such genuine grief is complicated
and would understandably set up roadblocks to real understanding. But a grief
in response to a suicide drove and
also excused everything in his life, shameful and glorious, that followed. It became his own fundamentalist pose,
and I think he knew it on some level and is admitting it here.
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