Thursday, May 21, 2015

#140

[No online link available.]

This one refers a couple times to the cornerstone Dream Song 1. DS 1 ends with, “Hard on the land wears the strong sea / and empty grows every bed.” Recognition of the wearing of age, the accumulation of cuts and bruises on the body is one aspect of life, and try as we might to hold it off with creams or surgery, in the end the Sea of Time wears out the land in this struggle. Our beds grow empty. It’s best to accept this, right? Doesn’t make it any easier to bear, but perhaps it does. This is a sustained motif throughout The Dream Songs. Self-abuse, substance abuse, make the anxiety that attends thoughts of mortality more acute in this long poem; because mortality comes on even faster and is attended by such a strong sense of regret. In the first stanza of DS 140, “Henry is vanishing.” “He broods & recedes.” Brooding and receding are also sustained motifs (in the famous DS 14, he recedes into his boredom till the only thing left is “me, wag”). Then in DS 140 comes this really interesting reference to DS 1 again: “I saw his point, / remains much, probably, but not enough.” This wouldn’t make any sense without recalling DS 1: “I see his point—, a trying to put things over. / It was the thought that they thought / they could do it made Henry wicked & away.” A line like “a trying to put things over” is tough to figure out, and even the most experienced and conscientious reader is liable to pass it over. It’s that unusual use of “put” that makes the interpretation a challenge. Now, a new reading of this line strikes me. It means something like a trying to make things stop, in others words put it to being over, end it.. Enough. End what? The ills of the world by commenting on them, assert the power of art for change, but maybe not, maybe it’s just a reference to this sustained campaign of self-erasure that mark The Dream Songs. Here’s the thing that makes poetry so endlessly fascinating for some heads who can accommodate it and so frustrating and enraging for others: it probably means all this stuff and even more I haven’t thought of yet. All at once. But, the poet, whatever it is he’s doing, is doing something. It means much. Perhaps. Perhaps not enough—there is real doubt in the poet right now as he feels himself disarticulating, “joint by joint”, that it’s ever going to matter.

I’m sticking with my agreement that it’s the thought they thought they could do it that so infuriates, often to helplessness. (We become Bob Dylan’s “Napoleon in rags,” cursing at seagulls on our self-imposed, far-off island prisons.) We don’t need the antecedent for “they” here; we know who B.’s addressing: Power. And it’s power’s arrogance and self-aggrandizing focus that is always, always the matter. You see it in state, national and world politics, you see it in corporate decision-making, you potentially see it in the administration of non-profit organizations, small Catholic liberal arts colleges, Boy Scout troops, book clubs, families, marriages—wherever one party gains power, whether built-in or taken, over others. It’s not always insufferable, corrupt, tyrannical; there are wise, concerned and gentle leaders. That fact just makes the recognition of tyranny when it arrives that much worse. On the world-stage level, animals go extinct, mountain ranges are levelled, hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes millions at a time, see their lives destroyed. WTF?

Another motif of The Dream Songs is the brutal awareness of the personal intricacies of the suffering poet splayed out beneath these greater, broader outrages. So it is here. “Does it advantage him, weak / / with violent effort, rickety, on the stairs”. The question remains unpunctuated and slides right into this: “It’s a race with Time & that is all it is, / almost, given the conditions / & the faceless monsters of the Soviet Unions”. Note that it’s not the singular Soviet Union, which would be a specific reference; it’s plural, where “the Soviet Unions” takes on symbolic representation of all modes of world-threatening power, including The US Air Force’s fleet of Minuteman missiles, the chemical warfare arsenal from corporations like Monsanto—Agent Orange, Napalm (in our day, Round-Up, PCBs, HFC, etc., etc., etc.)—the impoverishing activities of political power brokers, Wall Street financiers, and on and on, the same sold familiar, dispiriting list. It all culminates in the poem with the image of the first atomic bomb going off over New Mexico: “The shadows, under the tower, in the most brilliant sun / will get us nowhere too.” Those last two lines are self-explanatory.

In my poem from two days ago, in response to DS 138, I picked up on this broad existential dread of nihilistic, self-destructive tendencies that are certainly one way to respond to the bullshit overrunning the world. I ran with it for a time, et voilà la poème. It was valid in the 1960s and it drove the so-called Counter Culture in response. It’s true now, with environmental apocalypse replacing nuclear annihilation as the chief threat motivating thoughts of despair in the face of looming extinction. There are others: blooming racisms and misogyny, appalling income disparity, wars over oil and water in the Middle East. Take your pick, according to your lights. But I want to begin to question this approach of despair as a world-response, because in the end it’s a slog into the mire of hopelessness. There are reasons to think that the world is moving away from the establishment, and the powers in power are helpless to stop it, which is what makes them for this moment that much more virulent. Their virulence is born of the desperation of approaching revolution. We’ll see. The 60s gave birth to some real change. Much of what was progressively accomplished is under attack. But it happened. What matters more is the consciousness of the individual within the community: All this dread feeds itself, which is partly the tactic that disempowers the person and by extension his meaningful community. There are ways around it. Without those ways, you get stuck with depression, self-inflicted decay, nihilism, suicide, and you play with it right into the hands of power who wanted that for you in the first place. It shuts you up. B. was victimized by broad insensible power in the world, by circumstances emotional and actual, and by substance abuse, that together fed all this despair in him, and it led to a vision of his role on the planet that was dark and helpless. Good for him for speaking back. It was heroic, but here he’s fearing it was pointless in the end. That remains an open question. I’ll follow him, and I’ll respond to his despair as legitimate psychologically and historically, but also, for me, I declare: fuck that.

We’ll just have to see.

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