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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