Another uncomplicated set of
thoughts about the death of Delmore Schwartz. Wondering what he felt as he
dropped to the carpet in his New York City hotel. B. would like to say that as
he aged, he got better. It wasn’t to be, and there we have it. It is what it
is, they say as they say. Since this is Delmore Schwartz week, I think I’ll
just look into another of his poems and see what’s in store. I’m choosing this
one because of the great title:
“Dogs Are Shakespearean, Children
Are Strangers”
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171346
William Wordsworth wrote about children a
lot: “The child is the father of the man” is his great statement from “My Heart
Leaps Up when I Behold”. Wordsworth mentions his “glad animal movements”
thinking back on his boyhood with his sister in “Lines Composed a Few Miles
above Tintern Abbey.” Here is the connection of children with animals, and from
what I remember of my boyhood, it’s a pretty apt comparison. Freud, of course,
had a lot to say about children and the stages of development they go through,
and how interrupting one of those stages leads to various neuroses in the adult.
They are expression of the id, pure narcissistic desire, so their obsession
with natural functions is normal. For Schwartz, the idea seems to be that they
live in a timeless, thoughtless existence, which the progressively maturing,
educated adult, who dawn into a “knowing that heaven and hell surround us.” This
sucks, but we have to end up figuring this all out if we’re to live as normatively
functioning adults. Emerson called this dawning into knowledge of our existence
The Fall of Man—Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, the biologists say, which
means that the evolution of the organism, say a human, from fish through
amphibian, to reptile to mammal, to upright primate mammal, is cycled through again
as the embryo develops then loses its gill slits and its tail, all that. For
Emerson, the development of the youth recapitulates the development of
civilization. The child dawns into consciousness and eventually self-awareness
and self-control. Emerson remarked how much the ancient Greeks remind one of a
pack of unruly boys, except, I expect, they fight with dirt clods and bicycles
rather than spears and chariots.
That line “this which we say
before we’re sorry” is a good one. The wild animal and the pre-self-aware child
don’t say they’re sorry, because they’re not developmentally capable of such a
thing. Adults do, with their sophisticated understanding of their roles in the
social world they dawn into. But Schwartz is telling us, wait a second. These
beasts of our pasts aren’t quite the strangers we like to tell ourselves we
think they are. We live them behind our unseen faces, and they’re not gone, but
the thing is, this glad animal wildness doesn’t just fade into our backgrounds:
It grows and develops with us. So the whole concept takes a new turn: We don’t
leave the child/animal behind as we grow into newer, more socially acceptable
incarnations. Rather, we paste on new faces, like with clowns with makeup, and
the wildings beneath grow, and change in a continuous act of new becoming,
howling, and dancing, knowing no future, but also more learned and adult than
before.
How is this Shakespearean? I just
think it’s a nod to Shakespeare’s understanding of the human person and its
psychological layers. He saw it all, and well before Freud burrowed into his
patients’ psyches, categorizing and generalizing from what he discovered there,
Shakespeare knew it already. Hamlet, for example, has some pretty severe mother
issues that it takes him awhile to unravel before he’s finally free to act and
eventually get killed. Shakespeare seemed to be in touch with the things Freud
studied three centuries later. Dogs, children, Shakespeare: We see them
related. What connects them doesn’t fade as we mature, though, which we like to
tell ourselves.. It’s always with us. So if you’re barking like a coonhound at
your misbehaving child, you’re communicating effectively.
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