#156

I give in. I must not leave     the scene of this same death

as most of me strains to.

There are all the problems to be sorted out,

the fate of the soul, what it was all about

during its being, and whether he was drunk

at 4 a.m. on the wrong floor too 

fighting for air, tearing his sorry clothes

with his visions dying O and O I mourn

again this complex death

Almost my oldest friend should never have been born

to this terrible end, out of which what grows

but an unshaven, dissheveled corpse? 

The spirit & the joy, in memory

live of him on, the young will read his verse

for as long as such things go:

Why then do I despair, miserable Henry

who knew him all so long, for better & worse

and nearly would follow him below. 

Two things here: 1) The grief he’s stuck on goes on. Much more importantly: 2) Why? I think it’s because of this business of the immortality of the artist, who leaves something of himself behind through his work. He doubts it. There’s something of rationalization about this concept of the artist being immortal, I’ve always thought. Take Shakespeare, described to me when I was introduced to his work as an undergrad as “the best writer ever to have written in English.” Probably this is true. And while knowing this in an artist’s life, that his work made a cultural contribution, even one that’s lasting and deep, death is still death. Even for Shakespeare. Though long-term relevance of the work produced in that life can make a life meaningful, and it will have a kind of “life” of its own, it still doesn’t compensate for death if a real life wasn’t lived. One’s interior perceptions, feelings, ideas, they stop here, and whether they live on in an afterlife doesn’t matter. For a person of real faith, I suppose that’s not true. That’s not Berryman here, at least not yet. For all of the agnostic doubters, they can’t know that for sure either. Life simply ends. So the young reading someone’s verse in some virtual future is not compensation enough—this is Henry’s despair. It’s a problem because that’s what he’s staked his existence on. His life has some serious problems by most conventional standards, but the work—validated by fame—is supposed to compensate. Does it? Not if you take down what this block of poems portends.

Mary Oliver has an answer:

The Summer Day

Mary Oliver 

 Who made the world?

 Who made the swan, and the black bear?

 Who made the grasshopper?

 This grasshopper, I mean—

 the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

 the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

 who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

 who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

 Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face

 Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

 I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

 I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

 into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

 how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

 which is what I have been doing all day.

 Tell me, what else should I have done?

 Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

 Tell me, what is it you plan to do

 with your one wild and precious life? 

The answer to Oliver’s final question is contained in her poem: Pay attention to your life, pay attention to the world, and permit the world to fill you with wonder. This moment of wonder is what matters, and it is all that matters. Even a prayerful faith in something grand: Who really knows what that’s about? Something so common and humble as a grasshopper is what is miraculous, it leads you to all you need to know if you’ll only pay attention. For Berryman, he’s crying over Delmore Schwartz, and as I’ve figured, for himself, because the arc of their lives led to prodigious artistic production, fame, and a faith in a continued existence of life through art, but the whole damned enterprise is ringing hollow, isn’t it? Henry here is worried that they sold their lives and the fates of their souls to a figment—“the fate of the soul” is his phrase, not mine. Their lives weren’t fueled by wonder and life, they were fueled by a misplaced faith in a mistaken myth of artistic immortality, and while neither one could figure it out, on some level, Henry must know it. My hope and my expectations for The Dream Songs from the beginning has been that Berryman would lead the reader to this understanding. I don’t see it happening yet, but I’m not even halfway through. We’ll see. But this is still teaching me something, if only through a recognition of what’s absent, which is the The Now. Don’t squelch The Now in days of alcoholic oblivion, drugged stupors, and what I really do suspect is a self-inflicted madness. Pay attention instead. Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver are two voices I trust, and they have forerunners that go back millennia. But the groundwork for their immediate voice, I believe, was laid by the mistakes of the generations before them, who also, understand, have their progeny still jabbering away. There are many subtle, powerful, persuasive lies out there. But they’re lies anyway. Grasshoppers don’t lie. Pay attention. The thing about Shakespeare is that he did. His attention arrived in his work and that’s why we still produce his plays 400 years later. If Berryman didn’t pay some kind of attention, then his work will fade and crumble, like graffiti on the Berlin Wall. I’m not ready yet to say he didn’t. There may be other ways than communing with insects. We’ll see. But Berry and Oliver offer wise guidance.