Monday, June 8, 2015

#159

[No online link available.]

Looks like the occasion of a funeral, and of course we know whose it was. This looks to be the last of the Delmore Schwartz cycle—what turns out to be the 14th Dream Song dedicated to that person’s death, which obviously hit B. pretty hard. The first stanza is about dressing for the funeral. He was sick five times. A total wreck. The second just a fleeting image or two from the ceremony, with a passing mention of “exalted figures.” The third stanza looks forward:

I feel a final chill. This is cold sweat
that will not leave me now. Maybe it’s time
to throw in my own hand.
But there are secrets, secrets, I may yet—
hidden in history & theology, hidden in rhyme—
come on to understand.

That’s the spirit! All right, not to be so sarcastic. Maybe it’s finally time to end it, is the thought flitting about here, except that there are still secrets to be learned, and here we have a return to what a reader like me might be on the lookout for. What do we find hidden in those places, which take such concentration and effort to unlock, but which are so rewarding? A blog follower here, and friend, J___, mentioned in a comment yesterday that B.’s “demons sang him to sleep.” It’s such an apt and perfect assessment that I have to repeat it. Eventually they did exactly that, sang him dead, in fact, but for the moment he’s about to re-engage with the struggle to make music. I learned something important from this two-week howl over Delmore Schwartz that I’ve been so engaged with. It has to do with the folly of passively letting the past dictate anything, and at the same time, the folly of yearning toward the future—heaven, ambition to fame, they fill similar niches. Past and future—in T.S. Eliot’s great phrase, “mixing memory with desire”—robs the present of its agency. The arc of one’s life always has this great hole in the middle of it, and that shrinks one’s life, quite literally. Shrinks our engagement with our lives through the agency of the moment. When it came down to it, the expectation of comfort in heaven and the accolades of fame weren’t enough to compensate for the yawning donut hole. That’s a valuable, valuable lesson, I think.

This is different, by the way, from hope and history, both of which exist with us in the moment. We aren’t animals, in the end, we are aware of the arc of our lives. It’s a question of how we inhabit that arc. Are we focused or not? If a childhood trauma—whether we dramatize it or not—and faith in the compensations of a distant after-heaven control us, then we lose our focus, lose our moment, lose our way, and eventually lose our lives, either because the meaninglessness overwhelms us and we can’t find the way out, or life just ticks away.

I actually don’t think Berryman saw this, or at least if he did, it didn’t make it into the poems directly. But the pursuit of “secrets” is actually a now impulse, so that’s good. I came into these poems hoping that the poet would be a teacher in the traditional sense: Let me show you what I know, or come with me as I use my heightened wisdom and finely honed learning technique to discover new things. At times, this has been the case. More often, though, it has been a case of watch me proclaim, in detail, all my banal fuckups, including all the attendant shame, embarrassment and humiliation, and I’ll demonstrate with my whole being what not to do. You figure it out from there. Jeez, sometimes I so regret the modern world.

No comments:

Post a Comment