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.
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