An uncomplicated poem about
aging, and a self-assessment. “stomach & arm / Henry endured like a pain
farm.” That’s part of aging all right. Ouch. Then he worked all day and all
night, and nothing turned out. Another aspect of aging is that we lose some of our
mental acuity. Join the club. Second stanza: the “lust-quest” seems to be over,
he now having become an honest householder and all. Except for that one woman, Amy, in another city. Whatever. Third
stanza, it’s Thanksgiving. Assessing where he’s at. “I do this thrice a year;
that is, I grope / a few sore hours among my actuals / for evidence of
knighthood.” That old ego keeps on throbbing though, doesn’t it?
My response to this poem? Meh.
And I would bet that B. felt pretty much the same way. There is a small critical
voice squeaking in my intellectual background like a mouse in the corner of an
empty church that would argue something about the poetry of the ineffectual, how
a vapid poem brilliantly encapsulates the vapidity of ordinary aging—but that
would be hogwash. Not a chance.
Here’s a story about aging, naïveté,
and hard lessons in a hard world. I had dinner last night with an old friend,
who I’ve known since I was 15, lived with in 3 or 4 different houses and
apartments all through our extended years in college. We shared the deepest
secrets of our painful burgeoning into young adulthood, and though our lives
pull us in different directions these days, we can still read each other like
brothers. He’s an architect, co-owner of his own firm, his partner another of
our college roommates from back when, when we all shared an affectionate old
barn of a house. We found ourselves in a park in Over the Rhine, the rapidly
reviving historical district in Cincinnati, amazed like everyone else in this
town at the incredible pace of the change happening there. Architecturally, OTR
isn’t just a city treasure, it’s a national treasure, an amazing neighborhood,
the largest intact historical district in any city in the US, from what I
understand. It was lively and fun on a Thursday night in June, kids playing,
people walking dogs, a band playing up on the old bandstand. Picturesque,
diverse and lovely, and quite remarkable given how run-down the neighborhood
was just a few short years ago. But the neighborhood is sadly marred by the new
high school built next to the park, an incoherent, noisy, inexcusable failure
of a building, and quite frankly a civic embarrassment given its location and
the fact that it houses one of Cincinnati’s most cherished and proud institutions.
Turns out the firm my friend was
working for at the time had been in the design competition, which I never knew,
and had made it through as a finalist. He had designed his firm’s entry, which sensitively
addressed the various challenges the site threw to the designer. In the end they
didn’t get the job, which was a disappointment, but that’s life. But they were
shocked to see the design that did win—which, honestly, is truly awful. It’s
not just that it’s bad, it’s worse than bad. You have to work really hard to
come up with something so inappropriate and so blockheaded. So some years
later, my friend ran into the city official in charge of the project. What happened?
he asked. The answer: Oh, yours was by far the best design, no question. But I
don’t know you. You were a wild card. I didn’t know if you would do what you
were told. Maybe you would have been concerned with doing the right thing, or with
what’s best for the kids at the school, and I couldn’t have that. You’d best
learn something about politics.
Sitting in front of the
embarrassing structure that wound up getting built, that execrable piece of
crap, that chancrous blot on an otherwise gorgeous urban environment, I was
stunned, every bit as much as he was at the moment he received that speech. We
talked for much of the evening about what it all meant. The surrounding OTR
cityscape dates from a time when design aesthetics mattered, and there was an
understanding of aesthetics, and an insistence that if you were going to be
permitted to build something important in this great city, it must strive to
beautify and uplift the city. Those are old-fashioned ideas, but they were
taken seriously, and we now have glorious Over the Rhine to show for them. Now?
A couple things: Aesthetically, the present building should not stand, but it does. It does because aesthetics standards
have been twisted, muddled, degraded, corrupted, confused, to the extent that
not many people can look at a building and know how to judge it anymore, and
the end result is that too few people actually even care. They’ll tolerate such
a travesty. If you do care, or you do have an opinion, you’re elitist. The
other thing is that aesthetics weren’t the trump card anyway. Political
connections were what won the day. Best learn to play the politics.
It’s so challenging to learn an
art. It takes years of focused study and practice. Even with all the study and
practice, bad artists can still make it to positions of aesthetic influence through
the other “arts” of persuasion, glad-handing, and bullshit—and then they end up
promoting bad aesthetics. In architecture, aesthetic influence and politics
meet, because buildings define cities and they’re necessary, but they’re enormously
expensive. The problem is that power brokers are not art critics, but more to
the point, they don’t care about aesthetics. Not at all. At least not in this
conservative town. In fact, there’s a measure of contempt for that. An
architect with integrity needs his aesthetic and technical training, but turns
out that a critical part of his technical training needs to involve political acumen.
It’s a lot to ask. In the case of that school, the power and influence systems
at City Hall miserably failed the city. The lecture my friend received from
that city official was part gloating and rubbing some aesthete elitist’s face
in his failure, but we also felt that it was also offered as a lesson: This is
the way the world works, kid. Best learn your politics if you think you’re
gonna make it big in this town. We looked at each other and understood that you
can still be naïve in your 50s. It’s hard to move forward after such a lesson.
It’s pretty clear that B. played
the literary power circles very well, and even though he repeatedly fell on his
face personally, there always seemed to be a friend close by to help him back
to his feet. I don’t see DS 163 as a disastrous mote of literature. While it’s
not great like many of The Dream Songs,
it’s also not as actively bad and embarrassing as some of them either. But it’s
not the poem’s merits or lack thereof that got it into a great book. I think Berryman’s
connections and his reputation are what let this nebbish poem skulk its way
into the collection. Aesthetics had nothing to do with it.
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