I like Dream Songs best when they’re
about something other than the poet’s self-absorption. I had no idea back six
months ago there would be so much of it. But at least this Dream Song is about
life and parties, how interaction with people stimulates the mind for some
extroverted types. For all his self-pity and whining, the reflexive crawling
into various holes when in pain, like a cat going away to die by herself, the
guy seems like an extrovert, someone for whom talk and social interaction
trigger an endorphin cascade and he gets juiced over it. A “ritornello” is a
recurring theme in baroque music, a kind of musical interlude which returns to
the familiar before the piece strikes off into new territory. The ritornello for
the speaker is the party, the place where Henry’s blackface buddy can note, “Mr.
Bones, you am.” It means more in context than it otherwise might, since Henry
always sees himself as having been castrated, who hides and folds away, who squanders
two and three days at a time in nihilistic drunken oblivion. At a party, in
company, his wit unfolds, his riverine brain flows undammed, and he is who he
is—and he’s quite alive. Descartes proclaimed, “I think, therefore I am.” Henry
counters with, “I party, therefore I is.” Party conversation is the ritornello,
the familiar recurring motif that serves as comforting interlude between the
more adventurous sections of shame, fame, drunkenness, work, and triumph. It’s
real life for a change.
Let’s have a ritornello.
He loved them many & he loved
them well
and he held the world up like a
big sea-shell
or heather-ale, harkening to
follow.
This is why academics go to
conferences. The formal panels and presentations are showcases for the
artifacts of intellectual work, reports of which filter back to administrators
as justification for the dribbles of support money, and they are important
enough. But the parties are what it’s all about, where the real work is done.
Ideas are developed new and raw, and contacts are forged and cemented, and
there is joy and laughter accompanying all of the hard, out-loud thinking. This
is life of the mind at its most wonderful.
At the conference I just returned
from, there was singing every night.
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