#185

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Anyone over, say, 30, will sympathize with this poem, set in a fearful clinical surroundings of a dentist’s office, about aging and with drills whirring. It’s all about living with an aging body—“’His Majesty, / the body.’” There’s a great sense of humor about it, too: “‘Gynecomastia’ the surgeon called, / the man is old & bald / and has habits. In this circumstance / I cannot save him.’” Why bother? is the question that sometimes hovers around the songs. But, no, there is work to be done. The poem ends on a fairly profound statement: “The older you get, at once / the better death looks and / the more fearful & intolerable.”

For some reason I couldn’t explain—except that it was very effective, I suppose—one of the works of art I remember best from my exploration of the vast and magnificent store of art treasures in Paris was this contemporary piece in the Pompidou Center. It was an enormous painting of a set of rather unhealthy teeth. It wasn’t framed in a rectangle, but rather the teeth themselves shaped the canvas. Some wicked-looking hooked dental instrument hovered over them. Overhead (I want to say in neon letters, but I could be misremembering that detail) was the caption, “You Augment Our Horror.”

It’s a statement with some complication. On one hand, of course we fear the pain of a trip to the dentist (less these days, thanks to the compassionate miracle of Novocaine, but still…), and the experience of being laid out in a chair with someone poking around with metal implements in the intimacy of ones teeth is fundamentally humiliating. There’s that. But as well, the experience of being laid out in a dentist’s chair arises as a metaphor for what capitalism does to human beings and their dignity—obviously the powerless laborers and the poor are the victims. Our bodies are often the scenes of our pain and humiliation. We mine coal and our backs, lungs or knees suffer terribly for it, we sit for 14 hours at a stretch at sewing machines, we are forced into prostitution, if we transgress against a law we are put physically into prison, and the whole concept of slavery includes the captivity of the body in order to extract physical labor from it, though other aspects of the slave’s person are imprisoned as well. Humiliation through control of the body, and the exploitation or outright theft of the labor of the body. I think in the end, it’s not fair to dentists to make the comparison, since in the end they’re providing a beneficial, critical service. Life, especially since the triumph of the sugar industry, is hell on teeth, and we need dentists to keep us healthy. But they don’t cause our horror, they augment it—dentists are off the existential hook, as it were.

This is where I can remember to give Berryman a break. Sometimes I get exasperated with his obsessive self-absorption, and I’m supremely uninterested in his hairy body, ear wax and gynecomastia. But the body is the ground and starting point for much of life’s humiliation. This poet is aware of that, of what war and exploitative industry and the injustice of life and fate can do to the body, so his attention to the body has a political and artistic purpose behind it. The disintegration is physical and real, but it’s also a metaphor for an even more real, more painful disintegration that comes on spiritual, emotional and intellectual levels. The 20^th century was such complicated time for the body. On one hand we saw the rise of anesthesia, antibiotics, blood transfusions, vaccinations, tremendous medical advances that saved hundreds of millions of lives. The wars, genocides, exploitations, new diseases—it’s hard to say if we got ahead or not. Privilege certainly helps turn the balance for the lucky ones. When we’re in that dentist’s chair, and the drill is whirling, it’s a more complicated situation than it might seem. In the end, though, when the drill touches that enamel, and you hear the whine and smell the overheated tooth-smoke, things become very simple and very focused, don’t they? Once more: Thank God, and the good doctors and chemists of the 20^th century, for Novocaine!