#194

If all must hurt at once, let yet more hurt now,

so I’ll be ready, Dr God. Púsh on me.

Give it to Henry harder.

There lives content: one area, taking a bow,

unbothered, whére I can’t remember, lovely,

somewhere down there, 

or, better still, up here, where forest fires

burn on for years. From the fire-towers watch is kept

on diminuendo flaming.

Each jack be the custodian of his desires

from which he sprang & sullen then he slept

until a coda of blaming. 

—You do. She do. I will be with you-all,

in a little silence, Mr Bones.

—I see I depend on you

for nothing. —Try Dr God, clown a ball,

low come to you in the blue sad darkies’ moans

worsing than yours, too.

 

This Dream Song has sad substance. This one is good. From my present position in life—not perfect, with my own problems, but in the end a position of relative comfort, stability, health, and privilege—it’s easy enough to forget that other people do genuinely suffer. Doesn’t matter if it’s through their own stupidity or rotten behavior, or their own habits and body/brain destroying addictions, it still hurts, it’s still suffering. That is where this poem is coming from. (There are areas of success, of course.) Henry’s blackface conscience pipes up in this one, and if there has ever been any doubt that this is the Voice of Death, this line for me puts that to rest: “I will be with you-all, / in a little silence, Mr Bones.” Sure enough. There may be fights, and the fights may cause hurt, but the silence will be here eventually. It’ll all be over soon enough. Just be patient.

“Try Dr God, clown a ball”—a clear statement that faith still isn’t yet part of the picture for Henry. You could at least go ahead and try God, dumbass. It’s good for cures of the soul, you know? And then the last statement Death has to offer: You think you’ve got it bad? There’s worse. Believe it, if you believe nothing else I tell you.

W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts”  http://english.emory.edu/classes/paintings&poems/auden.html offers such an apt comment on this. All the terrible suffering going on around us, and there we are, much like the horse scratching his innocent behind on a tree. We don’t notice. Icarus falling astoundingly from the sky!? We hear a brief splash, look up, puzzled, then put our heads back down and go about our own dreary business. We scratch our own itches. Death is reminding Mr. Bones of that: Self-centered, stuck on your suffering, self-absorbed to the last, eh? Just be patient. You’ll see.

Even in the depths of B.’s anxiety and hurt, laid out with such frankness, what I get exasperated with at times because it seems so self-centered and blinkered, what justifies his whole project is that he sets himself up as a representative. Sure screwed up: He totally admits it! But so are we all. Is he so damn different, really? The answer is, probably not. We’re all addicted. Our cowardice has hold of us. Maybe the details vary—maybe to some substance like drink or heroin or cocaine or meth, maybe to sloth, maybe collectively to oil, or the latest TV nonsense—gotcha again!—maybe to sugar and salt and fat, maybe our own trifling dramas. Go ahead: Stare at your own bleeding navel. You’ll get through it soon enough. It’s our own desires that put us in this spot. When the desire morphs into the desire for peace, then there’s real trouble. Instead of cultivating peace we desire peace, which pushes it away. That’s the thing with B.: He has this tremendous desire for something to not be there, and his desire for it to go away keeps it in his face. It’s a metaphor: We desire peace and desire that anxiety not be there. Away goes peace and in comes anxiety a-flooding. To desire it means by definition that we don’t live in it. The Buddhists are correct: Along with hatred and ignorance, desire is a spiritual poison.

From my positon of comfort, stability, health and privilege, I can look at the 20^th century and the first decades of the 21^st, and be thankful for medicine, technical marvels, unprecedented knowledge at my fingertips. And yes, they’re the product of desire fulfilled. But it’s naïve to the point of stupidity to think that covers it, though, because there are consequences. War, corruption, environmental catastrophe are terrifying threats and they’re real. But it’s also depraved and cynical to discount what’s amazing about what we’ve accomplished. I don’t always know where the balance point is. What is correct? Where do we stand? Where do I stand?

I guess we negotiate such questions on our own. I had hoped B. would tell me: Stand here. Then make his case, like a good teacher. Joni Mitchell did that for me: “Play it cool, play it cool. 50/50 fire and ice.” That’s a piece of concrete advice I can go with. The Dream Songs? Well: No. That’s not what we get, is it? Instead what we get is his saying this: Let me demonstrate for you the hell desire leads to. Then here’s my only piece of advice, and all I can even do is imply it: Don’t do that. Learn what a real fuckup looks like, feels like. That’s the best I can offer, because I don’t really know anything else. As for the rest, for what’s positive and what works, you’ll need to figure that on your own, according to your own lights. If there’s a kind of backhanded teaching to that, then, yes, I’ll be grateful for it.