I had a moment in Paris some
years ago, outside of the famous ice cream shop on the Île Saint-Louis, with all
the bustling activity, a pleasant early spring evening, people enjoying their
lives and a treat with 30 or 40 marvelous flavors of ice cream and sorbet to
choose from (cantaloupe and cassis for me) and it occurred to me (obviously,
but still…) that this bustle and hum goes on all the time whether I’m in the
middle of it or not, and Paris has been going, thriving, recreating, suffering,
dancing killing and sexing, evolving for well over 2000 years. And by
extension, so has Istanbul and Tokyo and St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro, and
so too Cincinnati, which was tripping gaily right along without me at the
moment. Part of the dream B. is reporting comes from the same realization, and
whether distant through space or distant through time, it doesn’t especially
matter, especially in a dream. Rains rained in those places just like it does
here, and that helps bring them into an immediate, sensual focus. These places
live(d) and thrive(d) and die(d), and the world is so incredibly large and diverse
that our presence or not doesn’t matter and didn’t. It takes a self-absorbed
ego to come to this point (nothing special in that—we are all guilty), but it
also undermines the always-narcissistic ego in a healthy way. In a crappier
mood I might ascribe including Cambridge, Mass, home of Harvard University, in
a litany next to Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu as a “lost” city, as some kind of
self-pitying lament over a career failure; but nah, it’s just a joke.
And then there were the dead, “all
insane / & trying to sit up from fear.” I saw it all, he reports. Heck of a
dream! Why trying to sit up from fear? I take it as the fear of being left out.
All the world tripping along in activity, love, and brutality, and I’m not part of it? Since when? Um…since you died, pal. One might counter that you’re always part of it once you
get here, through your legacy and perhaps through the eternal vitality of your
spirit, but that’s probably another topic for another day. The fear—the fear
that presses toward a veritable insanity—is that you’ve been left out.
So the everyday magical vitality
of Machu Picchu and Angkor Wat, reduced to mere monumental skeletons, died
away. Now there’s the world with its baseball and nuclear missiles. Ancient
cities lived, then they died. Paris lives on for now, but it will die one day
too, somehow, the Eiffel Tower decayed into traces of dissolved iron in the
rich, virginal soil of the unpeopled ex-Parisian wilderness. But the bloody
fucking news for now converges, doesn’t it?, and we lick ice cream cones, which
lets us declare a brave, round screw it.
Licking ice cream is an act of courage, a proclamation of the fearless
insouciance we summon in order to face and to endure. Henry, the old Henry I remember from
awhile back, just cowers from it. If ice cream is courage, then bourbon is
cowardice. Which isn’t totally fair to bourbon, since it is designed as a kind
of potent treat in itself, but it does have that characteristic of engendering
drunkenness, which when carried to the extreme B. pursued, becomes a sniveling
form of groveling cowardice. But in his defense, while the sniveling seems to
have been real enough in his life, he transformed that into a second-level
courage in the writing of it. The man snivels; the poet stands up and licks his
bourbon proudly, tonguing his words without shame. Part of the bustle and hum
anyway. All it takes is the bitten stub of a pencil and a damp cocktail napkin,
potent instruments forging our connection to the life of life.
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