Strange and fascinating, this
one. “peine forte et dure”—pain strong and hard. The images are consistent—in a
hospital, at the scene of a religious service, though with ex-nuns and an ex-priest
(not quite, in other words), but the
overall tone and impact, and some of the allusions, are reminiscent of
something more like the prelude to a ritualized torment down in some dungeon torture chamber.
So it’s an incredibly weird and disturbing poem. Christianity, as I prefer to
think of it, is founded in Jesus’s message of love, empathy and tolerance, but
there is also the torture aspect of it that has a tendency to put me off.
Unbearable physical torment is at the very heart and soul of the Christian
story. I get it: Out of the depths of pain and humiliation arises something
amazing: salvation, and it took all that pain and humiliation to release it.
It’s an incredibly powerful story even if one only looks at it as a story, as
opposed to an article of religious faith. I don’t like to dwell on it, though.
But this poem draws off of that and turns it into something outrageous.
Is it dream, or a nightmare? It
may well be because it has that weird nightmarish vibe. I also think it could
be simple story-telling, that twists the events of a common-enough kind of
religious worship service in a hospital—all hospitals have chapels—distorts it
through the lens of the poet’s suffering into something sinister. Either way—there
is pressure on the speaker, through pain strong and hard, to give up his
secrets. But he’ll not break.
What secrets in The Dream Songs are being withheld,
anyway? He doesn’t seem very shy about revealing whatever he’s thinking or
experiencing. Except, as an artist, he picks and chooses, doesn’t he? Involves
himself in an extended project of persona-crafting. Some persona. But I’m not
judging—well, yes I am. Behold The Great Victim, crushed by events at once
self-inflicted, extra-personal and
worldwide, resulting in the model modern human man, a unique and bizarre mixture of shame
and pride, courage and self-destruction, humiliation and arrogance, fury and
cowardice. What’s being withheld? Is
it the knowledge that the man’s personal creation was all a creation, an artifice, and that the creation could
have taken any number of other forms? The persona gives justification and cover
for someone now—the schmuck—free to smoke, drink, lecture tediously, fight, and
philander, at will, with no reason to hold back because all this
self-destructive behavior is the nuclear reaction at the core of a great work
of modern art. Kablooey! Sublime, eh?
No Schadenfreude-riven ex-nun with a set of thumb screws is going to get this
admission out of this artist. Bring it on, sister.
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