#222

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Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was a hugely popular star of silent films in the years immediately after WWI, but his career was sunk overnight when he was indicted for murder in 1921. He weighed 300 pounds, and the accusation was that with his great weight he had injured a woman fatally while raping her—her bladder was ruptured. The jury could find little cause to convict him of rape, and thus if he hadn’t raped her he hadn’t murdered her either. If he was involved in her death at all it was a tragic accident. He was acquitted, but it was such a major public scandal that his career in films was finished. It’s an illustration for B. of the unstoppable, endlessly troublesome sex drive in the human psyche, and he hooks it up here with violence. The poem is the most sexually explicit Dream Song yet, but there’s nothing of love or intimacy about it whatsoever. It’s ragged enough stuff in how it asks its questions: “This burning to sheath it which so many males / so often and all over suffer: why?” Well…gosh…. Okay. Sheath it. Here’s one of Berryman’s tentative answers: “Is it: to make or kill / is jungle-like what constitutes my I, / so let’s thrust?” Well, it happens every day, doesn’t it? A friend told me that a man’s chances of getting raped in prison are the same as a woman out in society. So this is a real thing, and we need to ask the question. I’m square and sheltered enough that I do find myself wishing it would all just go away, though, and can’t we all just be nice to one another? But no. Ask the question. What’s with all this powerful need to sex your way into all these worlds of hurt anyway? B.’s sex drive never dropped him in front of a jury, but it certainly did lead him into to no end of drama and trouble. Nothing exceptional about that. “Around the planet men are erect / and girls lie ready.” Right.

Um, well, look, if I were playing poker, I’d throw in my hand about now. Three aces and a pair? No matter. Light a cigar, go pour a couple fingers of bourbon, sit out the next couple hands. If this were baseball I let the third strike go by and have a seat in the dugout. Let somebody else hit that bases-loaded triple. Say I’m an airline pilot. When a UFO with little green men inside pulls up next to my 747 at 35,000 feet, and they all wave at me, I decide I might just go ahead and keep this one to myself. But no. I’m ostensibly a writer and an unsanctioned freelance literary critic. I have to do this. I’m supposedly an adult anyway.

But, OH CRAP: “Melons, they say, though, / are best—I don’t know if that’s correct— / as well as infertile, it’s said.” Ok…Um…It’s said???? What melons are, my friend, are weirdly humongous fruits incapable of pain, emotional distress, trauma, shame, rage, and a sense of tragedy born of being treated like a large, weirdly humongous fruit with a hole cut in it when it gets raped. That’s what a melon is. What a woman is, on the other hand, is all the things a melon is not when it comes to rape, overly violent sex, exploitation, lies, and murder, none of which, by the way, a melon gives a damn about either. All we need to do is keep that in mind when these jerkish questions about the either making or killing of things in the jungle and all that dogwhistle racist and misogynist bullshit id crap comes up—which it seems to do now and again. You want to know how to stop exploiting and hurting women? Don’t exploit and hurt women. It gets a lot easier when you really, deep down, really and truly acknowledge that they’re fully functioning, fully thinking, fully feeling human beings. Some guys have more trouble with that than they should, and it leads to shtoopid questions about who they are and why they tick like they tick.