The animals sat face to face
& glared.
Henry was afraid.
Her love, which was not exactly
that of a maid,
failed to assuage his terrible
fears, who fared
forth in such a world.
Arose from throats anguish.
Disappeared in air
many, and many on the ground, and
many at sea.
It was not a place to love.
Thumbs into eyes, enormous
explosions of
what we know not, until sobriety
became a vice.
‘Our breakdowns guarantee us,’
said a pal.
I saw her in a dream, from my
dream she woke,
pleasantness & courtesy &
love
and all them stuff.
She had long hair, as if long
hair enough
to smother horrors. What with her
in the smoke
he did he will not say.
First stanza: “Phantasmic thunder
shook the welkin [the sky], high.” Big
stuff. A “her” enters the picture, and her love “was not exactly that of a
maid”—experienced, not shy about taking control. The “animals” sat face to face
and glared—so there is a kind of angry, intense sexual encounter about to
ensue. In the second stanza, anguish, “thumbs into eyes” kind of intimate violence,
and the defining lines: “enormous explosions of / what we know not, until
sobriety became a vice. / ‘Our breakdowns guarantee us,’ said a pal.” Third
stanza: I saw her in a dream. “She had long hair as if long hair enough / to
smother horrors.” The initial promise of her is pleasant—seductive—but when it
gets down to it, what he did with her in the smoke, he doesn’t say, owning that
it’s somehow unspeakable.
Yowzie! This poem is filled with such
an intense erotic fury, that loses control and moves into violence. Nothing of
love or intimacy here, it’s all thunder and a phantasmic witch figure with whom
he erotically struggles. Probably arising from some crazy dream, but with meaning.
The meaning? “Sobriety is a vice” is the phrase that opens this up. The
opposite of sobriety is alcohol addiction. To not engage in it is to indulge in
lassitude and passivity—a contemptible lassitude and passivity. So you face it,
engage it, be afraid because you know the consequences, but you still engage
it. So one way to read this is to see booze personified as a kind of bitch
goddess with whom the poet struggles in this booming, thunderous madness. The
thing about Henry is that he reduces himself so often to mere “wag” like in DS
14, but that is what comes in the frequent strung-out afterwards moments, when
the addict looks in the mirror in all the red-weak flush of humiliation and exhaustion
and sees a feeble, shaking old fool looking back at him. That’s not the whole
story though. This is what the other side of it is: Doing Battle. Ordeal and
the metaphoric erotic test, with personified alcohol as a seductive woman with
long smothering hair who must be overcome. She can be matched in the short
term, but over the long haul she will win this fight, and is winning. He is dying, slowly, but not without fighting
back it appears. It’s an important moment for my understanding of B., who often
seems like such a pathetic sad sack, but who is really seeing himself and
presenting himself as a warrior in the long run. If he’s physically and
psychologically losing this fight against this “woman”, in another way she is
providing for a triumph as well: As he writes, even as he’s being crushed by
all this metaphoric erotic struggle, he overcomes. As a person, he is being
killed by it, but as a figure, he’s
winning in a totally different arena. It’s this weird psychic split, as if he’s
fighting and losing over here on our physical planet, but the doppelganger from
a parallel universe in a different dimension is emerging triumphant—and as a
result of the same struggle. B.’s biographer notes that drinking seemed to
energize him, made him more lucid. This poem shows why. A drunken binge turns
out to be tantamount to buckling one’s armor and riding onto the field, except
the warrior isn’t another guy in armor, it’s a demon witch, and you don’t
defeat her by running her through with a sword, you defeat her by running her
through with an erection. It probably explains his near sex addiction and his misogyny
as well: Women present some kind of mythic struggle, and they need to be
overcome. They’re not just regular people, who have everyday insecurities, and who
can be hurt when used or mistreated.
Well, it comes off as pretty
demented stuff, to be honest, for all the heroic posing. But, heroic posing
underscores so much of human history, doesn’t it? There’s a line in Frank
Herbert’s Dune, about Duke Leto
Atreides: “Now, there was a man who appreciated the power of bravura—even in
death.” This from one of the older Bene Gesserit, the female society of highly
trained and cultivated women of stealth-power, known by the people in the world
of the book as “witches.” Even in death—isn’t
that what it’s about? So much of human history and psychological complication still
boils down to the abhorrence of the ego at the fact that the ego will one day
dissipate—the greatest of all horrors! So we invent these endless alternative
after-lives—that may or may not be real. Doesn’t matter . Heaven and hell,
reincarnation, the triumph of the alternate ego in the alternate realm, which takes
on a reality and power simply because we create it and acknowledge its unreal
reality. This all may be so. I’m also quite confident that if I’m on the right
track, there are as yet unexplored pockets of archetypal darkness in this
ersatz-heroic Henry/Berryman figure, too. What makes him use “woman” as an
opponent? Why are addiction and “woman” connected? Something tells me that it
explains B.’s marriage to Kate. He described her to someone in a letter as “volcanic”—she’s
not marrying the much older man then in an infantile, passive grasping at fame’s
coattails or as a father figure. She can play the role of the volcanic witch
herself, more than happy to meet her husband in bed and go to battle night
after night with the great experienced warrior. Perhaps the poem is even about
her, though that’s only a possibility and not clearly evident from the poem
itself. Eventually booze the bitch goddess overcame him physically, and though
he kept writing, the writing lost its potency as his body did. But, to listen
to him, it’s the best he could do with the emotional hand he was dealt. It was
something. This poem’s a trip. In my estimation, this is among the most
important of the Dream Songs so far. And as always, that doesn’t mean we have
to like it. But I suppose there is something to be said in the human soul for
the power of bravura. We don’t have to like that either. Power and bravura, all
over this one. But is it all a rationalization for a failed life? Or is the cause
of the failing life a struggle for a greater, alternate victory? Being a
non-hero myself, I tend toward believing the former. But I’m not immune to an
open-mouthed amazement at the whole crazed spectacle either.
I appreciated this one better after your essay.
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