Eyes rolling—at it again. Lusting
for a Miss Biernbaum, from there into German, riffing off her German name,
imagining he and her, in turn, on their knees, and “Down with the superior race!”
The whole thing is meant to be comical. It is. Maybe a bit weirdly comical, but
sure, we notice attractive people while reading poetry at them from the podium.
(Margot Timmons, lead singer for Cowboy Junkies, sang “Blue Moon” to me at a
concert. The whole song, never took her eyes off me, smiled back at me when I
smiled at her. It was a transcendent moment for me, but once I settled down I
figured she had probably just randomly lit on a particular head in a sea of
heads and sang at it to amuse herself. But who knows!) Any way, the feelings
behind this poem would normally come and go in a split second, but now it’s
immobilized in literature’s flash. He ends it on a “phantasie” “where ‘Fuck
you’ comes as no curse / but come as a sigh or a prayer.” There’s a pun on “come”,
and it’s not really comedic anymore. This takes a step into the realm of
subversive morality politics.
Well, I’m all for subversion. Unfortunately,
“F*” is the second vilest word we have in the American lexicon right now, our two
biggies descending from a legacy of Puritanism and slavery. I don’t need to
mention the other, and I never use it. But the F-bomb has a lot of currency.
With Puritanism having slightly receded, or having undermined itself with so
much delicious hypocrisy, F* is getting more play these days than it ever has.
It has entered the mainstream. It maybe doesn’t have the basso punch it used
to, but there’s still some treble left and it’s almost always an attention
getter. DS 46 in my opinion is one of the great American poems, and F* has a
lot to do with that, partly because he couples it with “lovely”. That’s where F*
should be. F* means sex first, but it gets its well-known dismissive punch from
a take on sex that’s degrading, domineering, that doesn’t acknowledge the
recipient’s value or even his or her humanity. “F* you.” For some reason, when I
saw the movie Tunnelvision, a movie which copied The Groove Tube way back
in the 70s, a line that sticks with me is a young Laraine Newman, from before Saturday Night Live, affecting a
pronounced Brooklyn accent and following “F* you” with “scumbag.” It was a vile
caricature, maybe the most vulgar expression possible at that cultural moment,
thrown out for its comedic shock value. It worked because I still remember it.
I was young and I was horrified and delighted at the same time, exactly the kid
this crass, subversive (and now nearly forgotten) movie had for its target.
The thing about Henry’s wishful
new take on the phrase is that his desired use is actually the most subversive use
of all. It’s not about dismissal it’s about acceptance, even through the armor
of taboo. A sigh of contentment or a prayer?
Johnathon Edwards, who preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in 1741,
would be rolling over in his fiery grave at the mere thought of it. Forget
about celebration of interpersonal intimacy, no way do we condone a rejection
of patriarchal control through subversive acts of acceptance and love, we are not to intimately acknowledge Jesus in
every soul of us—because we are sinners and we are not worthy. We are sinners, first and always. That’s maybe
the real reason why Henry’s plaint is an outrage. There are all sorts of good
reasons that cultures worldwide establish boundaries and taboos. There are
promises we make, both culturally and privately to each other. There is some truth
to the concept of the nuclear family as society’s bedrock. Connections like
hairy old experienced geezers with vulnerable young women, or girls, even, can
have or often do have serious and devastating emotional consequences. I’ve read
about a pedophile organization that argues that any “love” is sacred, so any
behavior done in its name should be sacred. Nonsense. You don’t use love to
justify a crime. So breaking some taboos should often have very serious
consequences, too. But taboos and boundaries can get overly restrictive, can
oppress for oppression’s sake, distant from their original purposes and
perpetuated through a thoughtless inertia, can have ulterior motives. When
that’s the case, then—well, just say it. Without the phrase and the meaning
behind it as part of one’s personal repertoire, we are too liable to
victimization. It has a healthy, cleansing quality when used appropriately and
artfully.
Well, she’s young she’s sitting
there, and while he’s broken the taboo against philandering with younger women
plenty of times, in this case he’s probably just ventilating those vapors and
not being coy about it. While they’re connected, ultimately there’s a difference
between what you think and what you do. This is thinking, it comes and goes,
can’t be helped, write your poem around it, acknowledge it, move on, just don’t
behave like a jerk and no one knows and no one is hurt—unless you write it out
and publish it, but that’s art. But if Johnathon Edwards and his descendent ilk have
something to say about what passes through our hearts and heads as we think? B. has two words for him.
Fuck yeah.
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