#240

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Written while giving final exams after the summer session at Middlebury College, 1962. “Air with thought thick, air scratched.” The room had exposed rafters and a stage, and B. was sitting on it, writing away while his students wrote their exams. One student—Mr. Torrey, who makes an appearance—remembers looking up at him on the stage, and every time he looked up, B. was staring at him, and then would wave at him.

             My rafters bulge with death

            kindly arising from creaking bodies, from

            my hundreds braining & self-burdensome

            yawning down there, catching their breath. 

B.’s wife, Kate, was pregnant, he was suffering from bouts of delirium tremens, he obsessively chain-smoked Tareytons non-stop, and he obsessively chain-wrote Dream Songs. He insulted about half of the faculty. His teaching that summer was universally regarded as brilliant, the talk of the school—brilliant, theatrical and passionate.

It occurs to me—probably late in the game—that Dream Songs are sometimes meant to be disposed of. I have a resistance to this, partly because when we study literature we go to the classics, which almost by definition are durable, relevant through the ages, timeless, lasting—classic. Big prizes cement the work’s reputation, the Nobel, the Pulitzer, the Man Booker, the National Book Award. B. won two of these with his two volumes of Dream Songs, so that helps solidify them. I came to them expecting gravitas and wisdom. But the story of him, on a stage, smoking like a furnace, waving at his students as he wrote a poem about them, writing a Dream Song as busily as they’re writing their exams—I begin to see that the product isn’t really the point. It’s the process. He just does it. It’s just what he does. There is the responsibility to send them out, gather them into a book, go through the publishing routine, because that’s all expected of someone who makes his living writing and teaching literature. But that was ancillary to the real project. Smoke, drink, write, chase women, the product of it all is not important. It was the moment of writing that defined who he was. He needed it like he needed cigarettes, and like he was addicted to scotch and bourbon. That had to be the focus, the core. Reputation followed later, but he knew that head down, pushing the pencil, was the only way forward. But it wasn’t even that. There was not a forward, only a timeless, sick and driven meditation.

I go into art museums sometimes and I get astonished at some of the modern and postmodern work you can find there characterized by repetition. There is, or was, a piece in the IU art museum in Bloomington: Springs, probably nothing more than common toy Slinkys, about 30 of them, suspended from the ceiling. Each one is wrapped in miles of red thread, so that they’re an inch thick. Somebody sat in a chair and wrapped red yarn around a Slinky for unimaginable, mind-boggling stretches of blank time. Or, in the Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not museum, in Daytona Beach Florida or some such place, which I visited when I was about 10 with my family, there was a 300-foot wooden chain carved by some OCD craftsman out of the trunk of an oak tree, done with a pen knife. I used to sit it my desk when I was a young teenager, with inch-high lead soldiers, painting them, one after another, all the same, and sell them or give them to my friends who were into war gaming with the little figures. They would line them up on tables, measure their movements with rulers and lengths of string, and they would fight intricately calculated stop-motion battles with charts and tables, and dice. Actually playing these games always bored me miserably, so I rarely played them myself, though I liked the look of the games, like vast miniature dioramas—blue and gray for the Civil War, royal blue and redcoats for the Napoleonic wars, and so on. I painted thousands of them, a meditative craft that I would get lost in. The best were the mounted knights for the Medieval games, which provided a bit more creativity. Each one was unique in color and pattern, but all on the same lead horse, with the same stiff lead arm holding its little brittle sword aloft. The impulse that had me painting clever variations on the same pattern (heraldic knights with shields, on horses) is the same one that had B. writing like he did. For me, I have memories of some of the knights, and it cemented the bond with a few close, nerdy friends. No famous prizes, but that was never the point. It was just something I did. I didn’t drink or smoke Tareytons, but I did listen to music—Elton John and Queen, mainly—and while the paint fumes were probably not good for me, they didn’t kill me either. Once the figures were given away, they were gone. I just did more of them, and gave those away too. They made my friends respect me within the closed, uber-dorky basement war-gamer set, and that was the only recognition I needed.