#266

https://books.google.com/books?id=2o9-BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA266&lpg=PA266&dq=Dinch+me+dark+God,+having+smoked+me+out.&source=bl&ots=A9h-rCl1ry&sig=8m-H2KYdeyDpr867wy64-8zAi9w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCoQ6AEwA2oVChMI1v2vkuGSyAIVBVweCh0c8QYz#v=onepage&q=Dinch%20me%20dark%20God%2C%20having%20smoked%20me%20out.&f=false

“Dinch” is to extinguish by crushing, exactly what one does with a cigarette once it’s smoked up. I think this is the Dream Song that clinches so much of what has been building: Awareness of death soon approaching and a wondering about what it all will add up to once the struggle’s done with. I think there’s something else here too, that has also been building, and that’s a frightened recognition of what a monumental mistake he has made. It’s there in the last four lines:

            He can advance no claim,

            save that he studied thy Word & grew afraid,

            work & fear be the basis for his terrible cry

            not to forget his name.

Well, I don’t think Henry studied His Word all that much, to be honest. A little bit, and that was enough to make him terrified at what he’s done. It’s a classic Faustian moment, because there has been a life of all that marvel and moments of artistic miracle, but there was a price to pay in how he went about it. The price rather than the simplistic surrender of your soul is simply to have your eyes opened about what you missed. Too late, schmuck. Your Ship of Holiness, the SS Wholeness, is nothing more than a smear of dark smoke staining the distant blue horizon. Thomas Mann’s take on it, in Dr. Faustus, has the devil admonishing with one thing: “Thou shalt not love.” It’s very easy for me to take a line such as the one from DS 265, “I don’t know one damned butterfly from another” as a way of acknowledging that B. has obeyed the devil’s dictum. In this poem, he even questions God and his love, and declares he doesn’t understand it. Perfect. Henry has forsaken organic life, organic emotion, and now as a result he’s even losing his facility for organic mentation, the one thing he had going for him and depended on: chucked it all for the ersatz of abstraction and ego and a forlorn, compensating hope that his name may echo a few decades… Henry… Henry… Henry… Henry…

I read Ariana Huffington’s biography of Picasso, a passionate hatchet-job on the great painter (much of it deserved), and she sees Picasso facing the same moment as he neared his end that Henry is putting up here. His final self-portrait, from 1972, captures Henry’s emotional state from this poem perfectly. If one can pity Faust—I think I do—then this painting by Picasso, and in the same breath, this poem by Berryman, are overwhelmingly pitiful. We would all do well to avoid the line that leads to this moment, the forsaking of a whole life for fame and a kind of success, the metaphoric selling of one’s soul. Pitiful. “Pitiful” is a complex word, with subtle variations and shades of meaning, none of them redounding to the pitiful’s final credit.