So, last night, in the dim, forlorn shadow of DS 277, I
coasted to a dead stop, floating there ringed by roiling slow-motion assemblages
of pulsing pale moon jellies. But there are freshets swirling today, cool
breezes and a zephyr or two. Yesterday’s Dream Song actually does have some
content, murkily something about leaving the US, where all the action is,
colleague immortal poets doing their work and solidifying their immortal
reputations while poor, forsaken Henry is forced to go to Ireland in order to
make his pitiful little living—as if living were more important in the Grand
Scheme of Things than one’s immortal reputation. But he wishes them well: “and
therefore all your grand works we’ll see win”, which we need to continue right on
into the first line of the third installment of this long, ambivalent farewell,
“Fail may your enemies, abundant here, / in that most happy clime.” Whatever
one may think of B. as a poet (many of my friends and occasional readers have
long ago had it with him, others are struggling or plugging right along beside
me), as an academic he was a frank, full-blown politician. Yes write well and
constantly, yes study, yes teach, give readings, and lecture, but remember that
publication, money, and ultimately legacy, these all come from adhering like an
octopus to one’s allies in some sort of literary/philosophical struggle,
including (especially!) the dead ones, and being always aware of enemies and
their painful slights and veiled attacks. Published verse whining can be a dishonorable
but effective tactic. A strategic arrogance is worth the risk. It’s all about the
using of one’s mind and life in the construction of an afterlife. Of course,
like most contemporary politicians, he was also a frequent idiot, and probably
the main reason he didn’t end up a permanent inmate in an asylum is because
most people on Earth actually are fundamentally kind and tolerant. Uh oh…the
breeze is failing again. My fault. You write you own breezes.
Henry, remember, is situated on the East Coast as he writes
this three-pronged farewell, like barbs on the tines of Neptune’s trident. He’s
looking back to California, the place to where his allied colleagues have all
symbolically dispersed, invoking that old “Go West, young man” trope that so
animates Americans. California was still the beacon of hope, symbolic of life,
action, and new starts. “Play it by ear / out there until all’s straight / and
may no rudeness interrupt your play.” While he—loser!—is heading off in the wrong
damn direction! Before he leaves, he fires off one last political broadside. “One
decade’s war”—I read this as a reference to the political/literary struggle he’s
leaving behind. All those “blue” foes had issued from the woodwork. “Blue” is a
nuanced word—it’s opposed to “red” politically, not in the Conservative/Progressive
mode of now, but with anti-capitalist/Establishment connotations more characteristic symbolically of red
in the 60s. “Pinko”, red's symbiont and blue's other opposite, meant both “gay” and “Commie” at the same
time, both totally pejorative. A “bluenose” is somebody stuck in an inflexible,
intolerant moral box. Those are the blue foes. Now that heroic Henry, the
poetical smiter of all foes blue, is off to the land of the green, he wishes
his allied heroes well, and will miss them and will miss operating next to them
in the center of all the political action. The foes, like swarms of bees, will
be after them.
Can’t be helped. It’s time to go. Ireland, green and orange,
not red, pink or blue, bobs like a patch of soft moss at the confluence of the
English Channel, the North Sea and the great Atlantic Ocean itself. East it is,
then, across the sea. This ends Book VI.
I, for one, am curious how Ireland affects the DSs.
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