#281 The Following Gulls

https://books.google.com/books?id=2o9-BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA281&lpg=PA281&dq=We+missed+Quebec+but+now+the+North+Shore+lights+are+bright&source=bl&ots=A9h0sEn1ux&sig=_emHyjKvq41b0_XlU0yQA5DeJQw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAGoVChMI96Phg7WzyAIVRdSACh0l0gj4#v=onepage&q=We%20missed%20Quebec%20but%20now%20the%20North%20Shore%20lights%20are%20bright&f=false

Traveling in the first two stanzas, and there isn’t much to say about that. He’s traveling. But the third is important. Thirty years earlier he had met with William Butler Yeats, a meeting that Dylan Thomas had tried to scuttle by getting the young B. drunk before the meeting. B. had pulled himself together, had a life-changing tea with Yeats which he never got over, and as part of that he vowed to himself that he would never stop working—this rather than the six weeks of paralysis and self-doubt he had been experiencing then in England. For all the alcoholism, narcissism, hubris, debauchery, and pain that followed in his life, you have to give him credit: It’s a vow he kept. He was prolific, he wrote through it all, even turning the moments of paralysis that all artists encounter into a kind of strange, inverted paralytic inspiration. He wrote, and he wrote hard, and he didn’t stop until he was finished.

So, the “new book in my briefcase” (i.e. The Dream Songs in manuscript) was four times too large. (I can attest to that!) His sojourn in Ireland will have an important object: In deciding “who is to lives & who to dies”, he’ll be doing battle with it. He’ll be weeding, culling and shaping the second volume of his major life’s work, the accomplishment upon which his reputation will stand. I’ve been disparaging of reputation a bit along the way here, in my daily one-at-a time engagement with these poems. It seems such an odd, abstract and uncertain thing, and potentially meaningless, if reputation is the altar upon which one sacrifices one’s life. He did that and basically admits to it, not paying sufficient attention to his relationships, butterflies, his body, and all the other ineffable magics that can suffuse one’s existence with an awareness of beauty, and peace. He found beauty, but he found it in the rarity of language. Fair enough. It’s what he did. From a non-judgmental standpoint, this voyage to Ireland put him on the brink of an important moment, where he was to escape the buffeting currents of struggle against overmastering power on the artistic/academic/political scene at home, the buffeting currents of a wife and family which can potentially provide such solidity, peace and meaning, but which are also distracting in their chaos, and he was escaping himself in a sense as well, also distracting with the self so tied up in emotions, liaisons, needs. The other thing he’s doing in deciding what lives and what dies in his book is making decisions about his influences. Who does he cast off? Whitman and Yeats seem to arise in his work as defining influences, with The Dream Songs unfolding as a kind of crazed, postmodern, anti-Song of Myself (Walt Whitman’s extended masterwork, as all English majors are aware), and with Yeats this overarching presence that sometimes guides but just as often looms as the foil against which The Dream Songs struggle. But influences can be masters too. Ultimately one must internalize them, master them, move beyond their oppressive presence. So in a real sense, B.’s voyage to Ireland is a preparation for a struggle. It makes sense that he’s been paying so much attention to it. This was big.

I prefer to think of life, my life at any rate, as influenced more by cooperation, community, relationships than by struggle. If I’m being honest, I realize that this is an existential choice I’ve made. It’s feminist in its conception, it’s ecological in its conception. Press me hard enough, catch me in a candid moment, and I’ll have to admit that life in all its iterations is more complex than that. There is ecological community on one hand, and symbiosis, and there is nature red in tooth and claw on the other. There is the interrelational support of community and communication on one hand, and there is struggle, contest and war on the other. Yin and yang. We make love and braid one another’s hair and plant gardens on one hand, and we compete and diminish each other on the other. We’ll hire you as an “adjunct.” Often, we kill. Somewhere in between are games like fencing and chess, the struggle to get published. A deer stomped two little pawpaw trees I had planted in the yard, so I had to put a fence around the little tulip tree to protect it: The offense of a rutting, testosterone-addled buck and the defense of a fence (those words have the same root), which achieves a poise, which protects the tree and permits it an attempt to flourish.

I’m already older than B. was when he died, but I’m relatively sheltered, inexperienced and naïve, much more so than he ever was. I came to him looking for guidance, and I did not get what I was expecting. Well, go figure, huh? But in some ways, which I suppose I’ve made abundantly clear, I’m fully in tune with something that always seems to have escaped him. There is something I could have showed him, though he wouldn’t have heard. It’s there in the literature he studied all his life. I’ll call it “life.” “Butterflies.” But there’s also an arrogance in innocence. His life was always a struggle, like pretty much every damn day. If you don’t acknowledge the struggle, you get rolled over by it anyway. I think he acknowledged it, and while the cards dealt to him in his life and personality weren’t a flush from birth, he played—he didn’t fold. It’s dawning on me that you have to play in order to win, and “play” here means “struggle.”

But still, I sympathize with Ferdinand the Bull more than I do with the matador. When Ferdinand steps into the ring and sees flowers strewn about, he sits down and starts smelling them. The matador gets so angry that he makes faces at the bull! I love that. I saw this Disney cartoon on TV when I was like six or seven years old, and it probably influenced me more than I might care to admit. This is the first time I’ve seen it since I was a little boy, but I remember almost every scene. The problem is that in real life, the matador usually runs Ferdinand through anyway, and holds him in contempt as he’s dying for being such a pussy. But bullfighting as a paradigm doesn’t show off the human race at its most noble. We take numerous steps backwards, into those moments of brutality that the bull ring dramatizes with its little show of genuine brutality. But I tend to think Ferdinand has the right idea even if we’re not ready for him yet. But, there is this—which turns out to have been not quite the event its viral simplicity would have us believe. But even so, the willingness and need for millions of people to believe it marks a genuine step forward for all of humanity, a counterbalance however small to things like ISIS, Dick Cheney, climate change, Iraq, the NRA, Syria, and the other powerful brutalities of the world as it rages. In the meantime, there is the voyage to Ireland, preparing for existential battle in what is arising as a metaphoric “Ireland,” where one contests life, work, and one’s literary/spiritual mentors.