There strikes me as something quite poignant about this
Dream Song. Remembering Richard Blackmur, Randall Jarrell and Delmore Schwartz—there’s
that. All friends who have passed away. Clearly, they meant something to him.
That’s what “friends” means at any rate, and these three, I think, seem different
from the other dead poets he laments. They were friends. To know you’ll never
see a friend again? Past the grief of it, there’s that sadness that lingers
always. They stick with you. I remember the girl I took to senior prom, who
died some years ago. Truth be told, she just went with me because I was the
only guy who asked her, and we never went on a date again. I don’t think she
even really liked me that much. So, this shouldn’t be such a missing element in
my life, and I suppose it’s not really. But she was young and pretty then, a very
beautiful girl, actually, if a bit too much on the shy side, and I remember her
and much of that whole night. The fog was so thick on the drive home that I had
to stop at certain intersections and leave the car to try and read the street
signs so we could figure out where we were. So, she had her moments in her
life, and they’re over with now. I don’t know much about what she did or what
happened to her. Just a couple odds and ends from her life. Even so, the image
of her isn’t as forgotten at all as it might otherwise be. It’s all back there
now, in the past, but as B. says, “the wind blows hard from our past into our
future, / and we are that wind.” This strikes me as more to the point than another
famous statement about the past: “So we beat on, boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly into the past.” From the very first time I read that in
college, I felt that Fitzgerald had it backwards, though it’s heartbreaking
enough in context. Gatsby, the love-driven thug crashing and burning at the
moment of his triumph because he wasn’t satisfied with most of what he had been
after: He had to have it all, and he had to have it exactly his way. Maybe it’s
the gangster mentality that was the cause for his tragedy. You can’t steal your
way into Daisy’s kind of high-born aristocracy, not really. He could only fake
it, and the fakery had to be perfect. Gatsby had built an elaborate house of
cards. There was no past pulling on him, or nothing pushing him back onto it,
those currents we so beat against. Even the romantic moment he had with young
Daisy way back when. It doesn’t pull Gatsby back, really, it pushes him on, at
least to circle around to something like that moment again. The past blows
forward, pushing us along. Wind in our sails. B. has it right. I’m probably
making too much of the metaphor. But I digress.
Here’s the real poignancy though: “except that the wind’s
nature was not to last.” I get this sense of the poet looking again at his life
and realizing that the path he chose might not have been the best one, the most
satisfying one, the right one. I remember a TV show I saw years and years ago,
an interview, I’m fairly sure it was with Tom Snyder, the late-night talk show
host from the 70s. He was talking to someone about the emotions of the dying
process, Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s theories about the five stages of grief people
who are dying go through, and the movie All
that Jazz, Bob Fosse’s film which dramatizes these concepts. This is what
my imperfect memory has constructed. At any rate, I seem to remember Snyder’s
guest saying that, in all her studies, the one thing that dying people
universally regret is that they didn’t go for it. They regretted shyness,
reticence, timidity, self-doubt if it kept them from doing what they wanted to do
with their lives. The other thing, is that people also always regretted their
moments of cruelty and meanness, their moments of turning away from love,
withholding affection. Okay, but which is it? B. certainly went after what he
wanted, and when he felt reticent he turned his reticence into the fuel of his
achievement. He followed up on his passion with great passion, talent, and perseverance.
But did he love enough? It’s not for me to say, but I might suggest the reason
these three poets he named have a hold on him now is because he didn’t love and
support them as much as he could have. They haunt him with their absence. If
they died because they were run over by a truck or were visited by some other
physical disaster, then there is grief and sadness, but no blame. I couldn’t
have done anything, and that ultimately is a comfort. But if they declined into
incapacity through loneliness? There is blame, and maybe that blows on you
hard. I could have made a difference,
or maybe it was all so much bigger than my poor ability to help—but the point
is I don’t know because I didn’t try. I suspect that lingers here.
Well-adjusted people forgive themselves, as long as the withholding of love
from a friend wasn’t too egregious. We don’t have to be perfect to be a friend;
there is much room in love for mistakes. But if your career pulls you away and
you don’t care to stay connected? Maybe such a thing does pull you back into
the past. “The wind’s nature / was not to last.” It never lasts! Legacy doesn’t
last. It’s a mirage. You have to love, immediately and now, yourself and your
body, the butterflies, your spouse and your children and your friends. That
matters, and that’s the realization that’s creeping up. You may puff out some
historical wind that blows toward the future, and good for you, and it may even
ring some chimes for awhile. But the breeze inevitably falters. It almost never
lasts.
Poignant. Agreed.
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