Sunday, October 11, 2015

#282




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.

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