#288

[Scroll about halfway down]: http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/main/essays.php?essay=ebury

Six-hundred thousand Hungarian Jews were murdered during the war, so it’s not a pleasing reference to invoke such an appalling nightmare. One common method of execution was to tie twenty people together, shoot one of them, then dump the rest together into the Danube. Nice reference. “Things are getting out of hand,” indeed. That’s a shocking moment of understatement. B. knew very well what he was doing. I have to confess that I find this use of history almost inexcusably specious, though. From what I gather from the criticism I’ve read, no one seems to hold too many reservations about that. It’s what the poet did. But don’t respect and humility actually still matter? There are appropriate ways to use history. It would take some doing to convince me this is one of them.

Well, he’s pulled this identification with outrage lots of times before. With African Americans, with Jews, with various atrociously tormented individual souls throughout history. From the cool of readerly contemplation, there seems to be scant justification for it. Get over yourself! However, I suppose that if we were to acknowledge, say, that a cultivated, self-imposed and somewhat theatrical suffering is nevertheless still suffering, and still can be intense, brutalizing, consuming, then we could perhaps let slide the egomaniacal self-absorption of it as a confessional literary tactic. So be it. He doesn’t shy away from that risk: Either his suffering is validated through the comparison, or the whole metaphoric comparison crashes into a smoking ruin of egotistical temerity, shameful and repulsive, embarrassing even to read.

If he’s truly writing out of suffering—and that’s clear enough—then the assumption is that he doesn’t have, maybe doesn’t need, the perspective to discern the risk he’s taking: They suffered; I suffer. We are kin. Nothing more need be said. That’s the assumption a reader is to carry through. Except maybe there are gradations to suffering? And maybe the collective mass suffering of genocide unbalances the equation? Egotism has a way of bloating the egotist’s self-importance, of course, even if his ego is driven toward an otherwise noble cause.

Be that as it may, the poem always had more than mere outrage as its object through its invoking of art’s noble cause. The act of writing is “Blundering, faltering, uphill all the way / & icy.” But the point of it is to sing, and even out of the mud-puddle of his murky heart, the thing he sings is “Serve, Serve.” That’s what takes this beyond simply a literal chronicle of a winter’s walk, something B. is fully capable of focusing on. Art’s music amounts to service. “New tasks will craze you in your happy ending. / Let go without a pang.” It would be easy enough, given the context of so many other more depressing Dream Songs, to read “let go” as an invocation to let go of life, to permit the respite of death he too often longs for and finally let it have its way. He invokes death in this poem anyway, with talk of Joyce’s Leopold Bloom considering death as a long rest. Death is also the fearful alternative to living, even if living involves suffering and a hospital. So “let go” is not about death, in what strikes me as an unusually (in context) positive Dream Song. What you let go of is the suffering that often blocks your expression, but that more often colors it or even reroutes it. His obsessive discipline enables constant expression. But that expression is often twisted and weird, dark and unhappy, fragmented. It makes me wonder if this poem isn’t the appearance of something a bit more positive enabled by a hospital stay where the dark influence of alcohol is being held at bay through outright force, by starchy Irish nurses and ringing school bells that divide the day into manageable, booze-free segments.

I also think that the contrast between suffering and the suffering-free moment the poem is marking is meant to be accentuated. So he ramps it up with that comparison I objected to. Berryman couldn’t care less if it comes off as insensitive, boorish or tasteless—that was history, it’s over, I’ll use it however I see fit since no one new is being hurt. I’ll give him that much. You sing any way you need to, in order to teach, hopefully to entertain but not necessarily, ultimately to serve. In the end it’s still what The Dream Songs are about.