“Life comes against
not all at once but in layers.” This is a weighty line, spoken by The
Interlocutor/Death personage calling Henry Mr. Bones. “Down on your knees” he
says, and Henry winds up indeed down on his knees—depressed.
It is sort of a miracle that Berryman accomplished what he
did under the circumstances he faced, whether they were his fault or not, whether
they were due to his bad decision and shortcomings or not. The only way he
could have done it, I think, was the way he did it: Make his bad decisions and
shortcomings, his depression and suicidal yearnings, his yearnings for drink,
into the subject of his epic. That way, there’s always something to say, always
a subject, no matter how depressed and despondent he might have gotten. It has
been a challenge for me to keep up but one I exect I’ll ride out. Might as well
at this point. My problem is that I’m not drawing every day from myself and my
experience. Sometimes I do, if I can make it relevant. I feel like a hitter at
batting practice and B. is the practice pitcher: He serves up a big fat one, so
I nonchalantly knock it over the center field wall. Some of those earlier obscure
difficult ones were fastballs, and it took all my concentration to make
contact. Then there were clunkers that bounced before they hit the plate. I hit
a couple of those on the rebound off the dirt. If the pitch is outside, you go
with it. There’s no hitting that one to left field. Etc. This metaphor is tired
already, but that’s kind of the point: I’m tired. I’ve been through so many
emotions with these: pity, exasperation, excitement, admiration, rage,
confusion, and that’s just scratching the emotional surface. A couple of those
words show up more than others in the day-to-day record of what The Dream Songs have elicited. Today:
Exhaustion. Emptiness and exhaustion. What else
could there possibly be to say about
this stuff? I read in the biography that Kate was in the same boat during this this
time in Ireland, though of course she had to have had it a thousand times worse
than I do now. Hey, John, gosh, wow—you snuck off to the pub and wrote another
Dream Song about how despondent you are and in the same poem how beautiful some
gorgeous French ingénue is, and you finished it just before we rushed you to
the hospital to deal with the alcohol poisoning (true), and here it is: On a soggy little napkin! Well
let me just sit down and type this one up too and we’ll add it to the pile of
350 other ones here on the table.
Well, I’m in just another phase in the movement through to
the end. Today it feels like a morass. I’ve been morassed. I morassed myself.
Toward the end of December I’ll find myself energized by the glide to the
finish. Not there yet. Back in January, it was all about excitement and
determination, and I had too much energy churning, that I channeled into lots
of poems, some in tight form, which take a lot of energy; it’s hard work.
Today: I confess I’m not really too
motivated by the Irish and their thick ankles. WTF is that? And why? Overlong and badly written letter and
a bad poem from California? Oh. My. God. Who
on earth cares? And by the way, never tell anyone about your dreams. A)
They don’t care. B) You’re quite likely to let some embarrassing Freudian
humiliation slip out, about how badly you want to sleep with your students, or
how you can’t wait to die, or about how some bitch-goddess queen attended by
slavering bears is always after you or wants to sleep with you herself, or you
don’t have any pants on, or whatever.
If you’re down on your knees now, good. I’ll take that as a
gesture of begging forgiveness from scholars of the future and otherwise well-meaning
readers like me posed further on down the long slick embankment of time sliding
into the future, where a morass awaits. Beg
for forgiveness, you dog!
Life doesn’t come at once all right. I was going to write
about my last day in Paris after six of the most amazing, rapidly growing,
fruitful, and romantic months of my life. Let me just say that I was sad to go.
That reminiscence might have proved poignant and heartbreaking for readers
around the world. But something about the tone of that line about the Irish
ankles, which is supposed to be wryly humorous—but not today—stopped me instead.
I haven’t been this annoyed by a comment from an American about the Irish since
Vice-President Dan Quayle visited Ireland and proceeded to insult every woman
in Ireland with an idiotic crack about how unattractive they all are. For what
it’s worth, I remain bleakly embarrassed as an American by that to this day,
and I’d write apologizing to every Irish woman on the Emerald Isle if I thought
it would do any good. (It wouldn’t.) And also for what it’s worth, Dan Quayle
is the single dumbest mammal ever to have been led into a governmental office
since Caligula’s horse. (Thanks Charles Pierce for that line. He wrote if for
Texas’s democratically elected contribution to our political process, Louis
Gohmert, but it fits Dan Quayle like a glove just as well.)
All right, I’ll stop now. I’m feeling better anyway. Let me
just finally assert that in my opinion, the Irish have normal ankles.
"I just found my fly open!"
ReplyDeleteIs this what you're worried about, B?