#331

This is the third. What have I more to say

except that I hope that in my dying hour

nobody will be ashamed of me:

May I not be scared then of that final void

into which I lapse, leaving all my power

& memory behind me.

There’s a lot of hair in Ireland, much of it red.

An ultimate segment of Irishmen are dead.

Climb over the tombs

to find the gay living at your feet, the intellectual girl

with good legs & fingers at her brow, listening to a whirl

of talk from her companions:

Yeats listened once, he found it did him good,

he died in full stride, a good way to go,

making them wonder what’s missing,

a strangeness in the final notes, never to be resolved,

Beethoven’s, Goya’s: You had better go to the Prado

downstairs, to see on what I am insisting.

To die full-stride: Doesn’t happen very often, does it? More often the fire and vitality of youth flares up some energetic masterpiece; if the artist is good and lucky then some subsequent work grows into a balance of fire tempered with maturity, and then the rest of the artistic life ebbs into denouement. Sometimes good, capable, crafty, wise even. I read somewhere that most masterpieces are written when the author is 35. So, school, according to this teacher, was all about preparing for age 35. After that, either you’ll fade away or you’ll become an elder statesman, purveying wisdom, which has value too, but it’s not as sexy. But there are the few, who grow and grow. All great work, pretty much by definition, is strange. For him or her working from youth, the strangeness so often takes on a revolutionary urgency, because blowing up old shit is necessary. For the elder, who persists in his strangeness, then it gets really strange. You don’t care anymore what anyone thinks because you’ve earned the right to say what you see beneath the stupid and petrified skin of orthodoxy. Goya and Beethoven are B.’s two examples. To this day, nothing in any art I’ve ever encountered disturbs me as deeply or as thoroughly as Goya’s The Disasters of War.

Shakespeare’s four great tragedies are all terribly disturbing, each in its own way. But somehow, The Tempest, the last-written of his great plays, has the most heartbreaking moment I know of when Prospero the wizard thinks back on all the amazing things he’s done with his magic in his career, then decides it’s time to chuck it:

            I’ll break my staff,

Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,

And deeper than did ever plummet sound

I’ll drown my book.

This is the great artist/scientist/magician facing the fact that it’s all nearly over, and the scene has this added resonance in that this is the only play of Shakespeare’s that has anything whatsoever to do with the New World (as far as I know of). Prospero’s career is ending, but so is Shakespeare’s, and beyond that, even, the life of insular Old-World Europe is about to change in profound and explosive ways as well. It will never again be the same. The New World had been known of for over a century, but it was just then beginning to have a real effect on Europe’s cultural consciousness. The play marks that moment when the next generation is coming into its own, and the world into which it is dawning will not be the same as its parents’. What’s especially poignant is that the new generation has no use for its parents’ world. Miranda sees new people, including a handsome young man, for the first time in her life and gushes:

             O wonder!

 How many goodly creatures are there here!

 How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world

 That has such people in't!

Her father answers, “'Tis new to thee.” But it’s her excitement that carries the day. He’s about to fade, bury his staff and drown his book, with all the learning, wisdom and wonder they symbolize. Which she won’t miss. She’ll have no conception, and she in her utter naïve ignorance, she couldn’t care less. She’s caught up in her rapturous erotic gushing and world-making—New-World-making—and nothing else matters to the burgeoning young woman and the equally burgeoning young man she’s infatuated with. Eventually they’ll flame out and die too, but not now. They’ll take one another’s hand for now and stroll along the beach, not seeing the sunset, the miraculous creatures swimming in the waves, the complex ancient world they’re part of and don’t know it.

B. is aware of all this, and writes about it, looking at his beloved daughter and wondering what’s in store for her. He had extended his misspent youth into a misspent appetite—Miranda is all appetite as well, but she’s driven by the wholesome natural desire to join the brave new world she’s growing into. It’s appropriate to her life-moment. For the youth who misses out, who is shy or wounded, oppressed or rejected, the appetite and desire will extend into his age, but there’s something pathetic about that, because something that should be supporting it, youthful wonder, is missing. This is Henry in his old age, still drinking and lusting, but maybe beginning, in his serious contemplation of death, to finally put aside adolescent desires and assess who he really is. That’s where Goya and Beethoven matter. Miranda is desire fulfilled by wonder. B.’s daughter, Triss, will grow into a Miranda very soon. Henry on the surface is a wonderless, feeding desire, though, still also ruled beneath that by fear and reticence and bewilderment, same as always. Old man Goya is the opposite, an appalled wonder without desire, observing clearly and reporting still. Prospero, in the drowning of his book, signals his intention to fade away and let Miranda and her lover take over the approaching new world that he is unequipped to even understand. Goya and Beethoven, and perhaps B. as well?, propose an alternative, where wisdom continues speaking, growing in relevance and appalled witness even as it fades. If there is a sense of redemption in the overall movement of The Dream Songs, I believe now that this is where it’s going to come from. The example of Goya and Beethoven are a guiding, steadying presence. The empty, gnawing hunger is being supplanted by the growth of something deeper and better, only finally being permitted by the decay of Henry’s body, the seat of that hunger. What’s arising is a quiet but astonished recognition that the world after all has been ruled by all that youthful hunger all along, and a quiet, astonished, clear-eyed understanding of what the consequences of that are. In preparing for his death, Henry has just taken the first step toward growing up. It’s an important moment in anyone’s life, though many never make it to that fullness of adulthood. I’ve been plenty worried for a long time now that Henry had no intention of ever getting there. But hope may just be dawning. We’ll see.