Over 3 million of the Ibo or Igbo people of Nigeria were
murdered between 1966 and 1970, so a catastrophe of this magnitude stands
alongside the other instances of genocidal savagery B. mentions to open the
poem. It’s a pretty dark piece of work, concerned with what hell is and how we
do or will experience it. Hell begins as essentially a religious concept, what
God does with those souls who chose to reject his word and give their souls to
lesser, banal, corrupt, evil pursuits while they’re alive. It is their just
punishment for a life misspent. B. here is stripping the religious overtones and
even the afterlife for a moment out of hell and asserting that we can
experience it here, in life, just as well. He should know, since he spent some
time there, with a lot of suffering along the way in his life—an existence-altering
grief and the subsequent consequences of alcoholism. Hell, simply, is suffering,
and it doesn’t matter if it was earned or not. For him, as he says, the terrors
of the life he experienced were sharp, and they stayed.
One of the things that it’s easy to forget is that this
state of being was his lot, and whether he earned it through some celestial or
earth-bound comeuppance or not, he so often wrote, thought and felt out of
something close to a state of the hell he’s describing. That’s a twisting,
warping thing to have to carry around constantly, and it might just lead to the
immaturity, behavioral irregularities, addictions, and self-centered struggle
for release that marks so many of these confessional poems and the personality
of the poet who confessed them. It gives an explanation for some of his
bullshit that goes beyond the narcissism it’s frequently so tempting to accuse
him of. After all, we forgive a victim being tormented on the rack if he’ll do
or say anything for release, and we certainly forgive him his self-absorption
in his extremis. Still, we tend not to extend mercy on people who have
willingly buckled themselves into the device. You asked for it, we tell them:
Don’t come crying to me. But I’m thinking now that’s not fair, and his behavior
and motivation for what he did doesn’t even have to matter. Judges don’t think
this way, but fortunately I’m not a judge. I can let a poet off the hook if I
choose to. I can assume that because B.’s an artist he’s doing the best he can.
There are other ways to make a living that don’t involve such a noble vocation.
The train of thought that leads to understanding and
forgiveness is the train he’s asking his readers to board with him with this
poem. It’s maybe not such an unreasonable request. Right at the end, though, he
hints that there are others out there who don’t deserve understanding and
forgiveness. I wonder if he’s not just saying to hell with them. Dante imagined
a very complex and structured Hell, featuring intricate gradations of
punishment according to the specific sins the damned engaged in while they were
alive. They don’t all just burn indiscriminately. I’m not going to try and
figure out which circle Berryman figuratively earned residence of while he
lived. For today I declare that I pity all the denizens of hell and I’m leaving
it at that. I wouldn’t wish hell on anybody.
"I wouldn’t wish hell on anybody."
ReplyDeleteYep.
It's difficult not to read this as narcissistic, especially when it begins so beautifully then reverts immediately to his own experience. Sometimes, it's as if he views life in tiny vstas, peering sqintily through the eye of a needle. He takes what he sees that can augment his own exprience and that's enough. And, let's not give him a pass on that giving birth to the consort of the devil thingy...
ReplyDeleteI could avoid typos if I typed with my glasses ON...*vistas*, *squintily*
ReplyDelete