In the Gospel of St. John, “telestai” is what Jesus said at
the moment he died. It means “it is finished.” So, the reference is clear in the
context of the poem: After great suffering, Berryman’s great task is done. It
is finished. While it does strike me as presumptuous to compare Jesus’s
crucifixion with the writing of a long poem, I guess I get it. B. has also
compared himself to Jews in the holocaust and to African Americans who suffered
slavery and Jim Crow oppression, so there’s plenty of precedent. It’s all partly
a great exercise in presumptuous self-absorption anyway.
I went to church today at the cathedral, an irregular
occurrence, but I went this morning. I can still smell the incense in my hair. The
bishop served the mass, and he actually said something interesting and relevant
in his homily. He said that we all know people who see themselves as superior,
who look down on others. (Check.) Either through their money, their
accomplishments, their accumulation of some kind of capital (my take on this) which
they use to assume a snobby privilege. We also know people who never give
themselves credit, who think they’re worthless, who don’t believe they’re
capable of performing whatever task they’re faced with. (Check.) These two
extremes of human behavior are linked, he said, by a preoccupation with the self.
Both extremes are self-absorbed in really the same way. The bishop, in a bit of
an aside, called both extremes “obnoxious,” which really caught my attention.
The point of this should be apparent, that a middle ground, an honest
assessment of our strengths, weaknesses and gifts is the way to go honorably (or
un-obnoxiously) through life, and of course being a bishop, the bishop figured Jesus
into an assessment of our gifts as blessings, etc. But it struck me that B.
walks both extremes the bishop talked about at the same time—“unappeasable
Henry sulked” or “leaving behind me, wag” on one hand, and “his foes are like
footnotes…absurd” or “his loins were the scenes of stupendous achievement” on
the other. The united extremes of self-absorption. These are not generally the
utterances of a whole or well-adjusted person, functioning out of an honest
recognition of the pros and cons of his centered self. But what’s weird about
it all, something that I never find easy to reconcile, is that these extremes
are superimposed, at least in the fictional Henry and the nearly fictional
Berryman that arises out of the work. So the obsequious, emotionally wrecked Henry
uses his obsequiousness and emotional wreckage as the very instruments of his
great achievement. On the other hand, his bragging and posing are always
undercut by a recognition of his own vacuousness. Anything he utters is liable
to be shot through with these ironies, coming from either direction. Not always—there
are honest moments aplenty. But more often, he’s out at one extreme or the
other. If, like in DS 353, this puts him in hell, well, that’s as apt a
definition of hell as I can come up with: stretched on the existential rack.
In this local installment of the greater long poem, you can
certainly hear his relief at being nearly done with it, and his claim of how
beaten down it has made him follows from the effort. It wasn’t just the writing,
it was the life performed that supported the writing of it, which were
inextricable. At the same time you can hear his bragging as he mentions the
invitation to the White House he missed out on—misery and accolades arriving at
once! And to wind it all up, you can also see him raise the whole shebang to a
veritable apotheosis of presumptuousness with the poem’s last line.
I think this is an odd DS, yet also almost perfectly representative of B's (self) interests. I do love this though, which reminds me of Kenneth Koch: "The only happy people in the world are those who do not have to write long poems."
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