#273

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Racist in a couple directions. This is once again comparing Henry in his privations and sufferings with the plight of African slaves: “Survive—exist—who is at others’ will / optionless; may gelded be, be put to stud / and were sweating sold; / was sold.” Aside from the reappearance of the castration business which I wearied of instantly way back eight or nine months ago, even worse is the comparison with slave experience, which, given the awfulness of slaves’ suffering from back in those Antebellum days, strikes me as always as way more presumptuous than I’ll ever be willing to swallow. It’s worse than that: The dude should have known better. I don’t care if it was the 1960s, when the great social revolutions were only just taking hold. B. sometimes gets credit in the literary scholarship circles for speaking in the hip young dialect of the Counterculture, but he holds on to much of the Establishment down deep. He’s just not a very wealthy or powerful example, and no real establishment figure, corporate or government, gray suit or blue, would have given him the time of day. Credit where credit’s due, he’s on solid Countercultural ground regarding war and Vietnam, but women on the whole are mainly good for certain delightful and shame-inducing things (though if they’re famous poets then that takes precedence and he’ll make an exception), and his appropriation of Black culture doesn’t hold up much better fifty years on than Jim Crow, Apartheid, and slavery itself if you ask me. So there’s that.

Then there’s Middle Eastern peoples and oil. “Come closer, Sambo. I planting in your face / ilex.” “Sambo” is ironic, and I’m afraid that I suspect the phrase sand-n____r is somewhere behind it. Ilex is holly, which has associations with Christianity because the thorny leaves recall the crown of thorns placed on Jesus’s head, and the red berries are symbolic of drops of his blood. I think there are other mythical associations that go further back to the Romans and Celts both, but B. is all about the Christian symbol as an aggressive affront to Islam here, in context of the oil it controls. Having your face shoved in a bunch of ilex would be extremely unpleasant at best. But I think that the word “optionless” still hovers over this. Oil addicted, we have no choice but to do as we’re told by the controllers of the stuff. We’re owned by the oil’s owners. Texas, “bigoty Texas,” which still had some oil left in the 60s, compares with Bahrein on the same grounds—driving Cadillacs, thinking they’re special.

I’m not quite sure what to make of the ending: “Muscle my whack. We gotta trickle. Seize / them Moslem testicles, and pull. Please / hurt my owner twice.” Well, I’m not sure I want to make anything of it, actually. It’s almost as if pulling those testicles will hurt, sure, but maybe like milking a cow it’s a way to get the oil flowing faster. They’re the balls of the owners, though. What slave hasn’t fantasized about hurting his owner, probably in ways unspeakable? This poem doesn’t walk the line of even half-decent propriety, it crosses thirty feet over it, but that being said, B. knows the score when it comes to who’s really calling the shots in the world. Oil owns us. I don’t like it either. But the energy and money in oil for the past century now has been too tempting. Climate change is as far down the oil-addict’s road as delirium tremens is for the alcoholic’s, but we’ve gotten there. The choice is a radical life change, AA, some 12-step program or another, or else we keep drinking the stuff because we have to and then we jump off a bridge when it’s finally clear the addiction is final and there’s no way back. It owns us once and for all.

#272

https://books.google.com/books?id=pE8MBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA201&lpg=PA201&dq=The+subject+was+her.+He+was+the+object.+Clings+still+to+these+facts+affect&source=bl&ots=so6tF4B4U5&sig=Dm3zKRF6FqWyDpLNJoEMXQZM2jU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAGoVChMIl_SHmvOeyAIVzoCSCh1f5wZO#v=onepage&q=The%20subject%20was%20her.%20He%20was%20the%20object.%20Clings%20still%20to%20these%20facts%20affect&f=false

Take some storied lovers—say Bogey and Bacall, or Hepburn and Tracy. No, forget them, pampered Hollywood blossoms. Try more storied yet, Heloise and Abelard. Heloise was Abelard’s student, already well-regarded in her own right as a scholar when he moved into her family’s house to become her tutor. Either he seduced her, or they fell desperately in love, or both, eventually got married in secret, she bore his child, and her relatives were so infuriated that they castrated him and sent her to a convent for the rest of her life. Doubtless it’s a lot more complicated than that. What’s obvious is that their relationship involved passion, love, sex, anguish, seduction, mutilation, a child, and letters from the convent. Without that handful of surviving letters, it’s not likely we’d even know much about this 12^th century drama. Which is the point. There have been countless millions of love affairs in the world since, and every last one of them was as intense and emotionally consuming for the participants as Heloise and Abelard’s affair, although I’m fairly confident only a tiny percentage of them concluded with a castration. Enough of them did. (Alan Turing, the genius mathematician who cracked the German code in WWII, who did as much any single person to help win the war, also happened to be gay and was chemically castrated by the British government for it. It ruined him. So much for heroism—to be homosexual counted for more against you than being a genius war hero counted in your favor. Humans beings have a disastrously twisted set of priorities sometimes.) The point I’m getting at: Our direst passions mean so much to us at the time. But they’re soon forgotten. The world strays and stumbles on, without us.

That’s what this poem is about. There are references to a woman, and there is desire and passion involved, though who she might be is kept obscure. She causes metaphoric kitties to dig their claws in his back while he’s up on some metaphoric parapet, or something, and his Interlocutor is a bit confused by the whole thing. (I just ran into that phrase for the voice that follows him. I don’t like it. This is the speaking personification of Death following and laughing at Henry, toning him down, like Death follows and laughs at all of us, and tones us down too.) So Death can’t deal with all this crossed up strong emotion—I gotta go. See you tomorrow. You’re not making sense. Henry has him stay, though if he knows it’s really Death he’s talking to, I wonder if that’s such a good idea. Whether he’s making sense or not (passion never makes sense, that’s the whole thing about passion!), Henry finds this way to this moment of wisdom:

                                    Get with it. When’s said & done

            all that we did & said

            & drank & dreamt, a hundred seasons hence,

            who’ll forgive sunspots & the stains of the son

            where all we crawled & bled?

I think Macbeth had a similar insight about all the sound and fury he was buffeted by. All this passion—Henry’s passion, Berryman’s abject passion—who’ll “forgive” it? It’s an interesting choice of words! To forgive it, a century down the line, you need first to remember it. Probably, since it has been a half century already, there will still be talk about this person and this work. But forgive? It won’t matter. There will be no need. Forgiveness is immediate except in the most horrific crimes. There’s no call to forgive the Holocaust. American slavery’s legacy hasn’t completely dissipated yet, so it’s not time to forgive that yet. But those are huge, societal movements. The transgressions, the screw-ups and bad behaviors, the passions and life-altering miscalculations, the sins—they last for awhile, but they dissipate. If Abelard seduced his student, Heloise, we can disapprove in theory about how he misused his influence and position of power, and we can note that nothing has changed in human behavior in a thousand years and try to learn from it, but the passions that drove her family to mutilate him so pointedly have long, long since cooled. Henry’s passions will cool, and already have for the most part. Now, these things that so wrenched him, and drove his anguished, twisted poetical confessions, we just watch and shake our heads, and try to learn what we can learn. He knows this. It’s just passion, and even the sins of the father, who so hurt his son when he took himself away, or got taken away, they’ll die with the son. All we get are pictures carved with words set in blocks of stone.

#271

https://books.google.com/books?id=2o9-BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA271&lpg=PA271&dq=why+then+did+he+make+at+such+cost+crazy+sounds&source=bl&ots=A9h-uJjXsq&sig=f9OOsekKgFUTnl40N2ROgjhJi68&hl=en&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAmoVChMI6fyy6bmdyAIVQheSCh3uvAbo#v=onepage&q=why%20then%20did%20he%20make%20at%20such%20cost%20crazy%20sounds&f=false

I remember when my son was born. I was the only man in the room, and the overall tone from all those busy women—nurses, doctors (it was a medically complicated and difficult birth), laboring mom—was, you can stay, but you need to keep the hell out of our way. Completely useless, but I’m comfortable with feeling that way. I looked into the new baby’s face when the nurse handed him to me, and I thought, Oh My God—it’s my Aunt Lola! I had been hoping he would be cute and all, but I figured I’d get used to it. That changed in a day or two, and the bonding happened, and then all that creative energy your first kid undams kept flowing. This poem is a response to the news that B.’s wife, Kate, was pregnant. Why the crazy sounds? Happiness, fear, nervousness, all of that, just flowing is what I’m thinking. I get the attention to the clouds: Your happy makes you goofy, and intense about it. Making cloud pictures is an act of creativity. But the thing about this: His excitement takes him too far:

                                    Wait till that kid

comes out, I’ll fix her.

I’ll burp her till she bleeds, I’ll take an ax

to her inability to focus, until in

one weird moment, I fall in love with her too.

Now there’s an excited father to be! My first response was to think, gosh that’s kind of sick in its extremity. Weird fantasies of violence coupled with a manic possessiveness. But, no. Relax. It’s a joke. He’s excited. When the child is born, he’ll look at her and think, I’m just the father. I have no place here. Then he’ll fall in love, dude. Mothers have that nine-month physical bonding thing that they’re always so damn smug about, but we fathers catch up pretty soon if we care to. We start banging and burping the hell out of those bambinos—till they bleed, baby!—and changing diapers so fast that crap and baby poop is spattering all over the walls and dripping down the curtains, and we’re funneling milk and formula down those gaping red maws, shaking rattles in their faces, building skyscrapers with their blocks, taking a firehose to their little fat naked asses in the tub and scrubbing with Brillo pads until they’re smooth and clean like they’ve been sandpapered—it’s amazing what intensity of care love can accomplish when you’ve got a vigorous and driven father doing the loving, man. Of course, then we zonk out on the couch in front of a football game and let mom or grandma or the damn babysitter clean up the mess. It’s all good, we earned it. Hey, babe, is there any beer left in the frig?