Tuesday, January 5, 2016

#370




Anyone who has followed The Dream Songs up to this point is probably past a sense of discovering new depths of sadness or pathos about the statement being made in this particular poem. I am. The cycle has taken us through all of that and pushed us out the other side. I’ve gone through these emotions. Do we feel sorry for him or not? Do we pity the damned in hell who suffer due to their own willful rejection of grace? I’ve concluded that yes, we must pity the self-damned anyway. I can’t help it. But there is still something new in this one, which of course we’ve seen coming, but still, here it is: A tragic dejection that is close to appalling in that there is such a sense of utter resignation about it. There is no longer any hope of turning back from the isolation imposed by the subject’s actions and choices. All the images contribute to the same psychological state: Cut off. Lost. Gone. Isolated. Sealed up. Alone. Dressed up, masked, but still cloistered in his own infinite monastery. B. had recorded that series of moments when his wife seems to have tried one intense, desperate last attempt to pull him out, and all he did was put his hands to his ears and scream because it hurt so much. Not long after in his life, she will leave him because she will refuse to be merely his nurse. He knows that’s coming, and it doesn’t matter. Addiction has cut him off.

Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” has that brilliant, twisted scene where the vengeance-bent psychopath narrator bricks up his enemy in a basement room. He lays the bricks one at a time, until the screams of his victim are finally muffled forever. B. is like the figure in that room, but there is a crucial difference: He has been laying the bricks himself, from the inside, screaming all along, and powerless to stop himself. What makes Poe’s story so weird and disturbing is that the scene is coupled with the victim’s clarity as his awareness terribly emerges through his drunkenness. B. has had that same clarity all along: “his costumes varied / with the southeast wind, but he remained aware. / Awareness was most of what he had.”

So, to be honest, this one isn’t triggering any rhetorical flights in me, and I don’t feel any poem in response coming on, no engagement of the critical apparatus, and the poem is clear and straightforward enough that it doesn’t need any explanation, no need to dig up and clarify any obscure references or untangle any difficult syntax. It’s a frank confession of an existential state of being, the end result of a long-time-coming arrival: Bricked up. The mortar is drying. One can hardly believe it. To a soul who struggles, who has insecurities, fears and worries, like everyone else, but who does not believe that he is lost or ever could be, this is something new. It has been coming, but here it is. One truly can become lost. It’s staggering. The most appropriate response is silence.

2 comments:

  1. "the fate my actions have so hardly earned." The one line where B still doesn't take responsibility, but it rings false and hollow. Otherwise, there's no false front to this depression.

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    1. I think the way he's using "hardly" here has the root in "hard", and it's his own odd usage; it's not the more common usage of "hardly" as in "barely" or "almost not", something like that. So "hardly earned" actually means something like justifiably painful, deserved hard punishment of my past crimes. I don't think there's any weaselry in this DS at all.

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