#383

http://jcpoetryclub.livejournal.com/5904.html

A morning poem, fittingly offering a sunrise rebirth after the funeral dance of DS 382. The rebirth comes, perhaps ironically, “at the end of the labour.” The labor, obviously, is the writing of the great Dream Songs project, though the pun on labor as childbirth is there, has been there, all along. There is a sense of relief dawning. The labor is over, something new—even if it’s death coming—is on the approach. I feel like I have earned a degree of sympathy for this sentiment. A year of commentary and response isn’t fifteen years of suffering and intensely ambitious writing, but I will declare that this was an intense and focused year of effort. The Temple to Poseidon at Sounion still stands, in ruins, and it’s a perfectly appropriate symbol. Poseidon gave Odysseus hell, and the Greeks built him a temple, which time and weather have given hell right back to. In its bare, battered, ascetic endurance, the temple is a symbol for any artist’s achievement. There was much suffering, and time has taken its toll, and will continue to erode and batter the achievement. But there it stands. Wow.

That woman he mentions, the tall Anglaise? “She was not born for sacrifice, I think. / But she was born.” In other words, someone so beautiful and so “fine”, by being born, time and life will batter her too, and eventually sacrifice her too. It’s what we get by being born, the price we pay. But something can endure, at least for a time, and that’s always amazing when it does. Chipped and weathered marble columns, precariously, mysteriously balanced on their foundation on a cliff over the Aegean.

B. states here that he didn’t dream the night before the morning when this poem was written. That wasn’t usual for him. “Many sins / are purged by a dreamless night.” The weight of the poem is lifting from him. Well, funny enough, for the very first and only time since this project of mine started over a year ago, I dreamed about it this morning. It wasn’t a beautiful or pleasant dream, but the details don’t matter and aren’t something I care to share anyway. The details were simply a dream-riff off of tragedies we’ve all heard in the news over the past year. But I learned this. It sounds silly to articulate, but it matters to one who has for the last year engaged (from a more or less safe distance) with the depression, addiction and suicidal yearnings of one writer so intensely: I am not that. In the dream, it was time to put the gun to my head and pull the trigger. But I couldn’t, and more to the point, wouldn’t do it. The humiliation and pain that I knew, knew, knew were rapidly approaching still weren’t enough to convince me to do that. The only lesson from this that matters: My personal attachment to life is utterly unshakable. There will be no arguing me out of that, ever. Period. Not even the argument of an advancing SWAT team. (As B. asserts [twice!], "All men have made mistakes.") I also understood at the same time that someone who, for whatever reason, hasn’t been afforded a seat on top of life’s secure foundation can’t be easily coaxed back onto it for the same unarguable reason. It’s not even a consideration. This person will eventually find a way to destroy himself. This doesn’t mean he won’t struggle, try. In waking from this dream this morning as the sun was rising, and mulling over its significance, I realized something else. I have made one sustained interpretive mistake, although I followed the poet into it, so I hope I can be forgiven. The distinction between life on one hand and literary ambition on the other is a false dichotomy. The one dichotomy that overrides all others, and the only one that matters, is the one between life and death, and poetry is always on the side of life. Always. We write to live; to write is to celebrate life. Berryman did it too. He might not have even realized it. Knocked off of life’s unshakeable pedestal, he struggled to write his way back onto it, dragging his sins, pain, and insecurities with him. For most, the foundation of life is solid and holds you like your feet are iron and it’s a great rare-earth magnet. For others, it’s slick and there is a constant earthquake. He made it there for just a bit, and his wild unsteady gyrations and desperate flailings from a distance looked like dancing.