#301

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An interesting Dream Song about St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin and Jonathon Swift, who had once served as the Dean of St. Patrick’s and is buried there. He is buried next to one of his “enigmatic ladies” “the giant presences / chained to St. Patrick’s, tumultuous, serene, / their mighty stint done, larger in stone than life.” That may be true—“larger in stone” really being a reference to the legacy and reputation of Swift, recognized three hundred years after his death as among the greatest writers in English, still read, still admired, still remembered. But is this stone-symbolized legacy of Swift’s larger than his life was? Depends on who you talk to, I suppose. Somebody might mention that Swift lived a successful and dramatic life, moving in high royal circles, angering queens with his satire, a leading political, religious and literary figure. He made money and lived a life with some financial security and modest luxury. But for B., reputation being larger than actual life turns out to be very important. Swift’s portrait graced the Irish £10 bank note. Now that means legacy!

Henry of course had visited St. Patrick’s on his journey to Ireland to have tea with Yeats thirty years before. Nothing in St. Patrick’s has changed, and nothing of Swift’s reputation has changed in a mere thirty years either.

The last stanza is really interesting because of the undeniable correspondences B. sees with the great writer, Swift:

            His frantic huge mind left him long before the end,

            he wandered mad through the apartments but once was seen

            to pause by a shelf & look

            at a copy of the Tale of a Tub: he took it down

            & was heard to mutter ‘What a genius was mine

            when I wrote down that book.’

Swift had lost his mind toward the end of his life and was declared mad and committed to an asylum. It’s a poignant moment in the poem when in a fleeting moment of clarity he comments on the book he wrote when he was young and strong. I’ve written and published a few things, and some I even like. What will it be like when I’m no longer capable of the effort and creativity it took to do that work? Do you look back proudly, or do you lament that you can’t do it any longer and will never again? Maybe it’s both. There is a kind of sad, wistful pride here, so I think it has to be a mixture of both. B. uses the scene with Swift because it approaches what he’s feeling as well. He calls himself a wreck, he’s been in and out of hospitals for years, and his major work is nearing completion. He did indeed win some high lauds and accolades, so it was reasonable to think that something of a legacy might have been established. While artists of the stature of Jonathon Swift only come along once or twice in a century, B. has still earned the right to at least make the comparison. And there is that sadness approaching—whatever it added up to, his life, it’s close to being over. His literary reputation and his legacy will be taking over soon. Addiction, ambition, and madness notwithstanding, it’s an honest human moment.

#300 Henry Comforted

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Here’s the comfort: A reception, room filling with “Irish types,” including “one gorgeous girl” (of course), people smoking, “the accents are flying”—I’ve been to a thousand similar receptions, just without the Irish setting. “Unshaven, tieless, with the most expensive drink in the room, / I have recovered a little.” Why is Henry comforted/recovered? “Henry is feeling better, / owing to three gin-&-vermouths.” Oh…okay. Back then to the reception: the Irish are not neat, the skirts are as short here as in Minneapolis (fashion in the 60s featured a broad acceptance of mini-skirts), a guy with “monumental” shoes, a couple men “are giving it verbal hell.”

Three gin-&-vermouths. Alcohol is the comfort. Admitting, with direct candor, that he’d much prefer to deal with the reception with three stiff drinks in him than not. And moreover, the drinks are his comfort, without which he probably wouldn’t be able to cope with a social situation, or without which it would be unbearable. If your first day in Dublin is your worst, which he repeats here as the poem’s first line, his subsequent days are better, and the implication—jaded as I am at this point about the potential for anything like sanity or recovery—is that once he finds out where the bar is at the reception or which corner pub is the best one to sneak off to, that’s why his days in Dublin improve. It gets better after that awful first dry day. In other poems this realization is often accompanied by shame, weak jokes, piteousness, and self-loathing. Here, it’s comfort. Might as well admit it.

I’ve been talking this over with colleague, friend and former student, Anna Marie, and we’ve both noted the psychic split that looks to be operative here. I’ve commented on it before, when B. says, “I lapse like an Irish clown” (DS 292). There, it finally impressed itself on me that the compulsion of the addict operates separately from his conscious ego, and from his decision-making processes, to the extent that as he walks up the corner to the pub, in what he knows is a serious betrayal of his wife and daughter who are so invested in his health and healing, he still watches himself go, makes wry jokes and bitter self-deprecating remarks like calling himself a clown, is fully aware of how awful what he’s doing is—yet he keeps on going. He didn’t say it there, but once he got to the pub, the drink had to have been a comfort. Here, he admits it: Henry’s Comfort. And really, why argue one’s way around it? Why even bother with rehab? Probably only as a desperate measure to extend whatever remains of his life, mainly so he can have the comfort of another drink, though it’s also what’s killing him.

As far as alcohol or any other substance, I don’t relate. Put three martinis in me, and if I’m not actually out on the floor, you’ll know I’m buzzed. Probably the same with him or anyone, though he obviously didn’t care. For me, I wouldn’t be able to function at anything close to a normal level. Well, fine, but this isn’t about me. But, it’s also true I’ve experienced the lift of just the right drunk on just a couple occasions. Once drinking bourbon with Janine and Wendy in the lounge of the Intercontinental in Chicago. A couple nights in Athens, OH, before my brother’s graduation from OU. Hitting cruising altitude at a couple parties in college. But I can count the times on one hand. Almost always, it slows me down, fuzzes me out, blurs my focus, makes me stupid and lazy. But for B., it pepped him up, by all accounts. I get it, or got it, rarely, but for him, that was the way of it. Booze was energy. And because of that, he connected it with the writing process that was the foundation of his career. Well, it was a Faustian bargain. I’ve hinted at that before, but no more pussy-footing about that either. Demon Rum giveth, and Demon Rum do most certainly, Mr. Bones, taketh away. What does it give? It gives thirty years of artistic accomplishment. Fame. He gets the girls and gets to give free rein to his goatish disposition. It proffers as well a simulacrum of comfort, like here, but it is not genuine comfort. What did the bargain cost? Health. The body. The self-esteem that comes from pride in one’s body and one’s health and one’s spirit. And there was this: Adrian Leverkühn, in his bargain in Thomas Mann’s novel, Doctor Faustus, is commanded by Mephistopheles himself (I’ve mentioned this before as well): Thou shalt not love. Not yourself, not your wife. In the novel, when Leverkühn does love some rosy-cheeked little angelic nephew, or somebody like that, the boy is taken from him by meningitis, the spirochete disease-cousin of Leverkühn’s metaphoric syphilis, the instrument of his demon. B. writes poems of appreciation for his wife, and we’ve seen love of his daughter. But he sent them shopping so he could slip away to the pub. He made his choice. Eventually, she will leave him.

Does he have a choice as he’s mingling amidst the Dublin literati? Not anymore. The self-awareness that knows what he’s doing is helpless to thwart the compulsion. In this poem, he doesn’t bother with jokes or self-disgust. He simply accepts the “comfort” of it and is grateful. As he was walking down the street toward the pub, did he have a choice? Not at that point. Though his self-disgusted consciousness may rage and sneer all it wants, it’s not in control. The deeper and stronger compulsion is what’s in control. It’s what he bargained for, and it’s something separate.

Did he ever have a choice? Ask The Dream Songs, and the answer you’ll get is no. He never had a choice. I’m leaving that up in the air for now, though. He knew what he was doing, I suspect, and he knew the connection he was forging with accomplishment and addiction, and what that would eventually cost. But it’s only a suspicion. I don’t know enough about the roots of addiction yet to decide. I’m still in the learning process.

#299

https://books.google.com/books?id=X6G15b6F8mIC&pg=PA12&lpg=PA12&dq=The+Irish+have+the+thickest+ankles+in+the+world&source=bl&ots=JVQLMIpY_a&sig=TgBQvAS1GzyqUZzbBlHI_X12L7Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAWoVChMIhfHlovPgyAIVg-8mCh2ZQwEE#v=onepage&q=The%20Irish%20have%20the%20thickest%20ankles%20in%20the%20world&f=false

“Life comes against    not all at once but in layers.” This is a weighty line, spoken by The Interlocutor/Death personage calling Henry Mr. Bones. “Down on your knees” he says, and Henry winds up indeed down on his knees—depressed.

It is sort of a miracle that Berryman accomplished what he did under the circumstances he faced, whether they were his fault or not, whether they were due to his bad decision and shortcomings or not. The only way he could have done it, I think, was the way he did it: Make his bad decisions and shortcomings, his depression and suicidal yearnings, his yearnings for drink, into the subject of his epic. That way, there’s always something to say, always a subject, no matter how depressed and despondent he might have gotten. It has been a challenge for me to keep up but one I exect I’ll ride out. Might as well at this point. My problem is that I’m not drawing every day from myself and my experience. Sometimes I do, if I can make it relevant. I feel like a hitter at batting practice and B. is the practice pitcher: He serves up a big fat one, so I nonchalantly knock it over the center field wall. Some of those earlier obscure difficult ones were fastballs, and it took all my concentration to make contact. Then there were clunkers that bounced before they hit the plate. I hit a couple of those on the rebound off the dirt. If the pitch is outside, you go with it. There’s no hitting that one to left field. Etc. This metaphor is tired already, but that’s kind of the point: I’m tired. I’ve been through so many emotions with these: pity, exasperation, excitement, admiration, rage, confusion, and that’s just scratching the emotional surface. A couple of those words show up more than others in the day-to-day record of what The Dream Songs have elicited. Today: Exhaustion. Emptiness and exhaustion. What else could there possibly be to say about this stuff? I read in the biography that Kate was in the same boat during this this time in Ireland, though of course she had to have had it a thousand times worse than I do now. Hey, John, gosh, wow—you snuck off to the pub and wrote another Dream Song about how despondent you are and in the same poem how beautiful some gorgeous French ingénue is, and you finished it just before we rushed you to the hospital to deal with the alcohol poisoning (true), and here it is: On a soggy little napkin! Well let me just sit down and type this one up too and we’ll add it to the pile of 350 other ones here on the table.

Well, I’m in just another phase in the movement through to the end. Today it feels like a morass. I’ve been morassed. I morassed myself. Toward the end of December I’ll find myself energized by the glide to the finish. Not there yet. Back in January, it was all about excitement and determination, and I had too much energy churning, that I channeled into lots of poems, some in tight form, which take a lot of energy; it’s hard work. Today: I confess I’m not really too motivated by the Irish and their thick ankles. WTF is that? And why? Overlong and badly written letter and a bad poem from California? Oh. My. God. Who on earth cares? And by the way, never tell anyone about your dreams. A) They don’t care. B) You’re quite likely to let some embarrassing Freudian humiliation slip out, about how badly you want to sleep with your students, or how you can’t wait to die, or about how some bitch-goddess queen attended by slavering bears is always after you or wants to sleep with you herself, or you don’t have any pants on, or whatever.

If you’re down on your knees now, good. I’ll take that as a gesture of begging forgiveness from scholars of the future and otherwise well-meaning readers like me posed further on down the long slick embankment of time sliding into the future, where a morass awaits. Beg for forgiveness, you dog!

Life doesn’t come at once all right. I was going to write about my last day in Paris after six of the most amazing, rapidly growing, fruitful, and romantic months of my life. Let me just say that I was sad to go. That reminiscence might have proved poignant and heartbreaking for readers around the world. But something about the tone of that line about the Irish ankles, which is supposed to be wryly humorous—but not today—stopped me instead. I haven’t been this annoyed by a comment from an American about the Irish since Vice-President Dan Quayle visited Ireland and proceeded to insult every woman in Ireland with an idiotic crack about how unattractive they all are. For what it’s worth, I remain bleakly embarrassed as an American by that to this day, and I’d write apologizing to every Irish woman on the Emerald Isle if I thought it would do any good. (It wouldn’t.) And also for what it’s worth, Dan Quayle is the single dumbest mammal ever to have been led into a governmental office since Caligula’s horse. (Thanks Charles Pierce for that line. He wrote if for Texas’s democratically elected contribution to our political process, Louis Gohmert, but it fits Dan Quayle like a glove just as well.)

All right, I’ll stop now. I’m feeling better anyway. Let me just finally assert that in my opinion, the Irish have normal ankles.