Month: December 2020

Eclectic Epiphanies: John Berryman, My Mother, the Pandemic, and the Curse of What’s Boring

 

 

 

I seem to be going through a poetry phase, which isn’t a bad thing. Berryman’s poem below has been running through my head lately as I’ve been trying to keep in touch with people over assorted devices and apps, across all this expanding time and distance, through the phone and letters, just like all The Experts say we’re supposed to do. The poem, “Dream Song 14,” was one my mother quoted a lot when I was young. She mostly tossed out the first seven lines. Have a read:

 

 

 

Dream Song 14*
By John Berryman

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
The reason my mother liked this poem is that she was, indeed, bored. She found being a parent often boring (which is not to say that she found us boring, but the allure of diapers; laundry; square meals; schlepping us to school, to piano lessons, to doctors’ appointments; catering to our feverish demands when we were ill — somehow escaped her). And, unlike Berryman’s Henry (honestly, I’m kind of unclear about the relationship between the poet and Henry, even after a bit of reading around the ‘Net), my mother had no qualms about saying so.
       To be fair, my mother inculcated in us, her children, some decent Inner Resources. She did so mostly by opening one door or the other and saying, “GO OUTSIDE,” and then leaving us to figure out what to do when we got there. But she also taught us how to throw balls and make mud pies (the trick is not to use too much water) and expected us to climb as high as possible in trees.
     When we couldn’t play outside (often because of smog), we had clay and blocks and Lego and crayons and paper and I don’t remember anyone ever complaining about the mess. Our folks also had no problems about our covering the floor with pillows and blankets and doing indoor gymnastics, though they did get a bit nervous when we slid down the stairs on pieces of cardboard.
     We weren’t constant hoodlums; we also played quietly in our rooms, alone or together (I spent hours reading), and grew up in a civilized era when we could do our homework every night and still have time to watch lots of sitcoms — Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch, I Dream of Jeannie, I Love Lucy. Inner Resources.
      So what does any of this have to do with the pandemic? Well, as I attempt to keep in touch with friends and family, I find these lovely people asking me questions such as “What’s new?” and “What have you been doing?” And I find myself answering “Not much” and “Laundry, paying bills, making dinner, napping.” One might assume that I am bored. But the truth is that I am not. “After all, the sky flashes…”
“the great sea yearns…”
“we ourselves flash and yearn…”
(this is as flashy as I get). 
     And I don’t find literature, especially great literature, boring.
             
Also, I have this blog where I can range around the scattered ideas that ping madly in my head. Inner Resources.
       So what’s my problem? As I said, I’m not bored. The problem is that I am boring. Most people want to hear about the hassles of working from home (I’m not working right now) or about ventures outside the house (I’m staying put) or about dealing with family (my folks are dead, my kids are grown). I think about Henry Higgins’ admonition to Eliza Doolittle, his “strict orders as to her behavior. She’s to keep to two subjects: the weather and everybody’s health–Fine day and How do you do, you know–and not to let herself go on things in general. That will be safe.”** Everybody’s health is of course the first subject discussed and, if no one has COVID, disposed of. Discussion of the weather currently seems to be insultingly banal. Politics is either too risky or too distressing. I’m not sure how to get conversations properly balanced these days.  Most don’t want to hear me read John Berryman or Richard Wilbur or Anne Sexton and then ramble on about their poems. Maybe you don’t either, yet here we are together. 
Thanks for sticking around.
________________________
*John Berryman, Dream Song 14 from The Dream Songs. Copyright © 1969 by John Berryman, renewed 1997 by Kate Donahue Berryman. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.
**Henry’s mother presciently responds, “Safe! To talk about our health! about our insides! perhaps about our outsides! How could you be so silly, Henry?” And of course Eliza ends up telling the genteel gathering about how her aunt “come through diphtheria right enough the year before. I saw her with my own eyes. Fairly blue with it, she was. They all thought she was dead; but my father he kept ladling gin down her throat til she came to so sudden that she bit the bowl off the spoon.… What call would a woman with that strength in her have to die of influenza? What become of her new straw hat that should have come to me? Somebody pinched it; and what I say is, them as pinched it done her in.”

Meandering Musings: The Beaver Moon and the “Beasts” of Richard Wilbur (with Some Shakespeare and Calvin and Hobbes Thrown In)

And here are some photos of November’s full moon, the Beaver Moon, and the poem of which it reminds me.

(See all the stars that show up in that shot?)

 

Sometimes my camera gets dramatic. On some of the options, the camera is stuck in a mode that takes six photos with different light settings. I don’t know why. When the pandemic is over, I’ll go back to the camera shop and ask someone to explain it to me.

 

A classic full moon photo. Lots of stars in this photo, too.

 

 

 

This photo comes closest to showing the colour of the moon when it rose.

 

 

With the moon in the background, the pine needles look soft, like the feathers on a gull, or perhaps the fur of a werewolf’s face.

((O))((O))((O))((O))((O))((O))((O))((O))((O))((O))((O))((O))
(Trigger warning: the poem and following comments discuss violence, death, images of assault, and rape.)

“Beasts,” by Richard Wilbur,* is one of the poems that I read several times a year — usually during the full moon. The poem fascinates me. I get swept up in its rhythms and the inexorable flow that rarely stops, even for the end of a stanza. Wilbur’s startling juxtaposition of concepts (I won’t give examples because that would be the poetic equivalent of spoilers) doesn’t quite reach Calvin-and-Hobbesian levels,

Swiped from https://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/08/30/to-long-grass/

but it has its own originality. The poem puts my spine on alert and fills the suburban darkness outside my window with more wild things than Maurice Sendak could imagine.

BEASTS

Beasts in their major freedom
Slumber in peace tonight. The gull on his ledge
Dreams in the guts of himself the moon-plucked waves below,
And the sunfish leans on a stone, slept
By the lyric water,

In which the spotless feet
Of deer make dulcet splashes, and to which
The ripped mouse, safe in the owl’s talon, cries
Concordance. Here there is no such harm
And no such darkness

As the selfsame moon observes
Where, warped in window-glass, it sponsors now
The werewolf’s painful change. Turning his head away
On the sweaty bolster, he tries to remember
The mood of manhood,

But lies at last, as always,
Letting it happen, the fierce fur soft to his face,
Hearing with sharper ears the wind’s exciting minors,
The leaves’ panic, and the degradation
Of the heavy streams.

Meantime, at high windows
Far from thicket and pad-fall, suitors of excellence
Sigh and turn from their work to construe again the painful
Beauty of heaven, the lucid moon
And the risen hunter,

Making such dreams for men
As told will break their hearts as always, bringing
Monsters into the city, crows on the public statues,
Navies fed to the fish in the dark
Unbridled waters.

– RICHARD WILBUR

The poem is like a haunted house at a carnival, if it turned out that the haunts were real and the exit led into the prologue of Longfellow’s Evangeline.** You know something is waiting to leap out around the bends, but not what, or when it will spring. The first line, “Beasts in their major freedom,” conjures the image of beasts on the prowl, exercising their rights to wander the landscape of the poem and of the poet’s imagination, but in the next line we learn that they “Slumber in peace tonight.” (It’s a bit like that song, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” You think it’s going to be about a mighty lion doing mighty-lion things like terrorizing the jungle and the village, but noooo — it’s about how everything is so peaceful and copacetic that even the king of cats decides to take a nap. Bit of a let-down, really.)

From that initial rush of tension and subsequent calming, the poem slowly builds the tension back up again. The first specific “beast” we encounter is “the gull on his ledge,” dreaming, but his dreams are lodged not in his avian mind, but “in the guts of himself” — an image of imagined self-evisceration, of auto-haruspicy. Note that the gull doesn’t dream of “the  moon-plucked waves below. Rather, he “dreams…the moon-plucked waves”; the waves are the direct object of “dreams.” In an act of creation, the gull somnolently envisions the ocean into being, though we aren’t told whether he saw that it was good.

In a similar syntactical maneuver, the stone in line four, the one the sunfish uses for a pillow, is “slept/ By the lyric water.” The gull dreams the waves, and the poetry of the water dreams the stone, and stone supports the fish. Wilbur’s poem ebbs and flows in a weaving that shuttles the reader forward and back and around, but never really stops moving.

We are not allowed to stop for breath at the end of the stanza, only to breathe long enough to plunge into the next with “the spotless feet/ Of deer.” The momentary charm of the “dulcet splashes,” like the the beasts slumbering in peace, puts us at our ease for another moment, but that calm is again pulled out from us as “The ripped mouse, safe in the owl’s talon, cries/Concordance.” And here I think of Isabella, in Measure for Measure, listening to Angelo’s demand that she “Fit thy consent to my sharp appetite;/ Lay by all nicety and prolixious blushes,/ That banish what they sue for,” (MFM, II. iv). The mouse, already torn open, probably being consumed alive while “safe in the owl’s talon” (and here I sense no irony, but feel that there is some nuance beyond shock and contrast I am missing),   fits its consent to the owl’s sharp appetite and acknowledges the barbaric harmony of its own destruction.

And what are we to do with the two “suches” — “no such harm/ And no such darkness” — that end the stanza? Our understanding of to what they refer is delayed until the middle of the next, a delay that once again propels us through the poem as we search for the way to the end of understanding. Between us and the conceit we find again the moon, the one that “plucked” the waves in line three and is responsible for the tides that ferry us along. The moon here is mediated by the glass of a window, a barrier between the moon and the interior of the room. that parallels the barrier that the moon provides between us and the meaning of the sentence. The “warping” of the moon also emphasizes the weaving motion that structures the poem, makes it the foundational thread upon which the tapestry will come alive.

Despite the effect of the glass, the distancing of the moon, the distortion to which our lunary satellite is subjected, we find that its power is not watered down. That “selfsame moon,” on whose light we glide into the bedroom, still “sponsors now/ The werewolf’s painful change.” And here we come to the referent for those suches in the previous stanza. There is no harm, no darkness, to compare with the change the man on the bolster is forced to undergo. The metamorphosis to the wolf is simultaneously a betrayal of and a return to different versions of a true self, a change that is less super than natural.

We see the man, like the mouse, already in pain, struggling to retain his former life, his “mood of manhood,” but (again like the mouse), he finally accedes to the inevitable and “lies at last, as always,/ Letting it happen,” a line that disturbingly echoes old “advice” that used to be given (and may still be, for what I know) to women about how to “keep themselves safe” while being raped. The poem takes us through the familiar pattern of comfort (“the fierce fur soft to his face”), mounting tension (“Hearing with sharper ears the wind’s exciting minors”), to threat (“The leaves’ panic”), and finally to violence (“the degradation/ Of the heavy streams.”) Note the return to water, the throw of the shuttle back to where we began.

The next stanza leads us back to a window, but here we start inside, looking out:

Meantime, at high windows
Far from thicket and pad-fall, suitors of excellence
Sigh and turn from their work to construe again the painful
Beauty of heaven, the lucid moon
And the risen hunter,

The same themes are iterated here: the division and refusion of man (all the beasts of the poem are male) and the “major freedom” of the worlds of nature and the imagination. The latter has already invaded the minds of these “suitors of excellence”; we learn in the next stanza that the suitors are “Making such dreams for men/ As told will break their hearts as always.” We started the poem with gull-dreams making the ocean, where life began, and circle around to the dreams of men gulling them into thinking they have left the wild behind. But the truth is that all their art, all their dreams, are merely

bringing
Monsters into the city, crows on the public statues,
Navies fed to the fish in the dark
Unbridled waters.

It is the thoughts and fancies of these men that let the wild back into civilization, “bringing/ Monsters into the city, crows on the public statues,/ Navies fed to the fish in the dark/ Unbridled waters.”

And we return to the untamed beasts, to the “unbridled waters,” to all that is out of our control and will, in the end, swallow us whole and force us to “suffer a sea-change/ Into something rich and strange.”**** There is little left for us to do but cry concordance.

Throughout the poem, we readers are placed, like the glass, between the catalytic serenity of the moon and the lunacy and violence its light engenders. As readers, we stand (we think) at a distance, but the rhythms and cadences of the lines sweep us into the flow, into “the degradation/ Of the heavy streams,” and maybe out into the “unbridled waters.” That is the power of a well-wrought poem. There is little left for us to do but cry concordance.

        

This is what I’m thinking about the poem right now. Next month I might think something else — in an inverse Petruchio, my mind changes even as the moon.*** This poem is woven into my own imagination and it rises with every full moon, sponsors changes in my mind, and inspires dreams in the guts my own self.

Am I the only one waiting for the howling to begin?

Find the “Leave a Comment” option over on the left and let me know.
________________________________

*I snagged the text from here.

**“This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

“This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it
Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman?”

***Petruchio: I say it is the moon.
Katherina: I know it is the moon.
Petruchio: Nay, then you lie. It is the blessèd sun.
Katherina: Then, God be blessed, it is the blessèd sun,
But sun it is not when you say it is not,
And the moon changes even as your mind.
What you will have it named, even that it is,
And so it shall be so for Katherine.
(The Taming of the Shrew, IV. v.)

****
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.
(The Tempest, I. ii)

 

Turkeys and Raptors and Crows — Oh My!: A Small Thanksgiving Drama

On Thanksgiving, my husband cooks the turkey (this, by the way, is all the mention that turkeys will get in this post). It’s his job because he’s really, really good at it. And his stuffing is even better. It’s a wonderful tradition, don’t you think?

 

However, our house does not have an exhaust fan in the kitchen, so sometimes the aromas of whatever is roasting and simmering and getting nuked in the microwave can get a little heavy. So at one point I opened the door to let some fresh air into the house and stepped out to let some fresh air into my lungs.

Across the way, on the edge of the park, there’s an old cottonwood that’s on the edge of death and probably will be for the next fifty years. It’s sort of a neutral zone for the neighborhood birds and squirrels. Often one can see nesting hawks, busy-body robins, clustering sparrows, and courting doves all in the tree at the same time, and at dawn, often an owl.

So I wasn’t surprized to see a crow (it might have been a raven. We have those too. But the tail looked more crow-like to me, so I’m going with crow. If anyone who knows more about birds than I do thinks it’s a raven, please speak up) and a red-tailed hawk (I looked that up in our bird book, so I feel a bit more sure of my identification here) hanging out amicably in the cottonwood.

BUT (and here’s where the drama begins) — there was another crow lurking in a different tree on other side of our neighbourhood and it began screaming and cawing and screaming and cawing, then screaming and cawing some more. It was obviously out of sorts.

I saw the crow and the hawk in the cottonwood look at each other. I swear they shrugged.

 

 

 

Then the farther crow apparently got to the one in the cottonwood because it shook its feathers and started squawking at the hawk.

 

The hawk tried to ignore all the noise. It even gave me a look that seemed to say “You see with what I have to put up?” (Hawks are total grammar wardens.)

 

 But the crows wouldn’t let up. The one I couldn’t see kept egging on the one by the park, and that one kept kvetching at the hawk. The hawk tried giving it the evil eye. It didn’t work. The crow started flapping around and jumping from branch to branch.

The hawk gave me another look. I’m not sure what it thought I was supposed to do. I was clearly a disappointment.

Then the crow took up a position directly over the hawk, paused, and dived at the raptor.

Now the hawk was rather bigger than the crow. It’s a hunting bird, fierce, far-seeing, fearless. The crow is a scavenger. It just sits around waits for stuff to die or for other animals to kill things. So you’d think the outcome would be obvious, that the hawk would bat the crow upside the head and show the corvid who was the boss.

But no, nope, not at all. The hawk took off and the crow harried it to another tree, away from the neighbourhood, at the far side of the park.

Job done, the crow flew off and settled on one of the lights by the baseball field.

As I turned off my camera and turned to go back in, the other crow, the one that had really instigated the whole affair, apparently dissatisfied with the job the first crow had done, burst out of the tree where it had been hiding, hared after the hawk, and proceeded to circle the tree where the hawk had sought refuge.

And that’s where I left them: the hawk in the pine, one crow surveying the empty baseball field, the other making small circles over the hawk.

Is there a point or a moral? I don’t think so. If you come up with one, let me know in the comments.