Monday
Someone on twitter suggested the following John Berryman dream poem as a lyric that describes our times. I think he or she was spot on:
Dream Song 46
I am, outside. Incredible panic rules.
People are blowing and beating each other without mercy.
Drinks are boiling. Iced
drinks are boiling. The worse anyone feels, the worse
treated he is. Fools elect fools.
A harmless man at an intersection said, under his
breath, “Christ!”
That word, so spoken, affected the vision
of, when they trod to work next day, shopkeepers
who went and were fitted for glasses.
Enjoyed they then an appearance of love & law.
Millenia whift & waft—one, one—er, er. . .
Their glasses were taken from them, & they saw.
Man has undertaken the top job of all,
son fin. Good luck.
I myself walked at the funeral of tenderness.
Followed other deaths. Among the last,
like the memory of a lovely fuck,
was: Do, ut des.I confess to being baffled by many of Berryman’s poems, including this one. But I love the idea of the “harmless man” exclaiming “Christ!” when he sees our situation—and then when others, moved by his response, go out to be fitted with glasses. Presumably they want to see what he is seeing.
What they see is an appearance of love and law, which I’m interpreting as the moral compass that the world has lost. Perhaps this man himself is Christ. (The “I am” that opens the poem, meanwhile, suggests God’s words to Moses from the burning bush: “I am that I am.” Moses represents law, Jesus love.) When the glasses are then taken from the shopkeepers, they see how far the world has fallen from these ideals.
Man taking over the “top job of all” would be humans replacing God. Perhaps “son fin” combines “son at an end”—as in Jesus as the son of God—and the French expression “sans fin,” which means “without end,” the words that conclude the gloria patri: “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.” This latter is Jesus’s vision of the kingdom of heaven brought to earth.
Trump, however, has taken the top job and made it all about himself. Trumpism without end. Despite his clearly secular aims, he has become the new messiah for certain Christian fundamentalists and Q-Anon supporters.
In his poem, Berryman sees himself attending the funeral of tenderness, which is certainly what Trump’s America feels like these days. (Latest outrage: Trump directing crowd hatred at Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer only days after we learned she was being targeted by rightwing terrorists.) A couple of stanzas from Don MacLean’s elegiac “American Pie” come to mind:
And in the streets the children screamed The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed But not a word was spoken The church bells all were broken And the three men I admire most The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost They caught the last train for the coast The day the music died
As he remembers lost tenderness, Berry concludes with a Latinism that suggests the golden rule: “do, ut des,” or “I give that you may give.”
We elect people to office that they may serve the common good. When they seek to serve only themselves, incredible panic rules.
Christ!