In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, or Jordan Catalano learns Irony, sort of... (but that's not the most important thing)

"In dreams begins responsibility."
                   Old Play.

The above is the inscription to W. B. Yeats' 1914 collection of poems Responsibilities. Try as I might, I have never been able to locate the actual 'Old Play" that Yeats is referencing (but that's not the most important part).

This inscription, slightly revised, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities", is used by the inimitable Delmore Schwartz as the title for his story published in the inaugural issue of The Partisan Review in 1937. It became the eponymous story of Delmore's first collection of poems and stories in 1938. The story is not available in full online that I have found, but I have a copy if anyone wants it. In it, the narrator tells the story of a nightmarish dream in which he watches a date between his parents some twenty-plus years previous from his seat in a movie theater. He is dismayed by their treatment of one another, both when gentle and when harsh. Knowing what will become of their marriage, including his own existence, he is dragged out of the theater for screaming out... I will not spoil the story by telling more, but let it suffice to say that the story ends thought-provokingly.

This leads to part three of this triptych: the final episode of My So Called Life, an episode I had forgotten I remembered so well. That episode's title just happens to be "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities". The episode begins with Angela's dream and proceeds with several other characters' dream references, but the episode quickly moves into the realm of dream as hope or hopefulness.  It is an episode full of personal tensions, temptations, and irony. In one particular case, an irony so obvious that even Jordan Catalano understood (finally picking up on his tutoring from "Brain").

At 18 or 19 years old when the show first aired, I found myself caught up in the Angela plotline--seeing a bit of myself in the hopelessly awkward Brian, much more so than the annoyingly awkward (yet handsome) Jordan. As a much older person watching the episode again now, though Brian's plight still resonates, it is the marriage drama that strikes me in a way it could not have then, though I recognized that then too.

(Feel free to watch the episode below before finishing reading this post--be my guest. But note the thumbnail I chose; I couldn't resist.)



So what does all this have in common, the Yeats, the Schwartz, and the teen/family drama? Well, besides me, and the shared title, it seems that it is a coming to terms with hope and with loss. For Yeats it is a coming to terms with what is gained and lost in continuing to tell (re-dream) the Irish stories. See, for example, the fifth poem in Responsibilities, "September 1913":

WHAT need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman's rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave;
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You'd cry "Some woman's yellow hair
Has maddened every mother's son":
They weighed so lightly what they gave,
But let them be, they're dead and gone,
They're with O'Leary in the grave.

In Schwartz, as well as in My So Called Life, it is a coming to terms with the recurring patterns that we as clan-collecting people face, that families face: the unavoidable irony of repeating one another's mistakes. A part of the sharing of dreams is the sharing of responsibilities even if we didn't know we were already doing both. Perhaps this sheds some light on the dream I shared a few posts ago. Maybe the room I am always looking for isn't mine after all, but a shared room where responsibilities can be meted out once and for all. Heck if I know, I'm only sleeping.

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As a side note, one of Delmore's pupils was a young man named Lou Reed. Here's one of Lou's best. Oh, and it has to do with TV, too.

Satellite Of Love - Lou Reed