I am a seabird, you are the Arctic Ocean I know your seasons, and your sanctuaries And when I’m wheeling over your wild white horses I know there’s nowhere else that I belong
[Stornoway, "Cold Harbour Road"]
The view from up here, soaring,
the view as only a sleeper sees,
not what is given for viewing
but what is wakefully missed
though unavoided, yet unseen.
Here your body curves into sleep,
the perfect contour, familiar lines
etched into my sleepy mind
wishing these wings were hands,
I'd give all this watery world for an island.
But to wake would be to fall,
to fall would be a graver loss,
a loneliness more pitiful than
even birdsong out of season,
hidden still behind skeleton trees.
To be awake, to be alone,
when the house sleeps,
when our children purr out dreams,
when even the coyotes stop their howling:
this is the time to hover above & look & look.
If you knew how I saw doubt disappear at each tide:
the breath's rise & fall through this not quite longest night,
through this beautiful untouched quiet,
you'd understand the more:
what this collection of feathers means to me.
Freelance Whales' self-released 2009 album Weathervanes is quite good. I've found myself coming back to it many times (during a summer with a lot of new music to listen to), but it wasn't until I listened to the following acoustic version of one of the best songs on the album, "Ghosting", that I realized that it might make a great theme for the film version of my recurring dream. (See previous post: The Triggering.)
I found thus that I had been a rich man without any damage to my poverty.
(Thoreau, Walden “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”)
Is the waking, then,
not, also, a little death?
Moving back to time
from the elegance
& lawlessness of sleep-space,
rousing wearyguilt
from the richness of
indolent & wayward thought,
petty desire.
The mind is as quick
to absolve as to place blame:
It’s only dreaming.
Knowing the richness
of absurdity only
temporarily,
dream melts away to
both regret & thankfulness.
Leaving only a
wakeful emptiness:
the familiar poverty
of consciousness.
[It's late. I should be sleeping. Everyone else here is. But something kept nagging. So I went ahead and wrote this. I may take it down in the morning, but for now, here it is.]
[Note: It was written in three line stanzas and then rearranged. Those stanzas were significant to the design of the poem during composition, but it reads more easily divided as it is now. Forgive me, I am trying to get out of my normal way of writing. Feel free to criticize this and the prior posts as well. Finally, good night.]
Reportage. Confession. Complaint. I know these modes best; that is, I employ them most often. More memory than imagination, a puzzling of word, line, break, emphasis, image, figure of speech, end, revise, fail to edit well enough… But even these apparent truth-tellings require the strategic lie: the replacement detail, the memory with différance.
In this most digital of ages, boredom is difficult, with or without a smartphone. Piles of books stack up in walls around me, articles, both cyber and print go unread, television episodes, seasons, and series remain unwatched, movies (the good and the bad) remain to be seen. Two books of poetry arrived in the mail today. The World Cup has begun. A recent vacation, 2000 miles, four major destinations, three bear sightings, and multiple river crossings yielded hundreds of pictures to be examined, deleted, posted, printed, and filed. And on top of all this (and two sons and a wife), last night I dreamed uncontrollably.
But a lack of boredom, apart from being overwhelming, can also be stifling. After all, it is a “heavy” boredom that makes an achilles out of Henry and J.B. both at once. In dreams time and place are differed; we move freely in time and space. As in poetry: “It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not […]” (Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”). Following this double advice, and trying to survive the most recent bout of poetry self-doubt known as artistic honesty,the next poem (not here yet) will be full of lies, will be more imagination than memory, will try to reconnect with daydream and not be limited by wakeful vision. I am through with truth (for now) as I find that I'm not that good at it anyway.
In dreams
begin
responsibilities,
then this
wakefulness
exhausts
like six days
on the road,
and sleep
settles only
the smallest
arguments
between
id & ego.
If what I am
is product
(too)
of my own
unconsciousness,
then imagination
should weigh
down
as much as
it uplifts.
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.
_________________
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.
I forget the names of towns without rivers.
A town needs a river to forgive the town.
Whatever river, whatever town –
it is much the same.
The cruel things I did I took to the river.
I begged the current: make me better.
The above lines comprise the opening stanza of Richard Hugo's poem "The Towns We Know and Leave Behind, The Rivers We Carry with Us" written for his dear friend and fellow poet and struggler James Wright.
Two years after publishing the above stanza (which was also the year of James Wright's death), Hugo published his conversational poetry manual: The Triggering Town; he defines the title in following paragraph:
In this case I imagined the town, but an imagined town is at least as real as an actual town. If it isn’t you may be in the wrong business. Our triggering subjects, like our words, come from obsessions we must submit to, whatever the social cost. It can be hard. It can be worse forty years from now if you feel you could have done it and didn’t. It is narcissistic, vain, egotistical, unrealistic, selfish, and hateful to assume emotional ownership of a town or a word. It is also essential.
We blogging poets or, in my case, poetasters know all too well this narcissistic obsession of following the triggers and getting the words and images, arriving like recurring dreams, down and dealt with. Here is a new poem (perhaps one day to better revised--I'd appreciate honest feedback) triggered by Hugo, my blogging friends, and mostly a recurring dream.
________________ The House
If I could smell in dreams (and whose to say that I cannot), I imagine I would smell a river, train smoke, and fermenting barley.
A large plot is scattered with children's playthings: trucks, balls, a sandbox, and an aging but solid, metal swing-set painted green.
The grass, green & wet as mid-spring, gathers in neighborhoods scattering the yard; clover & dandelion roads crisscross throughout.
But these I notice last, if you believe the waking imagination, the thrust & grasp of memory after the dream's disappearing act.
It's the tall & wide, white house rising in the middle of the yard, where the dream begins, inside, in any of a hundred rooms, all somehow familiar.
Always slightly different than the previous slumbering inhabitance, once a vaguely yellow kitchen with nook and spiraling wooden staircase.
In another, a library of unmarked books, Victrola, console radio, miniatures hung upon the walls; an endless hallway's walls are perfectly spaced with black & white photographs:
Never a face I recognize, but each door, each room branching off has obvious inhabitants: brothers, sisters, roommates, friends but never mine.
I never make it to that room I'm searching for. Stairways leading up, end back at the ground, steps turn to slides, secret passages open to whole new wings.
A green chair changes patterns in front of my eyes, a friend's suitcase packs itself and leaves. A window opens, a breeze enters and a fraying feather floats in and I chase it through the house.
The house shrinks and I find myself on a patch of green looking back & forth between swings and now the house sinks: a white window half in the ground takes the last bit of light down with it.
The dream ends before I decide what to do. Birdsong intervenes. My own house, small and less than quaint, lightens for morning.
Nothing is lost in dreaming, and yet a subtle haunting remains through the day. Somewhere, a looming white house rises above a green yard and children's playthings.
There, in the half-light, another version of me considers the magnitude of making a move.
