This passage from Love’s Work, Gillian Rose’s meditation on love and death, comes to mind as I read about the creeping, escalating de-creation of the island of Santorini, where “homes break apart” in the earthquakes.

Rose’s own disaster – the cancer that would kill her at 48 soon after she finished Love’s Work – generated her argument that life was best lived as an agon, an unceasing passionate losing heroic beautiful struggle toward clarity, justice, and bliss, against the forces of if you like subduction — error/fault, leading to destruction and death.

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UD’s favorite poem, James Merrill’s Santorini: Stopping the Leak, dances just this passionate expiring dance on the most beautiful of the world’s islands (Santorini is insanely beautiful because of its history of unimaginable natural catastrophe) at the very end of the long verse. The poet/poem dances

a grave dance - as if catastrophe
could long be lulled

A grave dance – serious, but also morbid, a dance danced over the centuries of bodies that lie under the island’s volcanic catastrophes. Merrill, visiting the island just having had his own radiation therapy for a cancer on his foot, is dancing on his own grave, and he is as much aware as Rose that the special spiritual passion ignited by the aesthetic bliss of being on gorgeously morbid/passionate Santorini merely damps for a time the subterranean fires. “No foothold on the void,” writes Merrill.

Or not really merely. If Rose and Merrill are right, that lulling dance over one’s grave is the finest expressive substance of our lives, the best that existence has to offer.

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Merrill’s poem is obsessed with the business of boundaries, of avoiding both the crippling madness of what he calls “psychic incontinence,” when you let too much of the world in and are overwhelmed, and “cemented boundaries,” when, in terror of the fires that underlie, you close off the self in self-protection. [Tante] Taube, a veteran survivor, … had fought the grave to a standstill, balking death itself by her slowness, Saul Bellow’s Herzog thinks as he regards his aunt’s non-life balking death through sheer inactivity. Between the madness of too much and the deathliness of too little you find most of us working our way toward how much of our aliveness – to quote the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips – we can bear:

[E]verybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves… We all have self-cures for strong feeling. Then the self-cure becomes a problem, in the obvious sense that the problem of the alcoholic is not alcohol but sobriety. Drinking becomes a problem, but actually the problem is what’s being cured by the alcohol. By the time we’re adults, we’ve all become alcoholics. That’s to say, we’ve all evolved ways of deadening certain feelings and thoughts. One of the reasons we admire or like art, if we do, is that it reopens us in some sense — as Kafka wrote in a letter, art breaks the sea that’s frozen inside us. It reminds us of sensitivities that we might have lost at some cost. Freud gets at this in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It’s as though one is struggling to be as inert as possible — and struggling against one’s inertia.

Santorini is always reconstituting itself amid the undermining that is its own violent, beauty-making dissolution, and this is the ideal the poet pursues for himself and for us. The poet “tighten[s] by a notch/The broad, star-studded belt Earth wears to feel/Hungers less mortal for a vanished whole.” This is Rose again: Stop hungering for a vanished whole; you and Santorini are nothing but gorgeous fragments, and that contingency is all you ever will be. Be like the poet and stud the earth with aesthetic jewels:

Our lives unreal
Except as jeweled self-windings

The poet’s words on windy Santorini are

bellowed to recycle
The bare, thyme-tousled world we’d stumbled on

We bejewel the bareness; we break what’s frozen, or quench the fires. Silent Santorini can only live in

imbecile 
Symbiosis with the molten genie

Our symbiosis is verbal. Ours are self-windings – they emerge from our human individual expressive battles between stasis and agon; and what our noblest battles produce will be the spoken truth of the broken beauty of being.

We had fed the Fed on fantasies
The Fed's grown fecal from the fare,
Stagnation in amenities
Breeds microbes everywhere.  Oh, GS-bees
Come build in the empty house of the State.

I'm doing what I did last year:

Standing on a cold Venetian balcony, listening.
The others have gone off to the canal
To see the fireworks.  For me, enough to hear
The crack and blast of the show from a distance.

Under the stars, the sky flashes pink and green
With each explosion.  The balcony rattles a bit
And, from dark corners of the city, unseen
Voices shout that a new year begins.

Strange to be here again for this strange
Light show, a sort of conceptual art,
Postmodern version of pitched battle,
Gunfight, terror, striking the heart

But sparing the body.  Some of it
Sounds like gunshots, and then my frame,
Like the balcony, rattles a bit.
Absurd.  But who can blame

Me for going there?  The only bombing campaign
I'll ever know simply smokes up the air
And leaves me standing there
Wondering about skirmish scrimmage and war.

Take a loose rein and a deep seat,
John, my father-in-law, would say
To someone starting out on a long journey, meaning, take it easy,
Relax, let what’s taking you take you.

On festive and non-festive days, old UD loves to read the poems of James Merrill. In the last weeks of his life, he wrote Christmas Tree, in which his wasting body is compared to a holiday tree taken in and decorated by a celebrating family — he is made to feel loved and cared for and even prettied up, shined up, in his last days, although the poet/tree knows that, having been cut down, his/its days are very much numbered. The hospital was the tree farm, where the poet has been “looked after, kept still,” but now it’s clear “there [is] nothing more to do,” and the poet will have to leave the hospital and go home to die.

Yet it’s Merrill, the poet, who inexhaustibly, to the end, elaborates, accessorizes, decorates, warms, and bejewels life — as I said in my last post about him, he’s no discouraged Prufrock. He keeps going, keeps embellishing. He’s an artist, mes petites. We can’t rescue the family jewels from the fire, but he can. Even as he’s dying, he can. Surrounded by loved ones in his warm home, covered in thick “sables,” nonetheless jewels from life continue to “flash forth” around him from these coverings. He’s not buried yet. Propitiating miracle-makers (amulets, milagros) hang from his body and a song plays and replays – brilliant, magical life continues to be wound about him.

And in shadow behind me, a primitive IV
To keep the show going.

The holiday and the primitive at-home IV/ivy. To keep the blood going. Heart-stopping poetry if you ask me.

Yes, yes, what lay ahead
Was clear: the stripping, the cold street, my chemicals
Plowed back into the Earth for lives to come—

No bullshit about it, I’m all lit up and about to die; my festive duties done, my poems written, I’m about to be stripped of my jewels, with my poor naked trunk about to be revealed for the rail-thin thing it is. I’m about to be buried, pine/IV “needles and bone.” And I’m ready to go.

Last image from last moments – a world in dusk, to be sure, but dusk “aglow,” with candlelight, loving faces, gifts brought to the tree, brought by the tree.

Still to be so poised, so
Receptive. Still to recall, praise.

The last lines of the last poem echo Merrill’s endless reverberating theme, as in his great poem “Santorini: Stopping the Leak,” where he insists on walking the volcanic, gorgeous island, staying poised and balanced and upright, despite serious pain from ailments in his feet. The imperative always is to stay in the game, to remain receptive to all of life, to call and recall, and above all to lyrically praise.

Christmas Tree

⭐

To be
Brought down at last
From the cold sighing mountain
Where I and the others
Had been fed, looked after, kept still,
Meant, I knew—of course I knew—
That it would be only a matter of weeks,
That there was nothing more to do.
Warmly they took me in, made much of me,
The point from the start was to keep my spirits up.
I could assent to that. For honestly,
It did help to be wound in jewels, to send
Their colors flashing forth from vents in the deep
Fragrant sables that cloaked me head to foot.

Over me then they wove a spell of shining—
Purple and silver chains, eavesdripping tinsel,
Amulets, milagros: software of silver,
A heart, a little girl, a Model T,
Two staring eyes. Then angels, trumpets, BUD and BEA
(The children’s names) in clownlike capitals,
Somewhere a music box whose tiny song
Played and replayed I ended before long
By loving. And in shadow behind me, a primitive IV
To keep the show going. Yes, yes, what lay ahead
Was clear: the stripping, the cold street, my chemicals
Plowed back into the Earth for lives to come—
No doubt a blessing, a harvest, but one that doesn’t bear,
Now or ever, dwelling upon. To have grown so thin.
Needles and bone. The little boy’s hands meeting
About my spine. The mother’s voice: Holding up wonderfully!
No dread. No bitterness. The end beginning. Today’s

Dusk room aglow
For the last time
With candlelight.
Faces love-lit
Gifts underfoot.
Still to be so poised, so
Receptive. Still to recall, praise.

***************************

Similar themes here.

Take these verses, call them today’s flower,

Cluster a rained‐in pupil might have scissored.

They too have suffered in the realm of hazard.

Sorry things all. Accepting them’s the art.

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The sad random childish awkward scissoring together of metaphor and sentiment makes of a poem a gift to the world, a gift to the lover.

This is clearly a pathetic gift, one of the sorry things all... The cluster the pupil makes means to be beautiful, a flower; but the pupil’s crude and cutting instrument of art – the scissors – guarantees a sorry thing, a thing unavoidably emerging from/entering into the realm of hazard, from our messy thrownness into being.

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it towards some overwhelming question,

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

If one, settling a pillow by her head

               Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;

               That is not it, at all.”

Prufrock knows the lover will not accept his poem, his gift, his hazarded random thing that carries his love and his hoped-for transcendent meaning. She, pillowed in contingency, had not meant to excite that sentiment, that meaning, at all, and she shatters him and breaks his heart refusing it. She will shatter him – so he will withhold the gift out of self-protection. He won’t even try.

Merrill the poet tries and tries in every poem; and for him, rather than withdrawing from the field of love and meaning and beauty and gift-giving, we must simply keep trying. The art that matters is the art of accepting what gifts there are – the hopeless lover’s overtures indeed, but more importantly the conditions of existence themselves: dailiness, balanced meals (see the post below) and all. Therein lies the true art – not the always-inept creation of a poem, but an open forgiving ever-reanimated ever-hopeful embrace of the sad contingency even in the most achieved Shakespeare sonnet.

Thus in his great poem “After Greece,” when a depressed Merrill returns home from the exuberant liberating glories of Athens to the crimped waspy realities of his American upbringing – that particular existence into which he was thrown – he ends with a kind of prayer:

 May I
Also survive its meanings, and my own.

Best is to have the fortitude to take on the burden of your own sad contingencies — not head-on, because that would be ungeneratively painful (one of Merrill’s best-known collections is titled The Fire-Screen), as well as the sad contingencies of loved others. One will always be a clumsy “pupil” of life, expressively ‘reined in’ (Merrill loves to pun) by the repressive fire-screening in which all sane people must engage. The highest art is accepting those sorry things all — even as you forgive yourself for – speaking poetically, quoting Wallace Stevens – the intricate evasions of as.

Thanksgiving poems stink of kitsch.
I search in vain for even one which
Leaves off redemption and the kids
The wife who saved me from the skids
The mom whose deep abiding love
Gave my rear a needed shove...

Instead of thanking friends and God
I'll thank the books that showed me Odd
Kafka, Beckett, E A Poe
Their twisted landscape helped me know
That sentiment is fine and good
But most of life's in darkest wood

SUNRISE, MONASTERY, SHENANDOAH

The clouds move left and I move right
The moon's a relic of the night

Sunrise winkles in the sky
A long rough patch of pinkeye

Conjunctive globes along the ridge
Must be some symbolic bridge

Between rhymed verse
And universe


Cemeteries lie at left and right
One for the monks pre-flight

The other green and no embalm
Dropped in a godless bed of calm

But near Saint Benedict just in case
Heaven turns out to be a place

A natural grave on sacred land
This ambivalence I understand


The sun's now bright but the world's still eerie
Acres of Terror Management Theory

An elderly constable in a commode

Unholstered his big loaded Glock

That was the only way that he knowed

To free up his piss-swollen cock

But – you know – he’s human

Had something on his mind

Tried to recall lines from Schumann…

And then he was needing to dry his behind

Cuz he had to do

Numbers One and Two

“Ah! That’s better! And now lemme

Forget for the rest of the day that I left my semi

Out here for all the little tykes

Who come to court on school field trips

And find a toy to let them strike

Classmates who give them lip.”

I stand amid the roar

Of a self-tormented shore,

And I clasp within my coat

Little dwindled bits of votes—

How few! and how they slide

Through my fingers to the other side,

While I weep — while I weep!

O God! Can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

O God!  Call down the pricks

That slashed and burned on January 6!

Is all that we see or seem

A horrid dream within a dream?

Half a billion, half a billion,

Half a billion — onward!

Out of the valley of Trump

   Rides the Dem Brigade.

No basking on the black volcanic sand

Imported here by antiquarians —

Sun Protection Factor:  Vesuvian.

That is, a skeletal and scorching strand

Ghost coast of ancient Roman carrion

Dead viticulture under dense black vine.

Visitors must be made to understand:

The parching here is post-millennian.

Dead dash to the Mediterranean.

O my brave brown companions, when your souls
Flock silently away, and the eyeless dead
Shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge,
Death will stand grieving in that field of war
Since your unvanquished hardihood is spent.
And through some mooned Valhalla there will pass
Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell;
The unreturning army that was youth;
The legions who have suffered and are dust.

Sun floods the room at six 
Two steps to the balcony to watch
Tai chi social media bagpipe cigar
Distant gaze usual metaphysical confusion

Boardwalk stroll for latte and scone
Superhearty good mornings from fellow oldies
Translation:  GRATEFUL LIKE HELL I'M HERE
Here meaning the world rather than

Whatever's behind the metaphysical curtain
Latte machine broken so cafe person 
Climbs almost to the top of it while cafe people
On the ground make inadequate latte after latte

All apologize I'm fine take your time
Boardwalk stroll back to the balcony
More greetings from gratefuls
And now: Grateful metaphysical breakfast

GARRETT PARK

The day here begins in the eighteenth century:
No trains, planes, or automobiles.  Birdsong, rather.
A farmer's market lays out tables down the street.
A choir in the Catholic church rehearses.

At eight the trains arrive from Harper's Ferry.
The industrial revolution is underway.
Handmowers, mailboxes, dishwashers, bicycles.
The buzz also of dogwalkers talking among themselves.

Cars are the following era, and planes from Reagan,
But cars are few, and planes keep their distance.  
There's still not quite the din of the twentieth century.
Still a village quiet.  Quieter still

 
Is the twenty-first.  The dogwalkers walk heads down
At their cell phones.  Electric cars are silent.
Evenings of course are timeless - black skies, stars -
Except for the strange passage of satellites.