I woke thinking of choice.
My dream had been an aesthetic mess: tedious, confusing, ill-conceived. As a maker, I’m sensitive to the quality of what I make: a dream, a salad, a poem – are they so different? When my product’s ugly, it reflects on the rest. Maybe this missive is as fatuous as my dream, and I just don’t know it!
I dislike dreams for their haphazard artistry. Sometimes they excite, but more often they exhaust, bewilder, taunt. Freud was right to focus on dreams as a locus for irrepressible candor, but to interpret any dream confidently is a fool’s errand. In this dream I was stuck at a boring reception attended by well-heeled geezers who didn’t much want to be there but didn’t want to be anywhere else: a modern version of the Styx wharf, meandering desultorily while awaiting Acheron’s ferry. This wasn’t my scene, dammit, I was wasting my chance, these geriatric oldsters cared no more for me than I for them, I longed to bolt, but wouldn’t that be rude? Just recalling my dream quickens my pulse unpleasantly. I wanted to rinse the event from my thoughts, only it’s not that easy. “Don’t think about it” may be the least useful advice, right up there with “Calm down” and “Get a grip.”
Didn’t I have a choice where to steer my attention, I wondered, and that word – choice – got me thinking about the activity. Do we ever really choose? We flatter ourselves that we’ve chosen, that we’re the masters of our fate and captains of our souls, but isn’t that brag disproved by our every motion? Did I choose to wake up? Did I choose to dream this dream? Did I choose to pee pronto? Does Henry choose to lick me awake as dawn slices past the shade?
Am I choosing the words I’m typing now or the direction in which they flow? No more than the brook out my window determines when and where to gush! Precipitation is a prerequisite but then? The water makes its own way, likewise my words. Pour being into me and out pop syllables. Do I have a choice?
A reader recommends a poem I know by reputation but can’t recall, Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” What the hell, it’s brief, maybe it will spark a thought. Brief is welcome: the enforced brevity of our daily outings protects us both. How boring can I be in six hundred words? (The nearness of tome and tomb seems no accident.)
Initially I resist Jarrell’s little poem. I’m not sure what a ball turret gunner is so have to look it up. Nor did I realize that bombers flew so high – six miles seemed an exaggeration. (It’s not.) And the likeness of the cramped curled gunner to a damp animal fetus makes my skin crawl. No, I didn’t like this poem – but my reader did – it had meant the world to him – so I read it again – and again. (That’s the advantage of small poems.) Gradually the eloquence and fury of the poem dissolved my resistance – that humans could treat each other so! And the cold clanking shock of that final line:
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Was man no more than a mess to be cleaned up? A tiresome task before the bomber’s next take-off?
I thanked my reader for thinking of me – and making me think. Had I chosen this meditation for my morning, I wondered, or had it chosen me? What makes a maker – and why?
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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThe Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.