T.R. Hummer
Walt Whitman in Hell
. . . on the black waters of Lethe?
—Ginsberg
In the second circle – the level of perpetual dysfunction
Where untouchable lovers are damned by definition
To read each others’ stories over and over
In voices like monotonous tape loops repeating forever
The lessons of the Book of the Unabridged Living Body –
The interior lights of a downtown express strobe
Grand Central platform and vanish leaving nothing
But a retinal afterglow of the Lexington Avenue line.
Engines push tarry winds out of the heavy darkness
Of the tunnels. They break like punished hurricanes
Into the station’s wintery light. I carry a map
Of this place in memory only – uptown, downtown,
Crosstown – capillaried in the visual mind,
Terminal names a systole and diastole of space
That contracts and relaxes around me when I think of it,
Including everything, the whole corporeal ghost
Of Manhattan and beyond. But where is anything, really?
Do I dare trust memory’s directions? Or is this the first
And most damning despair, that it may all be nothing
But dots, biochemical flashes, swampgas waverings
Of imaginary light, the meaning of this landscape
Of ashes simply being that I have to wonder
What it means, and thereby recall myself?
And as if this uncertainty were one of the most sublime
Angels of torture, I am suddenly empowered
To remember the mountains, hills, and gorges
Of Manhattan, where the gates of the subways appear
To the sight like holes and clefts in the rocks,
Some extended and wide, some straitened
And narrow, many of them rugged – they all,
When looked into, appear dark and dusky;
But the spirits in them are in such a luminosity
As arises from burning coals. Someone
Among them plays a saxophone – no, someone scats
A bebop riff in a voice so skewed by sterno
It comes through sounding like brass,
And modulates into the Lydian mode:
Someone of them remembers A Love Supreme,
And this is my signal, I go down, and everything begins.
It is given now that I realize what comes first,
The station of instruction, the 81st St. entrance
On the Avenue of the Americas line. I enter
From the basement of the Museum of Natural History,
Where passing over is a simple fact, no astonishment,
Because overhead is a whole granite houseful
Of memento mori – tombstones, mummies,
And the ichthyosaur’s whatmeworry grin. The way here
Is wide and smooth, passing over is a token
I buy from a woman in a Plexiglas cube,
Passing over is a slot and the click of a turnstile. It is here
The man with the methyl voice sings Coltrane and passes out
Pamphlets enumerating the seven words that mean
The body thinking: Thumos, Phrenes, Nöos, and Psyche,
All of them translated variously from Homeric Greek
As mind or soul – and Kradie, Ker, and Etor,
Rendered often as heart or spirit. But all
The translations are wrong, I read, entirely:
These must be thought of as objective parts
Of the body, the pamphlet tells me, understood
As my first clue that I am leaving
Anything behind. I embody now the plains and valleys
Of Brooklyn near the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge,
Where the subway gates resemble dens and caverns,
Chasms and whirlpools, bogs, standing water –
And when they are opened, there bursts from them
Something like the fire and smoke that is seen in the air
From burning buildings, or like a flame without smoke,
Or like soot such as comes from an explosive chimney,
Or like a mist and thick cloud: it is here the woman
With a face like a drowned suicide’s crouches
At the first turning of the downward stairway
I can’t help choosing, holding up her autocratic
Homemade sign: i am a victim
of the conspiracies of nazi racist
hatred they have sealed my vagina
with molten lead and left me to die
alone they send my children back to me
daily in manila legal envelopes
piece by mysterious piece don’t believe
a word they tell you pity me.
It is here I feel the first angina-constriction
Deep in the cardiac mind, and the Nöos says to the Psyche,
Watch where you go once you have entered here,
Which way and to whom you return,
To which the Kradie answers, That is not our concern.
It is our fate to open every door. So I remember, now,
This is the real truth of it: I enter from every gate
At once, on every numbered street and avenue,
Jackson Heights, Mt. Eden, Bleeker, Lorimer, 59th –
And the enormity of my multitudinousness,
This apocalyptic rush hour, eclipses even the brilliance
Of the four quarters of the midnight city –
Regions with designations, attributes, and enumerations:
North the Quarter of the Vomiting Multitudes,
East the Quarter of Suppurations, West
The Quarter of the Pissing Millions, South the Quarter
Of Investment Banking – but before I can say them,
The great fluid weight of my entering
Washes me forward, and the silent electric doors
Of the silver cars open all together to take me in,
Every human soul of me at every intersection
In every borough of the city, bringing me in a thunderous
Convergence of superimposed switch-engines
Simultaneously here, to a level that demands me,
Grand Central Terminal, and the carriers disgorge me
In my statistical millions to circle
From platform to platform where the right trains
Never come. Every man and woman who was breathing
An instant ago must be with me now. Here is the tourist
From Michigan – she was staring at the Empire State
When a cloud of noxious oblivion touched her,
And she opened her eyes and was part of me.
Here is the lawyer from Queens; he knew the city
Inside out, but now he wanders this station
He passed through hundreds of times in his life
Wide-eyed and blank, dangling his forgotten briefcase
Like the ghost of a severed limb. Here is the man
Who bewildered, here is the child who devoured,
Here is the old Hindu woman who lived
Sweetly as a saint, and woke to this at ninety
From a heart-bursting sexual dream, the perfect
Circle of the caste mark between here eyes
Red as a cartoon bullet hole.
Here is the stockbroker, here is the stewardess,
Here is the crowd of girls with prep school sweaters
And haloes of frosted hair who seem to be joined at the waist.
Here is the Chinese couple who juggled feathers
At the Lincoln Center Circus – they move
Their disciplined hands together, seeking a familiar balance.
Here is the Chilean ex-diplomat who went in fear
Of CIA assassins – to him these tiled walls
Have a beautiful coolness, he’s never been so calm.
Here is the defrocked priest: forgetfulness
Has utterly altered him. Here is the ex-Reagan aide:
She seems completely unchanged.
And the Priestess of Greenwich Village,
And the slacker, and the dental assistant,
The majorette, the machinist, the freak, and the mother’s son –
This is more than consent, or concord; it is a real
Unity of us all, in one and the same person,
Made by covenant of all of us with each of us, in such a manner
As if each of us should say to all of us, I Authorize.
I am a random human diorama, an outtake
From The Night of the Living Dead. This is my punishment
For forgetting to believe that blankness is the logical
Outcome of my passionate confusions. Now chaos darkens
The holy brightnesses of the unconscious world.
Overhead, signs light up to enumerate directions and destinations:
A Lake of Fire. A Bottomless Pit. A Horrible Tempest.
Everlasting Burnings. A Furnace of Fire. A Devouring Fire.
A Prison. A Place of Torments. A Place of Everlasting
Punishment. A Place where People Pray. A Place
Where they Scream for Mercy. A Place where they Wail.
A Place where they Curse God. In the vastnesses
Of Sotheby’s, snuffboxes, folk arts, antiquities, toys,
Judaica, and other sacred artifacts take on
An unearthly luminosity – at the Village Gate,
The horns of fusion musicians synthesize and burn.
Now the imperious Phrenes begins to thrash
Far down in the shadows of the diaphragm,
The intercostal muscles of the rib cage, the smooth
Muscles surrounding the bronchial tubes
That regulate their bore, and so their resistance
To the passage of air – and beside it, or within it,
Its Siamese-twin doppelgänger image or other self,
The terrible Thumos, also snorts out of a primitive dream
Of breath-souls and the smooth interiors
Of ventricles and veins, black bile and yellow bile, mucous
And vitreous humors. They surface together
Like incestuous homoerotic lovers waking hours
Before sunrise, both blind and invisible,
Caught in a bedroom-darkness so profound
They might be sealed in the flesh-insulated cavity
Of one enormous torso. They begin their old dialogue,
The equivalent of the talk of husbands’ and wives’
Did you hear a noise? Did you take out the garbage?
Did you pay the gas bill? Are the children murdered? –
But spoken in something other than words,
Whatever the language of nerves and corpuscles
Consists of, which cannot be rendered in the syntax
Of consciousness, but whose faintest echo
Translates roughly {Phrenes} If the body vanishes,
How can the spirit be broken? {Thumos} Don’t ask.
Its scars leave residues. {Phrenes} But if it is the body
That breaks, how long does it take for the heartbeat
To calcify? {Thumos} Hush. Tell me the story
Of the place breath goes to survive
The suffocations we make for it. {Phrenes} It is a place
Where they can never repent, a place of weeping,
A place of sorrows, a place of outer darkness,
A place where they have no rest, a place of blackness
Or darkness forever, a place where their worm dieth not,
And fire is not quenched. {Thumos} And none of this is certain?
But nobody answers, for now the darkness modulates,
And I find I am in a space exterior to the body after all,
On a secret path along the rim of the starless city, perhaps,
Between the wall and the torments, or perhaps in a tunnel
Dug far below the other shafts, where I have been
Let down through a column that seems of brass,
Descended safely among the unhappy that I might witness
The vastation of souls. A multitude of pitiful
Men and women are gargoyled by homelessness here,
Hung in various ways from the different parts of themselves
Corresponding to the sociology of their births.
And the Thumos says to the Phrenes: Enumerate
The ways the human body can be warped
By punishments, political or metapolitical, and how
Those punishments make allegories of suffering.
Do so succinctly, in an orderly way, clearly,
And giving examples. And the Phrenes offers up
This answer: These are the measure for measure
Hanging retributions against the disenfranchised:
Those who are Guilty of Passion
Or Cleanliness shall be hung by the pubic hair;
They shall be hung by the pierced thighs, Those
Who are Guilty of Standing Erect; by the eyes
Those who have Seen Things Clearly; by the nose
Those who Smell the Death of the Rat in the Wall;
Those Convicted of Worthiness shall be hoisted
By the reputation; Those Convicted of Intelligence
By the delicate inner skin of the wallet; by the tongue
Those who know Poverty, Hunger, Color, or Charm;
By the ears Those who Learn the Direction
Of the Class Dialectic; by the genitals Those
Refused Credit; by the breasts Those Discovered
Suckling More of Their Own Kind; by the DNA,
Those who Combine Unfitness with Survival;
By the Phrenes, the ones who are Poor and Disbelieve;
By the Thumos, the Ones who are Poor and Believe.
From the safety of my vantage point, I see
The truth of it all. The damned are ranged
Before me, row on blighted row. I approach the first
Prisoner or corpse or dead soul, a man dangled
By the tissues of the soft palate for the felony
Of his native tongue – he is effigied in the black rags
Of an ancient uniform of the Ohio National Guard,
His empty eye sockets ringed with kohl and stuffed
With planted Colombian Gold, the parchment
Of his forehead tattooed with the nine mystical numerals
Of the cabala of Social Security
And the Kent State coat of arms. In horror
Of this blasphemous apparition, I fall back,
Nearly fainting, and stagger into a landscape
Where five hundred thousand blasted acres
Have been ripped apart by trenches and shells,
Villages cast down in ruins as if by earthquake,
Wounded trees, limbless and headless, looming
Above the desolation like scaffolds, the valley
A skeleton without flesh, save for the bodies
Of half a million dead ground up beneath the ceaseless
Bombardments. In insensible confusion, I stumble
On the misery of women moaning in parlors, in memory
Of the names of rivers their husbands died for –
The Nile, the Rhone, the Rhine, the Somme, the Marne,
The Aisne, the Yser, the Meuse, the Chickamauga,
The Yangtze, the Mekong, the Tigris and the Euphrates,
Where stealth bombers and F-111s vomit sulfur and acid
On the Mesopotamian plain until the image of my old father
Gilgamesh lurches out of the dust to lay hands on
The byzantine levers of a T-72 Soviet tank. One
Of these demons of unforgetting, a magnetized girl of twenty
Who lived sixty years beyond the day of her lover’s desertion
By fuel-air bomb in the wreckage of Panama City,
Comes forward to comfort me with bandages and morphine,
Cool hands on the brow. The story of her girlhood
Materializes within me, an immaculate marriage
Of nightmare and menses. Now the voices of my stillborn
Sons and daughters rise from the blistered tarmac,
The strangled books of the vanished poets of America –
Lindsay, yes, and Sandburg, my binary idiot clones, but louder
I hear sweet Edwin Rolfe, whom no one now remembers:
John’s deathbed is a curious affair, he is singing,
The posts are made of bone, the spring of nerves,
The mattress bleeding flesh. Infinite air,
Compressed from dizzy altitudes, now serves
His skullface for a pillow. In my drugged fever dream,
I am damned to the furious realm of Sol Funaroff, where
The earth smoked and baked; stones in the field
Marked the dead land: coins taxing the earth,
And to Countee Cullen’s crucifixion:
"Maybe God thinks such things are right."
"Maybe God never thinks at all. . . ."
It seems the body is scattered over the whole expanse
Of thought, arms and legs sliced away and dropped
Horribly into a pail, the circuitry of the nerves
Corroded, abdominal cavity looted for spare parts
And salvage, the Kradie and the Ker
At infinite removes from one another,
The Psyche bereft of the Etor – body and body politic
Forever dissevered, like precincts of the brain
In the wake of a bad lobotomy. I try to remember
Wholeness, the image of meadows in starlight,
Lovers in sentimental landscapes, glacier-capped
Purple-skewed mountains, the visionary wheathead
Held up by the Dionysian priest at Eleusis,
The imperious cliché of the sea, the splendid material love
Of Rukeyser - I have gained mastery
Over my heart / I have gained mastery
Over my two hands / I have gained mastery
Over the waters / I have gained mastery
Over the river – but it splinters in a billion diffractions,
Cells, dustmotes, atoms of asthmatic pollen,
Spume, sperm, fragments of quartzite, nitrogen,
Duct tape, cotter pins, subatomic wreckage,
Shreds of pointless false narratives left over
From childhood memories or from moon-illumined
Bedrooms where lovers defected from one another’s countries.
This is the critical whirlwind. Nothing holds here.
I fracture again and again, giving in to every mythology.
The shattered ghosts come thick. Submicroscopic,
I seep through cracks in the nuclei,
An insidious multitudinous radioactive dust,
Undetectable by any instrument except as an oscillation
The cosmos emits at its own dismemberment
Into particles, into bodies carrying bowls of goats’ blood,
Each going down into the hell of its own one-track mind.
Here is the ruptured anarchist soul
Of Arturo Giovanetti in prison, the one true confession
Of his poetry: Wonderful is the supreme wisdom of the jail
That makes all think the same thought. / Marvelous
Is the providence of the law that equalizes all, even
In mind and sentiment. / Fallen is the last barrier of privilege,
The aristocracy of the intellect. / I, who have never killed,
Think like the murderer; / I, who have never stolen, reason
Like the thief. What is this place where wisdom
Is an unnatural abomination, all knowledge is nature
Destroyed? How have I come to this perigee, where the heart
Is nothing but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings,
And the joints but so many wheels, giving motion
To the whole, as was intended by the artificer?
Here the larynx of Mike gold, dipped in solder
And traced with magnificent circuitry, picks up the broadcast
His own crushed poems repeat into the emptiness
Like a satellite beacon: I am resigning from the American legion
It reminds me of a dog I used to have
That picked up toads in her mouth. . . .
Now, as the voices of these my emanations bark and bleed,
It is the intense strangeness of the world I want
To remember how to love – how it enters and exits
The body, air and æther and light – and to which I long
To return. Thrown into being out of the center of being.
But what am I – an insulated ghost, appearance, apparition,
Epiphenomenon, holographic projection,
A comic book death’s-head cast up on the shore
Of the living? Even this skin, which once trembled
At the thought of the touch of another human body,
Is unreal, only the projection of a vanished surface:
And the mind, when it falters and croaks –
I speak with authority now – loses its shape
As a bodily ego, follows the carcass
Cell by carrion cell, down through vegetable ooze
And crust and maggoty mantle and magma,
And arrives, in the innermost circle
Of the Republic of the Disappeared, at emptiness.
It was here, in the Land of the Metaphysically Free,
That, fallen, I dreamed my old America. By an act
Of most imperial will I assumed the Presidency of the Dead,
I shaped the ruptured shrapnel of my consciousness
Once more into a seedy mercenary army –
Phrenes and Thumos and Nöos
Commanding rank and file of the husks
Of riveters and lawyers (I gathered them
Tenderly as they settled), and residues of secretaries,
Dregs of ushers, gynecologists, thieves,
And the fine ash of Iraqi cabdrivers,
And the delicate grit of Marines,
Dust of Bush, Baker, Schwarzkopf, Cheney,
And beautiful Colin Powell: such a clay they made,
Such a multitude molded, such drum-taps and battle hymns.
At last I believed I understood them. At last
When I called their names they seemed
To shiver to hear me, as if they were almost alive.
But when I look now, there is only the finitude
Of nothing, only absence. I stand in the ultimate circle,
The innermost hell of all the hells, beyond
The outermost illusion: Purity, uncorrupted
Conscience, the body politic embracing
Self and nothing other, only the singular desire.
And as if at a mystical chime, or the alarm
Of a mineral clock, the subway signals ring again,
And I rush at the speed of darkness
From station to station, though the gnarly strata,
In among the tunnels of volcanic roots and sealed absolutes
Of salt domes, up along the nether edges
Of the limbo of flushing, transformed at Queensboro Plaza
And again at Hoyt-Schermerhorn, to emerge at last
In mercuric February afternoon light
At the stairway marked Brooklyn Bridge.
Nothing has changed. Manhattan grinds on,
Gears of the living irreversibly meshed
With the ratchet of desire. There is still the apocalyptic
Discharge of cluster-bombs over the lower east side,
Brimstone of artillery out of the Village, sniper fire
From the Chrysler Building, the strafing
Of Bloomingdales. But everything on the earth I love
Is sealed from my touch as by a zone
Of Platonic plate glass. In my loneliness I rise
And hover over the plutonium-gray span
Of East River, licked by the harrowing fallout
Of my own intangibility. From here I can see,
Like a skyline, the obvious contour of all
My error. O I freely confess it now: America,
I was wrong. I am only slightly larger than life.
I contain mere conspiracies. What do I know?
There is no identity at the basis of things, no one
Name beneath all names. There is no more than this
To remember: It is not godlike to die. It is not even human.
Refuse the honor, no matter who tells you its conquest is sublime.
I may have mumbled that old lie myself once.
I have confessed to many things. Maybe that is why I am
The only one dead here. Maybe that is why I have to suffer
Everything I can. Maybe that is why –
Over the unconscious roofs of your living
Beauty shops, sweatshops, pawnshops, printshops, meat shops,
Warehouses, bathhouses, crackhouses, penthouses, card houses –
Once and for all unhearable, and for all I know unthinkable, I go on
Sounding my doomed eternal bodiless goddamned
I, I, I, I, I.
from Walt Whitman in Hell, LSU Press, 1996.