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Thanksgiving for a Habitat. The Common Life. (for Chester Kallman)
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Thanksgiving for a Habitat
Nobody I know would like to be buried
with a silver cocktail-shaker,
a transistor radio and a strangled
daily help, or keep his word because
of a great-great-grandmother who got laid
by a sacred beast. Only a press lord
could have built San Simeon: no unearned income
can buy us back the gait and gestures
to manage a baroque staircase, or the art
of believing footmen don't hear
human speech. (In adulterine castles
our half-strong might hang their jackets
while mending their lethal bicycle-chains:
luckily, there are not enough
crags to go round. ) Still, Hetty Pegler's Tump
is worth a visit, so is Sch& #246; nbrunn,
to look at someone's idea of the body
that should have been his, as the flesh
Mum formulated shouldn't: that whatever
he does or feels in the mood for,
stock-taking, horse-play, worship, making love,
he stays the same shape, disgraces
a Royal I. To be over-admired is not
good enough: although a fine figure
is rare in either sex, others like it
have existed before. One may
be a Proustian snob or a sound Jacksonian
democrat, but which of us wants
to be touched inadvertently, even
by his beloved? We know all about graphs
and Darwin, enormous rooms no longer
superhumanise, but earnest
city-planners are mistaken: a pen
for a rational animal
is no fitting habitat for Adam's
sovereign clone. I, a transplant
from overseas, at last am dominant
over three acres and a blooming
conurbation of country lives, few of whom
I shall ever meet, and with fewer
converse. Linnaeus recoiled from the Amphibia
as a naked gruesome rabble,
Arachnids give me the shudders, but fools
who deface their emblem of guilt
are germane to Hitler: the race of spiders
shall be allowed their webs. I should like
to be to my water-brethren as a spell
of fine weather: Many are stupid,
and some, maybe, are heartless, but who is not
vulnerable, easy to scare,
and jealous of his privacy? (I am glad
the blackbird, for instance, cannot
tell if I'm talking English, German or
just typewriting: that what he utters
I may enjoy as an alien rigmarole. ) I ought
to outlast the limber dragonflies
as the muscle-bound firs are certainly
going to outlast me: I shall not end
down any oesophagus, though I may succumb
to a filter-passing predator,
shall, anyhow, stop eating, surrender my smidge
of nitrogen to the World Fund
with a drawn-out Oh (unless at the nod
of some jittery commander
I be translated in a nano-second
to a c. c. of poisonous nothing
in a giga-death). Should conventional
blunderbuss war and its routiers
invest my bailiwick, I shall of course
assume the submissive posture:
but men are not wolves and it probably
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won't help. Territory, status,
and love, sing all the birds, are what matter:
what I dared not hope or fight for
is, in my fifties, mine, a toft-and-croft
where I needn't, ever, be at home to
those I am not at home with, not a cradle,
a magic Eden without clocks,
and not a windowless grave, but a place
I may go both in and out of.
The Common Life
(for Chester Kallman)
A living-room, the catholic area you
(Thou, rather) and I may enter
without knocking, leave without a bow, confronts
each visitor with a style,
a secular faith: he compares its dogmas
with his, and decides whether
he would like to see more of us. (Spotless rooms
where nothing's left lying about
chill me, so do cups used for ash-trays or smeared
with lip-stick: the homes I warm to,
though seldom wealthy, always convey a feeling
of bills being promptly settled
with cheques that don't bounce. ) There's no We at an instant,
only Thou and I, two regions
of protestant being which nowhere overlap:
a room is too small, therefore,
if its occupants cannot forget at will
that they are not alone, too big
if it gives them any excuse in a quarrel
for raising their voices. What,
quizzing ours, would Sherlock Holmes infer? Plainly,
ours is a sitting culture
in a generation which prefers comfort
(or is forced to prefer it)
to command, would rather incline its buttocks
on a well-upholstered chair
than the burly back of a slave: a quick glance
at book-titles would tell him
that we belong to the clerisy and spend much
on our food. But could he read
what our prayers and jokes are about, what creatures
frighten us most, or what names
head our roll-call of persons we would least like
to go to bed with? What draws
singular lives together in the first place,
loneliness, lust, ambition,
or mere convenience, is obvious, why they drop
or murder one another
clear enough: how they create, though, a common world
between them, like Bombelli's
impossible yet useful numbers, no one
has yet explained. Still, they do
manage to forgive impossible behavior,
to endure by some miracle
conversational tics and larval habits
without wincing (were you to die,
I should miss yours). It's a wonder that neither
has been butchered by accident,
or, as lots have, silently vanished into
History's criminal noise
unmourned for, but that, after twenty-four years,
we should sit here in Austria
as cater-cousins, under the glassy look
of a Naples Bambino,
the portrayed regards of Strauss and Stravinsky,
doing British cross-word puzzles,
is very odd indeed. I'm glad the builder gave
our common-room small windows
through which no observed outsider can observe us:
every home should be a fortress,
equipped with all the very latest engines
for keeping Nature at bay,
versed in all ancient magic, the arts of quelling
the Dark Lord and his hungry
animivorous chimaeras. (Any brute
can buy a machine in a shop,
but the sacred spells are secret to the kind,
and if power is what we wish
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they won't work. ) The ogre will come in any case:
so Joyce has warned us. Howbeit,
fasting or feasting, we both know this: without
the Spirit we die, but life
without the Letter is in the worst of taste,
and always, though truth and love
can never really differ, when they seem to,
the subaltern should be truth.
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