TRANSCRIPT

This is a special episode of The Slowdown featuring David Duchovny.

I'm in Munich working on a movie that I think it's an important issue that the movie is dealing with, so hopefully my seriousness around the subject won't seem coy in the end.

I remember when I first read "Dream Song 1" by John Berryman in high school, the syntax is a little tortured. He's got a form that he's working in, this Dream Song that he created, so his meter is being tortured. “Once in a sycamore I was glad.” It's not the way we speak, but there's some kind of preciousness to it that's moving.

Having said that, as somebody that's never written myself with a strict form in mind, the liberating aspect of form forces you into certain positions and rhythms, as we see in this poem, that can be different and more magnificent than regular speech where you have no laws about it. If I'm writing a music lyric, I want it to rhyme, so that's putting me in a kind of prison there. But it also liberates me because now I have to make it work in this way. And I might come up with words, like Berryman no doubt does, because he's hamstrung by meter that he wouldn't rationally come up with if he had the entire English language at his disposal — instead of all words that rhyme with rain.

It also short-circuits your rationality and short-circuits sense. Now it has to be a word that fits this meter or rhymes this way, so you're no longer just thinking of the best word. You're thinking of the best word that also satisfies those requirements, and it can lead you to someplace you never would’ve had the thought. You had to trick yourself into thinking a different way.

As an actor, you're always tricking yourself. You're tricking yourself that nobody's watching, and you're this person, and you're having these thoughts and these emotions. And you just gotta put that critical side of your brain aside that's saying, "No, no, no, those things aren't really happening."

Poetry is just attention. Any poem can happen, any poetic sensibility can happen if you just put your attention on something. You pour your consciousness onto the thing and then you can reap that. That's a poetic consciousness, but it's also a human consciousness. Every day is a loss. We can focus on love and focus on positives, but the fact is we're living in time, and things are being stripped away from us constantly. And it can lead to either depression or to valuing things — it just depends on your psychology, your worldview, the rigorousness of your yearning to want to be on the positive side of things and not depress yourself too much.

The poem is about a paradise lost or a fall or a loss of innocence. He says, "Then came a departure,” and “nothing fell out as it might or ought." This is the inciting incident. There's been a loss. There's been a banishment from paradise. And now we're going to hear about this character, Henry, who's alternately sulking a little bit like a teenager — and yet the consciousness of the poem is saying, "Hey, you should've come out and talked."

There's a split in the consciousness. There's the Henry character, but there's also the guy writing the poem who isn't Henry. This falling out, he doesn't know what it is. Call it original sin; you could call it his specific sin that he's not talking about.

“Once in a sycamore,” – once in the Garden of Eden. Even as a high schooler, I understood that I was coming out of the Eden of childhood in a way and having these complicated thoughts, more complicated thoughts than I'd had as a child, and not that I would've put it into words that I just put it in now. But there was a loss involved that was moving to me. The volume that I read in high school, these Dream Songs, there were seventy-seven. I remember it’s a similar vibe where Henry is just feeling guilty about something, and he thinks, "Oh, it's like I've murdered somebody and hacked them up and hid the pieces where they can't be found." And then he says, "Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up / Nobody is ever missing." And so he has this guilt: again, original sin. He feels like a murderer, but everybody's here. I haven't killed anyone. Why do I feel this way? We've all done wrong, but you know what I mean.

Today's poem is an invitation to question your own personal sense of original sin. Why do we all feel this sense of wrongness even if we've done nothing wrong?

Dream Song 1
by John Berryman

Huffy Henry hid      the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point,—a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do  it made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.

All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry's side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don't see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived.

What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed.

“Dream Song 1” from THE DREAM SONGS © 1969 John Berryman. Copyright renewed by 1997 by Kate Donahue Berryman. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved.