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. I don't know what the laws are, of the Dream Song, but there are laws, 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.

He's an academic. These dream songs are kind of like sonnets. But having said that, as somebody that's never written myself with a strict form in mind, and as somebody who readily acknowledges the liberating aspect of form — because it 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. You have grammar, but not really, not in spoken speech.

I've just been reading some Marshall McLuhan when I've been here. I've been looking for a quote to kind of lead off this movie I just finished, and I haven't been successful in finding it. But he really talks about how language was this revolutionary technology, not necessarily in a positive sense. We went from being an oral learning society or oral living society, living in the present moment only with speech. And then to the written word was a revolution in consciousness, which he says is similar to television, or we would say similar to social media or even AI. And he doesn't see it as necessarily a positive thing.

I'm always like, "Oh, that was the height of our consciousness, was the written word." I want to get back to that. But it was interesting to be reading somebody who's like, "Ah, that took us out of the present moment." I studied a lot of, or read a lot of Beckett. I was-- Beckett is very much, it seems to me, interested in how language speaks to us, not how we speak language.

When I was talking about form, I just think 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. I think there's logic in those kinds of leaps that you have to make. There's logic in retrospect. There's a certain kind of friction or spark that happens that is interesting. You can take credit for it, but you didn't think of it. 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 because of their transitory nature. 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 / Thereafter 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. He seems 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.

There's always an inciting incident for a character that you're playing. You've got to figure that out. Why am I here? Why am I saying these things? If you can't find the way in, why are you gonna do that role? I mean, there are many reasons to do a role that aren't artistic, but that's really the beginning of it. What's the way in? Who is this guy? The trite way to say it is nobody thinks they're a villain in the world. So if you're playing a "bad guy," what's the way in that he's not a villain? How does he think of himself — and can I play that?

“Once in a sycamore,” you know, once in the Garden of Eden, “I was glad / all at the top, and I sang.” And then came 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. But as a high schooler, I think 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 in 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 “why do I feel so shitty?” What's the 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.