"Life, friends, is boring." [Berryman, Dream Songs]

Literature starts here.

The idea that the writer - like the jazz musician - intuitively - already "gets" it; & art is an effort to escape that knowledge.

Many are called, but few are chosen.

Is it possible that the best art stems from ambivalence (I love it - it bores me). Only the artist who exhibits both responses escapes the realm of Boring/Being-Bored.

Did you know that "dream songs" is the phrase used by the Ojibwa (of Minnesota) to describe their poetry? Where Berryman ended up, in winter, drinking a lot.

from "Ghost Dance" (chap. 4, Grassblade Light):

         17

  
 A silhouette on the snowbound bridge
 or sunlit there in San Francisco.
 With a cube of memory we go
 toward the grain meadow – strange wedge

  
 from elsewhere creases time now
 in the hollow between beats.  Pause,
 suspension... what was
 scrapes (stubborn resin on the bow).

  
 As in the spring mystery dream
 what was a morsel of death begins
 to thaw.  Shapes in the mind's
 eye – forms of human frame –

  
 Leonardo in the octagon, or
 Minnehaha among the hanging
 rocks.  You're hypnotizing
 together a borrowed Vermont –

  
 guest dancing again – while
 my heavy draft of burning lead
 (a buried man) dives head-
 first toward the ice-real

  
 echo in Kosovo (an evil double
 of Melchizedek unveils his
 haunted prairie... citadels
 of graves, villages of rubble).

  
I lie in warm air under the cedars.
 My body remembers what my heart
 forgets.  A tiny square of salt
 becomes – a black and rocky kingdom.

  
 There's where Abraham relented.
 Jesus dreamt his resurrection.  Michael
 intervened - there, where a bluejay spiral
 modulates... into my body.  Cedar-scented.

     
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