This Creature Smothered in Death Clothes: Twenty Notes on Violence

Abstract

This Creature Smothered in Death ClothesTwenty Notes on Violence Douglas Smith (bio) 1 Even our gods can be murdered. Think of Osiris, his body torn apart and scattered across the earth. Then follow Isis, who sailed after grief on a boat of papyrus. Gathering the limbs of Osiris, Isis made the dead god live. She has other names, other powers, but this morning I will call her poet. 2 Our fugitive world is elusive, always. The human mind cannot apprehend it. Everything hidden abides as the order of the day, the week, the year. “The artist’s problem,” Frank Bidart argues, “is to make life show itself.” 3 What we desire is revelation. Tell me, then, of Achilles, the way his spear pierces the “tender” flesh of Hektor’s neck. Or conduct me through the vast architecture of torture in Dante’s vision of hell. Or let me stand with the three murderers in Macbeth. “It will be rain to-night,” Banquo says, approaching his own death. “Let it come down,” the First Murderer replies. 4 To say that violence leads to revelation is to shiver. How can this be true? 5 The occasion of a poem can summon violence and contest it at once. See Paul Celan, the great poet of destruction, to confirm. 6 Try to write a brief catechism on violence. You will never complete it. 7 Look instead at a violent man made of words. His name is Herbert White, and his crimes are many. Frank Bidart calls him a “creature smothered in death clothes.” [End Page 135] 8 Find him, this man who kills “to make meaning,” in the first poem in Bidart’s first book. Here is a haunted voice. Here is a world confused. 9 “Herbert White” begins with a trapdoor: “‘When I hit her on the head, it was good.’” 10 “Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself,” Iris Murdoch wrote. Remember this sentence during our descent into Herbert White’s mind: “When I hit her on the head, it was good, and then I did it to her a couple of times,—but it was funny,—afterwards,it was as if somebody else did it . . . Everything flat, without sharpness, richnessor line.” 11 There, in the forest, standing above the body of a murdered girl, Herbert White is a figure of dread, and the manner of his voice shakes the reader. What is the fruit of such language? “—It sounds crazy, but I tell yousometimes it was beautiful—; I don’t know howto say it, but for a minute, everything was possible—;and then,then,— well, like I said, she didn’t move: and I saw,under me, a little girl was just lying there in the mud: and I knew I couldn’t have done that,—somebody else had to have done that,—” [End Page 136] 12 The world, for Herbert White, is both impediment and provocation. The past, including a difficult father, is the same. “—You see, ever since I was a kid I wantedto feel things make sense: I remember looking out the window of my room back home,—and being almost suffocated by the asphalt;and grass; and trees; and glass;just there, just there, doing nothing!not saying anything! filling me up—but also being a wall; dead, and stopping me;—how I wanted to see beneath it, cut beneath it, and make itsomehow, come alive . . .” 13 To make it come alive: the monster and the poet share this desire. “Cracking the shell of the world,” Bidart suggests, can lead to revelation, and writers often make this happen “by dramatizing crisis and disaster.” 14 The crisis of Herbert White’s mind disturbs his world. This is the ruin of thought, and the reader serves as witness. “—Naturally, I just got right back in the car,and believe me, was determined, determined,to head straight for home . . . but the more I drove,I kept thinking about getting a girl,and the more I thought I shouldn’t do it, the more I had to— [End Page 137] I saw her coming out of the movies,saw she was alone, and...