Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (8 page)

He starts with the chimney sweepers, those very young children and orphans who often died in London's chimneys, sacrificial victims commemorated in some of his finest lyrics. Once again, the paradox leaps out at us: the cry of the small child is what we customarily fail to hear, and in this instance it is not fanciful to imagine this cry coming actually from the chimney-coffins themselves, transformed by Blake into an indictment
d'outre-tombe,
from beyond the grave. These voices, largely unhearable in reality, become terribly potent: they "appall" "every blackening Church."

Here, again, we encounter the potency, muscularity, and reach of art. The physical setting is transfigured: the cry of the child-victim alters the landscape, both frightens and makes pale the sooty church, makes graphically and obscenely visible the power relations (as Blake saw them) between religious institution and victims of society. The following lines extend this revolutionary logic, this weird boomerang that cries out for justice for the weak by showing exactly who is doing them in: the hapless soldier's sigh—a sigh that takes place far away from London, somewhere in the empire, a sigh that cannot possibly be noticed in any realist scheme—is not only
heard
(given Blake's sensibilities, we expect this much), but is stunningly
translated
into an elemental script: it

"Runs in blood down Palace walls." This line carries, for me, some of the terror associated with the Greek oracle: a voice becomes fate, a noise becomes destiny, an institution turns reality into language, and language into reality.

In recent years our TV screens seem to overflow with images of bodies buried under rubble or uncovered in mass graves, of silent, stony faces trekking out of war zones, and we, in our living rooms, take this in as the obscene underside of our history. As we have learned, it can sometimes even happen on home ground. But for the most part it comes to us, even on today's TV screens, as silent film, as distant as the news-reels of another era that were called
The March of Time.
Is it too much to say that our grasp of history itself—including its most unprocessible chapters such as the Holocaust or Hiroshima or even the twin towers at New York's World Trade Center—is finally a set of images depicting mute victims, or (worse still) pure rubble that guards its secret, that entombs its silent dead?

To sum up, have we not learned, over and over, that cries go unheard, that the powerless are indeed powerless? New York, in the wake of September 11,2001, was dotted with posters of the missing, and
The New York Times,
for months afterward, published thumbnail sketches of the victims, to give at least some sense of the victims' humanity, their story. But this poem, in its own way, goes much further: each victim trumpets forth—not via scream but by a sigh—his fateful indictment, and the virulence of such utterance turns it into a liquid script, into the visible blood that runs down palace walls.

We all know that the institution of language is at a crucial remove from things themselves, that words are differential, part of an endless semiotic chain that signifies ever more words, never at one, as Kant said long ago, with the thing itself,
das Ding an sich.
And many have bemoaned the "prison house of language," not just theorists and scholars and revolutionaries, but all those who feel that words always come up short and are not commensurate with what one actually wants to utter.

For just these reasons, Blake's achievement matters. Blood running

down palace walls has a clarity and immediacy that are shockingly eloquent. Here is a pre-dictionary language (no schooling required), a violent but cogent
text
of abuse-and-punishment, an unmistakable graphic display of power relations that says: palaces send soldiers to their deaths, and churches are complicit with the exploitation of the weak. Blake has remained true to his initial image of the flowing Thames that cannot, we now realize, be "chartered," that does indeed
flow,
flows into and becomes running blood. Blake presents "flow" as the motor principle of the world, a flux that links victim back to institution, that becomes a fluid script for how power actually works, that eternal spectacle of the strong hurting the weak now become an actual spectacle, a kind of urban sound and light show,
son et lumiere,
in which our relations are at last on show.

To say that flow is the law of the world is to challenge all notions of fixity: here versus there, now versus then, even you versus me. Blake's poem overturns these binarisms and categories, and in this new dispensation the rulers and their victims are umbilically connected and exposed as such. Power is at last visible, yes, but so too is pain. We return to those "marks of weakness, marks of woe," and we see that it all began there, that pain and suffering are a language, are "marks" of a story that can be told. In "London," such "marks" seem demiurgic in their thrust, capable of reconfiguring the world, demanding to tell their story of hurt and abuse. The poem closes with Blake's darkest and most apocalyptic images, as we realize (with a jolt) that it is indeed midnight, and that London is as diseased venereally as it is morally and politically. The inclusion of the harlot not only echoes back to the biblical Babylon as den of iniquity, but caps the poet's series of exploited figures, thereby defining the modern city almost exclusively as a human market, a place for buying and selling humans themselves (chimney sweeper, soldier, prostitute), a serial parade of use and abuse. The young prostitutes participate in the life and logic of flow: they pass on their venereal disease to the husbands who give it to their wives who extend it to the babes, and a generation itself is now doomed.

The City's great needs—warmth, security, sex—are serviced by its victims, but their day comes, here, as we witness the great reflux, the insidious two-way traffic that is fatally egalitarian in its operation, exposing the trumps of privilege and power to be, ultimately, illusory. Finally, the last stanza keeps covenant with Blake's "liberation theology," his transmutation of hurt into indictment, of isolated victim into public revenge. Everything speaks. The harlot's curse has the clarity and virulence of ancient curses, those moments when language acts on the world: she helps tell the story of her city and her time, links her plaint with that of others, as the poet weaves her voice into the visionary tapestry at hand. A scream goes through the house, and we follow its ideological itinerary, as luminous and revelatory as a flare in the night. This connective vision annihilates privacy and protection, and it reveals a new creatural community linked by hurt and abuse. That revelation, every bit as articulated and interconnected as the "network" reality-picture that emerges from our computer screens, is the work of poetry.

The force of Blake's visionary poem is most fully felt if we contrast this pulsating portrait of a city—with its wounded and victimized up front, their pain and blood writ large, sprayed like graffiti onto the actual surface of the city, onto its proudest institutions—with any other depiction imaginable: your perception as tourist walking the London streets? your experience with a CD-ROM presentation of London? even, let's say, your effort to imagine (on your own, without Blake's aid) the extent of exploitation and abuse that were hardwired in early capitalist England? My view is that none of these renditions can possibly rival the surreal one provided in Blake's poem. Not only does he illuminate what is invisible to our customary sight, but I'd claim that he brings us into the picture, hurls us through Customs (both conceptual and immigration), makes us (by dint of merely reading his poem) fellow travelers, witnesses to the crime, called on to respond. We can hardly go back in time and rescue chimney sweeps. We cannot easily soften the lives of today's urban or industrial victims either. But we respond nonetheless, as Blake takes us into the looking glass, over the threshold, into the inte-

rior. And what we navigate is no less than the great river of pain that unifies the lives of all these casualties. Reading a poem like "London" is indeed a "trip" (as one says today), but a voyage of virtually cardiac dimensions, entailing entry into the bloodstream and flux of a great metropolis, so as to feel—in that ever so dry economic term—
the cost of living.

JAMES BALDWIN'S "SONNY'S BLUES": SUFFERING, KINSHIP, AND ART

If Blake begins on a private visionary note, James Baldwin opens his poignant short story "Sonny's Blues" with the public record: the narrator, Sonny's older brother, reads a newspaper account of Sonny being busted for heroin use. Whereas the poem explodes with its strange testimony, the narrative works perspectivally, gradually bringing
us
—the "straight" readers for whom the "straight" older brother is a perfect surrogate, a man who has escaped Harlem's blight by playing by the rules, marrying, having a family, becoming a schoolteacher—into Sonny's tortured life. And, indeed, is this not how most of us know about Harlem, about heroin, perhaps even about the blues: as dispassionate observers, as newspaper readers, as straight folks going about our lives? Baldwin knows what he is doing when he entrusts his story to the papers and the straight man.

Soon enough, we realize that "Sonny's Blues" is about the casualties produced by Harlem, about the possible escape routes and strategies devised in order not to go under. Not London with its Church and Palace, perhaps, but Harlem is no less an all-powerful toxic container of human lives, a systematic forecloser and contaminator of individual human possibility. Race is, of course, the major key. Hence, when the narrator, who is justifiably proud of his hard-won stability, ponders what he owes his busted brother Sonny, he recalls a good bit of his own early history, including a story he has heard only late in life, from his mother the last time he saw her, when he was home from the army on

leave. The story was about his father, long dead now, who, as a young man, witnessed the obscene murder of
his
younger (music-playing) brother by a bunch of drunk white youths out on a joyride:

They was all drunk, and when they seen your father's brother they let out a great whoop and holler and they aimed the car straight at him. They was having fun, they just wanted to scare him, the way they do sometimes, you know. But they was drunk. And I guess the boy, being drunk, too, and scared, kind of lost his head. By the time he jumped it was too late. Your father says he heard his brother scream when the car rolled over him, and he heard the wood of that guitar when it give, and he heard them strings go flying, and he heard them white men shouting, and the car kept on a-going and it ain't stopped till this day. (13)

This story conjures up a father unlike the one the narrator knew, a man who acted rough and strong but who carried inside him a wound and a fount of tears no one (except his wife) ever saw or suspected. Not only do we begin to measure the choral dimension of this story—a serial story of brotherly sacrifice and responsibility, passed on from father to son—but something else comes into view, something musical and expressive, something about the very sound of pain and death, registered in the noise of the crushed guitar and the noise of the broken strings, registered also in the sound of this silenced but still playing story, now assuming its melodic role in this family's life. And we learn that the narrator also has his own cross to bear: his daughter Grace has just died of polio, and this death too is rendered as an affair of sounds and screams:

Isabel [the wife] was in the kitchen fixing lunch for the two boys when they'd come in from school, and she heard Grace fall down in the living room. When you have a lot of children you don't always start running when one of them falls, unless they start screaming or something. And, this time, Grace was quiet. Yet, Isabel says that

when she heard that
thump
and then that silence, something happened in her to make her afraid. And she ran to the living room and there was little Grace on the floor, all twisted up, and the reason she hadn't screamed was that she couldn't get her breath. And when she did scream, it was the worst sound, Isabel says, that she'd ever heard in all her life, and she still hears it sometimes in her dreams. Isabel will sometimes wake me up with a low, moaning, strangled sound and I have to be quick to awaken her and hold her to me and where Isabel is weeping against me seems a mortal wound. (21)

We are now in a position to see that this well-regulated life is punctuated by noises from the past: the father's brother's death and the busted guitar, along with the car that "kept on a-going and it ain't stopped till this day"; Grace's
thump
and ensuing scream, a scream that Isabel still hears, that the narrator also hears on the countless nights when the sleeping mother's "mortal wound" opens and speaks its tears.

We come gradually to understand that every Harlem life is
composed
in this fashion, possesses its pulsing undercurrent of suffering and tears. We see a revival meeting consisting of one brother and two sisters: "All they had were their voices and their Bibles and a tambourine" (22), but this very old, very simple music played to the crowd "seemed to soothe a poison out of them" (23). Sonny reflects on what goes into this music: " 'While I was downstairs before, on my way here, listening to that woman sing, it struck me all of a sudden how much suffering she must have had to go through—to sing like that. It's
repulsive
to think you have to suffer that much' " (25). Sonny wonders that Harlem hasn't actually exploded: " 'all that hatred and misery and love. It's a wonder it doesn't blow the avenue apart' " (28). To our question, "Where does pain go?" Baldwin suggests two distinct trajectories: either into song—into blues—or into raw violence.

Withjust a few deft touches, Baldwin conveys the echoing, collective dimensions of the personal story of Sonny, offering a picture of Harlem life (human life?) as incessant, throbbing pain. Not entirely unlike