Full of all things but what one would expect—”
And he who listened said then to himself,
“A daemon, a daemon, no doubt: who else?
Such as was heard by Socrates, perhaps,
Or an angel, the angel who struggled with Jacob,
If Jacob lived, if angels also live—”
To which one voice cried back, as if in echo,
“Rome and romance of Death, what Mutt and Jeff,
Quixote, Alcestis, Jacob, Uncle Sam,
Hamlet and Holmes look down on all of you!
What King and Queen of Hearts as playing cards?
What President or Pharaoh on a coin?
— Your mind, kept waiting by a desperate hope
For the epiphany which starlight seems
Here where Long Island like a liner slants
To the great city, Europe’s last capital,
Now must suppose in Being’s surprises nothing less
Than singers who have soared through many keys,
Justice, Forgiveness, and Knowledge in their cries!—”
“A number of the dead have come to you,
O Hershey Green!”
“Have come to me?” he cried,
He shouted out, rapt in the absolute dark,
As one who in an empty valley bound by rocks
Shouts and awaits with some hope something more
Than merely his own voice in echo bruised,
And merely his own heart,
“Have come to you!
Hallucination holds you by the head,
Many a night you told yourself your life,
Tell it to us, we have no more to do,
Tell it to the immortal dead in the stone
And the chill of their — O so this is it! — conclusion…”
“Is this a true thing?” Hershey Green in the dark
And stillness spoke out again, leaning to hear
If once again his speech would bring back speech,
“O it is true enough! Many are dead.
Come, with your endless story,” one voice said,
“Hallucination leads you by the hand,
This is the way to freedom and to power,
This is the way to knowledge and to hope,
This is the way the world begins and ends,
Logos, man’s inner being going out—”
~
The child was born late at night in the middle of winter.
Jack Green was overwhelmed with joy, excited and exalted as never before in his life. An hour after the child was dragged headfirst with the help of instruments
From his mother’s womb, Jack Green called his relatives and his friends to tell them that he had a son. Snow had begun to fall from the low-hanging sky,
Pink-grey with the city lights, when Jack Green woke relatives and friends from the warmth of sleep: his emotion overflowed and demanded expression and required surrounding and answering voices,
He had to tell everyone! His mother-in-law said to him, They are sleeping, they will be angry. But he could not be stopped,
He spoke with warmth to people he had been cool to for years. His joy placed him outside himself,
He called his brother Albert and spoke with eloquence over the instantaneous miles, saying he had been wrong and on such an occasion
All must be forgiven. Everyone is always wrong all the time, answered Albert, wakened from sleep, too little awake in early morning
To know exactly what he was saying—
“The tears are icicles upon his cheeks
As the poor boy arrives at his first breath—”
“O Life is wonderful beyond belief
Here most of all, in parenthood’s great pleasure…”
“What egotism is so sharp and deaf
(Sharp as the knife and deaf as rock), which lives
That it can quite resist the infant’s face,
The fresh identity, the bawling life?”
“Ravished is Everyman by the small sight!
Faced by the double face and breathing twice
— The harder that the ego pained itself (like ice,
Pressed to the skin, a heavy iron-like pain),
The greater joy abounds! joy overflows…”
“This I always find touching, that great joy
Cannot contain itself, but overflows,
The body must run up and down the stairs,
Shout the good news and kiss the passing stranger,
— Joy drives such overwhelming energy—
Any move will express, dance out, and free
The body from the terrifying pleasure—”
“The father’s joy is a new class of joy,
— First Abraham, after his hopeless years—”
“Forgiveness for his brother and his friends!
Success is kind when quite secure and sure,
Success must buy the drinks, hand out cigars
(These actions are the same as sorrow’s tears!),
And is in this emotion just as blind
And self-absorbed as invalids, as cruel
As disappointment!
At two o’clock in the morning,
Jack Green must call his relatives and friends!”
“Thus may new goodness make the evil good
— I am a hopeless optimist, I know!”
The day came when the child was to be given a name, a name announcing the unique inimitable psyche,
And the tiny foreskin was to be cut with the knife which reached across five thousand years from Palestine,
Making him with this last turn of the knife even unto coitus fully a member of the people chosen for wandering and alienation.
Eva wished to name him Noah, after her dead father, who had come to America with his anger, but her mother did not want her to use that name.
Eva turned over a dozen names in her mind, unable to decide which one she liked best until
She thought of the neighbor’s child, four years of age, fat and happy,
Whom Eva had looked at fondly and fondled during her barren unhappy years. His name was Harold, but he called himself Hershey, a German version, because he was obsessed with chocolate, and amused adults had come to call him Hershey, Hershey Bar, struck by the quaintness,
Extending the smile of amusement at the child with this poem. And Eva had vowed in a moment of delight with the child, that if she had a child, she would name him Hershey, for, looking at him, she saw the image of what she wanted her child to be:
She decided in a moment, Baby Green was named Hershey, howling his pain and ignorance when his foreskin was cut,
And all thought twenty years in advance of the next generation—
“Lo, with what tenderness he speaks his name,
As if he spoke a scandal or a fame!”
“Why not? It is a sign of the self’s darkness,
The private darkness of the individual
The anguished darkness of the struggling will,
The sound which means the ego is alone,
The bass of harbor boats, alone, alone!
The pathos of departure’s fogbound moan,
The self’s self-exile from the womb and home—”
“The basis of the art of poetry,
The hard identity felt in the bone—”
“The basis of the art of music, too,
The self-same darkness flows from orchestras,
The brilliant congress of the instruments
Merely goes walking in what wilderness—”
“His name might have been Noah: beautiful!
Suggests so much a boat on desperate seas—”
“Hershey, I think, is best, the Hershey Bar,
A bitter chocolate or a milk sweet chocolate
— Such is the self, knowing and gnawing the body,
When the decayed teeth of the Pleasure-Principle
Bite it, by the sweet senses’ candies pained!”
“There is a joke which grows within my mind:
Here is a stadium and cheering crowd,
Pigeons pass overhead, and one lets go
(Nature’s necessities are all his life),
— The one man wet amid the 70,000