An unfortunate modern-day allegory of Steve Kowalski, continued
In the poem he is writing, insists on writing despite my strong warnings, censure and friendly advice, to which he has given the working title “Recuperation”, Steve Kowalski imagines himself as the poem’s young speaker, or narrator, very much like himself, except that the young man in the poem had been careening fast toward death because of lung cancer. But miraculously, as the poem opens, although we find him exhausted and weakened in the wake of his fight with the disease, he has been victorious.
He is now recovering.
It is a hot summer night – sultry, as the poem points out more than once – and quite late, meaning it could be midnight, or, nefariously and ominously, even later, like 2 a.m., or even 4 a.m.; so late, in fact, that it is almost morning.
The setting is a mature suburban solidly middle-class neighborhood somewhere in the U.S.A., whose development began perhaps as early as before the turn of the 20th century, with some of the original trees aged 100 years or more still alive and in the ground turning up the sidewalks and bearing testament to the township’s original foundation.
The young recovering narrator is outside, out of doors. We imagine this is his neighborhood and the house he lives in is somewhere right there.
Outside the poem, we might imagine a worried mother ask her husband in bed:
“Honey, it’s so late. Where’s our son.”
And the father says, “Don’t worry, I see him right out in the front yard. He’s standing under the oak and elm, coughing and shivering.”
“Well, don’t you think we should call him in? Don’t you think he should be sleeping and resting after what he’s been through?”
“Zos, the boy just beat lung cancer. How he did it, I don’t have a clue. These are things we’ll never understand. Whatever it was, he’s alive again. It must be strange to him, when he saw himself dying, and now he’s alive! Let him experience it, come to terms with it, take stock of his new lease on life, or whatever he needs to do to grasp it. Let him stay out there – hell, until morning, if he wants. After all, it’s his life, to live it how he wants. And you know, Zos, after what he’s been through, I’ve learned something, too. I’m not going to control him anymore or tell him what to do. If he wants to go to Ukraine, of all places, to find his fortune, let him. And let him take in the summer, let him take in the hot night, let him sweat and breathe the air, take a walk down the block and back, feel the ground under his feet. It’s his earth, just like it’s ours, just like it’s anybody’s, and we’re all going to be dead, anyway, so let him live. And you know there’s a patrol car on duty cruising the neighborhood. That’s what we pay our taxes for. They know our boy, Steve. They know all about him. I mean, what can possibly happen to him?!”
“But just listen to him cough, Mike. He’s still so weak, his body’s rattling through and through. I’m going out there and bringing him in! I’m –”
“Damn it, Zos! He just beat cancer! He’ll be all right now! Just let him be! I’ve got to go to work tomorrow, that is, today. So will you just let me sleep, or do I have to –”
“Oh, Mike, you big, strong Pollack, all full of your quiet explosive strength, you know how I absolutely crave it when you’re both philosophical and tough, talking rough to me like that while demonstrating your superior layman’s intellect, all of that masculine control and reason, as against my emotion, in combo with a justifiable anger, and… and… even treating me like a… like a… filthy worthless whore… Oh, Mike, when you do that to me, I want… I just want to be excommunicated from the Church…”
“Mmm…”
“Mike, you’re so strong-minded and rational, it just… turns me on so much, it just… drives me crazy!!!”
Back inside the poem:
The narrator speaks of himself as resurrected – a bad sign, delusional, and he talks about some kind of victory, and this is troublesome, because we don’t quite know if he is talking about his recent victory over death, or if the narration is portending something more ominous and criminal that we are about to encounter in the next several stanzas. For he speaks not of “victory” as having already been achieved, but as something yet to be achieved in the future:
I breathe, toward victory,
I breathe.
He’s also angry about the trees around him having easily gained over 100 years of life while he, at his young age, having not even truly lived, had almost died.
And sultriness
Being very much a part of this scene,
I can’t fathom the polemic between
The rooted glory, the bare, brutal force
Breaking through the concrete, one hundred years
Of life at least the easy property
Of their bulk and caverns,
And death, tangible, hard,
Once rooted in my sickly specter.
The narrator combines reflection upon his recovery, his awareness of the nighttime’s late hour, and the feeling of ever-increasing physical strength incrementally but irreversibly replacing his former near-death vulnerability and weakness, even as he stands there, and the resulting sensation for him is both wild and intoxicating. As he gets stronger and stronger, he begins to feel or imagine his power is boundless, which gives rise to dark and, by their nature, vengeful, thoughts.
His delusion grows as he feels he has begun to direct nature; indeed, the universe itself, which approves of his descent into barbarity and applauds his contemplated criminal actions:
And I feel like a necromancer,
Under the oak and elm,
Conjuring the stars tonight, in an in-
terplay of applause
to my newfound savagery.
He now imagines himself growing above and beyond quotidian life, reality, and humanity; that, like Goethe’s Faust, he has become “a warrior of transcendence”.
Even Faust, damned by his bookishness
Was brought down, recovered; once shuddering
At fate, created fate
With one fierce twist of time
Erected perspective, raised vaults
Of consciousness, became
A warrior of transcendence.
As his bodily sickness disappears, the sickness of his mind increases together with irrepressible sexual potency:
This is no time to erect monuments
Or contemplate. Once shaken, now shaking
to take recourse
In artful tribute to
The violent genesis of humanity,
Trembling with anticipation,
Tremors shake my blood-engorged loins.
At this point in the poem, it is now clear to us that the narrator, disguising Steve Kowalski, is bent upon some terrible act, which, lacking any other word for its description, can be nothing less than… evil…
Oh, no, Steve, Steve, why are you doing this; why are you going there. Do not write this poem, DO NOT WRITE IT!!! Stop this immediately, or you will, or you will –
“Shut up, I said, SHUT UP!!!”
Steeeeeve…!!!
Filed by Saint Stephan, July 6, 2016