Analysis Poem by gershon hepner

Confiding to a priest or analyst
may seem to unbelievers banal. List
your problems by all means, but don’t
expect solutions, for they simply won’t
be solved by anyone, except sometimes
yourself, but if you have to tell your crimes
to someone I believe could do worse
that telling them to all the world in verse
that’s likely to provide as much catharsis
as telling them to analytic arses
who’ll make pronouncements on them as they snarl,
like many readers when they hear banal
pronounced quite incorrectly. (I’m sure you
had noticed that, but no, you cannot sue
a writer like an analyst.) Oh well.
It’s just a thought. If you’re inclined to tell
what maybe you should never tell, at least
consider doing without help of priest
or analyst, or even rabbi, and
convert to poet. God will understand.
Resign yourself to fate and let your own
resources lead you to what can’t be known.

Inspired by communications that I had today with David West, who shares my great admiration for the HBO program “In Treatment, ” whose leading character the charming Irish psychotherapist played by Gabriel Byrne, solves nobody’s problems but makes his life meaningful but creating his own. Also inspired by an article on the Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes by Peter Conrad in The New Yorker (“Doctor and Patient, ” May 4,2009) :

Lobo Antunes, who admires Faulkner, shares his partiality for overlapping monologues, which gives the impression that an entire society is incautiously confiding in an analyst or a confessor. “Fado Alexandrino, ” published in 1983, uses this polyphonic technique to investigate the failed hopes of Portugal’s recent history. The “fado” of the title is the music of helpless resignation: the word means “fate, ” and it refers to the ululating laments declaimed by singers—wrapped in funereal black shawls, their faces set in a rictus of misery—in Lisbon’s night clubs. Here the vocalists are four soldiers who return disillusioned, like Lobo Antunes himself, from a colonial war, this one in Mozambique. They become disgruntled witnesses to the 1974 revolution, in which the army bloodlessly toppled the moribund Fascist regime. That uprising occurred on April 25th, which made it a rite of spring—a carnival of renewal, celebrated by soldiers with carnations in the muzzles of their guns. The rejoicing, as the novel demonstrates, did not last long. Leftist hardliners took over and, for a while, it seemed that Portugal would be captured by Communism. The ideology that prevailed, however, was consumerism. Lobo Antunes’s cohorts helplessly watch their nation’s collapse from idealism into self-indulgence, and even surrender to it themselves during a boozy reunion that takes them on a long crawl through bars and brothels. Their night of carousing ends in a death: one member of the gang is murdered, and the rest share blame for inciting the crime. The novel pessimistically concludes that there is no way of salvaging a society so embedded in the past: revolution seems “so absurd in a country that was worm-eaten, ” and the flag-waving and chanting of the ideologues amount to little more than “a ridiculous piece of fiction, a puppet show, a complete farce.”


4/29/09