Fragments of the Jug: Mark Strand’s “The Dreadful Has Already Happened”

By Ian Ganassi

“The Dreadful Has Already Happened”

The relatives are leaning over, staring expectantly.

They moisten their lips with their tongues. I can feel

them urging me on. I hold the baby in the air.

Heaps of broken bottles glitter in the sun.

A small band is playing old fashioned marches.

My mother is keeping time by stamping her foot.

My father is kissing a woman who keeps waving

to somebody else. There are palm trees.

The hills are spotted with orange flamboyants and tall

billowy clouds move behind them. “Go on, Boy,”

I hear somebody say, “Go on.”

I keep wondering if it will rain.

The sky darkens. There is thunder.

“Break his legs,” says one of my aunts,

“Now give him a kiss.” I do what I’m told.

The trees bend in the bleak tropical wind.

The baby did not scream, but I remember that sigh

when I reached inside for his tiny lungs and shook them

out in the air for the flies. The relatives cheered.

It was about that time I gave up.

Now, when I answer the phone, his lips

are in the receiver; when I sleep, his hair is gathered

around a familiar face on the pillow; wherever I search

I find his feet. He is what is left of my life.

This frightening poem (page 42 of 1970’s Darker and page 74 of 1980’s Selected Poems) takes its title and its impetus from a phrase in an essay by Martin Heidegger titled “The Thing” (Das Ding), which is collected in Poetry, Language, Thought (copyright 1971). Heidegger’s essay (originally a lecture delivered in 1950) essentially (and this is a gross oversimplification) states that science, by breaking down everything in existence into its material constituents, has reduced “things,” in the truest sense of that word, to mere objects. Or, to put it another way, that science has robbed things of their ethical or spiritual essence. The essay uses the example of a jug, and analyzes what makes the jug a “thing” in Heidegger’s special sense, rather than a mere object. Heidegger’s analysis leads back to the etymological origins of the word “thing” (dinc), in the Old High German, in which it means “a gathering to deliberate on a matter under discussion, a contested matter.” Heidegger argues that the jug as “thing” is, in the truest sense, a “gathering”: the sum total of everything associated with it—its physical composition and its human meanings and uses. Specifically, it unites (“gathers”) earth (it is made of clay, and contains, and is used to pour out, water or wine, all of which are products of the earth), sky (the water or wine and the clay of the jug are products of the sun and rain), divinity (when the jug is used to pour libations to the gods), and mortals, or humans, in the combination of the previous three aspects. Heidegger argues that because our worldview has become largely a scientific one, we are deprived of the “thingness of things.” It takes a special effort to get back to this true sense of “thingness.” The specific phrase, “the dreadful (or “terrible,” in the contemporary translation) has already happened” refers to our fear of nuclear weapons. Heidegger asserts that the atomic bomb is only the last and most extreme case of the scientific spirit breaking things down into their material components and thus depriving them of their “thingness,” their function as gatherings of important matters. “The dreadful has already happened,” prior to the atomic bomb. The bomb is only a punctuation mark ending a sentence that is already complete, albeit an exclamation point.

Strand’s poem is not a transliteration of the essay, but rather uses the essay as a springboard, which is typical of the process of inspiration. The poem refers to the essay, affirms it in some ways, and adds to it, or departs from it, in others. As in any work of art that is truly symbolic (Frankenstein and Moby Dick come to mind), this poem has almost endless metaphorical potential. Its metaphorical activity takes place on two interrelated levels—the psychological and the political/social. On the psychological level the poem is a parable about the loss of innocence and of what it means to become an adult in a world that, in the poem’s view at least, is a very dark one. On the political level (which more manifestly refers to Heidegger’s ideas), the poem indicates the darkness of the world by referring in an oblique way to issues and topics that were important at the time the poem was written (the late 1960s), and that remain relevant today. The development of the psychological aspect of the poem is more complete and closer to the surface, but the political aspect is equally important, largely because the darkness of the world as portrayed on the psychological level is the same darkness portrayed on the political level. That is, the violence and breaking that is portrayed on the personal level is intimately connected with, and even gives rise to, the violence and breaking referred to on the political level.

What immediately strikes one at the start of the poem is the stadium-like setting. The relatives are “leaning over,” as though they are sitting in bleachers, and the speaker of the poem is performing a ritualized act in a space that is set apart. The heaps of broken bottles suggest a dangerous ordeal (one thinks of rituals or magic acts in which people walk on broken glass); whatever this space is, it is one where breaking has gone on for some time. The relatives are “staring expectantly” and “urging” the speaker on, like the audience at a sporting event. Sports are ritualized (and thus sublimated) aggression, and are for many (if not most) people a prolonged rite of passage associated with school, especially during adolescence. The audience at scholastic sporting events consists of one’s peers but also, importantly, of parents and other relatives and their friends—people who have participated in the same rites of passage in the fairly recent past.

There is a strong element of eroticism contained in the portrayal of the rite of passage. This is appropriate, since the coming of age that occurs in a rite of passage includes official recognition by the adult world of the child’s now mature sexuality. However, here the eroticism is tinged with sadism, which is consistent with the poem’s dark view. The relatives’ delight in the cruelty they are urging is voyeuristically sadistic: “They moisten their lips with their tongues,” and later, “Break his legs...”//“Now give him a kiss.” There is also a sexual or generational continuity with the audience of relatives, who have already gone through this rite of passage, producing babies who will grow up to have babies, who will themselves go through the rite of passage. As adults, they are the end product of the rite of passage, urging their “boy” to “go on” and do what they have done before. They want him to become like them so the cycle can repeat itself.

The second stanza is a description of what (in the terms of the poem) it means to grow up. A band plays “old fashioned marches.” Marches are ultimately music for going to war, and becoming an adult, along with coming of age sexually, means being old enough to go to war—to be drafted or to enlist. These are old-fashioned marches—they are the marches of the forefathers, the generations of adults and relatives metaphorically standing behind the relatives in the current scene. The protagonist’s mother is “keeping time by stamping her feet.” She is participating in and enjoying both the erotic and the martial aspects of the ritual. The banal infidelity of the protagonist’s father—“My father is kissing a woman who keeps waving/to somebody else”—also represents the casualness of betrayal in a more general sense in the adult world.

In the third and fourth stanzas, the “boy” is a good boy, he “does as he is told.” Again, there is the sadistic eroticism: “Break his legs...//Now give him a kiss.” When the coup de gras is performed, the relatives cheer. The game has been won, the “boy” has become a “man.” Or, at least, that is the implied presumption of the relatives. The method of killing the baby is highly symbolic and dramatic: He is deprived of the power to breathe. Breath is traditionally one of the most prevalent symbols both of physical and of spiritual life. One of the older meanings of the word “spirit” is breath.

“It was about that time I gave up,” at first seems to indicate a breakdown—the actor in the drama couldn’t continue with the cruelty. But really it signals the end of the ritual. The baby is dead. The giving up is in a sense a giving up of resistance to the notion of leaving childhood and becoming an adult. And the last stanza, on the psychological level, makes explicit what we have suspected, if not known, in reading the prior stanzas: The baby is the speaker of the poem. Or more specifically, the baby represents what the speaker of the poem was before the rite of passage. The state of mind the speaker has entered is an ambivalent one—he is unhappy about the fact that the baby haunts him, that “he is what is left of [his] life.” But this ambivalence, though at first it seems subversive, is really a description of the fallen state that, paradoxically, one enters through the rite(s) of passage. Adults are conscious of loss in a way that children are not. Experience brings loss and the accompanying pain of loss, and in a general sense the loss that adults must live with is the loss of the innocence of childhood. Thus there is an interesting inversion or paradox—the rite of passage consists of killing the child in oneself so that one can enter a state in which one is in constant mourning for the child one has killed.

The psychological truths of this poem are powerful and true. And yet in reading them one has the uneasy feeling that these psychological truths are too easy—that the poem spells them out a little too clearly, that they may even be a tiny bit trite. What makes the poem more complex and more satisfying is the political and/or ethical dimension, the dimension which more directly suggests some of the ideas in Heidegger’s essay.

It is interesting that while the psychological strain of meaning in the poem is borne primarily by the human activities (the quotes, the gestures and thoughts of the people), the political or social strain of meaning is borne primarily by the setting and the weather, though of course the two inform one another. To begin with, in addition to venues for sporting events, large stadiums are convenient places for political events: rallies, on the one hand, and mass executions and sadistic games on the other. The use of stadiums for these purposes is common, both in recent history and in the past; Nazi Germany, Latin America, and ancient Rome are only a few obvious examples.

The heaps of broken bottles call to mind, first, Heidegger’s jug. “Jug” is a somewhat antiquated term—bottle is a more contemporary equivalent. In any case this is a setting in which many unities (“things”) have been shattered. And the image itself—the glinting of the bright, sharp glass—indicates the danger of serious injury. One thinks of the practice of putting broken glass on the tops of walls to keep people from climbing over. Again the old-fashioned marches and the mother’s stamping are symbols of war—one cannot help but remember film clips of the music that accompanied state events in Nazi Germany.

And, as a sidelight, one cannot help recalling Heidegger’s ambiguous but well-established participation in National Socialism, which he never completely repudiated. This element adds an odd doubling or tripling to the poem, since the poem comments on the kind of brutality practiced by the Nazis, while it takes its title from an essay by a philosopher who was associated, for a time, with them.

In the second and third stanzas we get a series of indications of the geographical setting: “There are palm trees.//The hills are spotted with orange flamboyants.../.” In the fourth stanza, “The trees bend in the bleak tropical wind.” The setting is clearly tropical, and somewhere in the countryside. Flamboyants are Poinciana, a tropical tree with bright flowers which grows wild in the tropics and is also used for ornamental purposes. The country is hilly. This is also a setting in which rainstorms develop rapidly. The broken bottles glitter in the sun, and then, two stanzas later, the sky begins to darken. The “bleak” tropical wind is an interesting description in that “bleak” is a word that would more readily be associated with a temperate or a dry climate. Thus it is more indicative of the mood of the setting rather than of the objective conditions. Finally, there are a lot of flies in the stadium. While temperate climates have flies, the idea of the presence of a swarm of them ready to consume the baby’s lungs is suggestive of the proliferation of flying insects in tropical countries.

In short, the landscape and the weather are those of Vietnam or Latin America (Africa is another possibility). Darker was first published in 1970, which means the poems were written during the late 60s (one or two may have been written in 1970). This poem could have been written in 1969, one of the worst years of the Vietnam war. Further, as a prominent translator of Latin American poetry, Strand would have been very aware of the politics of Latin America and specifically of the U.S.’s ongoing involvement in the region.

Seen in this light, the poem becomes an expression, almost a parable or allegory, of the brutality of Europe and America toward their southern neighbors. For instance, the relatives could be the ruling elites, the speaker of the poem could be the military represented by an individual American soldier, and the baby could be Vietnam or various Latin American countries, represented by a Vietnamese or Latin American baby. The combination of cruelty and eroticism expresses well the ambiguous nature of our involvement in the less developed world: brutality and exploitation on the one hand, and the illusion of benign intentions on the other (in which many of our politicians, religious figures, and intelligence operatives truly believe, in some twisted way understood only by themselves).

As another sidelight, the line “I keep wondering if it will rain,” is interesting in that it indicates (among other things), on the one hand, the state of dissociation that often accompanies brutal acts, and on the other the mundane nature of brutality. In the midst of this unspeakable and yet commonplace horror, a banal, pedestrian, and largely irrelevant thought passes through the performer’s mind. It is well-known that this is, in fact, a psychological phenomenon found in both perpetrators and victims of brutality.

Finally, in the last stanza, the speaker of the poem tells us of how he is haunted by his act of brutality. Specifically, “wherever I search I find his feet” could be taken in a literal sense as referring in part to the massive legacy of severed body parts associated with wars and with brutal regimes of all kinds. This stanza is an apt metaphor for the somewhat paradoxical phenomenon of collective and individual guilt suffered by the societies of the first world. On the individual level, one thinks of the post-traumatic stress suffered by veterans (which seems to afflict more veterans of wars that occurred after World War II, perhaps because World War II is seen by most people as a just war). On the collective level, America is obsessed with race relations and the legacy of slavery (as well it should be). And of course the insanity of the Vietnam war continues to haunt us on a collective level, as does, to a lesser extent, the United States’ involvement in the politics of Latin America.

All of which brings us back to the title of the poem, and the realization that, whether in Heidegger’s sense or in the poem’s sense, the “dreadful” has been happening for a very long time. And this is true on both the psychological and the political level. The power of the poem comes from the uniting of the two levels—the insight that “the personal is the political.” There is nothing new about political brutality, exploitation, interference, just as there is nothing new about rites of passage that entail the destruction of the child in the adult (“the inner child” to use the trite terminology of pop psychology). And the two are directly related. Perhaps the most obvious embodiment of this truth is the fact that, in our society, the age at which one is considered an adult (18) is the age at which one can legally go or be sent to war (as well as the age of sexual consent). To come of age psychologically is also to reach the age at which one can participate in the brutality of one’s society.

To return to Heidegger, although he dismisses fear of the atomic bomb as a delayed reaction to something that has already occurred, by seeing the bomb as the ultimate expression of the dissociation created by the scientific worldview, he implies that this dissociation is, at least in part, a political or social, and contemporary, dilemma, as well as a psychological dilemma. In Heidegger’s essay, the breaking or abstracting has been accomplished by science; in Strand’s poem the breaking has been accomplished by war and, in general, humanity’s inhumanity. But the two phenomena are closely identified. Most important, science has enhanced the destructive power of war to an unimaginable degree.

Strand’s poem is full of images of breaking, of violating the unity of wholes, of disrupting “thingness.” Broken bottles, broken social codes (the banality of infidelity in the second stanza), broken babies, and, finally, the broken emotional life of the breaker. Thus, the “gathering of important matters,” the wholeness or unity of the “thing” in Heidegger’s special sense, is given a more concrete, more human, and less metaphysical cast in the poem. The rite of passage destroys the wholeness of self that was present in childhood, and at the same time places us in the position of carrying out the political brutality of our society. We must leave the relative innocence and unity of youth for the conflicts and disappointments of adult life.

The cruelty and injustice perpetrated by people (adults) against one another, both on a personal and on a political level, destroys the unity of societies and worldviews, as well as the psychological integrity of individuals. To become an adult, to leave “the waters of childhood” (to quote from the title of another poem by Strand), is to enter “the broken world,” which is made up of the shards of the shattered jug.