In Dreams Begin Responsibility: Martin Luther King Day 2010

Reiko Eoh's cartoon commentary on Martin Luther King Day 2010 reminds me of the phrase "In dreams begins responsibility," used as an epigraph for William Butler Yeats' poem "Responsibilities 1914" (and attributed, mysteriously enough, to simply an "Old Play").


The phrase is sometimes quoted as "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," the title of a frequently anthologized short story by Delmore Schwartz. In one of the PBS American Masters series documentaries, the rock musician Lou Reed (a former student of Schwartz), talks about the influence the poet and writer had on him as an artist. Reed calls it "the best short story I'd ever read."


I haven't yet read it, but would like to now. Wikipedia summarizes this way:

The story tells of an unnamed young man who has a dream that he is in an old-fashioned movie theater in 1909. As he sits down to watch the film, he starts to realize that it is a motion picture documenting his parents' courtship. The black-and-white silent film is of very poor quality, and the camera is shaky, but nonetheless he is engrossed. Soon the young man starts to get upset. He yells things at the screen, trying to influence the outcome of his parents' courtship and the other people in the audience begin to think he is crazy. Several times the character breaks down. In the end he shouts at his parents when it appears they are going to break up, and he is dragged out of the theater by an usher who reprimands him. The animadversion is important to the story, as it reveals a bit of the character's insecurity. In the end, the character wakes up from his dream and notes that it is the snowy morning of his twenty-first birthday.

(Schwartz's own parents divorced when he was nine, an event that is said to have had a profound impact on him.) LOVE this pic of Delmore at an angle in his chair, with all those books at angles and odds, too. And this other photo of him with his bookish cohort.

 Here is Yeats' poem:

"In dreams begins responsibility."

                   Old Play.

"How am I fallen from myself, for a long time now
I have not seen the Prince of Chang in my dreams."

                           Khoung-fou-tseu.

PARDON, old fathers, if you still remain
Somewhere in ear-shot for the story's end,
Old Dublin merchant "free of ten and four"
Or trading out of Galway into Spain;
And country scholar, Robert Emmet's friend,
A hundred-year-old memory to the poor;
Traders or soldiers who have left me blood
That has not passed through any huxter's loin,
Pardon, and you that did not weigh the cost,
Old Butlers when you took to horse and stood
Beside the brackish waters of the Boyne
Till your bad master blenched and all was lost;
You merchant skipper that leaped overboard
After a ragged hat in Biscay Bay,
You most of all, silent and fierce old man
Because you were the spectacle that stirred
My fancy, and set my boyish lips to say
"Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun ";
Pardon that for a barren passion's sake,
Although I have come close on forty-nine
I have no child, I have nothing but a book,
Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine.

January 1914.

That's a long way from Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, and from the headaches facing Obama. The common theme? Something to do with legacy, with the traces of history inherited from one's forebears. The specific challenge of shouldering the burden of "the dream," in all of its ambiguity. The film of the past ("screen memories," as Freud would describe them) that affect our Ability to Respond. The sense of "falling from oneself." The desire to affect both chance and change, and to avoid squandering energy on barren passions.

As Martin Luther King, Jr. put it in a letter from the Birmingham jail:

"We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right."

Harry Belafonte and Odetta as Henry and Liza

Harry Belafonte performed "There's a Hole in the Bucket" with Odetta (Odetta Holmes) on May 2, 1960 in Carnegie Hall. This version appeared on his album, Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall, where he also sang with The Chad Mitchell Trio and Miriam Makeba.

There are a couple of YouTube Videos of this song performed by Belafonte and Odetta. Not impressive for their visual content, they nonetheless capture the vocal moment when these two wonderful performers played Henry and Liza. What strikes me is how clear and simple and evocative the music is: just two voices and guitar, with all the annoyance and irony of an "infinite loop" between an exasperated woman and a man reluctant to "fix it" on his own.

The photo of Belafonte here is from the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C with Sidney Poitier and Charlton Heston, back when Heston had causes other than the NRA.

Sadly, Odetta died on December 2nd, 2008, before she could perform (as she had hoped) at Obama's inauguration. In 1961, she sang "I'm on My Way" before Martin Luther King's famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial. Obama asked her to sing that song at his inauguration 46 years later: it would have been an amazing "rhyme in time." (I do love Odetta's hats in these two pictures.)