SOURCE: "Art and AIDS; or, How Will Culture Cure You?," in Raritan, Vol. 14, No. 3, Winter, 1995, pp. 103-18.

[In the essay below, Hammer meditates on various aspects of the relation between "culture" and "AIDS"—between aesthetics and sexuality—by comparing Rich's "In Memoriam: D. K." and James Merrill's "Farewell Performance."]

This essay will address the question in my title through a reading of two poems. One is by Adrienne Rich, the other by James Merrill; both are elegies for the literary critic David Kalstone. In each case, Kalstone's death in 1986 from AIDS-related causes provokes a troubled meditation on the relation between culture and AIDS. Culture is Rich's word for the high art of Mozart and Keats, and I will use it in that restricted, old-fashioned sense, since it is exactly the high-art forms of the ballet, opera, and lyric that are in question for Rich and Merrill. Culture is seen in their poems as powerless to help people with AIDS, so removed is it from the material realities of disease and death. Yet culture also seems strangely involved in the suffering caused by HIV, as if it were itself infected. The instability of the relation between culture and AIDS in these poems—the feeling that high art is alternately remote from the catastrophe "AIDS" names and deeply implicated in it—structures the unstable, ambivalent relations between these poets and their friend. Those relations include in each case erotic longing and erotophobic dread. At issue for both poets is the connectedness of grief and fear—grief that they have been separated from their friend, and fear that they may be reunited with him.

The pairing of Rich and Merrill, the political poet and the esthete, may seem an unlikely one, but there is a precedent for it in Five Temperaments, Kalstone's critical study of Lowell, Bishop, Merrill, Rich, and Ashbery, published in 1977. Although set forth in Kalstone's characteristically modest, nonpolemical prose (or just for this reason), Five Temperaments helped to define and secure one of the canonical formations in postmodern American poetry. Kalstone's practice in Five Temperaments—his focus on individual poets, the informal elegance of his style, his reliance not on any kind of theory but on his own taste and discrimination (his own "temperament")—reflects the virtues he sees in the poets he writes about. The group they constitute in his book is imagined less as a movement or school than as a coterie. That it is a homosexual coterie goes without saying—literally, since Kalstone does not explicitly discuss lesbian and gay sexuality, although only one of the "five temperaments" he studies—Robert Lowell's—is straight. Kalstone simply assumes, rather than argues, the paradigmatic status of homosexual writing, queer poems are the norm in his work. In a sense, the question of sexuality is sublimated in his criticism in the same way that he sees sexuality sublimated in the poems he discusses. The word temperament is important. Borrowed from Balanchine's Four Temperaments, it calls attention to Kalstone's faith in the value of the individual sensibility. Both essential to the making of art and itself the outcome of esthetic experience, sensibility for Kalstone is created through a tempering process by which the poet moves beyond the passions and losses of lived experience—seen, in Kalstone's chapters on Rich and Merrill, as specifically sexual fires—toward a distinctive, formalized self. Ballet is a suggestive model for this process: its way of using the natural body, which it turns into a stylized esthetic form, is analogous to the way these poets recreate their lives in and through art. The result in Five Temperaments is an ethical criticism centered on the question of what kind of life poetry makes available to poets and readers. Near the end of his book Kalstone writes: "we learn from the best of these poets what writing can and cannot do for their lives."

Given this emphasis in his criticism on poetry's value for living, it is perhaps not surprising that a number of poets have written about Kalstone's death, asking, in effect, what art could or could not do for Kalstone himself. These poets include, in addition to Rich and Merrill, Henri Cole, Alfred Corn, Anthony Hecht, Richard Howard, J. McClatchy, and Mona Van Duyn. They are poets strongly identified with the high-art traditions I am calling culture; and when they ask what art could or could not do for Kalstone, they are also asking what it can or cannot do for themselves and their readers. Kalstone is recalled in their poems as a beloved friend whose cultivation, sensitivity, and wit give moving proof that devotion to art can sustain and elevate a life. But they also suggest how AIDS threatens this idealization of the life-enhancing powers of art. In particular, these poems link anxieties about male homosexuality with anxieties about the effects of art. Although the connection between HIV-transmission and gay male sex is only contingent, male homosexuality and AIDS are indissolubly bound in the imaginative constructions of our society. This is the case in the nuanced literary texts I will be discussing no less than in the tabloid fantasies of mass culture. For Rich and Merrill, the sublimation of sexuality in esthetic experience seems to transfer the threat of infection from the realm of sexuality to that of art, leading both poets to wonder whether there is not something potentially unhealthy, even contaminating about art—above all, about art's effects on the way one lives. Kalstone makes such a compelling subject for poetry because his life and death both affirm and challenge the humanistic ideal of a cultured life, an ideal that is crucial not only to poetry that Kalstone particularly admired, but to most poetry written in America today.

Rich's poetry is not an exception, although her feminism makes her critical of the universalizing terms in which culture is usually defended. She began her career as a formalist poet writing in the same mode as Merrill. When she redefined herself as a feminist poet, Rich repudiated the elitism, as she saw it, of her early work. But this development was not a rejection, as much as an extension, of an assumption Rich shared with Kalstone: that culture can and should help people live. So when, in the middle of her poem "In Memoriam: D. K.," Rich asks Kalstone, "How will culture cure you?," Rich is asking him the kind of question he asked in criticism, and that she has always asked in poetry. In the poem's opening paragraph, Rich speaks of her friend in the third-person as if he were ill but still alive and walking on the street. In the second paragraph, Rich addresses Kalstone in the second-person, asking him how he thinks culture is going to help him in his illness.

     And what good will it do you
     to go home and put on the Mozart Requiem?
     Read Keats? How will culture cure you?
                                      Poor,
     unhappy
     unwell culture what can it sing or say
     six weeks from now, to you?

It is possible to hear these questions as mocking ones. Heard in this way, they ironically, aggressively separate Rich from the culture-lover, the male critic who, infected by HIV, returns home to a sheltered space of esthetic reflection and listens to Mozart or reads Keats. In this setting, the contemplation of art is a means of thinking about dying that does not oblige the person with AIDS to take action or to connect his condition with that of less privileged people out on the street—to whose fate, however, his own remains bound. Bitterly, Rich's poem seems to ask of the dead man, What good does your refined temperament do you now? In another sense, though, Rich is asking Kalstone about the limits of her own ability, as a poet, to help him, as if she were saying. What good does my refined temperament, my culture, do you now? That guilty question is close to the surface of the poem when Rich shifts her attention to culture itself, which, as if sympathetically, seems as "Poor, unhappy," and "unwell" as the person with AIDS. In its incapacity to cure, culture has come to seem contaminated—elite, decadent, ineffectual.

There is also an implication that, before it can cure, culture itself must be cured; which is to say, culture must be disassociated from death, or more exactly, from a certain morbid construction of desire. Of course, the deathliness of desire and the desirability of death are familiar ideas in Romantic art. In her elegy for Kalstone, Rich is consciously writing against that tradition and its identification of beauty with morbidity. That is the polemical force of the striking and deliberate echo of Keats in Rich's last paragraph. Here is Keats's famous fragment, "This living hand," followed by the closing lines of Rich's poem:

     This living hand, now warm and capable
     Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
     And in the icy silence of the tomb,
     So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
     That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood,
     So in my veins red life might stream again,
     And thou be conscience-calmed. See, here it is—
     I hold it towards you.
 
     Give me your living hand  If I could take the hour
     death moved into you undeclared, unnamed
     —even if sweet, if I could take that hour
     between my forceps tear at it like a monster
     wrench it out of your flesh   dissolve its shape in quicklime
     and make you well again
                         no, not again
     but still….

"This living hand," Keats writes, extending it to the reader in a gesture that promises not so much to save the dying poet as to draw the reader into the text's odd, unliving afterlife. "Give me your living hand," Rich replies, speaking to her friend as if to Keats in an imaginative move that promises to reverse the deathly spell of the Romantic text and place Rich's poem safely, unambiguously on the side of life (where the poem appears, like the elegy by Merrill, in the anthology of AIDS poetry edited by Michael Klein, Poets for Life).

When I told a friend, a poet, I was working on Rich's elegy, he said, "I hate that poem! It's like Kalstone read Keats, got sick, and died." I don't hate Rich's poem—I admire it, but my friend was right about what it means to read Keats in this case. In the poem's first paragraph, death has "its music," as autumn does in Keats's final ode, and music somehow carries death within it. That opening paragraph makes us feel that reading Keats, or listening to Mozart, is like looking at beautiful flowers, and that these are both sexually exciting and potentially dangerous acts.

      A man walking on the street
      feels unwell   has felt unwell
      all week, a little   Yet the flowers crammed
      in pots on the corner:   furled anemones:
      he knows they open
      burgundy, violet, pink, amarillo
      all the way to their velvet cores
      The flowers hanging over the fence:   fuchsias:
      each tongued, staring,   all of a fire:
      the flowers  He who has
      been happy oftener than sad
      carelessly happy   well oftener than sick
      one of the lucky   is thinking about death
      and its music   about poetry
      its translations of his life

The man on the street "feels unwell," "Yet the flowers" call him out of himself; he looks on them as a consolation, if not a cure, for disease. But they signify something more like the cause of the man's illness, since the poem allows one to feel that it was the carelessness of his happiness, the false sense of immunity that came with being "one of the lucky," a man privileged by temperament and culture, that exposed him to infection to begin with. Rather than making sexuality seem as innocent as esthetic contemplation, the implicit analogy between them makes esthetic contemplation seem as highly fraught as sexuality. The flowers arouse in Rich's friend a desire to penetrate them, or to offer himself for penetration in the same way that the flowers seem to, these brilliantly colored, "furled" anemones that open ("he knows") "all the way to their velvet cores." The "tongued" and "staring" blooms are a line-up of boys, "all of a fire," as beautiful and threatening as the death-bound young man who reaches out to the reader in Keats's fragment.

Because death and desire are linked in this way here, when Rich tries, in the last paragraph, to remove death from her poem, she must also try to remove sexual desire. "If I could take the hour / death moved into you," Rich begins, envisioning death as a force that comes from outside the self, and specifically as a penetrating sexual partner. The metaphor fixes the "undeclared, unnamed" origin of infection in a moment of "carelessly happy" sex—what Rich refers to as the fatal "hour / death moved into you," She calls that hour a "a monster" not so much although, as because, it was also a "sweet" time: the horror Rich expresses arises both from the irreversibility of HIV infection and from the sexual form of its transmission. The irreversibility of HIV and its sexual transmission connect infection, in this case, with human conception—only it is death, not life, that gay male sex breeds. That is the underlying fantasy, I think, at the end of the poem. When the poet wishes she could extract death from the sick man's body, the tool that Rich imagines using, forceps, evokes childbirth and surgery at once, and she becomes a midwife bringing forth a monster born of desire and disease.

The man in the first line of Rich's poem, "walking on the street" like anyone else, confronts us with the "oxymoronic image of a healthy sick person," as Peter Bowen, in another context, has described the paradoxical status of HIV-infected people who are asymptomatic. The image is confusing, Bowen explains, because, "in addition to raising the frightening possibility that anyone … could be infected and not show it," it "complicates the rigid binary division that categorizes people as either healthy or sick, living or dying, and, to some extent, innocent or guilty." Rich moves to resolve this confusion of categories at the end of her poem when she reestablishes the difference between the living and dying, healthy and sick, by imagining the removal of death from the body of her friend. But Rich's fantasy only restates the confusion of categories she began with, and it points to her own implication in death. When Rich returns to "the hour / death moved into you," she is not reversing, as much as repeating, the penetration of the body that signifies death in this poem. For Rich's desire to enter her friend's body retraces the path death took there, putting her in contact with it. There is also a sense that, when she imagines her removal of death as a form of childbirth, Rich is placing the gay man with AIDS in the position of a woman. That gesture draws Kalstone away from the risks of gay male sexual practice evoked earlier in the poem, and it interprets Rich's relation to him according to the model of nurturant relations between women Rich has elsewhere called "the lesbian continuum." But the gesture works in the opposite direction too by emphasizing the poet's identification with her friend and drawing her closer to his unhealthy condition. That is, if the feminizing of the gay man with AIDS makes him like the poet, and therefore alive and well, it also makes her like him, which means infected and dying.

The danger Rich's identification with Kalstone conveys is reinforced by the ghostly presence of Keats's fragment. Recall the reciprocity Keats evokes: "if it were cold / And in the icy silence of the tomb," the speaker's outstretched hand would "So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights / That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood, / So in my veins red life might stream again." For the reader Keats addresses, the desire to exchange fluids with the dead—"red life"—will be motivated by a disturbed conscience, rather than sympathy. In the age of AIDS, "This living hand" speaks to the sexual guilt of survivors, and it proposes a kind of erotic sacrifice as a means of discharging that guilt (through a vampire fantasy long associated with same-sex desire: you will have to give up your own life, in the form of your blood, to satisfy the dead, the contamination of whose blood has killed them). Rich does not speak of such a terrifying exchange of fluids. Breaking off before completing her final sentence, the one that begins "if I could," Rich stops short of specifying what she would do, or give up, in order to bring her friend back to life. But Keats's proposition haunts Rich's incompleted one, which ends abruptly, but eloquently enough, in silence.

Rich's wish in this poem is to take hold of AIDS and "dissolve its shape in quicklime," but it is AIDS that takes hold of her poem and dissolves it. That is the powerful effect of the final fragmentary lines. Throughout the poem, Rich arranges her free verse with double-spacing within the line. These caesuras create a small but notable break within each line (suggesting an internal threat perhaps like that of the virus itself). At the end of the poem, Rich's lines break apart. This breaking occurs when Rich constructs the penultimate line by dropping a half-line down from the one above it ("and make you well again / no, not again") and then ends with a two-word phrase and ellipsis: "but still…." These lines push Rich's poem to the edge of inarticulateness: Rich appears unsure of what she has "to sing or say" to her friend now that she has relinquished the fantasy of healing him. Admitting culture's incapacity to "cure" AIDS, to make the person with AIDS "well again," Rich claims for her poem only the power of make-believe—the power to speak to Kalstone as if he were not dead "but still" alive and uninfected. The final ellipsis enacts a falling away, then, that acknowledges that the hand Rich wishes to grasp is no longer living. There is grief in this conclusion. But there is also relief: the moment at which she is separated from her friend, when it becomes impossible to speak to him any longer (to go on pretending), the poet is also released from the threat the dead hand represents. At the end of the poem, Rich, not Kalstone, is restored to life.

..…

Merrill's elegy for Kalstone is a suggestive complement to Rich's, because it explores the same confusion of categories hers does, but comes to a different conclusion. Rich's effort to place art on the side of life is consistent with the distrust of artifice, virtuosity, and performance she has shown throughout her career. In contrast, Merrill has always been dedicated to exactly these dimensions of esthetic experience. The title of his elegy, "Farewell Performance," declares that stance archly and sadly. But like Rich, Merrill is skeptical about culture's power to console. His poem, inscribed for DK, begins with an account of an evening at the ballet. It is perhaps a memory of the New York City Ballet performance of Mozartiana that Suzanne Farrell dedicated to Kalstone, her friend and admirer, two days after his death.

     Art. It cures affliction. As lights go down and
     Maestro lifts his wand, the unfailing sea change
     starts within us. Limber alembics once more
     make of the common
 
     lot a pure, brief gold. At the end our bravos
     call them back, sweat-soldered and leotarded,
     back, again back—anything not to face the
     fact that it's over.

"Art. It cures affliction." Merrill can only take this truism seriously by forgetting about his subject. But then that is just the cure art seems to offer, a temporary forgetting. Merrill has come to the ballet in memory of Kalstone, the balletomane, but the evening allows Merrill to forget his grief for a while, even as the account of it postpones, until the start of the third stanza, Merrill's acknowledgment of his friend's death: "You are gone." "At the end, our bravos / call them back," Merrill says of the dancers. The audience urges them "back, again back," with a will "not to face the / fact that it's over," implying that the need to defer this moment had compelled the audience's pleasure in the dance from the beginning. In this sense, art is no cure at all.

In fact, it might be seen as a cause of disease. This is the possibility Merrill goes on to explore, in a move strikingly like Rich's, when he compares esthetic experience to infection. This is Merrill's story of his own role in the performance of a private ceremony—the release of Kalstone's ashes in Long Island Sound.

     You are gone. You'd caught like a cold their airy
     lust for essence. Now, in the furnace parched to
     ten or twelve light handfuls, a mortal gravel
     sifted through fingers.
 
     coarse yet grayly glimmering sublimate of
     palace days. Strauss, Sidney, the lover's plaintive
     Can't we just be friends? which your breakfast
     phone call
     clothed in amusement,
 
     this is what we paddled a neighbor's dinghy
     out to scatter—Peter who grasped the buoy,
     I who held the box underwater, freeing
     all it contained. Past
 
     sunny, fluent soundings that gruel of selfhood
     taking manlike shape for one last jeté on
     ghostly—wait, ah!—point into darkness vanished.
     High up, a gull's wings
 
     clapped. The house lights (always supposing, caro,
     Earth remains your house) at their brightest set the
     scene for good: true colors, the sun-warm hand to
     cover my wet one….

"You'd caught like a cold their airy / lust for essence," Merrill jokes, as if to explain the simple fact that "You are gone." Is there a sense in which Kalstone is dead because he loved the New York City Ballet? To answer that question, we need to remember that the dancers' transcendental drive is a lustful one, and that this lust can be "caught" like a cold. In "Matinees," a sonnet sequence that is also dedicated to Kalstone, Merrill makes the same set of associations. These lines come near the end of the sequence.

     When Jan Kiepura sang His Handsomeness
     Of Mantua those high airs light as lust
     Attuned one's bare throat to the dagger-thrust.
     Living for them would have been death no less.
 
     Or Lehmann's Marschallin!—heartbreak so shrewd,
     So ostrich-plumed, one ached to disengage
     Oneself from a last love, at center stage,
     To the beloved's dazzled gratitude.
 
     What havoc certain Saturday afternoons
     Wrought upon a bright young person's morals
     I now leave to the public to condemn.
 
     The point thereafter was to arrange for one's
     Own chills and fever, passions and betrayals.
     Chiefly in order to make song of them.

Grand opera, not ballet, is the art form in question here. The soprano's thrillingly "high airs" operate like "lust" to open the poet's own throat to receive a deadly, sexual "dagger-thrust." In this theater of queer desires, where Merrill and Kalstone are both at home, art triumphs over nature, and the body opens itself to overwhelming, transforming passions. The self forged in this theater is a cultivated temperament, what "Farewell Performance" calls the "grayly glimmering sublimate of / palace days, Strauss, Sidney, the lover's plaintive / Can't we just be friends?" But the passage through fire "Farewell Performance" concerns is not metaphorical; Merrill is discussing the cremation of his friend's body and the scattering of his ashes. "Matinees" (where the opera audience is a "furnace roaring praise") was written twenty years before "Farewell Performance." Viewed from the perspective of the later poem, the plan to arrange "for one's / Own chills and fever, passions and betrayals," is provocative. Someone might want to ask: Did David Kalstone kill himself? But the real question is: How can Merrill avoid that suggestion—and its homophobic charge—without also renouncing the desire for deathlike raptures?

Leo Bersani and, more recently, Tim Dean have addressed the general implications of that question by using the psychoanalytic concept of the death drive to locate a self-destructive moment in gay desire that is not simply an internalization of the murderous will of the so-called general population. I will not try to summarize their complex arguments, but I want to take from Dean, in particular, Lacan's reformulation of the death drive as the expression of an internal psychic conflict. In Dean's view, "Perhaps the greatest psychic horror of AIDS for a culture that always segregates and shifts death elsewhere is the way AIDS intertwines death with life—and with what is generally assumed to be the life force: the sex drive." This is the horror we see in Rich's elegy for Kalstone. For Dean, that horror is essential to jouissance, the notoriously untranslatable term Lacan uses to define the pleasure beyond the pleasure principle that is at the heart of human sexuality. Among American critics, jouissance has often been identified with a certain uncritical celebration of sexuality. Dean wishes to restore to it the negativity the term conveys in Lacan. "In its combination of sex and death," Dean explains, "jouissance is like AIDS"; and in this sense, the intertwining of sex and death in AIDS can be seen as a paradigm, not a perversion, of sexual desire. The idea is important because it breaks down the binary division between the living and the dead, and it gives us a theoretical model for "the oxymoronic image of a healthy sick person." With Dean's argument in mind, we can understand the "confusing" image of the person who is at once HIV-infected and asymptomatic as an image of the confusion of life and death that, in Lacan as in Freud, structures psychic life in general. The point is not that there is no difference between those who are infected with HIV and those who are not, but that the special "horror" of AIDS—its linking of sex and death—cannot be confined to the gay man with AIDS.

I think the final stanzas of "Farewell Performance" work toward the same idea. At first, Merrill seems to accept his severance from Kalstone when Peter, his lover, places his "sunwarm," living hand on Merrill's wet one. Peter's gesture recalls the poet to life, drying and warming the hand that released the dead man's remains into the underworld. But it is not easy to let go of the dead, and the question of the poet's relation to his dead friend returns when the dancers return to the stage for a last bow.

Back they come. How you would have loved it. We in
turn have risen. Pity and terror done with,
programs furled, lips parted, we jostle forward
eager to hail them,
 
more, to join the troupe—will a friend enroll us
one fine day? Strange, though. For up close their magic
self-destructs. Pale, dripping, with downcast eyes they've
seen where it led you.

Here Merrill recovers, not his friend, but the dancers his friend loved, who are also figures for his lovers. From the beginning, there is an interesting vagueness about the dancers. They are simply they—a pronoun that gives their bodies an indistinct, spectral quality, allowing them to float free of personality and gender, even as the poet emphasizes their physicality. "Sweat-soldered," when we see them in the second stanza, the dancers are fused together by glistening traces of the "sea-change" that was their performance. It is over, but they return, esthetic forms—stylized bodies—that triumph over time. Yet "up close their magic / self-destructs." "Self-destructs," because their sweat is a sign of human labor: their magic is dispelled by the same force, the body, that created it; their sweat reveals the bodily effort necessary to produce the transcendent effect of their effortlessness. For the audience as well as the dancers, it is a moment of desublimation that brings to consciousness the sexual intensities submerged in, and yet animating, the performance. In this sense, Merrill's verb "self-destructs" seems more pointed, suggesting not only that the magic of the dance destroys itself, but that it impels those under its influence to do the same. Perhaps the excitement of esthetic experience, like sexuality, is self-destructive in a way that Lacan's concept of the death drive is intended to describe.

"The aggressivity that interests Lacan," writes Richard Boothby, a valuable expositor of Lacan and Freud, "is not a defense of an ideal unity of the self but a rebellion against it. Aggressivity is a drive toward violation of the imaginary form of the body that models the ego." The aggressivity that Boothby speaks of works like the dancers' "airy / lust for essence": it uses the body to speak on behalf of the inexpressible desires excluded by the social ego, that is, everything in subjectivity that lies beyond representation. Expressing the inexpressible, the dancers' mastery of the body extends to the point of its violation and unmaking. This is the point arrived at in the middle of Merrill's poem when the dead man's ashes momentarily cohere in the "manlike shape" of a dancer—before they vanish into ocean darkness. From their own "sea-change," Merrill's dancers return to the stage "pale" and "dripping," as if drained or drowned. I would like to think that Merrill's language here, reinforced by his decision to write in Sapphic meter, is intended to recall Sappho's second ode, perhaps the most famous lyric expression of same-sex desire and one of Longinus's examples of the sublime. Sappho's poem breaks off at the moment when, bearing her toward the woman she wants, passion drives the poet toward death: "Cold sweat pours off me; shivering grips me all over; I am paler than grass; I seem near to dying" (in Neil Hertz's translation). Like disease, desire seizes Sappho with a force she cannot contain—no more than the dancers can stop themselves from sweating. The fluids their bodies release (like tears, like cum, like night sweats) cnact a radical dissolution of self.

The complexity of Merrill's relation to his dead friend is made clear in those closing stanzas. Wishing he could share the encore with Kalstone (and so call him back), Merrill is drawn to the stage in an erotic flurry ("lips parted") with the rest of the audience; perhaps Peter is included in the "we" Merrill describes. Merrill finds himself desiring not simply to hail the dancers in their other world, but to join them there. Feigning a giddy naiveté, Merrill wonders aloud, "will a friend enroll us / one fine day?" The troupe Merrill speaks of is an elite company of artists, like that of Five Temperaments, as surely as it is the spectral society of the AIDS dead. Heard as a question about sexually transmitted disease, the answer to Merrill's query is. Yes indeed, a friend may enroll you; maybe he already has. It must be this recognition that determines the poet's sudden sense of alienation ("Strange, though"), his abrupt recoil from the self-destroying magic of the troupe. It is hard not to hear a homophobic moral in Merrill's last sentence: "with downcast eyes they've / seen where it led you." That phrase "led you" evokes art's power to seduce those who live for it, with the pejorative meaning of "lead astray"; and there is no question but that the poet's friend has been led to death. Yet any sense in which Merrill may be felt to stand apart from his friend at the end of the poem, immune to art's magic, is qualified by the "downcast" eyes of the dancers. "Downcast" is an exceptionally rich word in this context. It implies mourning, regret, and shame; it is an English version of the Greek word "catastrophe"; and it reminds us that at this moment the dancers' eyes meet those of the audience below them. The magic of the dance led David Kalstone to the lip of the stage where James Merrill now stands in his place. The scene restages the scattering of Kalstone's ashes, when Merrill's own eyes were downcast, watching as his friend—with "one last jeté"—vanished in the waters below him. Now, the dancers look down on Merrill, who looks up at them. Who is in the underworld and who is not?

Culture cures no one in Merrill's poem. What it does do—what esthetic experience does—is break down the boundary between people on stage and in the audience, between people who suffer and those who observe them. Art, in this specific sense, communicates AIDS. At the end of Merrill's poem, in that final stanza, the dead and living recognize each other—or recognize themselves in each other—with a feeling of complicity I want to call love.