Louise Gluck, 1985

The worst this poem can imagine is "what happens to dreamers." The worst is to sleep through a life. By definition, it doesn't matter what the lover dreams; if he dreams, he isn't watching. Nor has the speaker's "weakness" been cured forever. Forever is, in itself, the dreamer's word. As for the peace passion gives: it could
be called courage. Among the residual gifts of love is a composure, an openness to all experience, so profound it amounts to an acceptance of death. Or, more accurately, the future is no longer necessary. One is not rash, neither is one paralyzed by conservatism or hope. Simply, the sense of having lived, of having known one's fate, is vey strong. And that sensation tells us what it is to live without the restrictions of fear. Such moments, in a way, have nothing to teach; they can be neither contrived nor prolonged by will. What they establish is a standard. Not forever, but for one it was possible to refuse consolation, to refuse the blindfold.

"Night Song" issues from, is made possible by, a sudden confidence. Whether finally or briefly, the soul can expose itself to "the revolutions," the massive cycles and upheavals of time. This is the greatest freedom we can know; its source, in the poem, is love, but the experience itself, the sense of being no longer "compelled," is an experience of autonomy. The lover's alert presence is necessary to confirm these sensations, since such experiences must be tested, witnessed.

What the speaker wants is PRESENCE, not union, dissolution, but the condition which preceded it. The choice is not between the dreaming and lovemaking (another escape of self) but between dreaming and watching. Simultaneous consciousness, in other words -- the exultant recognition of one soul by another. The ideal of balance has replaced the fantasy of incorporation. Contact of this sort seems to exist outside of time, beyond the laws of earth: all motion, whether toward future or separation, ends it. Motion is the first law. And as surely as the speaker's state dramatizes one of the soul's primary aims -- to exist distinctly, to know where it ends and the blur of the world begins -- so will the conflicting aim be asserted as the wish to dissolve, to be allied with, absorbed into another. The drive toward oblivion seems to me (as to many others) not a symptom of sickness but a true goal, and this wish of the self to do away with the very boundaries it has struggled to discover and maintain seems to me an endless subject, however we may try to subvert its grandeur.

I don't think of "Night Song" as a love poem. Love is a stimulus, and the advantage of writing out of situations of this kind seems to me an advantage of subject and attitude: one can write as lovers speak, of what is crucial in simple language.

The underlying subject seems to me to be individuality, without which no love can exist -- groups do not love other groups. Love connects one irreplaceable being to another: the payment is terror of death, since each person is unique, each death is singular, an eternal isolation. That we have common drives is consoling, but to dwell on them is to evade the issue of ultimate solitude. The relationships, in this poem, of the various forms of oblivion, of dream to orgasm to death, are less important that the perception of oblivion, in any form, as noncollective. ... "Night Song" suggests that the oblivion we ultimately achieve is an outpost of solitude from which the other is exiled -- your oblivion is not mine, as your dream is not. This last line makes a mockery of placation; it damns the wish it grants. Against the relentless pronoun, the verbs are drumbeats, infantile, primitive. If what we want is oblivion, we are all lucky.

A last point. We are given to assume that morality depends on a regard for consequences. To some extend, this is surely true. But the regard is felt as fear -- in this light, morality appears as a product of intimidation. If "Night Song" connects the idea of freedom to rejection of the future, what is diminished, emotionally, is greed. Not avidity, but compulsive acquisition, need projected into time, the self straining to predict and provide for all foreseeable deficiency. I think the word FREE has no meaning if it does not suggest freedom from greed. To live in the present must mean being unerringly decisive, but choice, there, is easier, not harder. I do not claim to live on this plane, but I can imagine it.

It was clear to me long ago that any hope I had of writing real poetry depended on my living through common experiences. The privileged, the too-protected, the mandarin in my nature would have to be checked. At the same time, I was wary of drama, of disaster too deliberately courted: I have always been too at ease with extremes. What had to be cultivated, beyond a necessary neutrality, was the willingness to be identified with others. Not with the single other, the elect, but with a human community. My wish was to be special. But the representative life I wanted to record had somehow to be lived.

Major experiences vary in form -- what reader and writer learn to do is recognize analogies. I watched my house burn -- in the category of major losses, this made only the most modest start. Nor was it unexpected: I had spent twenty years waiting to undergo the losses I knew to be inevitable. I was obsessed with loss; not surprisingly, I was also acquisitive, possessive. The two tendencies fed each other; every impulse to extend my holdings increase the fundamental anxiety. Actual loss, loss of mere property, was a release, an abrupt transition from anticipation to expertise. I watched the destruction of all that had been, all that would not be again, and all that remained took on a radiance.

These are, in the deepest sense, ordinary experiences. On the subject of change, of loss, we all attain to authority. In my case, the timing was efficient. I was in my late thirties; perhaps I'd learned all I could about preparation, about gathering. The next lesson is abandon, letting go.

jonathan richman, 1970

She'd eat garbage, eat shit, get stoned

I stay alone, eat health food at home