The Dreamer and the Watcher
[In this essay, originally published in 1985, Glück elucidates the process through which a poem takes shape out of her ordinary experience. She also discusses particular tasks she has set herself concerning matters of form, structure, rhythm, and syntax.]
I have to say at once that I am uneasy with commentary. My insights on what I perceive to be the themes of this poem are already expressed: the poem embodies them. I can't add anything; what I can do is make the implicit explicit, which exactly reverses the poet's ambition. Perhaps the best alternative is to begin in circumstance.
In April of 1980, my house was destroyed by fire. A burned house: a reprimand to the collector. Gradually certain benefits became apparent. I felt grateful; the vivid sense of escape conferred on daily life an aura of blessedness. I felt lucky to wake up, lucky to make the beds, lucky to grind the coffee. There was also, after a period of devastating grief, a strange exhilaration. Having nothing, I was no longer hostage to possessions. For six weeks, my husband and son and I lived with friends; in May we moved into Plainfield Village, which seemed, after the isolation of the country road, miraculously varied, alive.
At that time, I hadn't written anything for about six months. The natural silence after a book. Then the natural silence imposed by crisis. I was oddly at peace with it. What word did I use? Necessary, appropriate—whatever I said, the fact is that for once I relinquished the anxiety which, in my mind, ensured the return of vision. That first summer after the fire was a period of rare happiness—not ecstasy but another state, one more balanced, serene, attentive.
Toward the end of June, I began writing again, working on a poem called "Mock Orange." Then that poem was finished; in rapid succession, over a period of about two weeks, I wrote twelve more. Such experiences are, in many lives, a commonplace. But for me this was unprecedented and unexpectedly frightening. I kept feeling the poems weren't mine but collages of remembered lines. When I thought otherwise, I thought such fluency meant I was going to die, not sometime, but very soon. At such moments, for the first time in my life, I wished not to write; for the first time, I wanted survival above all else. That wish had no influence on behavior. Other factors—twenty years of discipline and obsession—were more powerful. When, of itself, the seizure ended, I was left with a sense of direction, a sense of how I wanted to sound. I wanted to locate poems in a now that would never recur, in a present that seemed to me utterly different from my previous uses of that tense. I had tried, always, to get at the unchanging. But, beginning at this time, my definitions of essential were themselves altering. I wanted, as well, poems not so much developed as undulant, more fire than marble. The work I'd just done suggested these possibilities. Meaning, it suggested a method, a tone. The chief attribute of that tone, as I heard it, was urgency, even recklessness….
In practical terms, in the period before the fire I had set myself certain assignments. In the gloomy, unproductive winter of 1980, I was sorting, analyzing, trying to identify in my poems those habitual gestures—signature rhythms, tricks of syntax, and so on—that had to be discarded, trying, at the same time, to see...
(This entire section contains 2821 words.)
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what constructions I had tended to avoid. I had made a style of avoiding contractions and questions; it seemed to me I should learn to use them. Both forms felt completely alien, which was encouraging. That is, I allowed myself to believe something profound had been addressed. My work has always been strongly marked by a disregard for the circumstantial, except insofar as it could be transformed into paradigm. The poems inDescending Figure aim at a kind of terminal authority: they will not be distracted by the transitory, the partial; they reserve their love for what doesn't exist. I expect that, to some degree, this disposition not to acquiesce will always inform my work: an aspect of character. An aspect, also, of the passion for form. But if writing is to be a discovery, it must explore the unknown, and the unknown, to me, was informality—contractions and questions specify the human, not the oracular, voice.
"Night Song" was written in the early part of 1981, about six months after the period I've described. It's not clear to me to what extent the poem reflects either these concerns or these events. I find traces of both in the lines. And yet, the poem could not have been predicted. All this is something like looking at an old photograph of a friend: you can see readily how that child came to be this adult. But it doesn't work the other way; you can't find in the blurred, soft face of an infant the inevitable adult structure.
The process of writing doesn't, in my experience, vary much. What varies is the time required. For me, all poems begin in some fragment of motivating language—the task of writing a poem is the search for context. Other imaginations begin, I believe, in the actual, in the world, in some concrete thing which examination endows with significance. That process is generative: its proliferating associations produce a broad, lush, inclusive and, at times, playful poetry; its failures seem simply diffuse, without focus. My own work begins at the opposite end, at the end, literally, at illumination, which has then to be traced back to some source in the world. This method, when it succeeds, makes a thing that seems irrefutable. Its failure is felt as portentousness.
"Night Song" began with its first stanza, heard whole. And a working title: "Siren Song." A seduction. Are all seductions riddled with the imperative? As I remember, I had been thinking, on and off, of Psyche and Eros, thinking specifically of the illustration which had introduced these figures to me in childhood: the mortal woman bending over the ravishing god. This image remained with me, an independent fact, so divested of narrative that for years I didn't remember that Psyche had to be pressured into this betrayal. In my mind, Psyche leaning over Eros stood for the human compulsion to see, to know, for the rejection of whatever comfort results from deception. The figures suggested, as well, the dilemma of sexuality: the single body split apart again, an old subject; the exhausting obligation to recognize the other as other, as not part of the self.
For some months, I had no idea what to do with this beginning. The lines did seem a beginning: they were a summons, after all. In some sense, the "you" at this point was myself. "The calm of darkness is the horror of heaven"—the lesson was the lesson I keep trying to learn. But the poem had, I thought, to be dramatic.
When work resumed (how, why, I don't know), it went quickly. The dramatic situation remains sketchy—perhaps there is not enough background, in both senses of the word. But the truth is I didn't care about how these people got to this beach, or where the beach was. I could imagine no answers to such questions that were not conventional. What compelled me were the figures juxtaposed by this reunion: Eros and Psyche; the dreamer and the watcher.
What's essential is the idea of reunion; there has been provided, in reality, an exact replica of dream. Which event presumably erases the need for compensation or escape. And yet two primary responses suggest themselves: one can repudiate the translation or, in a kind of exorcism, one may permit the actual to supplant the dreamed. But immersion in time is a shock, involving real forfeits—of perfection, of the fantasy of eternity. That shock could be predicted. The surprise is that there are benefits to this perspective. To someone who feels, however briefly, without longing or regret, life on the shore, the life of dream, of waiting, seems suddenly tragic in its implications.
"Mild expectancy": what can be wrong with that? The lover hardly seems to be suffering. In his fatigue, he relaxes easily into the natural cycle, whereas the speaker's conscious determination places her outside these rhythms. This determination to stay awake is fueled by terror; it is, throughout the poem, a continuous, an active, choice. Expectancy, the sign of a heart set on the future—suddenly this seems a grave misuse of time. To dream, to yearn, or, in the realm of consciousness, to plan, to calculate—all a waste, a delusion. To live this way is to slight the earth. Not that the future isn't real. The delusion lies in projecting oneself into it indefinitely. One cannot live both there and here.
What the future holds is clear enough: the beach, the night world are dense with presentiments. Everywhere is stillness, the stillness of sleep which cannot help but resemble the stillness of death. What life there is regresses, the gulls, by example, transformed into clusters of cells. This is a warning, the message being: time is short. I hope a reader senses, in the poem's slow unreeling, interrupted with recurring commands, the degree to which this speaker is subject to the lure of the regressive. Her urgency reflects her own desire to capitulate and, in this sense, she sings to herself to keep awake, like someone on a vigil, a firewatch. There is, to put it plainly, an aspect of this which is pure pep talk.
The worst this poem can imagine is "what happens to the 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 very 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 once 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 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 fusion 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 if 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 than the perception of oblivion, in any form, as noncollective. If the pronouns in the last line are changed to "we" and "our," the line is instantly cloying, conventional; the sentiment thus expressed is paraphrased many times in the archives of Hallmark. Even if the second person is retained and only the possessive deleted, the thought turns vague—that in the second instance the line is also destroyed as a rhythmic unit is another problem. "You'll get oblivion"; "We'll get our oblivion": despite extreme discrepancies of tone, both sentences express the idea that oblivion is an alternative to self. Total eradication or complete union. "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 extent, this is surely true. But the regard is felt as fear—in this light, morality appears 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 increased the fundamental anxiety. Actual loss, loss of mere property, was a release, an abrupt transition from anticipation to expertise. In passing, I learned something about fire, about its appetite. 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
Perhaps, too, in all this there were other massages to be heard. And perhaps "Night Song" sounds much more of a piece with my other work than this suggests. It wouldn't surprise me. It seems these are the messages I'm equipped to receive.
