LOUISE GLUCK—CELESTIAL MUSIC

THE FULLNESS OF LIFE

CELESTIAL MUSIC

I have a friend who still believes in heaven.

Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to God.

She thinks someone listens in heaven.

Brave too, able to face unpleasantness.

We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it.

I'm always moved by disaster, always eager to oppose vitality

But timid also, quick to shut my eyes.

Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out

According to nature. For my sake she intervened

Brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down

Across the road.

My friend says I shut my eyes to God, that nothing else explains

My aversion to reality. She says I'm like the child who

Buries her head in the pillow

So as not to see, the child who tells herself

That light causes sadness--

My friend is like the mother. Patient, urging me

To wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person--

In my dreams, my friend reproaches me. We're walking

On the same road, except it's winter now;

She's telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial music:

Look up, she says. When I look up, nothing.

Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees

Like brides leaping to a great height--

Then I'm afraid for her; I see her

Caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth--

In reality, we sit by the side of the road, watching the sun set;

From time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall.

It's this moment we're trying to explain, the fact

That we're at ease with death, with solitude.

My friend draws a circle in the dirt; inside, the caterpillar doesn't move.

She's always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image

Capable of life apart from her.

We're very quiet. It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking. The composition

Fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air

Going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering--

It's this stillness we both love.

The love of form is a love of endings.

It is telling that the title of this poem comes from a stanza in which the poet has a dream. Her thoughts are reflected in her relationship with a “friend” who is the counterpoint to herself. It is apparent at the beginning that the poet is somewhat skeptical of her friend's belief in heaven but the friend is also “brave too, able to face unpleasantness” which is perhaps how the poet confesses in their discussion about faith, cowardly and timid. This is a poem about faith and what a leap into it might look like—or feel like.

Not only is this about faith but it is also about what exists on this side of faith. It is about a caterpillar and its fate given over to “greedy ants.” In the second stanza the poet describes herself as “moved by disaster/always eager to oppose vitality/but timid also.” I stumbled over the vitality part, as I read into this at first some opposition to life as vitality. But the dictionary offered as a possible definition the “capacity to live, grow, or develop.” Perhaps the poet sees in herself enough timidity not to be open to the force or energy needed to experience personal growth. Sometimes we humans favor what holds us back because it is what is comfortable. Diving into the unknown and the uncertain and unfamiliar is a leap too far. Yet, aren't all of us drawn to “disaster” because it is dramatic and novel? This is one of the juxtapositions that this poem develops. Our need for control over our environment keeps us stuck in our emotional responses and we can't “let events play out/according to nature.” The poet's friend is more open about what is possible to control and what must happen according to urges and compulsions that lie beyond our conscious understanding. The poet's friend contrasts what it is to be a child in the world, a child that hides from aspects of reality because they are too fearful and the child is too timid to face them. To be an adult is to be a “courageous person.” To be courageous is to wake up to what life offers even when (or especially when) reality is unpleasant or threatening.

Then, in stanza four, there is the dream sequence. It is here that we are introduced to what “celestial music” might be. The friend tells her “that when you love the world you hear celestial music.” Love binds what we know of the world and the realm in which celestial music can be experienced (heaven). The phrase bridges the gap between our material lives and a realm in which something as insubstantial and profound as music can coexist. It is this latter realm that is the “heaven” the friend believes in. But it is love that crosses the bridge. When urged to look up, the poet still grips her reality and can't see anything, just the details of the winter's day and she fears for her friend's delusional state of mind. What will change the poet's mind?

Stanza five returns this friendly couple to the reality of their hike together. Together they experience details of the landscape, the forms of reality, and we see that they are a mixture of what were earlier details specific to the dream as well as ones specific to the waking sequence with the dying caterpillar. Silence and peace fall over them and there is a turning to an easy acceptance of death, perhaps as the caterpillar has died free of the ants. The friend's courage encompasses not only making of something seemingly brutal a beautiful “image,” but also an image “capable of life apart from her,” a realm in which there is celestial music to behold. There is a return to the familiarity of the landscape but now perhaps burnished in ways that highlight their beauty. And, lastly, “It's this stillness we both love/The love of form is a form of endings.” Love, remember, is the medium that carries the weight of this world into the realm of faith over the bridge that connects the two realms in the fullness of life.

I would like to reflect on some of the elements of this poem which I think make it a brilliant and forceful illustration of how one can come to a faithful life. In part, the message of the poem is embedded in how juxtapositions of forms can illuminate the story being told. This poem, after all, is about a pilgrimage, a hike if you will, with action and musings complimenting and emphasizing one another. It seems to me that one of the responsibilities of a poem is to challenge the dimensions of the whole person; body, mind, and spirit. This can happen in bits and pieces but with all of them pointing to what a life experience might be in granular detail as well as the celestial. There might also be intimations of immortality in the images of a sunset or a birdcall or a “caterpillar dying in the dirt.” No experience is off limits in a full life and we know our courage as “adults” when we are able to admit into our consciousness what we might hide from. The philosopher C. G. Jung offers just this orientation to life when he explores dream archetypes (most often inhabiting the unconscious realm) and how they define how we see and live in the world.

There are also in this poem references to metaphors of space: heaven in the first stanza; “look up”; height; a net over the earth; celestial. All of these are located at some point on a vertical axis, sometimes contrasted with what occurs at ground level, perhaps in a more horizontal axis. One cultural critic (Glenn Slater in Jung vs. Borg: Finding the Deeply Human in a Posthuman Age) enlists the notion of verticality (“higher planes of existence”) and contrasts that with our mundane lives lived on the ground, in a horizontal plane. He makes this distinction throughout his book:

“Alongside the temporal dimension of remembering there is a spatial one too, recalling the dimensionality of experience and the breadth of being.”

“Whereas for most living in the industrialized world at least, reversion to such practices [rites and rituals] has become unthinkable, we are in a desperate need of the kind of vertical awareness that alerts us to the psychic realities and archetypal patterns these practices tend to preserve.”

“By the deeply human I am thus referring to the base upon which the vertical axis of reality stands. This axis reaches up into the ineffable experiences of life, which poet and mystic attempt to witness and express through word and image; and it reaches down into the enduring patterns of nature—to the place where animality meets psychology.”

Slater develops the idea of how important it becomes for individuals to explore the interior life, by going “in and down.” The interior life is presented as an antidote to the current overwhelming emphasis on technologies and the possible menace of AI as we become more and more dissociated from the forces and energies that not only make us thoroughly human on good days but also those energies (Jung's archetypes) that we suppress but which continue to shape our emotional lives. Slater makes more of the vertical and the horizontal but Gluck introduces those metaphors in her poem with accompanying space surrounding them to allow us as readers to make some of the same associations Slater postulates. What Slater also points out in his book, and what is true in this poem, is the necessity of having the form of a dying caterpillar (for instance) to contemplate as the beginning of an awareness of where celestial music can be heard.

The caterpillar (on the continuum of life on the horizontal axis) is an archetype of death, feared and avoided early in this poem, returns as an accommodation to death, made more bearable by the poet's friend's attempt to “make something whole, something beautiful, an image/Capable of life apart from her” (perhaps a life somewhere on the vertical axis). It is a “form” with an ending and, in the last phrase, this form and the love of it that echoes love of stillness in the line just above it. Stillness and endings are linked together here as a beckoning toward where love can lead. And love of the caterpillar (a form) is a “love of endings” (where endings, death and its possible “beyond”) create the ground from which ascent on the vertical axis can be experienced. In this poem, the stillness of present reality and celestial music are made one by love in the fullness of life.