In the late poet Louise Gluck’s poem ”Celestial Music” are presented two friends reflecting on fundamental sensibilities about nature, death, and reality.
The friends are walking on a country road. One friend senses the indifference of nature toward suffering and violence, even in the cruelty of battling insects encountered on the roadside. The friend is the poet herself, by nature pessimistic. This friend sees that the meaning or import of things is understood or identified by the self (however that is construed) and not by something higher. Or perhaps not so much understood as simply experienced. What is about us receives its identity from what we see.
The other friend sees reality as harmony, speaks of the beauty of nature, celebrates sky and clouds and color and grandeur, hears “celestial music.”
In a previous entry we quoted a line in Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah: “You don’t really care for music, do you?” Is this music the frivolous pop music of convention, or is this the celestial music of Gluck’s poem? The former is negligible and its classical counterpart is intense but historically pretensious. What Oliver Sacks could have labelled potential earworms. But are not both contrived? Are not they and celestial music illusory imaginings of peace and harmony in the universe?
This may have been the realization that came to the young Nietzsche when at first he became enamored of the sweeping mythological grandeur of Wagner’s music. Then he confronted its reality by attending a performance at Bayreuth. The audience was entirely aristocrats and bourgeoisie with their arrogance and opulence in full display. At that moment, Nietzsche walked away from music in disgust and never returned.
In Gluck’s poem is the telling line of the optimistic friend: “when you love the world you hear celestial music.” The original friend — the poet — would object that one need not love the world, be reconciled to the universe, to its suffering and death, but merely acknowledge its reality.
Here is Gluck’s poem:
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.
On earth, she’s unusually competent.
Brave, too, able to face unpleasantness.
We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it.
I’m always moved by weakness, 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 both 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 that we both love.
The love of form is a love of endings.
Louise Gluck, Poems 1962-2012. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013, p. 240.