a glimpse into the depths of solitary absence

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality. 

                   T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets. 

To have the courage to stare disaster right in the face, to look into the depths of the abyss. However painful.

Is there any other way of getting out of it, of not sinking into total shipwreck?

To summon up the strength, to prepare yourself - and then to turn.

To get rid of yourself to find yourself.


Or maybe not as radical as that. Just this, this --

*       *       *

What you really are when faithful to the truth.

The day muffles it and the frenzied rhythm of work and routine is a pretext for ignoring it, in the same way that you frown upon and snub a person that tells you a truth you need to hear.

Yet at night, alone with yourself, you cannot escape it. Not for some form of masochism, but for the love of truth. You strain your ears, standing still, wide awake, because you have to face it somehow.

On rainy nights, strangely, with the wind blowing outside, it becomes more audible, almost close.

Listen.

Does it bring you  reassurance, this truth? I don't know. You listen, listen, eventually it lulls you to sleep, and you rise again for another morning, yawning, but always a little changed.

There is something at once new and weary around your eyes, on your skin.

What you really are.

*       *       *

At Night, I often sit an hour out thus,
Attentive to a dull insistent roar --
Or not a roar, rather a kind of cry, and yet
No cry, for that would be a sound too clear,
And what I hear might come from underground,
It is so thick and muffled, and yet hollow-sounding too,
Although not resonant at all, but harsh and dead,
If dead is not too definite a word:
And whatsoever this dull urgent rumour be,
It holds me spellbound by the hour and more,
While I, with great longing to be free
From doubt about what it can signify,
Gaze up through a small skylight's panes and see
Nothing at all of my star's watch-fire
That may be burning in the black neglected sky;
Do not see even that blank square the window frames --
As though all sight lay blinded in my ears.
And then, returning suddenly again
To consciousness of my immediate self,
I've had a moment's glimpse into the depths
Of solitary absence through which stray
Our tired and restless bodies among all the dead things found
Strewn round them on all sides in an unanimated dream:
Dread has distracted us away from what is here
And what we really are when faithful to the truth;
So we must suffer hopelessly the sullen apathy
That reigns on a deserted theatre's stage
Where all night long we play out our null roles,
In a Morality that could be called 'No Man'.


David Gascoyne, from Night Thoughts (1955) in Selected Poems (London: Enitharmon, 1994), pp. 212-13.