`Go Plumbing'

As I get older, I’ve come to recognize a sort of memory I might called faded or attenuated. I can’t say a memory “flashes” – that’s too emphatic. Rather, it’s more like hearing a sound from several rooms away, and being fairly certain you didn’t imagine it. I know something is there, and I’ve learned it’s best to relax, and wait, and see if the circuit will be completed. Let me illustrate. Late the other night I was reading Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems, one of the books I read most often, and I re-read “Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel”:

“Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

“In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is –
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.”

This is typical Larkinesque finesse masquerading as slice-of-life glumness. It’s a masterpiece of music – listen to all those “l’s.” And note the way the first line starts with “Light” and the final lines starts with “Night.” This time, something about the poem reminded me of something else I had read not long ago but, as with my cell phone, the signal was poor. Rather than force it, I tried to forget it and kept on reading, and my strategy seems to have paid off. The following morning, the connection came to me, rising to the surface like the first bubbles in a boiling poet: Emily Dickinson. I’d been reading her a week or so earlier, just a few poems, so I quickly found the linkage, which turned out to be a single word – “loneliness.” Here it is:

“The Loneliness One dare not sound –
And would as soon surmise
As in its Grave go plumbing
To ascertain the size –

“The Loneliness whose worst alarm
Is lest itself should see –
And perish from before itself
For just a scrutiny –

“The Horror not to be surveyed –
But skirted in the Dark –
With Consciousness suspended –
And Being under Lock –

“I fear me this -- is Loneliness –
The Maker of the soul
Its Caverns and its Corridors
Illuminate -- or seal –”

There’s another linkage, I see -- “corridors” – but that’s not what echoed. Both poems address loneliness, but it’s the sound that remained and served to remind me – proof of sound becoming sense, and proof that even a fallible memory, with a little patience, remains serviceable.