Consciousness Bemoaned in “Aubade” by Philip Larkin (Part 2)

In the medieval tradition of courtly love, the aubade inverts the serenade. Where one heralds an evening arrival, the other laments a morning departure. In John Dunne’s famous poetic contribution to the genre, he chastises the sun for waking and so separating lovers, but consoles us with the notion that the power of the sun is ultimately subordinate to the imperatives of love. More bleak, Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” seems to abandon this indictment on behalf of love for one on behalf of self-love, perhaps even on behalf of life itself. Morning awakens us to both workaday drudgery and an awareness of our own mortality. As a consequence, life is harder to live by the light of day, the consolations of philosophy and religion notwithstanding, and vitality is confined to the sorts of evening revelry that make waking all the harder. Wes & Erin discuss whether life (and love) can be reconciled with human self-consciousness and all that it entails. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Okay, welcome to Subtext. This is part two of our discussion of Philip Larkin's poem Aubade. We got half a half a line into the second stanza, so we'll pick it up from there. The mind blanks at the glare created by our speed as we go through this poem. Okay, so we were just about to get to the lines. Oh, actually, in fact, I never read this second stanza Aloud. So perhaps I should. 1:01 Wes: Yeah. So why don't you read the stanza and then we. 1:03 Erin: Okay, here we go. The mind blanks at the glare not in remorse, the good not done, the love not given. Time torn off unused, nor wretchedly because an only life can take so long to climb clear of its wrong beginnings and may never but at the total emptiness forever, the sure extinction that we travel to and shall be lost in always. Not to be here, not to be anywhere, and soon. Nothing more terrible, nothing more true. 1:35 Wes: Okay, so as usual, I've been operating under a misconception because of my misinterpretation of. I had been thinking about death in life as wasted time and inhibited love. But he's denying that here. He's saying the mind blanks at the glare. Not because we are remorseful about unused time and love not given or because. And this is a great. This is a really great idea. Only life. And only life can take so long to climb clear of its wrong beginnings. The idea that we've been screwed up by our childhoods. Right. And a significant portion of our life involves trying to climb clear of. Of that so that we can really achieve what we want to achieve. So there's this kind of remedial aspect to some aspects of how we spend our time. And we only have one life to do it. So the question is, can we do all the remedial stuff and then get into AP calculus once we're done with that? But he's saying it's not that either. It's not that we have so much to overcome in our limited time, but just this idea that our extinction is. Sure. And I guess one might think that that deprives anything that we might do. No matter how productive we are, no matter how much love there is in our life, it perhaps makes it all meaningless, that we can't. None of that can be meaningful, if. Sure, extinction is what lies at the end of it. 3:12 Erin: You know, I think your reading is correct, though, because, I mean, I think it is on a certain level. First of all, the best phrase in the whole poem is time torn off, unused. And, you know, and we do get. You know, we do. We do spend some lines here really preoccupied with what he says. He's not preoccupied by. So, you know, again, I think he's. Through negation. He's. He's able to sort of occupy two states of mind at the same time. 3:42 Wes: Yeah. 3:42 Erin: But I do think, you know, I'm really interested in this idea of remorse as actually maybe a fantasy about more life. You Know, this is the idea that maybe somewhere, some other time, under some other circumstances, you could have had another life. Or it's kind of dreaming of a parallel life in which the correct choices were made, the achievements, you know, were many. I don't know. You know, in which everything went well. Right. And so this. This idea of. I think what he's thinking of as, like, deathbed remorse is actually a further stay against this idea of extinction, because it's actually a fantasy about another thread, a continued life, or just a different one, but still something that's more life. Right. And what he's talking about is shutting all that down because those kind of open up little wormholes of hope and possibility. The thing that's really the scary part is the extinction. And I'm not sure that I agree. I mean, not that it's my place to agree or disagree with the poem, but I think remorse can be a much scarier thing than the eternal dirt nap. I don't know. 5:01 Wes: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, yes, there are nights when I wake up in existential dread. Oh, my God, I'm going to die. 5:10 Erin: Yeah. 5:11 Wes: And I. Unless one has some religious consolation for that, that can be quite piercing, but it's pretty rare. I actually used to do that as a kid, believe it or not. 5:24 Erin: That explains a lot. Yeah. 5:27 Wes: Like, oh, my God, I'm gonna die. But I think, yeah, most of us are concerned about what we can fit into life. This is one life to live, and how do we make it the best life that we can live, and how do we get as much love and work accomplishment and then good, which, of course, is the word that I ignore. Right. There's a triad here. Good love and time unused, which, you know, thinking of not just work, but anything we might do. So, of course, I ignored the good part. Right. The good not done. All the nice things we might have done for people or the. Or how we might have perfected ourselves ethically or improved ourselves ethically and been better people and proved, you know, maybe done something for justice in the world and things like that. So that's the part I ignored. But, yeah, so there's. There's a trio of these things. And I think, yeah, most of us think in those terms about when we're fearful about time passing, we're fearful about not being able to do enough of those things. 6:38 Erin: Did I ever tell you my. My panic attack in the Coolidge Corner theater story? 6:45 Wes: No. 6:47 Erin: So I think I've only had, like, one really extremely vivid reckoning with my own death. I mean, I think you know, obviously I have garden variety thoughts of death all the time, but I was in the Coolidge Corner Theater. I was watching The Old Man & the Gun, the Robert Redford film that came out maybe, oh, I don't know, five, five years ago now. Five, six years ago. 7:10 Wes: I haven't heard of it. 7:13 Erin: It's. I don't remember if it was good or not, because I. For whatever reason, I went to go, you know, this is Coolidge Corner Theater. Was like, you know, kitty Corner to my apartment. So sometimes I would just like, at the last minute just go in and see a movie by myself. And anyway, I was sitting in the theater. Redford came on the screen. I was shocked at how old he was. And suddenly I had a really. A really vivid experience of the fact that, like, I was actually going to physically die someday. And because Redford looked so old. So I guess if Redford's gonna die, I am, too. I don't know. And anyway, it was so upsetting and so vivid that I started, I guess, having a panic attack. Like, I couldn't breathe. And I actually had to leave the theater to calm down. And anyway, sorry, that's just a ridiculous. I just love telling that story. 8:14 Wes: I don't have to have a movie ticket to have that experience. I just have to look in the mirror. 8:21 Erin: No, but it's a Redford. 8:22 Wes: Who is that person? 8:24 Erin: I know there's something. 8:25 Wes: Well, that's what I used to look. 8:27 Erin: Exactly. 8:30 Wes: I was a model. Yeah. No, that's really interesting because it captures all of this at a visceral level. It's not just about. So what is it? Yeah, what is it about someone looking really old and Robert Redford in particular, that would cause a panic attack? What aspect of your mortality is that plugging into another world? Is it about the eternal dirt nap or is it about time torn off, unused, or which. 9:02 Erin: I think more the former, but also the idea that there is an initiation into death. I think there was also something kind of religious, too, in the fear that, oh, he has aged. We are all going to undergo aging. The manner of our death might be excruciatingly painful and drawn out. If things don't go so well for us, you know, we're not all guaranteed to die in our sleep. And then I'm going to have to give an account of what I've done. Like, I think it's all kind of in a ball for me. You know, it's all. It's all entwined together. And part of that could be my sense of faith. Which is also, like, I think, a really profound fear that he's not giving any attention to in this poem, which is like, what if. You know, what if you die? And then after you die, there's someone who has on divine videotape every single bad decision you've ever made in your entire life and then plays it back to you, and you have to give an account for that. You know, you have to pay for it. 10:12 Wes: I'd rather do the eternal. 10:14 Erin: Exactly. Right. Like, you know, it's like, oh, yeah, religion is just a way to make you feel better about yourself. Really. That's not my. Not my experience. 10:23 Wes: I would not want to relive all my bad decisions. 10:26 Erin: Yeah. So I think, you know, I think that was a big part of it for me, and I think it was. Yeah. I think it was induced by this idea that even Redford is getting old and is going to die. And so that means. That means it's going to definitely happen to mere mortals like me. And. I don't know. 10:44 Wes: I mean, anyone could have not gotten old. It would have been him, right? 10:48 Erin: Or Paul Newman. But Paul Newman's already dead, so unless he's just, you know, been assumed into heaven. 10:55 Wes: Is Paul Newman dead? 10:56 Erin: Oh, yeah. He's been dead for a while. 10:58 Wes: I had no idea. 10:58 Erin: Yeah, I thought, Joanne Woodward's still alive, but you surprised? 11:03 Wes: Oh, I was thinking Natalie Wood. I thought you were messing with me. Okay. 11:06 Erin: No, no, no, no, no, no. Joanne Woodward, his wife. 11:09 Wes: But Paul Newman, he was. Isn't he the one who put his head, face in the bowl of cold water to prevent aging? Or is that Robert Redford? 11:17 Erin: I don't know. I've never heard that. But I don't think Paul Newman would do ice dives. What? Really? 11:22 Wes: You don't think so? Okay, he's too manly for that. 11:25 Erin: No, he was so. He was so ambivalent about his own looks, and they caused him so many problems that you. I think it would have been. If I had to venture a guess, I would assume it would have been a relief for him to age a little bit, though. I don't know. With men, sometimes they look even better when they age. It's a whole thing. Anyway, the point being, I think that these thoughts that he's talking about of this kind of, you know, I'll call it like the deathbed remorse thoughts, I think that can't help but be tied to or come with, you know, in the caboose of. Or in the trunk of the car of extinction. Because it's about. What is this Extinction about it's the lack of continuation in one's life that means one wants one's life to continue. There's inherent remorse in the idea of extinction for what is lost. I think it's about more than just this idea that the screen goes blank and that's it, you know? 12:23 Wes: Yeah. I mean, we develop all these abilities, for instance, we learn all these things. This is always what struck me as this is the meaning aspect of it. Right. So there's the dirt nap aspect, but then there's the way in which everything that we might think is meaningful in some sense could be deprived of meaning by the fact that it's all going to be terminated. What's the point of becoming good at something if all of that work is for naught in some larger sense, because it can't be carried forward indefinitely. 12:54 Erin: Right, right. But isn't that also what gives. You know, we also wouldn't, say, develop any skills if we lived forever, you know what I mean? Like, there would be no. I don't know, there would be no point to becoming good at anything if any kind of excellence wasn't needed to give meaning to our lives, sustain our lives for the brief time that we're here. We could always just say, oh, we'll do it later. There's no urgency, there's no pressure to become great. I mean, I think like, death maybe takes away the. The meaning of becoming good at something, but it also lends the meaning for. At least for certain things. I mean, maybe not for like, you know, learning to play the piano, but certainly for making the most of one's time in certain crucial other ways. I mean, I think that includes playing the piano. But, you know, for argument's sake. 13:44 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point. I was thinking. And you know, if just thinking strictly in terms of accomplishment, people can be driven by prestige or they can be just driven by love of the work itself. But to the extent that we're driven by prestige, yet that's something that's time pressured. Perhaps it is the case that if we had an infinite amount of time to do any of those things, then it would become meaningless. And after all, the person who's a great novelist inside of 80 years, if I have an infinity to tell myself that I might be able to do that one day. Yeah, no, I think so. That's a good point. Before we move to the next stanza, just like this, these last two lines, not to be here, not to be anywhere and soon nothing more terrible, nothing more true. Makes me think there should be a Dr. Seuss version of this with drawings and just for kids. 14:46 Erin: Oh, the places you won't go when you're dead. 14:50 Wes: That's great. Everybody dies. 14:56 Erin: I really want you to become used 14:58 Wes: to the idea early. 14:59 Erin: Yeah. I really want you to write a series of children's books on the theme of mortality. 15:04 Wes: Actually, that is actually not a bad idea. 15:07 Erin: That would be horrid. Have you ever read. I had some of these books. Maybe. Maybe it was Hilaire Belloc wrote a couple of children's books on this theme or. I also loved the Edward Gorey, the kids dying in gruesome ways according to the Alphabet. You know, like A is for Arthur who was struck down by an axe or whatever, you know, and it shows, like all these kids being brutally murdered or dying in heinous ways. Anyway, I loved that when I was a kid. Kids are sickos. 15:37 Wes: All right, you want to read the next one? 15:40 Erin: This is a special way of being afraid. No trick dispels religion. Used to try that. Vast moth eaten musical brocade created to pretend we never die. And specious stuff that says no rational being can fear a thing. It will not feel, not seeing that this is what we fear. No sight, no sound, no touch or taste or smell. Nothing to think with, nothing to love or link with the anesthetic from which none come round. 16:10 Wes: Yeah. So this idea, no rational being can fear thing. It will not feel. This is what I attributed to Epicurus, which it is. It's. It's. And then the other option is the. I guess it's not just Christianity, but whatever religions introduce us to. An afterlife can be a source of consolation. But it's an interesting juxtaposition because like I said, there's this interesting historical dynamic between the Epicurean and Christian point of view. In particular, historically very important. And he's introducing those two different options here. The religious option he discards as a fiction, but the Epicurean option he dismisses as specious. So the first option is false and the second option is just badly reasoned, which I don't think is the case, by the way. I think Epicurus has a really good point because he himself, I think by. In the lines towards the ends, at the end of the stanza highlights the paradox of this sort of fear. This is what we fear. No sight, no sound. Which of course is not of this. It's not something that can happen to us. 17:28 Erin: Well, first of all, I like your. Your binary choice between Christianity and eternal nothingness is very crusadery of you. Like, these are your two options, Christianity or Eternal death. Anyway, this idea, too, that, you know, it's. This is a sort of like post Christian poem, like religion used to try. So in other words, you know, even religion has given up on this attempt. It's just sort of. I don't know what it's doing now in Larkin's mind, I thought too, for a long time about the brocade and what that might be suggesting. I didn't get very far, but, you know, I was just thinking of, like, priestly vestments, but also drapes and maybe furniture and furniture coverings, things that cover, like, you know, if there's a connection to the drapes in the room, the curtains, rather. And musical. You know, I kind of. This was a pretty slippery image for me. I was trying to think through this. Like, it's. Why musical brocade? Because it's patterned. 18:35 Wes: Well, I was thinking of brocade in terms of weaving. Right. So one could say you've weaved a tale, if, you know, oh, sure, it's made up. Yeah. But why musical? 18:45 Erin: There it made me think of. 18:46 Wes: Which seems to mix the. Mixes the metaphor, Right? 18:50 Erin: Yeah. Like there's, like. There's something inherently sort of sense crossed in it, you know, I mean, later we're going to get the list of the five senses. Maybe that nonsensical element is part of what he's getting at here. 19:01 Wes: Yeah. I mean, it occurs to me that. So there is this intimate relationship between Christianity, not to say that there aren't other religions with afterlives, but I'm going to keep focusing on that. But music sort of arises within the context of Christianity, and maybe the idea is that that is part of what seduces us in religion. And, of course, music is still an important part of religion in a way, but we get seduced into humming a certain tune. Maybe. I don't know. 19:37 Erin: I like that. In regards to the Epicurean quote, it just makes me think of Hannah and her sisters. The character Mickey that Woody Allen plays his father, when he's like, now I'm alive, when I'm dead, I'll be dead. And then Mickey's like, you know, aren't you afraid? He's like, of what? I'll be unconscious. You know, it's like there's actually a pretty simple, fixed all of this, which is, I'll worry about it. I think he says something like, who knows? Like, I'll either be unconscious or I'll. I'll be awake. If not, I'll deal with it then. I'm not going to worry now, you know, this is Just like the perfect tonic for this poem. 20:17 Wes: Right. Reminds me as well of Annie hall and the other consolation that Woody Allen introduces, which is that it's all just far off. Right. What's the uncle? He says something like, alvy, don't worry, Alvy. The universe is not gonna. 20:33 Erin: It's not gonna fall apart for billions 20:36 Wes: of years, so we can't be reassured that the universe isn't gonna end, but it's just gonna happen really, really far off. 20:46 Erin: I don't want this whole episode to just become like Erin arguing with Larkin. But another thing I take issue with, or which maybe doesn't sound so bad to me, is the anesthetic from which none come round. I mean, you know, maybe this is where I should know that I'm. I'm just like, too tired and overworked to have coherent thoughts about things. But I was just reading this thinking to myself, like, wow, that sounds really good to me. I mean, I've often. I've often said that I'd love to be put in a medically induced coma for like six months or so just to get a really nice long rest in. I know that's not the same thing, but, like, it sort of is. 21:28 Wes: And, yeah, death is just a permanent vacation. 21:32 Erin: Right. Well, you know, thinking actually of this idea of rest. I mean, seeing as this whole poem takes place in a moment of disturbed rest, of disturbed sleep, you know, for someone who, you know, I think I mentioned this in the last episode, but for a speaker who works all day and has to get drunk at night to mildly anesthetize himself, one would think that maybe he'd be a little bit more like me in his thinking and be grateful for the knowledge that there's a break coming. 22:02 Wes: Absolutely. 22:03 Erin: You know, it doesn't sound like the speaker has the easiest life. 22:05 Wes: Right, right. No, I think this is a very important point. It's at this point where he mentions an anesthetic. We're supposed to make this connection between drinking and death. So he's trying to. With drinking, he's trying to reduce his consciousness of things. He's trying to anesthetize himself and put him in himself, not in just a half drunk state, but a half death state in order to deal with what to deal with nominally in the beginning, with work, having a bad job or a meaningless job or something like that, and having to deal with that, the stress of that, by anesthetizing himself. But work, you know, as. As we saw and shall see as the poem goes on, meaningless work is kind of associated with death in a way that I think we're meant to ask why, if being meaninglessly busy is the deathlike thing that we're trying to escape, why would drinking as an anesthetic and something that puts us in a half death like state, why would that be the solution? So I see it as somewhat paradoxical. 23:18 Erin: Yeah. You know, I'd want to draw. I think it's too early to do this because towards the end of the poem is where I have a better reading of this. But if we want to draw a connection between something I know you've talked about a lot, which is the sort of euphoric state that drinking induces, and if we can connect that maybe to art making and to this poem itself as another kind of stay against death, maybe they're doing something again, similarly complicated. Right. Where it's a kind of like a distraction, but also something that mimics the thing that one is distracted from. I mean, I don't know if we can make this argument for poetry, or maybe we can make it more easily for poetry as an art form than we could for other forms, since writing is a difficult thing to portray on film because it involves you sitting still and not talking to other people and being alone. But, you know, I don't want to make too fine a point of that, but somehow, like in, you know, in the act of writing poetry, you're imitating being dead. 24:18 Wes: Yeah, No, I think that's spot on in the sense that. So Freud would call it this narcissistic libido. Whenever we're engaged in work of that kind, creative work, we're taking libido and turning it away from objects outside of us. So love objects outside of us. Instead of directing our love towards people, we direct it towards our own aspiration. And there's an element of narcissism in that. And there's an element of withdrawal from life in that. You see it more obviously, right, in ascetic, philosophical or scientific activity where people are being hyper rational and so therefore kind of withdrawing from the realm of feeling, which one might think of as obviously deathlike. Nietzsche made a big deal of that. But in any creative pursuit, one is withdrawing to some extent from people to focus on that and in a sense, to focus on oneself, one's own artistic output. So, Hanns, there's a psychoanalyst named Hanns Sachs who made this point, and he wrote a book called the Creative Unconscious, which is that beauty itself is evocative of death. We talked about this with Keats, I think, and to be involved in Life is to be involved in appetitive behaviors and satisfying oneself with the sensuous world. And to enjoy something as beautiful is to refrain from treating it as an object that might satisfy us. So the example I always use is right. And there's the painted apple, which we enjoy qua representation. We enjoy it formally, but we don't. We can't pick it up and eat it as we would normally. So there's. Or. Which would be the worldly, typical, worldly way of enjoying the apple. So that's a withdrawal, right? It represents a withdrawal from life to enjoy things at an aesthetic, formal level. There's something inherently deathlike in that. So I think your point about that is spot on. 26:34 Erin: Yeah. That's like me watching Redford circa 1973. We were. And the way he no longer is. 26:43 Wes: Yeah. You ready to move on? 26:46 Erin: Yeah. 26:46 Wes: Yeah. 26:47 Erin: And so it stays just on the edge of vision. A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill that slows each impulse down to indecision. Most things may never happen. This one will. And realization of it rages out in furnace fear when we are caught without people or drink. Courage is no good. It means not scaring others. Being brave lets no one off the grave. Death is no different. whined at than withstood just one cheery thing after another. 27:20 Wes: Okay, so on the edge of vision. 27:24 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like the fact that the, you know, the flash or the glare is now kind of, like, turned down. It's like I'm getting this image of, like, an oil lamp that has the knob on it that you can kind of put on a dimmer, you know, burning less. Less brightly in the corners. Seems to still have an effect, right? It's. It's affecting maybe the vitality, if we want to call it that, of. Of his choices. It's not blindingly before him all the time. And this, again, I think, again, I'm going to kind of disagree. It's like he's attributing this knowledge of his own extinction to the thing that, in the moment, interferes with his ability to make a decision. And I just, again, I don't know if this is true necessarily to my experience, my personal experience at least, but I don't know. I mean, are people, you know, unable to choose between pistachio and Rocky Road ice cream because they're thinking, well, what does it matter? I'm going to die anyway? I don't know. And then they're like, oh, I guess Rocky Road, since that's all my life, is just a Rocky road to death. 28:34 Wes: But, yeah, how does this compare to Prufrock's sort of indecision? Because I was associating them. What is it that leads a Prufrock to lack courage? So it's interesting that he talks about courage in this context. So I'm going to just answer my own question. 28:49 Erin: Please do. 28:51 Wes: Part of it is a lack of courage, right? So he can't make a move on a woman, for instance, or something like that. And then one has to ask the question of why people might lack the courage to seek out the love that they want or to do the work that they want to do. What is it that gets them in trouble? And on a more surface level, it's about failure, right? It's about rejection or it's about failure. And then if one were a psychoanalyst, one might say it's also about fear of success. So fear of succeeding and then being submerged, whether, you know, in a relationship or in something that one has accomplished such that it gives you a new identity. One. One's previous self gets kind of wiped out in that. So you could look at it in both ways. So what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to think about what about the fear of death would lead to indecision. I'm not sure. I've talked about fear of success and failure. And in either case, I suppose one could make an association to death. Either is like being killed, right? So if you. The failure or the rejection is like being cut off from human contact forever and dying in that sense. And then the success is like merger, reabsorption into the womb, let's say merger with another person. Loss of one's identity, which is another form of death. So we're kind of damned if we do, damned if we don't. I don't know what you make that's. I'm thinking out loud again here about trying to make this connection. 30:27 Erin: No, I like this a lot. I think it's. Maybe I don't have a lot of sympathy or something because my identity isn't all that great or precious, so it doesn't really matter if it gets absorbed into something better, like as if, you know, we're all. I kid a little. Not much, anyway. No, I like both of those things. I think for me, maybe the most powerful line in the whole poem and the one with which I can most, you know, most heartily sign on is, most things may never happen. This one will. You know, I think this is like the most effective and chilling line in the poem. Because you know, in fact, as we all know, like most of the things we spend hours and hours worrying about never actually do happen. It's sort of as if they happen maybe because we torture ourselves with these false scenarios, right? But most of our fears never come to pass, right? But this is like the surefire thing that will happen. Everybody's story ends the same way. So this is really the only legitimate thing one could worry about. Even though it's the most self defeating one, it seems. 31:42 Wes: Yeah, I like your point as well about the contrast between the glare earlier on, the glare of the sun or the glare of the. Of consciousness of death that produces indecision, right? Because we can think of that as being caught like a deer in the headlights, something like that, and we'd be stunned and unable to move just because we are terrified. And maybe that's one part of what he's thinking about here, but the way he chooses to do it in the stanza or to characterize it in the stanza is to say it's not a glare but an unfocused blur on the edge of vision, which suggests that we can sort of exclude it from consciousness to some extent. We just can't fully exclude it. So that even when we are not thinking about death, it's there doing its work in our peripheral vision and that somehow this leads, it leads us to indecision as well. I think part of the point of that, part of the point of that very subdued depiction of the role of death, his desire to contrast that with furnace fear, right, that rages out. So awareness of death is there as an unfocused blur. And then we get fear being the passionate raging thing if we are caught without people or drink. So this is very interesting, right? So we come back to this idea that drink might be used to anesthetize oneself against the fear of death. Or as it seemed in the very beginning, the stress of work. It's now just occurring to him that love is another solution to this. And you know, in Aubade, right, we expect this, you know, at some point, concept of other people or love to get to be involved. But he's, he's juxtaposing those two things as if social relationships were also just another form of anesthetic. 33:46 Erin: Yeah, and the contrast between the. Yeah, the anesthetic and then the furnace fear. I spent a lot of time thinking about that phrase and how to me it's like a sort of more tangible and maybe quotidian version of like hellfire or something. You know, this is sort of like the furnace fear is what the atheist has. And, you know, maybe this is a little too literal, but for me, it also recalls the, you know, my childhood fear of, like, the furnace in the basement, you know, the thing that makes strange noises that we don't want to be left alone in the room with, we're afraid of, you know, which is just sort of alien to us. So I think there's this concept of like, yeah, not wanting to be left alone with the scary thing. 34:35 Wes: So, again, I think it's interesting, this association between people and drinking and then the talk of courage is no good, because the way I had tried to parse out indecision and then relating that to Prufrock was the idea that it involved a certain amount of lack of courage in the face of death, like the deathlike consequences of our relationships to work and to people. So when he says courage is no good, well, it is good. Courage is good for overcoming indecision, actually. Yes, it's no consolation for death per se, but he has been talking about the consequences that consciousness of death has in life. And courage is actually a good solution for some of that stuff. Courage might make it so that you don't need drink or that your relationship to people isn't simply about. It's more generous, and it's not simply about avoiding fear of death. And then he says it means not scaring others, which is true, but he seems to suggest that's all it's about, is I'm just putting on a brave face for other people when I know the truth. But there is something to helping other people out with their fear that is an important part of relationships and shouldn't be ignored. 36:03 Erin: I like that. So I think what I'm hearing you say is that you would like to nudge him into a sort of healthy existentialism. Like, if he's going to be an atheist, then courage is a good way to deal with this inevitability or to manage those problems which arise from fear. Is that right? 36:27 Wes: In the context of. Right. Fear of success as merger or fear of failure as a kind of death, people do overcome that and therefore overcome indecision. And so courage is relevant in that sense. But the larger question about whether it can help us face truly existential fear. Maybe he's right. I'm not sure. Maybe courage is no good for that. 36:54 Erin: Should we read the last stanza? I mean, I think we'll have to let that one ride. 36:58 Wes: Yeah. But I just, you know, to bring it back to figuring out where the lover is in this poem. Or the. The missing lover. I think one important thing to note is that. Well, I've already noted it, but work and love sort of stand in contrast to each other because it's in the typical Aubade. It's getting up to go to work. That's part of the problem, part of the thing that separates the lovers. But also, as we've pointed out, love and work are sort of the two big factors in our happiness and they compete with each other. And work might be seen as a form of narcissistic withdrawal. Right. If we're focused on our own creative activities as opposed to another person. So we get this competition between them, which I think you can make good use of with Aubade. But here, what are the two things that are competing? I mean, there's something deathlike about work, and I think that really comes out in the. In the last stanza. But where is love in this? Maybe we can't really answer it until we read this last stanza. 38:11 Erin: Well, you are. I mean, before we go to that, because I think we do get something of an answer. You're pointing me back to Stanza 3. This is what we fear. No sight, no sound, no touch or taste or smell. Nothing to think with, nothing to love or link with, except perhaps for nothing to think with. What he's describing, I think, is as much his current state alone in his room as it is death. Right. I mean, the light doesn't enter until the last stanza, so he's in a dark room. There's an element of sensory deprivation tank about, you know, the circumstances that he's currently occupying. And he's alone, so he's already inside. Death, it seems. I mean, not just the realization of it, but he's in. Like. There's something here, I think, about the idea that the lack of the lover is already inducing a kind of a death for him, or that there's something in him which is dead because of the fact that he's alone in the room. Is that. You know, I don't want to be too histrionic about that. 39:14 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think one wonders. Yeah. Why is it that he's alone and has he misdiagnosed his problem? 39:26 Erin: I like that. 39:27 Wes: Fear of death, right. 39:29 Erin: I like that a lot. Yeah. 39:30 Wes: Yeah. And I'm stressed out at work and I'm afraid of dying and therefore I have to drink at night. Drinking may be the primary problem, actually. The first task is to get him off the drink and then second is to get laid. 39:45 Erin: Is that what you're saying? 39:46 Wes: Yeah, exactly. Overall, the tension is between fear of death and love. So in a typical Abad, it's between love and the other work a day requirements of the other requirements of life, which include work, but other things. Just going out into the world, into the sunlight and doing things, not being cooped up in a room or in bed, which itself, Right. Is arguably a very deathlike state. Lovers in a bed, you know, there's sex, but then there's also, like I said, a lot of sleeping and a lot of lazing about. Right. So love comes across as this languid thing, as something that's kind of the opposite of work. All right, so there's that contrast that I'm associating with the typical Aubade. And then there's Larkin's contrast between love and death, I guess, where love is really hardly visible in this, except some of the lines we've already pointed to, like nothing to love. Right. So death is evocative of not having anything to love. But yeah, in a concrete sense, the lover is actually absent from this poem. So the Persona here is of a person who, his life is loveless. It's not like work is taking him away from a lover. And his explanation for the lovelessness of life is just that death is the thing that hangs over him and he associates. Again in the last stanza we'll see this most clearly. But he associates work with death. So it's not just that having to go to work in the morning is going to take him away from a lover, but work in general, the pointless work, and then certainty of death following that extinguishes love altogether from one's life. See what I mean? So it's kind of an extreme version of the Aubade, where love is permanently extinguished by everything else that goes on. 41:51 Erin: I think I read. I mean, I think you're right and that reading is corrective work, but I also see something a little bit more hopeful and a little bit of a twist, I think, on what you're saying in the last stanza. But maybe I'm wrong. But we'll. 42:05 Wes: Let's read it. Sure, yeah, read it. 42:07 Erin: And then, yeah, slowly light strengthens and the room takes shape. It stands plain as a wardrobe. What we know, have always known, Know that we can't escape yet can't accept One side will have to go. Meanwhile, telephones crouch getting ready to ring in locked up offices and all the uncaring, intricate rented world begins to rouse. The sky is white as clay with no sun. Work has to be done. Postmen like doctors go from house to house. 42:41 Wes: So I love this. 42:42 Erin: Yeah, me too. 42:44 Wes: Intricate rented world. That is fantastic, that intricacy. It reminds me of the brocade earlier on because there's an intricacy, there's a weaving to that. And it's as if the intricacies of workaday life are part of what we use to distract ourselves. But I love this. Telephones crouch. Great metaphor. It's as if they are animals. So there's something vital, there's a vitality to that. They're crouching and instead of getting ready to pounce, though, they're getting ready to ring. So that's the irony. And when they ring, they are calling us to some unpleasant work task. Right. And so the vitality there is extinguished. The vital metaphor is extinguished by the. By the reality. And then the idea that they are in locked up offices. Right. So if the telephone were a cat or something like that, crouching and ready to pounce. It's also in a cage. So life is being caged up in these offices and in the work world. Rented. Yeah. What is it? Why is it rent? It's not owned, but rented. The world. I guess that's because we're going to be leaving inevitably, or maybe we're not committed or. 44:01 Erin: I like that. Yeah. Yeah. I see the plain as a wardrobe phrase as kind of predicting this rented world idea. I was thinking a lot about the word wardrobe and I looked at it too long, I think, so I just started to see it as its component parts. So the world is just like a ward of robes. I was thinking about, you know, whether we take robe for its ceremonial implications or something like, you know, a bathrobe, a dressing gown. There's a temporariness, I think, inherent to the robe, more so than most other garments. So it sort of points us subsequently to this idea of the rented world. 44:39 Wes: Yeah. Normally we might say plain as day. That's the idea that he's playing with. So light is strengthening and instead of it being simply plain as day, it's plain as the thing. As the dull. The dull thing that light is being shed on. And I imagine the light. There's not a whole lot of light at this point. 44:59 Erin: So I'm imagining him just looking at. Just, you know, plain as a. And he looks up and it's, you know, I'm imagining that the wardrobe is just directly in his field of. Field of vision. And so that's what he, you know, that's what he settles on there. 45:12 Wes: Yeah, exactly, yeah. 45:14 Erin: You know, thinking, though, about the idea of the postman, like doctors and the telephones crouching line. I think where things get a little bit complicated for me is the twin idea here in. I'm going to locate it in communication, maybe the postman and the telephone as both being ways for people to be in touch with us, even if they're the electric company with a bill or something. So I'm seeing this communication as being both threatening and kind of intercessory or something like that. So the fact that the doctor, obviously, he's invoking the idea of doctors making house calls, you know, a bygone ritual. But the idea that he has to make a house call suggests that the person inside is sick, right. And needs ministration. And so we could just say that the doctor is a temporary stay against the inevitability of death. That, you know, we shouldn't need doctors at all because we're all going to die eventually. In the simile here, of course, you know, what the. What the doctor is really administering is contact. It's the postman bringing letters, something, right? Something that's keeping you engaged in society and thus distracted from the, you know, the furnace fear of the previous stanza, right? It's bringing people to you. So it's bringing communication and communion and maybe especially like the demands and needs of others, you know, with a phone call, like the urgent phone call or the, you know, someone writing you a letter asking you for something. It's a band aid, but it does seem to be kind of the band aid here. And any kind of communication puts me in mind of poetry itself. And maybe what this says about poetry is a little bit less clear or about art. It's a form of communication on the one hand, and the act of making it is an act of communicating something as a way to stave off these thoughts of death. At the same time, this poem seems designed to be that memento mori that's, you know, that's calling up impending doom for the reader. So it's kind of like a. You know, I have in my notes, I just wrote that it's a made you look poem. You know, it's like forcing you to reckon with the thing that maybe art is at least sometimes distracting you from. Obviously not always or you know, ultimately maybe if it's great art, it always leads you to that deeper realization of one's own death. But. But insofar it's entertainment, say it has a distracting element. So I don't know. I mean, I just kind of throwing a lot of things out there. But I guess to go back to the main point, just this idea that the communication, that there's the threat and the distracted quality. The latter seems kind of positive. 48:01 Wes: Yeah. Okay. I mean it. To me. Okay. So my. This looks very bleak to me, but it's super bleak. 48:10 Erin: But. I don't know. But at the same time, I mean, does he want to just lie around and think about death all day, or does he want to get drawn into something? And communication seems to be the means by which one gets drawn into distraction. 48:25 Wes: Yeah. I mean, if this were a typical Aubade. Right. Work has to be done. Sorry, lover, got to go. But we'll meet up later. And the sun revolves around us, and this is the only thing that's important. Right. Instead of saying that work has to be done, and then we get postmen, like doctors, going from house to house, which is. I think you're exactly right. That's about contact with people. Right. The doctors are supposed to. The compensation for this bleak workaday world is supposed to be ultimately. Right. Love. In this case, it's social contact delivered by postman. So it's not intimate, it's distant and remote. And the only other image of that kind of contact we get is the telephone. So human contact is made to look like something that's remote and something that is just a palliative for the hospice that life turns out to be. We're all in hospice and we're all going to die. And what is social contact? It's a kind of palliative, which I think is the point you were making, but maybe it seems more positive to you. 49:35 Erin: Yeah, exactly. I'm just reading that as like, yay, thank God we have this. But I mean, I guess, yeah, I 49:46 Wes: mean, the question is, I think the Aubade in its ordinary form says love is the most important thing and work is a distraction, and everything revolves around the. Love, in Larkin's formulation, is work is all there is and work is death. And love, in a way, is a satellite of that that can't fully compensate the reality. Everything revolves around death and work. Love can be kind of a deluding. And love, and by which I mean love in general, not just romantic love, but relationships are just a way of anesthetizing oneself. Right. Without people or drink, one is afraid. And so one anesthetizes oneself. And so whether one's drinking or relating to people, it's all the same. So we could go back to the very first sentence and see that drinking, in a way, stands in for love and relatedness to people. It's one of the two ways one can deal with awareness of death. And so we do get in the very first sentence. We get a work love contrast here. It's just that love has been distorted into something else. 51:04 Erin: Well, I still think that if I just say that in a happier voice, it'll sound fine. But 51:12 Wes: the sky is white as clay with no sun. 51:15 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So we're all actually just already dead. Were already underground. 51:21 Wes: Right. 51:22 Erin: To me that's reminiscent of just. Yeah, the earth heaped on the grave. And so, yeah, what's the point? 51:29 Wes: It's quite bleak, right? 51:32 Erin: I'm a little afraid to release this two part episode into the world and send people on their way with this moral. I feel like we should do a little song and dance now. 51:45 Wes: Unfortunately, we have to part with our listenership now because we have to go to work unsubscribes after this, but listeners stay in bed, take a day, eat ice cream and strawberries or whatever. We'll be back from work shortly. 52:09 Erin: Okay, that's great. 52:12 Wes: All right, thank you. 52:14 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.