On Neediness: Midnight Chimes

That particular November 2nd was ninety years since W.B. Yeats wrote “All Souls’ Night.” My friend Theo and I marked the occasion by staying up into the small hours, writing our own poems to the dead. We were about twenty years old, living in university housing, sitting on the scratchy carpet of Theo’s bedroom. We had a bottle of wine and two mugs, but no “long glasses brimmed with muscatel.” Around midnight, I went to check my phone and heard a sound like a fork being scraped across stone. It was probably a loose floorboard, someone else in the house getting in. But until the toilet light clicked on, I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a ghost.

In Yeats’s poem, midnight chimes, and he calls on the ghosts of two former friends (William Thomas Horton and MacGregor Mathers) and an old maybe-lover (Florence Emery). “A ghost may come,” he says, “to drink from the wine-breath/While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.” I used to love this poem almost entirely because of that image of dead spirits siphoning wine from the breath of the living. It encapsulated what I wanted to believe in, at an age when I was eager to believe in anything: namely, that poets don’t write as such. They commune, they channel, they receive dictation.

This conception is central to the poet’s neediness. What other kind of writer puts so much stock in the quasi-religious notion of a calling or a vocation? You can’t choose to be a poet; you have to be chosen, called upon by some force outside of yourself. As a result, you are always watching, waiting, anxiously hoping you’ll get the chance to write again.

Neediness is both a feature of poems and a characteristic of those who write them. Paul Celan calls poems “lonely,” a quality often, though not always, interchangeable with neediness. Novels are self-sufficient—cutting through the waves like cruise ships—whereas the poem, Celan continues, “intends another, needs this other, needs an opposite. It goes toward it, bespeaks it.” That needy repetition of needs makes the point for him.

It’s significant that in “All Souls’ Night,” Yeats doesn’t necessarily get through to the spirits he addresses. His estranged friend Mathers, an “arrogant” ghost, won’t appear. Yeats says of him: “He had much industry at setting out,/Much boisterous courage, before loneliness/Had driven him crazed.” Commenting on another person’s “crazed” loneliness seems a bit much when you’re the one summoning ghosts at midnight and getting peeved at their indifference. But this only illustrates the neediness—the unreasonable desire to speak and be spoken back to and affirmed—that animates Yeats’s poem.

I had come to a halt the year before that All Souls’ Night on the carpet. I don’t know how else to put it. Maybe I’d experienced something similar before. I largely kept to myself during my teen years, though, so those moods would have gone off like underwater detonations. Now at university, surrounded by others, I was self-conscious about the force of my emotions. I knew something was wrong. When I failed to hand in another assignment, I told the professor I was stuck, like there was a Lego jammed in my internal mechanism.

Still, I tried. I spent hours in my room writing and rewriting the same sentence. Something was surfacing, a raw aloneness and grief I hadn’t let myself feel before. Its effect was immobilizing. The only thing that still moved, just about, was poetry. I read and wrote poems constantly; they took on the transferred weight of whatever else I was feeling. Poems absorbed it all. However small or hermetically sealed they seemed, they simulated a connection with others. Two weeks before Celan’s death by suicide, he wrote to his friend Ilana Shmueli, “when I read my poems, they grant me, momentarily, the possibility to exist, to stand.” I think that’s because poems are vehicles built to express neediness.

Whether the material of the poem is generated by direct address to a you or, as with Yeats, channels the spirits of the dead, there is a sense of bare tendrils reaching outward. Neediness is an ugly emotion in part because it gets overshadowed by more respectable ugly emotions such as anxiety. Anxiety, writes Sianne Ngai, has “a certain epistemological cachet.” Neediness, on the other hand, is more abject, associated with embarrassing traits like codependency in a romantic partnership or clinginess in a friendship.

But there is another way to see it.

If a specific wish lies behind neediness—maybe not one that could be fulfilled—it is the fantasy of psychic porousness, of minds laid open. The corollary in speech would be a language holding the possibility of total understanding, which renders speech itself unnecessary. Celan’s work, despite its perceived obscurity, strains toward this condition. A short poem titled “To Stand” echoes the language of his letter to Shmueli but in more ambivalent terms. A contradictory neediness runs through it: there’s the desire (as translated by Pierre Joris) to stand “for-no-one-and-nothing” while also to be “for you/alone.” He then closes with the image of a room “without/language” which cannot, by definition, be entered into by the poem.

Every feeling contains its opposite. To be needy is also to fantasize about being self-reliant, islanded, never in need. Of course, that makes it easier to shut out the needs of others—to regard them as separate from your own. But writing poems isn’t like that. As Celan said elsewhere, poems are a “making toward something.” Back in Theo’s room on All Souls’ Night, I was needy. As much as I wanted to be “for-no-one-and-nothing,” every part of me was directed toward a you. The poem “intends another, needs this other.” That was the first time I understood what it means to write. I was sitting with a friend; it was between night and morning, then and now. Waves of laughter and sadness passed through us. We inhabited a shared, transitive state, writing by the glare of a desk light, looking earnestly out of the window, waiting for something—someone—to respond.