So Many Monsters

Annie Lennox is one of my favorite singers, not just for her haunting bluesy voice, but also for the complete access she gives us to her inner life. The confessional impulse is presented to us in complex melodies that often seem experimental. It's not clear if she's going to fall into a dirge or raise us to gospel-level rapture within the same song. The lyrics also play hopscotch with detachment followed by direct focus and back again, yet the situations and emotions she alludes to pulse through each line. 

She may be playing for us and with us, but she keeps us close inside her world on her terms, which is highly courageous, even if only for a few minutes. This song wasn't written solely by her, but she makes it her own by her performance. Yet there is a generosity about her style--as if there is room for all to contribute and take away. I can imagine her liking the jar that reads, "Need a penny? Take a penny. Have a penny? Leave a penny." (Or twopence, in her case.)

One of her tunes that comes whistling into my head at unexpected times is from the song "No More I Love You's".

(First of all, any pop song that can get away with using the word "language" is a rare accomplishment for that alone). She invites us into her mood with an odd, lilting background of children laughing along with her imitation of a little girl's voice telling her mummy about monsters acting crazy, set against a rising progression. In a contrasting move of formality, she intones high-pitched voices like a Greek chorus to her lamentations: "The lover speaks about the monsters."

I'm in her spell, ready to receive what the chorus presents, the most intimate stanza yet: "I used to have demons in my room at night/ Desire, despair, desire… So many monsters." The repetition of "desire" calls up an image of someone shifting her frightened gaze from one side of the bed to another, until she shuts her eyes with the certainty that she is surrounded by several.

The Nightmare Henry Fuseli 1781

It's the most universal and ageless position of hide and seek with all the forces both natural and supernatural: bolt, duck and cover. Those fears in the night that plague us often do feel as if they are surrounding and closing in until we lose our ability to name them, and then lose our language to defeat them.

So, here I'll follow Annie Lennox in form--I will confess, disarm, and present, but also profess:

Recently I've felt surrounded by so many monsters that are scaring both me and the people I love. The specifics don't matter, because they're the same demons that have been described and wrestled with the world over. They parade past in the shape of unstable relationships, mental illness, drug dependence, old age, uncertain futures, career changes, loss and grief, all to the tune of hope.

What I desire in each situation is for the right sort of world to materialize. What I fear in each situation can cause me to despair, according to the limits of my own mind. While all of these looming problems make me feel as tiny as a child under the covers, hiding from a puppet show of monsters, I'm also relieved that fortunes, judgments, and blessings are not left up to someone so small.

In a moment of seeking comfort, it occurred to me to find it by taking back my voice. To use my innermost "inside voice," as we tell children, out of the silence the monsters leave me in. It's possible that I can disarm them with the honest confession of my inadequacy. I can turn on them suddenly with a formal chorus of voices in my head that say "I love you" to the people I'm frightened for, even if they can't hear me at that moment. I can even say "I love you" to the monsters, because really, what on earth could silence them more profoundly? I can then rest by professing the language before it leaves me entirely.