Life-and-Destruction                                                            Page 33

The poem allows both a deconstructive reading, (based on Taylor's

deconstructive theology) and a more traditional Jungian interpretation. The

latter may at first sight seem neater but acceptance of the shadow side of self

in the poem, is more than peaceful coexistence of apparently conflicting

opposites. There is a "change" in perception. The shadow is seen first as an

invading presence that will be "master", and then the vision changes to

awareness that the shadow is indeed the other half of oneself. The "logic of

exclusion" admits to the existence of a "dark side" but keeps it separate, at a

distance, seen as alien or something to be endured and kept under control. To

proclaim, "we are one" is to accept the "single and perilous" reality that there is

always "The Other Half (C.P. p.215):

I face the light, the dark of me I bury.

My silent answer and my other half,

we meet at midnight and by music only .

Yet there's a word that I would give to you:

the truth you tell in your dumb images

my daylight self goes stumbling after too.

So may we meet at last, and meeting bless,

and turn into one truth in singleness.

The two halves of self, one of "daylight" the other of "the dark" meet "at

midnight", the intersection point of day and night, and "by music only". At

midnight the clear lines of certitude are blurred, smudged and shadowy and in

this realm an unspoken "word" is said "by music only". Music releases the

mind from the relentless search for demonstrable "truth" into the truth of the

senses and imagination. The rational "daylight self goes stumbling after" the

midnight music of the dark self, wanting that truth found in "dumb", wordless

symbols, images, pictures and sensations. The meeting comes about "by music

only" as if music enables the union of opposites (the daylight self and the dark

self) in much the same way as the "crystal sense" focussed and fused joy and

pain in "The Maker".