Nights In White Satin

Nights in White Satin
Never reaching the end
Letters I've written
Never meaning to send

Beauty I'd always missed
With these eyes before
Just what the truth is
I can't say any more

'Cause I love you
Yes I love you
Oh how I love you

Gazing at people
Some hand in hand
Just what I'm going through
They can't understand

Some try to tell me
Thoughts they can not defend
Just what you want to be 
you'll be in the end

'Cause I love you...


For years I thought the song was called Knights in White Satin - until I saw the title in writing. I then presumed that this was ambiguity by design. The initial music whispers of princessly romance in a faerie garden while the closing orchestral sequence smacks of medieval trumpets heralding a king's army. Common testimony however pegs a set of satin bedsheets as the origin of the title.

I don't pretend to know what messages Justin Hayward and the Moody Blues wished to send but the messages which I personally interpret are of significantly more resonance than the average pop song. What follows here is simply one interpretation:

Nights in white satin
Never reaching the end

A world of darkness, devoid of enlightenment, in which we wear absurd robes, masking ourselves as saintly creatures - though with a garish quality because it is not the real image of a saint but rather the image of our flawed interpretation of a saint. This darkness has no end. Enlightenment is not coming. Evolution has stalled. We rest at a morbid standstill.

Letters I've written
Never meaning to send

The internal dialogue of weak consciousness. The bad testimony. Poor excuses for the evil we constantly do and feel. Rationalization. We do it all the time and mostly don't even know we're doing it. The instinctive mind placating the confused consciousness. "We're not evil. We're good."

But we can't transmit these messages; well, some of us can't. For the thoughtful person, as soon as we start speaking these rationalizations aloud they break down and we detect the falseness; the failed logic.

Beauty I'd always missed
With these eyes before

With the perspectives accessed through nascent enlightenment, the same people we'd either subconsciously despised for the evil we outwardly tried to ignore or whom we overtly despised for the evils we chose to see, have now become beautiful, because we've amended our flawed perspective; graduated to the universal context. Evil is normal and was necessary for existence. It is the new and rare capacity for goodness that is miraculous and relevant. The human is beautiful for that.

Just what the truth is
I can't say any more

Now that we grasp the power and inaccessibility of the master mind; the instinctive mind; the non-consciousness, we know that we can never fully trust our conscious thoughts any more  Was that thought pure and true? Or was it rationalization? We are now at war: Consciousness versus instinct, and as with any war, our internal communications are encoded.

'Cause I love you
Yes I love you
Oh how I love you

You're all beautiful. Love is losing its linear dimension. Love is a state. We are becoming a creature of love.

Gazing at people
Some hand in hand

We see those who have not made these discoveries. They wear the clothes we used to wear and say the things we used to say. They grasp onto each other in pairs. Rather than learn to become a creature of love; something they know not the possibility of, they make artificial contracts with each other. They promise to wear the robes of love for each other for all time and to deny love to anyone else. But it's a very hard promise to keep.

Just what I'm going through
They can't understand

For the creature of love, the hand-in-hand tradition does not apply. The artificial security it offers is of no value to the creature of love while the restrictions of exclusivity threaten to dis-enlighten  to stifle the capacity for evolved love. But the uninitiated can not grasp this.

Some try to tell me
Thoughts they can not defend

The uninitiated don't know what we've been through. They contradict our advice with illegitimate perspectives which pass for reality to them, derived from ingrained false or flawed dogma embedded by the ruling structures of society. They are the things we used to say before we knew better.

Just what you want to be 
you'll be in the end

To the uninitiated all of their living experience is a weaving of illusions. When all of life is illusory then that is your reality. Whatever rationalizations one relies upon may as well, for all purposes, be regarded as your reality, since reality is perception. It is the matrix.

'Cause I love you
Yes I love you
Oh how I love you...

So much love stems from pity for those in the matrix. But we don't say this aloud for the word pity is despised. It is insulting to be pitied because we don't have the capacity to appreciate most of our own suffering. We have not the necessary perspectives to do the accounting. The suffering is written off as the price for being alive. But that is not the reality. And what enlightened being should not love the sufferer?

This pretty much concludes the thoughts I have had about this song. But now, listening to the 7.5 minute album version in order to transcribe the lyrics accurately, I am taking in the further poetry spoken toward the end of this version: The "Late Lament." I've heard it before but without paying it much mind, so I will now attempt an initial exploration:

Breathe deep the gathering gloom
watch lights fade from every room

Night approaches, be that linear or metaphorical.

---- people look back and lament
Another days useless ---- spent

Sorry. I can't make this out! This isn't going very well, is it?

Impassioned lovers wrestle as one
Lonely man cries for love and has none
New mother picks up and settles her son
Senior citizens wish they were young

The limits of linear love? The sex addiction (not that sex isn't okay!), the grief when the matrix offers no hand-in-hand lover to the uninitiated. The dual nature of maternal love; a function of natural selection; a chemical equation, which, granted, does not preclude a component of more noble conscious love. And the fear of dying alone?

Cold hearted orb rules the night
removes the colours from our sight
red is gray and yellow, white
but we decide which is right
and which is an illusion

It is the moon, not the sun which sheds our light. The lunar light is a counterfeit light. The moon is not the real source. Metaphorically, it is illusion not truth which guides our lives. As individuals we each decide which battles to fight. When do we accept illusion for truth (the rule) and when do we laboriously endeavour to calculate the hidden truth?

Of course, the lyrics taken as literally as possible tell a simple tale of long sleepless nights haunted by unrequited love, though I never hear that. But that's applicability for you.

So... this is a glimpse into one component of the poetic life. Not escape, observation, contemplation or discipline, but consolidation. Not particularly astounding though, eh? This song has never enlightened me to anything; contained no revelation. As with almost any exploration it offers no more than consolidation: words that these ears might choose to interpret as affirmation; an indulgence, admittedly.