Streetlights

Dancing into 2024

For a number of years now, I’ve spent New Year’s Eve dancing. One year, it was at the bar my friend’s cousins owned, where they played Motown and Yes’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart”, a prog rock 80s classic I would never have thought to dance to before I tried it. Otherwise, the dancing has been at house parties thrown by friends. The soundtrack is a little different at each house, and every year, but some standards, like “1999”, make everyone’s list.

There’s no better way to end the year, in my view. Dancing at parties is a wonderful activity for those of a somewhat introverted nature, like me, since it allows for interaction with strangers without needing to talk: smiling, imitating, and pointing replace awkward conversation. And however you felt about the year that passed, dancing will mean you feel exhilaration going into the next one.

Since many of the dance tracks at these parties are now approaching, if not exceeding, a half-century of play, it’s no surprise people know a lot of the words by heart. Toward midnight last night, it was the words of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” being belted out. Everyone knew the first couple of lines (“Just a smalltown girl/living in a lonely world/took the midnight train going anywhere”), things became a bit fuzzy, and then we were back for “Streetlights, people, oh-oh-oh.”

It made me think about people, and how for a few years we didn’t see many at all, but we’d decided to gather together as a group, again, even as Covid continues to circulate and keeps our everyday lives more cautious and limited than before.

And I thought about streetlights, and what that represented in the song. Urban life? Is “people, streetlights” shorthand for the charms of city life?

When the song began, someone said, after a few beats, “Oh, this is the slow version.” What was playing was the original Journey recording, but there has been more than one dance cover of the song since it was first released in 1981. I first heard a dance version on this video of a spontaneous street celebration of Obama’s 2008 election victory in Seattle, where someone had dragged speakers out of a local club to the street. I tracked that version down after that, and added it to my own wedding playlist. The dance beat, in my view, enhances the overall hopefulness and exuberance of the original. And it’s just as easy to sing along to.

Perhaps because of the way the snowflakes hovered under the streetlights as we walked down a perfect winter street to the party last night, perhaps because of the magic of voices joining together to shout “streetlights!” in the kitchen, a short poem by Russian poet Alexander Blok that has always stuck with me came to mind. I read it again today, and I think it can be a new year’s poem, of a sort. It’s definitely a winter poem.

There are many professional translations of the poem available – a thoughtful one here, and another, recommended by Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky, who reflects on the poem, here. There’s also this page, which seems to collect a lot of individual people’s translations in one place, which give you an idea of the range: https://ruverses.com/alexander-blok/night-street-lamp-drugstore/. But none of the I translations align with how I hear the poem in my head, so here’s my own rough one.

Night. Street. Streetlight. Pharmacy.

Meaningless and dull light.

Live another quarter of a century –

Everything will be like this. There is no escape.

You’ll die, and begin again

And everything will repeat, like before

Night, icy ripples on the canal

Pharmacy, street, streetlight.

The original:

Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека,
Бессмысленный и тусклый свет.
Живи еще хоть четверть века –
Все будет так. Исхода нет.

Умрешь – начнешь опять сначала
И повторится все, как встарь:
Ночь, ледяная рябь канала,
Аптека, улица, фонарь.

The simplicity of the language, and the slightly altered repetition, are what draw me in. The words are morose, but also, I think, hopeful, in a sense — if not the “Streetlights!” sense. Fast away the old year passes. Life goes on. The (street)light remains.