Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow

Everybody's lonely. The human race hasn't learned how not to be; the inner language doesn't exist. There are degrees, times, places, people, who are more or less so, but it's true for all. Many know how to mask it, some how to stand it, and some make a lifelong mission of beating it. The skillful or the lucky minimize the effects in a surround of love. Some are relentlessly tortured by their desolation. Some have found peace in their quietude. You can appeal to the godhead, try to meditate your way out of it. You've seen others make a spectacle of themselves straining to caper and titter their way through it, to surround themselves with bodies that only increase their isolation.

For most the feeling of anomie comes to the fore just now and then, due to some event or from the lack of event, of distracting stimuli.

Here, in "developed" nations, loneliness is seen as a kind of plague; in Japan there's a word for people who live and die alone, kodokushi, and it's seen as a national problem.

I'm easy in my solitude, I like it, but I know what the Acid God told me of old, I know what the voice of the turtle whispers in the land; down in there somewhere I must be lonely. A while ago I had a dream in which I was hiking into a hilly landscape, happy, eager to explore - I've had a lot of these good dreams - when I saw that the terrain was just empty, lifeless, black volcanic sand. No one there but me. I took a few steps back, onto a hummock of cindery grit, lifted my hands to the empty sky, and raised my voice, "I don't want to be alone! I don't want to be alone!"

That was the message from the Black Planet. I took it to be a warning: fix this.

Later, though, a casual carpool driver, a woman who loves the constant flow of being, that life is change, told me that these sharp moments are just that, the weather of the mind, leaves in the wind, haiku. Pay them no mind, they pass.

Could that be true? What a relief if it is. I can go on like this, not burden myself with the assignment of pairing up. No grotesqueries like online dating or adult classes. Free to be me unbothered. Unhounded by the pitchfork-and-torch waving persecutors of the loner.

Solitude is a social heresy; it is rejected and despised, the obverse of "having a life," while the solitary is shamed, pitied, and mocked. The epidemic here isn't being alone, it's fear of being alone. And of being thought to be alone.

Solitude and loneliness are not the same. In solitude there is strength. Aldous Huxley wrote, “The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”  But then, anybody can say anything. The loneliness is still there somewhere.

A popular quote from Faulkner's As I Lay Dying: "It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end."

Whether you do or whether you don't. My mother told me how a volunteer came to her assisted living home and held her hand through a long night of pneumonia. She said that physical contact, that warm palm, kept her tethered to life until morning and revival. I believe her. She died anyway.

In those moments of alienation, a Dylan line comes up: "...the bitter dance of loneliness fading into space..."

Fading into space...

Human contact, real intimacy, is a vitamin; a deep need. The eye to eye, the touch of a voice, the presence here now of someone who sees what you see, who sees you, whom you see.

So is the need to be by yourself.

You know what I think? That I know I can make it alone, I've done it for most of my life, talking to people who aren't there and can't hear me. The love is still there. If you know that the world is love, that being is love...if you know...

Everybody knows how to die. You can't fuck that up. What a relief. 

Yeah, I know I can take whatever comes, and enjoy myself most of the time. But with that one-tenth of a percent of the illusion of free will that may actually be at our disposal, I will make it as good as I can, as deep and fine. With (a few) people. Simplicity, authenticity, depth, beauty, warmth, direct connection. Be real. Don't be a hardass.

"Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone."
Paul Tillich