loneliness -- some digressions

 

Loneliness -- some digressions

 

Loneliness

 

Come closer friend,

Let me crush you in love

With this intimate kiss

I’ll give you a bruise

 

I’m parched as dust

I’ll drink down your soul

If you’ve fresh thoughts

I swallow it all.

 

Draw near

Everyone’s shy

I plucked you out

From the crowds passing by

 

It’s been forever

Boiling alone

My soliloquy

Is degraded to drone.

 

                There is the man who walks into the room and everybody's hearts are lifted; they adore him, they want to be seen by him, they enjoy his presence. There is a sense of group eros, here, perhaps it is charisma; such men and women light up the room, there is a lamp behind their eyes and hearts. If this person wanted to gather a group for a party, you'd better believe they'd all be there. And if his loved one awaited his return on the train station platform, her heart would be panging and emptied from his absence; she would throw her arms around him and love him tenderly.

                I am not this man. Not at all. I feel I am a master of shadows, that my pain in the world turns my wit sharp, exacting, and sarcastic. I feel brilliant as the sun, high flying as the divine -- but who can relate to any of that? Perhaps it is a fear of solids. Solids kill. To close myself off in this autistic world of self-created beauty -- that is something. I can do that.

**

                “Have you ever listened to a piece of music, and it rapt your entire attention, moved you to your pith, so that when the music transfigured, your heart transfigured too? This is what Carl Rogers called a ‘Peak Moment.’ It is wonderful when I can find a song that brings that creative achievement together in such a way, and also, personal, since I cannot get others to experience what I mean. More to the point, I write such songs myself, with great care, and perform them, bringing to glory this moment of ecstatic insight. Nobody shares it, not ever, in any time or in any way. That moment is completely my own. Perhaps I can’t sing. I like to think I can write better than sing, and my writing is to me highly developed and sublime. Yet again, I have no proof that it delivers others to the spiritual place that wrote them.

                “My singing of my song to an unhearing crowd: this moment captures my life

                “My heart is completely other from the world.

                “This is the nature of my loneliness on earth.”

                My life is full of joys and intolerable bliss -- I am often grateful and sometimes shocked at how happy I am. Yet the sad part about being me is that there are times when I get lonely, but because I am different, I have no peers to console me. A few in my lifetime I have enjoyed for a while. Ultimately, my greatest joy must be in you alone: the writing of my ideas.

                These writings are conscious. They are second mind. Every sentence is a nerve. But you are not my brain. The best of you came out of my fingertips, between me and matter; I could not have predicted you.

                I have found every friendship and indeed every romance, even the ones I stay loyal to, lacking in what I want. I seek in vain. I feel best when I am mirror meditating, when I am playing my guitar in my room, when I am writing and editing you, my friend. There remains something sad in all friendship, the feeling of disconnect, he doesn’t get me, she is secretly afraid of me, I see it all too well. I am never loved as I love. My passionate love is unequalled. Never in a human being have I felt the depth and profundity of appreciation, desire, need as I have given. With Ama, I met a peak, but we destroyed each other.

                I had read all the Bible, the theology, the works of many saints and sages. Such a sad day when I realized that my love beat stronger, deeper, more profound than God. It is no great pride to best God in love, for with that you realize that you love God more than God can love anybody, that your heart is greater than the divine. This was a sad day for me. Not even God was equal to me. Where shall I turn?

                Narcissism grants me great comfort. And the love of my readers, though I have to see my true readers behind your eyes who doubt, and wonder, and scoff, and frown, and never quite get what you are reading. I look sadly at you. I see your inner self, looking scared, hopingly, wonderingly, like a child in a way, I see you all the time in people, like my own children, and afraid of me. There lies a great disconnect between us: you must grow wings to reach me. I am worth every bird you have ever held in your hand.

                My heart swells, my words slow to a flow. I am alone here. I, in love with all of mankind, and yet not loved—if they knew themselves they would know me!—not seen, never seen, never scented. Did you not feel your soul turn inside you as I walked by? Your eyes remained fixed on your task, but your soul turned around and watched me go. I wish you were more the puppy, who unashamedly pounces up, sniffs and licks the one he loves. Or perhaps I will kitten with you, and we will fill our basket with purring! I would love you dearly if you would know me. No, that is unlikely! I am alone here.

                Today, today, the great light keen arrives, with dark dark eyes, he is a comet—you never know him. He is the light that closes all your eyes: I am quite alone when this happens. I get winged with quickness, and stay awake, but you all, day or not, slow your face, dull your eye, and see only darkness amidst the hypnotic light. How lonely I get, in this dark dark moments for you. Not that I talk to him: what have we to do with each other? I care nothing for comets. And so I grow a little more introverted and frantic. And all great pains are cured by—work!

                If one is mentally different from others, though he is brilliant, or fascinating, or exhilarating, if he remains unique and different, intimacy with him is impossible, even his dearest friend and closest lovers cannot love him, because she fears him and the strangeness of his mind. She will make excuses to avoid all forms of intimacy, he will be painfully reminded of what he felt his whole life, that he is different, his mind is unique, perhaps even monstrous in its demonstrations, and that his greatest glory is to love himself.

**

                I’ve seen many of my friendships and loves disintegrate: sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once. Often I am uncertain why. I used to accuse others for not telling me the truth; now I suspect they are unable to tell it. Either they do not know the truth, or even if they have a sense of it, they can’t articulate it. I need a new entourage.

                Yet even absence if a gift. Ellen, the red lipped poet who wed Emerson, passed this place and made her independence complete, left Waldo alone and bereft and hence independent of traditional religion. He could cast off the Christian lens and see the direct Oversoul. Tradition failed to protect him, so he left tradition and initiated direct contact. In the same way, the beloved departed gives us spiritual gifts still, and whatever injustice you suffer, your own soul will counterbalance with intimate success.

** ** **

                A lonely man may feel he is always holding back in society. He gives, but not all himself. He would give more, but cannot, not with control, and effusive feelings the world finds repugnant. Control over emotion, a fine powerful ego that can put the heart in place, this is the prerequisite for magnanimity and is the aim of all philosophical men and women, never to dull the passions -- if anything to intensify them -- but to subjugate the heart to idea, to let love serve as that one thing it always was: a fuel for the fire.

                And yet in any body, any religious body or corporate body, there is in each of us the topics on which we are lonely upon, which we refrain from publicly discussing, and then there are those men and women who are the group loners -- and their subjective loneliness fulfills a collective role, it is mandated, it is necessary.

                We need rebels, criminals, and blasphemers -- mankind would make no progress without such people. The great implausibility in Orwell's 1984 is the lack of theocracy -- for politics is not enough. If the Muslims or Christians were able to freeze world beliefs and suppress dissenters, the world machine would freeze and settle. We need to break down monopolies and oppose every great instance. We need inward men and women to act as centers and as social sponges, to absorb the stress and angst of a system and to languish, to release in intense fictions and crimes that pent energy, having filtered through their pith and made it something fantastic and divine.

                "Whilst all authority in it will be derived from and dependent on society, the society will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in danger from interested combinations of the majority."

                In other words, diversity is security, just as the poison of religion is neutralized by multiplicity of sects, so that even under these systems of divine conformism, there is some choice and legitimacy of choice.

                It is a sense of loneliness, that sort of ache that blankets its truth while seemingly trying to share it, that ensures a few types are preserved, a few types will insist on being lonely rather than conformed, would rather be alone as themselves than befriended as a fake. Solitude is sweeter than compromise.

** ** **

 

 

\ ~@M@~ /

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