Using Loneliness

Natalie Goldberg writes a chapter under the above title, in Writing Down the Bones. She writes of her own confrontation with being alone and lonely after separating from her husband, and of how she learned that loneliness was also a time of activity. She had been complaining to her Zen master of how hard it was to be alone, and he asked her what she did when she was alone: “Suddenly, it had a fascination” (149). She kept track of how she filled her loneliness.

My recurrently sporadic “activity” around the concepts of “alone” and “lonely” several times in my life, so far, has been to fantasize all the time about being alone, with no thought of the parallel condition of feeling lonely.

The two states, alone and lonely, are named from the same root, of course. Ironically, the root, according to my dictionary, is the Middle English concept of “all one.”  But the two are distinctly different states:  It is possible to be alone and feel complete, adequate to the occasion; the feeling of loneliness is that one is not enough.

“Alone” can be rather attractive. In fact, it is possible to seek and even crave the state of being alone, on your own, solo, living in solitude. It is especially possible to seek that state in an overly eventful life. I realized that one year, taking a Management Effectiveness Training workshop that among other things explained why I was marginal management material.

One of the exercises was to imagine a ship, and to staff and populate that ship deck by deck with friends and others who needed to be part of your voyage. And I realized the only ship I wanted was for a crew of one, equipped for a solo sail around the world. There was no one I wanted to share it with. I just wanted to be left alone. And I had no experience with sailing.

At that time I was effectively working two jobs. One was a fairly contained and boring day job looking after the library of the Saskatoon Star Phoenix, a small daily newspaper.  The other, the night job, was the very public one of reviewing theatre and books in the same newspaper, writing some magazine features, and otherwise having my name and voice out on display all the time. I couldn’t go shopping or walk downtown on a Saturday afternoon without seeing somebody I knew, or running into someone who wanted to talk.

At first that felt pretty good--the satisfaction of being a modestly talented fingerling in a manageable pond. Then I began to doubt that talent and to detest that level of visibility--the need always to be “on.” That was probably part of it. I realized later that I had also been going through a depressive state at the time—I realized that when I was going through another, bigger, one later and had to go for treatment. And what I had been experiencing was a kind of painfully crowded loneliness—the kind it is possible to feel only in a crowd you cannot connect with or find much joy in.

Or sharing a small house with a spouse on a different journey. I think my first wife married me partly because she was afraid of being alone, and afraid of feeling lonely. I married her because she said she would marry me, and we were a pretty dynamic and passionate pair at the start. She divorced me when she realized there were worse things than being alone—and being lonely in a marriage was one of them. We had gone our separate and lonely ways across the yawning abyss of a double mattress long since. Being alone together with someone else in a shared space full of memories of more companionable times and activities is a devastating kind of loneliness. It proved harder on her than on me, so she called a halt first.

So suddenly there I was: alone.

Separated.

And lonely.

In one sense it was a state I had helped orchestrate. The alone part was maybe okay—but the lonely part was a shock. I would walk the city, looking for company that somehow suddenly seemed disappointingly elusive. Was I running into fewer people? Not really. I had not really been running into so many, previously: it had simple felt that way.

I was also unemployed—or seriously underemployed and underpaid, scraping together a living from free lance writing and part-time library work. That’s a different kind of loneliness. Suddenly every advertisement on tv was an insult to my sense of myself as a consuming member of the educated, professional adult middle class. Not only did it feel like I would never again have friends or friendly company, or even again have sex; no, worse, I would never again buy anything foolishly expensive and undeniably unnecessary.

Now I live in Edmonton, a city in which even after 27 years I have little public presence and no real “friends,” none I can drop in on for a laugh at any time. Well, not quite none. I have the friendship of my wife of over twenty-five years. Eva is a woman of amazing resilience in the face of my recurrent but less and less frequent downers. She has friends, and so “we” have many acquaintances, usually maintained through her outwardness.

But as I considered Goldberg's invitation to muse about the state of solitude and the activity of loneliness, I began to realize I have not craved the solo life much in the last many years. That’s a good sign, because one day soon enough, it looks like, Eva and I will be retired together.

It was sad watching my parents’ marriage go apparently suddenly and irretrievably to hell once Dad had to take early retirement, at 60, on stress leave. (I say “apparently suddenly” because the tensions had probably been there for years, but manageable. And I had been out of the house for years, so had not witnessed the slide.) So he stayed home and drove himself and Mom crazy. And maybe in self defense, she helped return the favour.

I won’t be quitting work until closer to 70 (not getting on the pension plan till 59 has had something to do with that). I can’t see quitting at 65 to be home alone, eating ceaselessly while trying to keep busy and entertained while Eva is still at work for several more years.  

In fact, in my much more private life as an educator, even the once relatively attractive idea of being alone has lost a lot of its sparkle. Even if for practical purposes, because of committee commitments, I am still doing two jobs.

As for the idea of feeling “usefully lonely” so I have to manufacture busyness, it has no appeal at all.

Bonding Routine

“E, a place that, they afterwards learned, bore a v,” : 

This bit of “found poetry” was the “subject” line for some spam that came through my e-mail recently. I thought it might make for an interesting starting line for a writing prompt, as recommended by Natalie Goldberg. Here’s what has come of it.

E, a place that, they afterwards learned, bore a v, was a most private and unassuming address in a rather ordinary looking gated community. The “v” E bore was its mark of distinction, engraved on the address plate on the front of the house above and to the left of E’s upper ^--, in order to distinguish ^vE from its cross-town suburban counterpart, E².  Where E² was a lab devoted, so far as the public was even interested, to arcane things to do with particle string theory, v-bearing E was the office away from the office for several of Bond’s employer’s weapons and special effects masters. It looked on the outside like an over-sized bungalow made of brick, but it was built onto a hillside, and its basement went in and down several steel and titanium sheathed storeys, emptying out into something that would have embarrassed the Bat Cave: A toyshop of destruction, right beside a full-sized, fully equipped gymnasium and firing range.

        But that was not ^vE’s most interesting feature. To get there, without a high security clearance or a licence to kill, you had to have dated or caught the amorous attention of M, James Bond’s boss. Because right across the hall from the weapons lab and fitness centre was a fully stocked boudoir, in which M entertained – well, whomever she pleased. Or more to the point, whoever pleased her. Though as she got older, that list grew shorter, along with her temper. 

       Unlike the employers of the director of the CIA, M’s bosses were not prudes. If she wanted to dally, even at her age, she had their full co-operation.  They had, after all, recruited her years ago for her talents at dalliance. With her relaxed, elegant beauty and her Oxford Ph.D. in the history of applied sexual anthropology, she had been one of their best agents for seducing cold-war enemy agents to reveal more than their physical skills under the covers, back in her younger, less acerbic, days.

           All those years of whoring for Queen and country had pretty much used up her patience with fumbling twits, impressive mostly for the fact that higher-ups believed they could be trusted with information, when they were just men, after all. Well—most of them. Some of those Russian agentesses had been spectacular. Almost as spectacular as M in her prime. Almost as spectacular, and a little harder to impress—the only real challenges to her inventiveness, but ultimately the key to her advancement up the ranks.

       None of M’s guests, for reasons best left to the imagination, ever took note of the ^v on the way in—only on their exhausted way out, their senses a tuned a bit higher to the finer details. But it was the thing they recalled ever after—maybe ruing, maybe relishing, the realization they had just become another notch on her headboard.  

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Now—where did that come from? Probably the fact that the newest Bond movie came out this last week, though I haven’t seen it yet. But I’ve sure never wondered what M’s back story was. Not until that weird V-bearing E opened the gate. Does this mean I am to become a knocker-off of Bond prequels? Something to look forward to in my retirement. Something even to retire to pursue—a career as a soft-core cold-war espionage pornographer. Who knew?

Natalie Goldberg, in her entertaining and irritatingly inspiring book Writing Down the Bones, a book that's been around since 1986, so it's been inspiring and irritating for over a generation now, writes of Russell Edson, who would sit down and write off ten short pieces in a session, always beginning with an absurd but strong first sentence like, "As a man sauteed his hat he was thinking of how his mother used to saute his father's hat, and how grandmother used to saute grandfather's hat, " or "Like a white snail the toilet seat slides into the living room, demanding to be loved." Her invitation is to follow this lead, to "dive into absurdity and write."

So I tried.

Here's what's come out--at least these are two I don't mind sharing:

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Ginger stepped orangely out of the rainbow and strolled through the unobstructed vision Ralph thought he was having of his rosy future.  He removed his glasses to make sure he had the right chromatic correction, then replaced them. No. She definitely came from a shade or two too far up the spectrum. Too bad, too, because in every other respect she was a perfect fit for the life Ralph had planned far into his level-headed future. He began to reconsider his options, wondering if maybe he hadn’t set his sights a tad too narrowly, or if some cosmetic adjustment could make up for her deficiencies. Ginger, a playful sort who had just wanted to add a little spice to the life stewing flavorlessly in Ralph’s monochromatic imagination, grew impatient with his dithering and procrastination, and withdrew, back into the prism that was her home. “I simply have no time for the terminally bland,” she muttered.

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The Queen Margharita pizza ordered the customers at the table to pay attention.  She was steamed. Well, baked, actually. Not half-baked, like before, like earlier on when nothing had gone right. She wanted fully to be the star, celebrated at this moment when something like perfection seemed possible out of the disgrace of earlier the same evening.   

The idiot rookie line cook who had falsified his resumé had begun a trial incarnation with a cheap undergarment of some ghastly commercial pesto before anyone could stop him. Then for a petticoat layer, he’d poured some weird reddish sauce over the pesto—which did deserve being hidden, but still…. A lady has her standards.  Then he had layered on an overskirt of processed mozzarella slices, the taste and texture of semi-congealed wall plaster. She had been sent out looking so common, then ingloriously been sent back, to finally just slip herself off the platter and into hiding in a plastic bin.

She had re-emerged in all her regal splendour when a qualified courtier, understanding the job and sensing the importance of decorum and occasion, fitted her out to emerge with dignity and command appreciation for all her richness. Her unbaked nakedness first moisturized and rouged with deep crushed romas;  this foundation decorated with an overlayer of tiny perfect dots of buffalo bocconcini buds, elegantly arranged and floated over the smooth silk of the tomatoes; a few perfect, locally grown, fresh basil leaves delicately, greenly, accenting the whole—just enough to get the aromas wafting into the hall. She commanded respect for her elegant simplicity, and everyone had damned well better acknowledge the fact.

She just hoped the diners were talented and gracious enough to appreciate what she brought to the occasion, whatever it was. There was no going back this time. She’d rather go out the front door cold and ignored in a doggy bag than have to return, discarded, to the kitchen with all the common trash.