I’m sitting at a bar in a restaurant in Long Beach and with the celebrants of an impending wedding. The gush of a bottle of Champagne just uncorked, and a table of eighteen settles into the pleasures of its own company. Conversations rise, pass, and I’m alone, the only drinker at the bar in the light fading from a late afternoon in September. I’m alone. I’m alone in a scene of ordinary conviviality, telling you that I’m alone, aware of the irony. Every man is an island (a libertarian reformulation of John Donne); so who isn’t alone? Except the imperial self might just be a historical oddity, made by central heating and the triumph of the middle class. Just as likely as any triumph to disappear. “Civilization will go on whether you attend the block party or not.” lonerist Anneli Rufus (Party of One) says. But what if civilization won’t? “Your participation is now optional,” Rufus says. But what if it isn’t? Few can bear the risks of being alone...well...all alone. It takes a village, minyans, congregations - but kept at bay - to be god without a religion. Then pitiless solitude and having no one to forgive.
Still, “I am lonely, lonely,/I was born to be lonely,/I am best so!” wrote W. C. Williams, MD (a poet who had an actual job, as American poets once did. Wallace Stevens walked to work as an insurance executive. When offered a ride to work, he politely refused. I imagine the walk in his words. The walk is in mine.) Williams wrote of himself as the “happy genius” of his household.
Chances are Williams’ words sounded moments ago in the solitary chamber of you skull with a spectral voice that is like, but not exactly the same as, your own. You’re imitating St. Ambrose, famously described by St. Augustine in his “Confession” as the first reader he had seen in his wide-ranging education who read silently to himself, lips unmoved, committed to a radical mode of being alone that no one St. Augustine knew had ever attempted. Before St. Ambrose, reading had been aloud, potentially as a form of declamation. Something done in a crowd for a crowd. Afterwards, reading became what you’re doing now. Something solitary, done by turning away.
Still, that voice, not exactly yours (not exactly the writer’s either) speaks. Even if we suspect that the homunculus inside the head is an “emergent property” of the brain’s many soulless robots when they convene; neural automata, genetically hardwired, generating the illusion of a presiding self that is really a pretty GUI fronting for the machines inside. In the company of that voice, we can’t help but be convivial.
The photo associated with this post was taken by Flickr user loungerie. It was used under Creative Commons license. `
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"It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it." Charlotte Bronte / Jane Eyre
I am physically alone surrounded by an electronic world filled with sound, images and text, on an ship floating on a sea of information.
Lovely post. :O)