I would love to be alone,
would love to be alone
in the library
and not lost in the library,
alone in the library
with Foucault
and Croissant
and Breakfast tea
and Night
in the library alone willing myself
to read more and think less
of my romantic aloneness
And I would be alone,
loving being alone,
and not lonely,
and not lost but alone
not staring into the eyelids
of the friends I haven't made
as they walk the other way,
not lost in the library,
but alone when I could be anything else
and not lonely for lack of options
and not lost for lack of knowledge
of a space and a community
that have no need for me
and I could concentrate on the book
I was reading
if I could find my place
or the place where I was sitting
Crushing and beautiful. The repetition made me think, made me think of Plath. I hope this comparison is lazy and generic; lacking the bite of true insight - after all, things didn't turn out so well for her. Your writing is immaculate; of conception and in execution (think of Plath again - at least for the execution part). The next stage for you is surely an expanded elocution. For that you need to take the first step. Don't rely on other people. You are smart, pretty (predicated upon a 200x200 giff), and you have important things to say; so say them to someone other than yourself or the gaping echo of an electronic abyss - the very antithesis of intimacy ... as safe as a closet, which (ironically) contains the clothes designed to allow us to preen in society outdoors. Take that step towards one who walks away; you'll turn them around. Don't speak to their eyelids: Open their eyes. As regards being alone, that is a purely temporal concern. Everyone is alone all the time, some appear not to be so some of the time, but don't worry abut them, or the joy they may seem to present to each other (which we always vastly exaggerate internally) - nor all the different lives you could have led. "Comparison is the thief of joy", according to Roosevelt. Engagement with other people is always messy, always adorned with fear, and lacking in perfection. The choice of whether to engage is yours, let them then choose the response. Know that it will involve pain. Sometimes a lot of pain. Keep on loving for without that you'll wither and grow hard and bitter. Whither will you wander then, what island to claim your punishment; to avoid infecting others, always more bright and beautiful and competent than you - as though this were some birthright, rather than a series of choices or some self-conception gone awry ? We make choices in the "now", so you start from where you are. Start by knowing there are people who will think you are amazing - surely some already do. Start by knowing these people are neither wrong nor insane nor blind nor desperate nor dumb. Most of them won't be appropriate for you, but that's where your choices start, and it's good to know they're there (the people and the ability to choose and the capacity to discern).
ReplyDeleteHere are a couple of quotes from articles related to David Foster Wallace (another writer, other than Plath, who took his life too soon). Your poem made me think of them:
ReplyDelete"if there was one thing Wallace’s fiction did better than anything else, it was evoking the terrible loneliness of depression. In his short story The Depressed Person, depression is not so much an extreme sadness as a numbing isolation, a disengagement so total that the depressed person’s subjectivity is eventually replaced by the depression itself. Franzen paints a picture of a writer “bored with his old tricks”, a “lifelong prisoner on the island of himself.”
Of course, it only takes a little mental sleight of hand to re-imagine a prison as a refuge. This is the one great trick of liberalism – convincing us that the prison of the individual is actually a fortress, armed with rights against the hostile world. The depressed person repeats the same trick in miniature – depression becomes a refuge against the pain of relating to others.
In an age of terror it almost goes without saying that such a refuge is permeated with fear. Halfway through Robinson Crusoe our hero is driven mad by “the fear of man” after he finds a footprint on his island. Despite his abject loneliness, he becomes obsessed with transforming his home into a fortress against the imagined cannibal invaders."
Don't worry about the footprint, MAKE the footprint yourself by taking the step towards somebody - the step towards leaving the island ... or the library ... or your (possibly) increasingly moribund thoughts.
"For Franzen, the way off the island isn’t concentration but “the endlessly interesting hazards of living relationships”. Boredom is impossible if we are alive to those around us. In his grief and anger at his friend’s suicide, he wrote that Wallace took the “ontological exit door”. Yet I find that their positions are remarkably similar. In an interview about the role of fiction, Wallace said that reading fiction made him feel “unalone – intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I’m in a deep conversation with another consciousness.”
Thus on the other side of boredom is not entertainment, but engagement. As Wallace’s fiction shows, engagement is difficult and messy – and therein lies its inherent subversion of the injunction to enjoy – because engagement is never rewarding, because it never ends. As tiring and painful as that sounds, the alternative is to remain marooned on our solitary islands."
If "No Man is an Island" (Donne) you are still not absolved of this aphorism's virtual injunction (maybe it is intended as a statement, but given the vast potential for the statement to be rendered incorrect, I view it as more of an injunction or an imperative) by sole virtue of being a woman ... the blatant androcentrism is a literary device, but is not intended literally !
There are two other things I'd like to share with you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2XCgcxsvTg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q77-ggkzWRI