10 posts tagged “lonliness”

The lyrics to the Gladiator theme song NOW WE ARE FREE are playing in the background as I write:

Anol shalom
Anol sheh lay konnud de ne um
Flavum
Nom de leesh
Ham de nam um das...

La um de
Flavne
We de ze zu bu
We de sooo a ru
Un va-a pesh a lay
Un vi-i bee
Un da la pech ni sa

Aaahh

Un di-i lay na day
Un ma la pech a nay mee di nu ku

La la da pa da le na da na
Ve va da pa da le na la dumda
La la da pa da le na da na
Ve va da pa da le na la dumda
La la da pa da le na da na
Ve va da pa da le na la dumda
La la da pa da le na da na
Ve va da pa da le na la dumda

Anol shalom
Anol sheh ley kon-nud de ne um
Flavum
Flavum
M-ai shondol-lee
Flavu Lof flesh lay
Nof ne
Nom de lis
Ham de num um dass
La um de
Flavne
Flay
Shom de nomm
Ma-lun des dwondi.
Dwwoondi

Alas sharum
du koos
Shaley koot-tum

Translation:
Almighty Freedom
Almighty freer of the soul
Be free
Walk with me
Through the golden fields
So lovely
Lovely

We regret our sins, but...
We sew our own fate and
Under my face I remain feeble
Under my face, I smile

Aaahh)

Even alone/afraid
Under my face I will be waiting

Run with me now soldier of Rome
Run and play in the field with the ponies
Run with me now soldier of Rome
Run and play in the field with the ponies
Run with me now soldier of Rome
Run and play in the field with the ponies
Run with me now soldier of Rome
Run and play in the field with the ponies

Almighty Freedom
Almighty freeer of the soul
Be free
Be free
And imagine
Free with peace at last
It's lovely
It's lovely, this land
No one can believe or understand
How far I came just for my lovely family
I should have been there
with them when the world crashed down
But now they rest with me.

I'll never forget
How I felt that moment
I became free.




"How far I came just for my lovely family." I am not sure anyone can really understand the power of this instinct to find a family who has never lost their access to it. In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the explorer, Robert Walton expresses in a letter to his sister how deeply he feels the lack of a companion. In some ways, his search for discovery and fame is a substitute for that which he would most desire: As he puts it:





"But I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy; and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil. I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavor to sustain me in dejection. I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me; whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans. How would such a friend repair the faults of your poor brother! I am too ardent in execution, and too impatient of difficulties. . . . Now I am twenty-eight, and am in reality more illiterate than many schoolboys of fifteen. It is true that I have thought more, and that my day dreams are more extended and magnificent; but they want (as the painters call it) keeping; and I greatly need a friend who would have sense enough not to despise me as romantic, and affection enough for me to endeavor to regulate my mind."

Clearly, it is precisely this sort of companionship, this "family of the mind" that Frankenstein's creature himself seeks so deeply. He is excluded from it because of the aesthetic challenges he must live with and because his creator will not provide for him the counterpart in the flesh that he seeks. It is this deprivation that sends him into such a perpetual rage.


In so many respects, alienation from this sort of communion is a trauma and the song Now We Are Free speaks (at least to me) of the depth of human emotion that is reserved for this instinct.


I myself can often feel the pain of this loss, this separation, this tearing apart of family. It is not simply the absense of a pleasure we wish we had. It is the constant presence of a pain that really physically hurts almost all the time. I would wish it on no one. Not even my enemies if I have any.

Question for Comment: What plays a more essential role in your life? Your families of blood or your families of mind? Is there a way to make them both the same? Or is that just being idealistic?

Adam’s Game

Now I know how Adam felt
Walking woods alone
Naming pairs that
Always came in sets
Until he began missing . . .
Or was it, brother Adam, aching
For the counterpart he’d never seen.
Indeed who was not even there yet.
I have to think that the task
Began as such a blast.

“Sun” God had said pointing at the round thing in the sky.
“Moon” God had said, pointing at another round thing later.
“Sky” God had said, pointing at the blue heavens.
“Land” God had said, pointing at the ground.
“Sea” God had said, pointing at the water.
“Ish” God said pointing at Adam

“Now you try” God must have said to his bright-eyed pupil.
“Worm” said Adam, pointing to the ground.
“Oh Good,” said God. “Jolly Good! We’ll call that little thing a worm. Do it again.”
“Zebra” Adam must have exclaimed all proud of himself.
“Zebra it is,” God laughed. “Excellent”
And then he would have pointed to a female Zebra and named that too,
Adding the feminine suffix.
“Ez” [goat] said Adam. “and ezah” God responded.
“Nesher” [eagle] said Adam. “and Nesherah” said God.
“ahh,” Adam would have noted after working through the process for several animals.
“How cool is that!” Everything has a counterpart.”
“Shual . . . and shualah” he would have said looking at a pair of foxes.
“Dob . . .” said Adam, looking at the brown furry thing in the brush.
“. . .  and dobbah” he chuckled a moment later when he caught a flash of
the same brown fur on the other side of the clearing.
“Dob and Dobba it is then,” said God laughing, “Brilliant. Exactly. Can you find another pair?”

And so the game went for the rest of the afternoon.
Oh Brother Adam, brother Adam!
When did the game stop being fun for you?
How many of those animals did you name before
The game became a search for isha?
The bone of your bone.
The flesh of your flesh.

Counterpart.

Eyes peeled, brother Adam.
Don’t settle for a barnacle.

----snip----

What if I AM the barnacle?

THE PREACHER RUMINATES BEHIND THE SERMON
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

I think it must be lonely to be God.
Nobody loves a master. No. Despite
The bright hosannas, bright dear-Lords, and bright
Determined reverence of Sunday eyes.

Picture Jehovah striding through the hall
Of his importance, creatures running out
From servant-corners to acclaim, to shout
Appreciation of His merit's gaze.

But who walks with Him?--dares to take His arm,
To slap Him on the shoulder, tweak His ear,
Buy Him a Coca-Cola or a beer,
Pooh-pooh His politics, call Him a fool?

Perhaps--who knows?--He tires of looking down.
Those eyes are never lifted. Never straight.
Perhaps sometimes He tires of being great
In solitude. Without a hand to hold.

Question for Comment: Some would regard the notion of God being lonely ... or of just wanting to enjoy a beer with buddies as suspect if not sacrilegious. can you conceive of God in these terms? Why or why not?

Simple Song by Marge Piercy

When we are going towards someone we say
you are just like me
your thoughts are my brothers
word matches word
how easy to be together

when we are leaving someone we say
how strange you are
we cannot communicate
we can never agree
how hard, hard and weary to be together.

we are not different nor alike
But each strange in his leather body
sealed in skin and reaching out clumsy hands
and loving as an act
that cannot outlive
the open hand
the open eye
the door in the chest standing open.

The Story by Lisel Mueller

You are telling a story;
How Fire Took Water to Wife
 its always like this you say
opposites attract
They want to enter each other,
be one,
so he burns her as hard as he can
and she tries to drown him
its called love at first sight
and it doesn't hurt.
but after a while she weeps
and says he is killing her
he shouts that he cannot breath
underwater.

"The poet sheds his blood in the ring and calls the pools poems." George Barker

"Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the readers recognize as their own" Salvatore Quasimodo

"Poems are like dreams. In them you put what you do not know that you know.'"Adrienne Rich

Question for Comment: Are you going towards someone or leaving someone right now? Are you finding this first poem to be true? What causes people to  close that "door in the chest" the poet speaks of?

Give All To Love

Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good fame,
Plans, credit, and the muse;
Nothing refuse.

'Tis a brave master,
Let it have scope,
Follow it utterly,
Hope beyond hope;
High and more high,
It dives into noon,
With wing unspent,
Untold intent;
But 'tis a god,
Knows its own path,
And the outlets of the sky.
'Tis not for the mean,
It requireth courage stout,
Souls above doubt,
Valor unbending;
Such 'twill reward,
They shall return
More than they were,
And ever ascending.

Leave all for love;—
Yet, hear me, yet,
One word more thy heart behoved,
One pulse more of firm endeavor,
Keep thee to-day,
To-morrow, for ever,
Free as an Arab
Of thy beloved.
Cling with life to the maid;
But when the surprise,
Vague shadow of surmise,
Flits across her bosom young
Of a joy apart from thee,
Free be she, fancy-free,
Do not thou detain a hem,
Nor the palest rose she flung
From her summer diadem.

Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Tho' her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive,
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.

Emerson-

Question for Comment: Do they really? When half gods go, lonliness arrives it seems more like to me.

Everything is a cost-benefit analysis these days isn't it? I wonder what part education plays in the pursuit of happiness? I wonder who of us is most happy living here in Vermont and if we achieved what level of happiness we have through thinking and education and better understanding of ourselves and the world ... or if in some other way?

As I look over the material in my assigned textbook for Vermont history, Freedom and Unity this week, I am tempted to ask ... all these people believing that once they got their railroad access, once they got "connected" their lives would improve and they would be happier ... I wonder if that was so? Why is it that people today are spending MORE money for houses that seem to have LESS connection to the world? Are further out in the woods ... away from the major thoroughfares of transportation? And are they too in for a surprise?

I went to a play in Dorset a few months ago and in the conclusion of the play (Theophilus North by Thorton Wilder), the main character concludes that what he needs in his life is "nine women friends, three older, three younger, and three his age AND nine male friends, three older, three younger, and three his age."

Question for Comment: I wonder if Wilder is on to something?

It is interesting that in Robert Frost's poem, A TUFT OF FLOWERS, Frost talks about two people separated in time and space who work together. While in MENDING WALL, he talks about two people working in the same time and space who are so not together at all.

“Asked once about his intended meaning, Frost recast the question: "In my Mending Wall was my intention fulfilled with the characters portrayed and the atmosphere of the place?" Characteristically, he went on to answer obliquely. "I should be sorry if a single one of my poems stopped with either of those things stopped anywhere in fact," he began. "My poems-I should suppose everybody's poems-are all set to trip the reader head foremost into
the boundless. Ever since infancy," he continued, "I have had the habit of leaving my blocks carts chairs and such like ordinaries where people would be pretty sure to fall forward over them in the dark. Forward, you understand, and in the dark. I may leave my toys in the wrong place and so in vain. It is my intention we are speaking of-my innate rnischievou~nes.”

Robert Frost's Linked Analogies
George Monteiro
The New England Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 3. (Sep., 1973), pp. 463-468.

Question for Comment: Why does it seem so difficult to find people who can be as physically close as two men fixing a stone wall WHILE being as connected as Frost is to the soul mate who left the tuft of flowers earlier in the day? why am I sitting here at 10:30 at night typing to someone who isn't HERE?

It is interesting to note that the speaker in MENDING WALL, even though he wants the wall removed, does NOT like the way that hunters go about removing it. The speaker is FINE with nature taking the wall down over time. he is FINE with his neighbor taking the wall down ... but when he sees hunters and dogs ripping into it, he goes out and REPAIRS it. Why would he repair the wall that he himself loves to watch nature and time destroy?

And what does this question have to do with American society, Jordanian society, and the relationship between cultures?

All the speaker in the poem can do is say that it "seems" like the neighbor is being a blind traditionalist. The speaker seems to have contempt for his neighbor's reliance on proverbial family wisdom ... but ... maybe there is wisdom in that tribal wisdom?

"He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice." Albert Einstein

Is it possible that traditionalists have gifts to offer too? 

I am not sure how many 12-14 hour days I have had lately but I can't remember what time to myself feels like anymore. I am sitting in the library at the college responding to those submitting their final exams and final papers. All my colleagues have gone home for the day and I wonder what drives me to feel like all these students deserve feedback. I don't know. It just seems like a human rights issue. If someone puts in effort for me, it seems like they deserve to know whether they did or did not meet the expectations I had. It seems like I WANT them to know how they educated me, inspired me, stumped me, or made me think.

"A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us."

I feel like people need to know that their ideas mattered to someone ... that their intellectual work doesn't just get fed into a steam powered paper-grader. I think I need to sign up for another face to face class sometime. I miss knowing if students like me.

Question for Comment: Do you work harder than you are paid to? Why or why not? 

"la angustia es el precio de ser uno mismo" ("anguish is the price of being oneself"). Silvio Rodriguez

Of course one might also argue that anguish is the price of NOT being oneself too. You can align yourself with a community (thus avoiding aloneness) by NOT being oneself but at the cost of alientation FROM oneself. Or you can align yourself with yourself at the cost of alienation from the community that you come from. Is one better off starting with the community one wants to be in and aligning the self accordingly? Or trying to align the community with oneself? Or just starting from scratch and building a community out of a declaration of the self?

Is that what a blog does? Does it say to the world, "This is who I am. Will others like me come and find me?"

C.S. Lewis suggests that we cannot know anyone face to face until we have faces. We have to say "This is who I am. I am much like the community I come from but not entirely." Only then can we hope to be known. He writes in his book, The Four Loves:

"Friendship arises out of mere companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one." We can imagine that among those early hunters and warriors single individuals -- one in a century? one in a thousand years? -- saw what others did not; saw that the deer was beautiful as well as edible, that hunting was fun as well as necessary, dreamed that his gods might be not only powerful but holy. But as long as each of these percipient persons dies without finding a kindred soul, nothing (I suspect) will come of it; art or sport or spiritual religion will not be born. It is when two such persons discover one another, when, whether with immense difficulties and semi-articulate fumblings or with what would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their vision -- it is then that Friendship is born. And instantly they stand together in an immense solitude. . . .

Lovers seek for privacy. Friends find this solitude about them, this barrier between them and the herd, whether they want it or not... as Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth? -- Or at least, 'Do you care about the same truth?' The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our Friend. . . .

[Companions will be doing something together, and so too will friends] be doing something together, but something more inward, less widely shared and less easily defined... Hence we picture lovers face to face but Friends side by side; their eyes look ahead. That is why those pathetic people who simply 'want friends' can never make any... Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers."