By Eric Le Roy
“The world is a comedy for those who think, and a tragedy for those who feel” – Horace Walpole
“Only the Lonely” was the signature song of a guy named Roy Orbison, a star in the early rock’ n’ roll era. Orbison died in 1988 of a heart attack at the age of 52. Songs are full of lonely guys; they were back then, and they still are quite a bit, although today the emphasis is on sex.
In the late 1950s, people sang about love, and in many of the songs, they found it. The great female vocalists were on the watch for love, too, but sometimes, after it came their way, the boys (usually rebellious roustabouts but sooo irresistible with their ducktails, leather jackets, and filterless Lucky Strikes or Camels dangling from their lips) would go and fuck it up by dying in a motorbike or car crash. But what-the-heck, the honey-voiced survivors were young, and by the time their next ‘hit’ came out, there was a new boy on the block.
When people sing about love – especially when love is not there – they are lyricizing an underlying loneliness which, they are convinced, only the fulfillment of a dream (romantic love, they imagine) can cure. But, of course, it takes two, doesn’t it? The loneliness goes away when the void is filled, the yearning addressed, the bringer of love now in the room. Whether it lasts or not, as long as the magic spell is working, all heartache and despondency are driven hence.
Someone told me once that loneliness is the source of all art, and I believe there is much truth in that; however, unlike in the popular songs, this brand of emotional desolation does not have a simple ‘correct button’. Rather, it speaks to a human cistern of deep-water craving at its essence – that which the sometimes beautiful, sometimes tender, but often blind fury of the libido addresses – and which, when pressed further down, down still more, arrives at a place in the psyche where love – acceptably conditional at first, but ultimately unconditional – cries its mournful cry. This is therefore a well full of the First Water. A lot of the poetry comes from out of that well.
Life has a very short plot list of happy endings. And sometimes we die just as the happy end comes in sight, although gravelly, taciturn Time teaches that the fantasy often pales with the lived experience. So it must be said that death sort of puts the finishing touch on the lyric, relieving the sad one of the responsibility of enduring further pain or, in many cases, of persevering to actually make something work.
In fact, it’s not a stretch to suggest that too much happiness renders the creative impulse superfluous. This is why there would be no poets in a Christian Heaven. At first, possibly – but only until they ran out of steam upon noticing that nothing was ever going to change. Art – at least the need for it – would soon become as outmoded as a corn cob in an outhouse stocked with toilet paper. (Or maybe they would adapt, composing Odes to Boredom and Sonnets entitled “What the Fuck NOW?”)
This is not to say that all art is ‘tragedy’; such an idea is ridiculous. It might be wiser to suggest that art emerges from uncertainty – the craving for suspense that ‘flesh is heir to’ (as Shakespeare put it). From resolutely unresolvable imperfection comes inspiration for grief-pipings of all levels of skill. The poet dies forever when the doorman of Heavenly Perfection sends its belly-laughing goon squads down the golden streets to beat the frowns off the faces of the unconvinced.
If life were perfect, we would need autocratic, failsafe law enforcement to keep people from sneaking off into imperfect corners, corridors, and beds (yes, beds) as a spiritual rebellion against such tyranny. Perfection-Boredom. Inseparable synonyms. The true poet, therefore, thrives on the loose ends of life, the careless phrase, the flawed performance, the trace of dirt under the nails of the shapely fingers.
The creative shake-up occurs when the restless renegade looks askance while the rest are toasting the Signing of the Contract. Perfection would be (because hopefully it will never happen) the ultimate dystopia. In a way, therefore, the old stereotype of the ‘starving poet in the garret’ is not a bad game plan – but perhaps more in a figurative than literal sense. I mean, Christ, give the trembling, shivering bards a cheeseburger once in a while just to them going.
But someone else told me that learning to be alone was the river-mouth of self-discovery and the way forward into existential (popular word, this) independence, and freedom, not from the company of others, but from expecting these others to be doctors and nurses, prophets and sages assigned by the Almighty or by benevolent breath from distant galaxies, to save us. For the human race has this seemingly hardwired necessity of looking outside itself for guardian angels. Totally understandable, and my compassion is extended in a wholly selfish manner: I, too, look for them: the protectors, explainers, and ultimate rescuers.
I am one of those guys who shouts a violent cynicism at the world, but can be reduced to tears by a single glimpse into the invisible palaces just behind the atmosphere: that which poets seem to see better than anyone else, except maybe mathematicians. I, too, I confess, am always, against my better judgment, looking for a sign.
But Time is the most bitterly honest doctor of all, the one who reads the bad news with a voice more impassive than the drowning powers of the oceans. This is the face and voice that dictates the ground rules of impending death from the medical chart (no longer bothering to look you in the eye) and states with clinical politeness and appropriate gravity that “unfortunately, Mr. Lobotigan, you would be wise to put your things in order.”
Time is the Mercury that brings the Reaper to the Village and signals to the midwife and the mother that the infant is ephemeral. All the poems, all the smiles and tears, cries and whispers, will not alter the fact that everyone dies alone, even in a plummeting aircraft with many souls on board. Death is when the one holding your hand is left only a lifeless facsimile and not a human hand at all. Any person who has learned to be alone knows this and accepts it without flinching. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t understand the grief of those who will come to mourn his passing; rather, that he has taught himself to stand outside himself. Alone, he can linger like a ghost among the bereaved and simply watch himself die. He can follow them to the graveyard or the incinerator. It means that he has swallowed all sorrow and has learned to be its master.
The unbearably lonely woman in the village will sometimes jump into a deep ravine, thus committing suicide. The woman who comes to see where she has gone, and finds out, will stare bemused, deep into the crack where the other has fallen – and if she is confidently alone, will smile scornfully, scan an acid glance at the abyss, and turn to other things that have to be done, however mundane they are.
Indeed, there comes a quiet frenzy of delight for the one who is alone, who has conquered loneliness by treating it as a laboratory experiment, even admiring it, the way one might be briefly intoxicated by the graceful undulations of a beautiful, deadly snake, and then dismiss it as the same viper that crawls among people who are seduced by toxins. These scientists know that letting the snake bite you gives power only to the snake. So do the hermits and nomads. The true poet, however, cannot tear himself away before confronting the full effect of the snake’s intentions.
The lonely person is more likely to be driven to try to create art than the happy extrovert who has all the cakes and candy and other ‘deliverables’ at hand. It’s like with boxers and MMA fighters, in a way. The kid who brawls his way out of a Mexico City or Panama barrio is the one I’ll bet on over a rich kid with a soccer mom. It is called ‘hunger’. If the lonely person writes better poetry, it’s because a kind of hunger that no microwave can warm and turn into a meal leads him to bend his neck to the tongue of the serpent – not because he hopes to end his existence, but because he wants to live fully, even if doing so means testing death’s desire. (Maybe this sounds like something a ‘poet’ would write, so go ahead and laugh your ass off.) The poet compulsively seeks to force the moment to a truth-yielding crisis in hopes of achieving ultimate reconciliation with forces beyond his understanding.
On the other hand, the one who accepts being alone — and refuses to define it in terms of ‘loneliness’ — has a greater chance of remaining untroubled by nightmare (and the morning shakes) because he has built a wall of invulnerability about himself. In a sense, this person has effected a trade-off: I will forfeit ecstasy to escape agony. He sees death as basically a garage with no car in it, not as a prelude to friends and family casting a platoon of balloons skyward in ‘celebration’ of his life. Thus, he remains, at least outwardly, insensate. The question arises: how happy can such a person ever be if the ingredients for happiness are willfully discarded? Isn’t the result a kind of formal frigidity, an icy refusal to be truly impressed by anything?
This individual may go far in life — even become a conqueror of nations — but what do we make of someone who positions himself at an emotional distance from those who are ‘weaker’ (in his or her opinion)? The Ubermench for whom morning birdsong is just a sleep-dividing annoyance, and a flock of evening swallow and sparrow cries merely grounds for closing the windows? This kind of ‘guy’ is like the cynic “who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Against the pagan dance on the hillside and the morning-noon-and-night riot of the human soul….he is immune. Death will take him before Life touches him. And he wants it that way.
The reasoner, the stoic, the One who is Alone, sees this as the Truth and says OK. The One who is Lonely understands on a deeper level that the Truth is not OK, even though its power is overwhelming, and all-silencing after a day – this is the one who sings of his own grief but also to and of the iron solitude of his neighbor, the triumphantly Independent One, who does not sing back, it being a waste of time.
The famous comedian Robin Williams, who committed suicide (by hanging), said something that I regard as one of life’s greatest insights: He said, “I was always afraid of ending up alone, until I understood that what is worse is ending up with people who make you feel like you are alone.”
And so, how does all this affect me on a personal basis? Well, I think that if you take Robin Williams’s idea to heart, you will see that, not only was Williams right, but that the truth does not apply only to misfits, chronic depressives, or to the old and infirm. It comes at the moment when you recognize that the loneliness which compelled you to ‘seek for Eldorado’ led, always and forever, to the place where no Eldorado ever was. And you see it for what it is. Make of it what you will; that is your task.
For me, of course, I experience a lot of this because of my age. But I know that the intrinsic loneliness, the spiritual hunger which drove me “drunk or sober through the dawn” — as with Yeats’ Red Hanrahan – was but the catalyst of a Great Ambition – to know myself – and finally put away all the lies that, like the jagged armour in a Picasso painting, had made me only one of the executioners when what I wanted was to be the genuine heretic writhing on the stake as the flames rose to engulf him. “Be of good comfort, sir, and play the man,” said Hugh Latimer to Nicholas Ridley before they were set aflame by the expressionless, god-worshipping mob. In my case, there will be no fire, but perhaps a little ash at least, I hope, because, even though I have never completely believed in the existence of Jesus, I always wanted to be like Jesus. I do take a pauper’s comfort in that, even though I failed.
In old age, I have reconciled myself, not to mediocrity — though in many ways I have been a mediocre man — but to the spirit-smacking finality of accepting that my finest thoughts and best intentions hardly have mattered in the slightest in terms of changing the world. In fact, as I write this, I daresay it will reach a limited audience — if much of an audience at all — but that’s not why I do it.
I write my thoughts on a page (or ‘type’ them, to be exact) because it satisfies some intense hunger in myself to do so. And with the passing years, I have learned to accept it as a road leading nowhere. It is – to trumpet a cliche – the journey that counts, because all roads lead eventually to the same place, and it is a place where you and I will be alone, whether we want to or not.
Therefore, perhaps loneliness and being alone — with which there are stark differences, as I have strained with words to point out — are merely part of a connective tissue, the one leading to the other. The difference is that some embrace the whole experience, while others, busy surgeons that they are, simply cut the part out that they cannot or refuse to deal with – or regard as cancerous.
Tonight, I work in my room. My sick little black cat, Sammy, who is anemic and kept ‘healthy’ only by regular medicine that increases his appetite, hunches beside me on his little bones atop a stool. In the other room, the big white cat Lusik and playful, chubby Simka are perched on some high shelf, and the new dog, Baron, thunders about.
My dear old friends Casper and Poppendoshka — of whom I have spoken often — are gone now. They lie in makeshift graves in the field down below our apartment building. It was a green place until the builders came and dug everything up and flattened it out. Maybe they disturbed my friends’ carcasses. Probably.
My wife is out there in the other room. (She has her own sleeping quarters as well.) I am familiar enough with her to guess that she is looking at something on her telephone screen. We have been together for 17 years, married for 15 of them. We have had some adventures as a couple. There has been…beauty. But I see, as time goes by, that she lives more and more in another world. I am sure we will stay together until one of us says a last good night. I think her name is Liubov. That’s what she tells me.
