Some Notes On Loneliness
People speak of the critical need for community, of the many material and non-material benefits of living with shared purpose and communal care, of bonding with people of different generations and backgrounds who are all devoted to maintaining that community with intention and grace. Of mutual activities, creativity, and coexisting — a deep intimacy. This is the good life. We can make this dream come true kinda. What is less spoken of, acknowledged, or even understood is the mirror to all this, of what happens to those who are shut out from the good life, that those who are in most need of real community, of relief from the howling loneliness, of saving from the world, are those who are the least deserving of it, the most difficult to give it to, the least pleasant to be around, who every day walk closest to the edge of oblivion. If we have no place for them, or worse, if we once admitted them warmly to belonging and participation but then revoked it, casting them out into nothingness with the full weighty knowledge and cruel memory of the better life, then our communities begin to seem provincial and provisional indeed, as those left behind battle with themselves and each other over quickly winnowing possibilities, living anxious, enervated lives and meeting early deaths.
Those really are the stakes. I know. I’ve seen it. I’ve felt it. It is on the streets. It is in the quiet houses. People out here are desperately, desperately lonely. They reach out to me, and I to them, and neither one of us feel equipped to offer what the other person desperately needs, and so the desperate age, and age, and age, advancing and retreating, trying and not succeeding, our desperation growing further exigent with every rejection, every failed relationship, every collapsed endeavor, every unreturned attempt at connection, every happy person our age we see walking with their companion, knowing that our time for making such things happen for ourselves is finite and dwindling (“It’s hard…It’s so hard…” one tearful, lonely, aging woman told me), our furtive grasping for each other getting tighter and more painful, scratching more and more skin away in the now seemingly inevitable flights from one another back into ourselves. The losses don’t get easier, they take more and more away from us. We’re not getting stronger here, we’re just getting more hurt, and we’re so far away from all the things that mean anything.
We should not be so easy to disavow and disregard these desperate people — to say nothing of merely pitying them, saying that we care, and moving on so blithely. They are us. The dividing line between desperate and secure is provisional at best, context dependent, and can melt away in an instant of catastrophe. This worrisome human desperation holds within it the worst of our human potential. Don’t be surprised when those worst potentials, left untended, become kinetic.
Now, I’m not arguing that every community, in whatever form it may take, should open their doors to all the outcasts. That would be simply untenable. Not everyone can be saved. Not every community has the capacity to save. The most difficult to care for, such as the dangerously mentally ill, require specialized treatment that your average hippie commune cannot and should not try to administer. When it comes to psychosis, typical notions of free will, reasonable accommodation, consensual treatment, and, I hate to say it, even love go right out the window. Take the case of Bob Rosenthal, secretary to the legendary Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Rosenthal found himself having to also manage Ginsberg’s parttime lover Peter Orlovsky through his chronic and sometimes violent psychotic episodes. “I loved [Orlovsky],” Rosenthal wrote in his memoir, “I loved that guy — until he threatened my children. And when he threatened my children, all the love just flowed right out of me like toothpaste out of a tube. I had never experienced any taboo like that but all of a sudden I never felt the same again.” With Orlovsky dancing butt-naked and waving a machete around while threatening his kids, Rosenthal called the cops. A rational response.
But even with less severe cases, I’m not arguing that you should accept into the community the incorrigibly self-sabotaging, miserable, disruptive guy (it’s usually, though not always, a guy). I’m not saying you should practice radical acceptance for radically heinous shit. I’m saying that the worst people amongst us (worst as in most difficult, not as in some fundamental, immutable moral sense) need to have homes — in the more expansive meaning of that word, not mere dwellings — or they will die. That is the choice. They must be integrated. Some of our communities will have the capacity to work with them to become better members of those communities. Other cases will require more intensive care by professionals, with what should be the goal of eventual reintegration to the society.
What concerns me is that it is comparatively easy to cast someone out for being difficult. It is infinitely harder to ensure that they receive the kind of consistent care that they need to land on their feet and find meaning again. I want you to understand this. I cannot imagine a fate worse than banishment, and indeed the human psyche is hardwired to consider it a death sentence. And that is what it feels like, every day. The frequency with which lonely, sick, desperate people reach out to me on the street just for mere human connection, a hello, a compliment, a conversation, some observations they want to get off their chest, expressions of their abject condition, makes me wish that more people could muster the time and patience to just listen to them. Just listen, if nothing else. And I get it. It can feel awkward and like a put out even on a good day. Many of these people are deeply wounded and therefore can wound deeply as well. Caution is not undue. But the more I come to understand them, the more I interface with them, the more I see myself in them. Which is both frightening and infinitely sad. I just wish more people could recognize their societal — and personal — duty to the desperate ones. As George Orwell wrote about the people living in the industrial slums of northern England in the 1930s, “…it is no use saying that people like [them] are just disgusting and trying to put them out of mind. For they exist in tens and hundreds of thousands; they are one of the characteristic by-products of the modern world. You cannot disregard them if you accept the civilization that produced them. … It is a kind of duty to see and smell such places now and again, especially smell them, lest you should forget that they exist; though perhaps it is better not to stay there too long.”
More than this I want you to know that the loneliness I see is both a wound and it is wounding. It is a wound for the lonely person and it wounds those in its orbit. And I must say, by all the evidence around me, that orbit of loneliness is enlarging. I am speaking primarily of older single women — some empty-nesters and some never-nesters — and of abject men living on the streets because those two demographics are the kinds of lonely people in my orbit, but I know that this loneliness extends well beyond them. I see people, by right deserving of all the kindness, presence, and sensitivity in the world, being treated with callous casualness as they are severed from the things that meant the world to them. We are left bereft and searching. That deep, profound loss, I am telling you, doesn’t just go away. The loss happens again and again every single day. How could it not? We remember, and we dream, and we reach out over empty sheets and empty time for what is no longer there. And who would we be to forget that loss? To let go of that grief? I do not understand those who do such things. When the pain is all that you have left, how could you relinquish it? How could you? Who will have held on to the things that were so important then? Where will they go? That loneliness becomes cherished, don’t you see? “We cherish our griefs over those green fields because our griefs seem to prove that what we grieve over must once have existed,” wrote Lois Phillips Hudson in her memoir about the catastrophe of the Dustbowl. “And in a way none of us ever really leaves those fields that made us. It is from those lost fields that we go on shyly, silently calling to each other.”
Our griefs seem to prove that what we grieve over must once have existed.
I see people out here shyly, silently calling to each other all the time. It hurts to watch it. It hurts to do it. The calls go mostly unheeded. The bittersweet confirmation that our grief itself brings is a kind of sustenance, a killing hope for what was better to be here again. Hudson was writing about a time when community existed and meant everything. It still means everything. We seem to have lost the conviction to keep it existing. I want those shy, silent calls of ours to be heard. I think, I hope, that we all do.
This made me feel again the relationships I had when working with homeless people. Fear motivates, rightfully, many of their reactions to everyday interactions.
Loneliness was the primary , deepest, overall chain that froze forward movement.
This one makes me so very sad. Yet so very proud of your profound empathy and caring nature.