Loneliness is the basic condition of life – we are born of another, but we are born alone; die near others (if we are lucky and loved), but die alone; we spend our lives focused on our one and only human experience – in these particular bodies and minds and situations drawn from the cosmic lottery – in the midst of a vast ocean of time and opportunity filled with all possible events. Every thing of beauty and what we do – every poem, every painting, every friendship – is an outstretched hand from one loneliness to another, reaching out to a mouth that is forever mute so that the vowels of the common language cry out our urgent request now.
But despite being so basic, or maybe because of it, loneliness is scattered – the closer you look at the granularity of life, the more you see it growing into a mass of loneliness, which, like the types of sadness, all have different emotional colors.
The loneliness of feeling unseen or misunderstood is as bottomless and bone-chilling as a Scottish fog.
The loneliness of seeing what others see far, far away and on the shore like a lighthouse.
The loneliness of public humiliation, the red hot iron rod.
The loneliness of your most secret failure, inky and dry as a desert at night.
The loneliness of success, shiny and sharp like obsidian.
The loneliness of love, which does not shine like the inside of a skull.
In his classic 2008 psychology book The Gold Within: Understanding Psychological Predictions (public library), Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson groups all possible loneliness into three main types that affect our daily lives and govern our search for love: the past-oriented loneliness of missing what was and will never be, the future-oriented loneliness of longing for what could be but has not yet happened, and what he calls “the loneliness of approaching God.” I take this to mean the existential discomfort of feeling your passing press against the edge of eternity, your smallness pressing against the greatness that resides at the crossroads of time, chance, and love; God is what some call their dream of crossing the road when they face that intersection.
The first two units are focused on time, which is itself a fractal – there are many types of time that we live with. The third type of loneliness is not temporary but eternal; it exists outside of time – like music, like miracles, like love. It is an existing loneliness, an old loneliness, made not of the present atoms that make up the other two lonelinesses but of eternal atoms.
Because we, creatures made in time, cannot understand eternity, it is easy to call it God – that which holds everything great and mysterious that we experience in ourselves. But this is a false impression – forever is also a wrist, and its visits in our daily lives. In testimony to James Baldwin's constant insistence that “poets… in the end are the only people who know the truth about us,” it is not psychologists or philosophers but poets who tear apart the veil of illusion to reveal the truth:
SOME ETERNAL SPECIES VISIT YOU
by Brenda HillmanThe unknown wakes up in the morning;
they browsed for copper
deck railings. Crows
call & late
apples are burning
and there was nothing in the west.
In your illness,
the edges are questionable;
as a rebellion
of workers, they
it will take time…Here comes love
mild winters; the rest
places are noisy
& with one voice. You click
screen & dream
while we wait; four
eternal forms
I visited you today:
something, nothing,
everything and art,
bigger than you
and your doing –
The poem is honored by the Academy of American Poets
