Fifty Days of Solitude (10 page)

Determined = formed? or, directed? But not, I thought, forever. There may be a time, such as now, when the search for the inward being cuts it away from determination by others, frees it for the moment from direction from the outside, gives it stasis, and more than that temporary peace.

Desultory thoughts on solitude:

I noticed that one keeps one's friends better when one is alone. The corollary to this is that one loses one's friends, slowly, when one sees them too often or when they visit for too long a time.

“People who cannot bear to be alone are the worst company” (Albert Guinon).

Inner resources
: What are they? Are they like mineral resources, so deeply buried that they require a mining operation to raise them to the surface. Or are they simply
there
, so that they can be used at will, like the ability to follow a line of thought to its conclusion, as the young Valéry trained himself to do, or like the rich muck of memory that yields useful parallels and evidence for one's ideas at the moment they are required, or like the ability to lose oneself in books and be comforted and interested in music and live in paintings, to be able to forget the world and remember only the faint shadow of the inner being one is searching for.

I had closed off all the doors to the house except the one to the flight of steps equipped with roughened treads against the chance of my falling. So I had cut off the many means of egress, and thus the temptation to go out.

My message on the telephone said: “If you must reach me call back after five.” I trusted to that gruff sentence to discourage callers. I did not promise to call back because I had no intention of doing so. But of course I knew that if a report of a catastrophe should be left on the answering machine I would return the call at once. The only way to avoid the arrival of bad news would have been to turn off the machine and unplug the telephone.

A church's charity is often known as “outreach.” Reaching out. I was trying for a kind of inreach, an “inscape,” in Gerard Manley Hopkins's term.

The radio news, in a single day while I was alone: Disastrous floods in southern California. Two trains collide in Gary, Indiana, and six persons are decapitated. One hundred fifty miles from Ankara, Turkey, an entire village is buried in snow. The United States and its allies bomb Iraq, killing many civilians. An Estonian ship breaks up near Finland, spilling two hundred thousand gallons of oil.

Here in Sargentville, on the bank of Billings Cove, two matters of great moment: two grosbeaks arrived at the feeder and the Eggemoggin Reach froze over for the first time in thirty-two years.

After eight hours of silence, I felt dried out, like a well entirely without water. I found myself saying aloud to my computer: “Why are you sitting there mute, doing nothing for me?”

When no thoughts of any value came to me I blamed it on my way of life, not on myself. Margaret Mead believed that “a small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” But what of a person without thoughts? Is she an obstacle to progress and change?

Only for wood, coffee, water, the toilet did I leave my warm study during the sometimes productive hours of the morning. On the way to and from the kitchen I discovered the need to straighten every object and to put on the shelves every displaced book I passed. Was I tidying up all the rooms outside in hopes that then I could make some order out of the scrabbly manuscript on my desk? Or was I putting off returning to the verbal battles in the study, like a soldier recovered from his wounds who dreads returning to the front line?

The house expanded. It now seemed to have more rooms than before, even with three upstairs rooms closed off. I found that the silence I maintained also increased until it filled every space, pushed out the walls, invaded closets, drawers, and cupboards. Eventually it seeped out through the house's seams and surrounded the whole property with a blessed, protective wall of quiet.

The less one talks the more one thinks? Is thought internalized speech rising from and then directed back, soundlessly, into oneself?

Talk uses up ideas, although others have told me that they find it profitable to talk out their ideas and plans for a story because it clarifies their intentions. Not I. Once I have spoken them aloud, they are lost to me, dissipated into the noisy air like smoke. Only if I bury them, like bulbs, in the rich soil of silence do they grow. Sometimes I am lucky. In the interment process, they often multiply and become more complex.

I
NAUGURATION DAY
, January 20, 1993. Sybil had gone to Washington to attend a private party with friends. She had waited twelve years for this change of administration. During that time we held three mourning wakes four years apart on inauguration days. Now it seemed to her only fitting to celebrate.

I stayed at home and listened to some of the events on the radio. Afterward I took a nap. When I woke, still dazed from the force of late afternoon sleep, I fantasized about how Bill Clinton might more suitably have taken office:

In this year of severe recession, unemployment, homelessness, and hunger, he might have announced that, because of great need in the country, there would be no fancy balls (there were thirteen), no limos, no grandstands and parades, no elaborate lunches and dinners. Instead, he would be sworn in on the steps of the Capitol at the usual moment, with his vice president, in the standing presence of everyone who wished to be there. “The Star-Spangled Banner” would be played by the Marine band and sung by the gathering, led by the fine voice of Marilyn Home. Then Mr. Clinton would return to the White House in a simple American car, perhaps a Ford, to begin the business of the nation “for which I was hired,” as he noted earlier in a speech.

The money saved—for transportation, clothing, hair-dressing, hotels, overtime police and protection services, limousines, parties, and the extraordinary paraphernalia of parades—might be turned over to the many welfare services now in danger of being cut from the budget, or used to make a small dent in the national debt.

In this way Bill Clinton would be known to history as the first president to put human need before pomp, the first to make significant contributions to the commonweal in place of self-gratifying, empty celebration.

S
ILENCE
and isolation are freeing agents. The chatter of company, the news of the imperiled and turgid world imprisons me.

I wondered if the sure way into the self is to lose one's senses, totally: to become deaf, blind, without voice, without tactile ability. Under those extreme conditions, perhaps, would the mind be freed to expand without stimulus from anything outside. Would it function on its own?

I read the newspaper in the protection of my silent house. I learned that Senator Daniel Moynihan, a thirty-year expert on welfare, says American society has “normalized” all its worst social ills: teen-aged pregnancy and suicide, divorce, street violence and death, sexual disease, child and wife abuse, drugs, homelessness of the poor and the mad, the enormous black jail population, guns in the grade schools, crimes of every sort. We no longer are indignant about these things. We accept them as normal. They are commonplace, almost unnoticed by some of us.

Marshall McLuhan: “If the temperature of the bath rises one degree every ten minutes, how will the bather know when to scream?”

But I am far from contact with all these terrible, “normal” characteristics of modern society. So I have tended to magnify their importance, to dwell on them with pity and terror. In solitude, they occupy far more of my time than I wish. I would have to go back to living among them, as I once did, to have them become normal to me.

A reluctant interview with the painter ninety-year-old Esteban Vincente, in the
New Yorker
: “My paintings talk, and I don't have anything else to say. I'm still trying to find out what painting is, and the only way to do that is to be alone. The loneliness has to do with what you do.”

O
FTEN
in the late night I dreamed of Jude Bartlett, the young man who died this winter of
AIDS
in nearby Brooklin. He inhabited my dreams in odd ways, sometimes on his toes in a ballet I could not identify, sometimes holding my hand, once laughing at something I had said. He had been dead some months, but he was often present in my quiet house when I slept, out of his bed and once, curiously, lying beside me in mine.

Jean Hylan, his sister, brought Jude by ambulance from his apartment in New York City to the house she had rented around the corner from where she lived with her husband and five-year-old daughter, Kate. Before she decided to do this, her mother had said to her: “Why don't you put him in a hospital and let professionals take care of him?”

Jean thought otherwise. She organized the community to help with his care. Some people came to sit with him and provide for his almost constant needs, others cooked or shopped. Still others stayed the night to spare Jean the cost of too many health-care professionals. A nurse came on occasion to change his IVs and dress his sores. But most of the ordinary work was done by people who had never before had contact with a gay man suffering the last terrible afflictions of
AIDS
.

Jude was a gentle, sweet fellow who had been a dancer with the Martha Graham troupe and then a chef. He was still concerned about his appearance and disturbed about his decaying and fallen-out teeth. Although Jean was aware that he had very little time left, she had a dentist visit him to fit him with a bridge. By the time it was made he was too sick to wear it, but he knew it was there in the kitchen. It may have made him think that someday he would be able to put it in.

Jean confessed that she hesitated at first to ask for volunteers from the community for fear of homophobia and revulsion against the disease, especially for fear that her young daughter in school might be affected. Nothing of this sort happened, or at least was ever expressed by anyone. The volunteers were faithful and efficient. All of them became very fond of the dying man.

Jude's tastes were fun to cater to. When I offered him a pear for dessert he asked shyly if he might have a bit of Stilton with it. In the refrigerator I could find only sliced and packaged Kraft cheese which he seemed to accept but, with his chef's delicacy still intact even if his teeth were not, he did not eat any of it.

My contribution to his entertainment was a few videos of Balanchine dances. He watched them once but did not want to see them again. Others brought tapes of classical music. But as he grew sicker and unable to leave his bed he lost interest in things beyond himself. His mind seemed to be on his body, the places where sores developed, his spinal abscess, the brittle tenderness in his bones. He studied his feet which still bore the unmistakable calluses of a dancer.

“You have lovely feet,” I said to him once while I rubbed his fleshless body with lotion.

He smiled, his charming boy's smile. “Yes, I do,” he said.

Late in the afternoon on which he died, “just gave out,” one of his caretakers said, some of us had gone to a meeting to be instructed in the changes in his care for what was expected to be his last days. Seated there and waiting, we were informed of his death. A great sadness, a deep silence settled over us. We stayed, seated around the table thinking about what we had done, and what Jude, the suffering, prematurely aged young man, had taught us about gentle mortality.

We spoke of our experiences with him. Most of the narrators were young, heterosexual couples, boat builders like Jean's husband, and a few single women and men of various sexual persuasions. One of them, a gay man who had often stayed the night with Jude, told us quietly that once, when Jude was restless, he asked if there was something he might do for him.

“Yes,” he said. “You could come in bed with me and cuddle.”

They lay together, “cuddling,” for about an hour.

After this report there was silence. Then the wife of the boat builder who lives down the road from us in Sargentville said: “Yes. I know. Everybody needs to be cuddled sometimes.”

It was a fine moment.

After the fever of Jude's life had cooled into death just before Thanksgiving last year, those of us who had known him had trouble adjusting to his absence from our schedules. Later, in the days and nights I was alone, he was back, not only in dreams but also present to me awake, his sweet voice asking for the herb tea he was too weak to drink and the exotic foods he remembered but could no longer eat.

Fran Lebowitz denied there was “such a thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death,” she wrote. I thought not. Despite the outer turmoil created by the world (the nervousness), if one turns one's back on it there are moments of inner peace.

I
F
I have learned anything in these days, it is that the proper conditions for productive solitude are old age and the outside presence of a small portion of the beauty of the world. Given these, and the drive to explore and understand an inner territory, solitude can be an enlivening, even exhilarating experience. But when I was young, and eager to make my way in the world, I remember how painfully it turned into debilitating loneliness. For me, and for many others like me.

For the young: To be left alone with themselves when they are too unsure to respect the self they have been persuaded by the world's opinion to dislike, those who feel unworthy in the eyes of their families, what a terrible condition that is. The dismayingly high number of suicides among young persons attests to the consequences of such destructive isolation, that is, to their insurmountable loneliness.

Years ago, for a semester during the temporary absence of its director, I was left in charge of a writers' workshop at a university in the middle west. The heartland, as it was proudly termed by its poet-founder, was considered (by him) to be the perfect place to write. It was far from the fevered, distracting coasts, it gave the young writer space, time, and unlimited solitude in which to do good work.