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Exercises in Loneliness – IV

I’m sitting at Cornerhouse in Manchester, on the first floor. There aren’t many people there yet, and I am fortunate to find myself by the window in the farthest corner. People are eating, or drinking, and chatting, and at the next table to mine sit two Spanish girls, in similar clothes, with laptops.

It’s almost seven o’clock. Going to work in the morning happens pretty quickly, or so it seems, perhaps because I’m in a hurry. But in the evening homecoming takes ages. In truth, it takes probably just a little bit longer than in the morning – about 20 minutes longer – but somehow I’m conscious of this difference.

And so, I’m sitting here, writing this, and the tea in a delicate glass cup is still fairly hot, but will get colder by the time I finish writing.

What is it that I wanted to say? I came here with the intent to carry on with my musings on self-identification and categorisation. I spent the most fulfilling half an hour on the train spilling the words out on the lined pages of a reporter’s notebook, where I’m now continuing with this. Henry Miller – and with him many a writer – would call this “dictation”. It’s this wonderful state of things when you feel as a tool in someone’s hands who, somewhere afar, is whispering these words into the tip of the tool, and they pass at the speed of light to land in your head to be heard and discovered.

I don’t enjoy being lonely. I don’t want to be lonely. But rather often than not I want to be alone to capture moments like this. When this moment is gone, I will probably feel empty, not being certain about anything, whether future, past, or present. But how should I feel otherwise, if on the train I have suddenly and plainly realised that I don’t belong to anything but this huge multitude of human bodies that we call mankind, and that I was happy to realise this?

This doesn’t mean that I don’t want to friend or to bond, or that I don’t ever belong to any group. It simply means that I want to friend and to bond by essence, and not by category. And our only essence is deeply, painfully, undeniably human. It’s not our religion, or political views, or nationality, or sexuality, or social class. It is all that remains after these “identities” are stripped away – a human figure, forever insecure, forever seeking for acceptance, which is why it wants to identify itself somehow, sometimes for the mere sake of it.

My tea is now warm, and it’s quarter past seven. At the crossroads of Oxford Rd and Whitworth St there aren’t many cars, and even less people. The Spanish girls are joined by other Spanish girls, and Cornerhouse now sounds like a multilingual beehive. They already took away a chair from my table, and, God knows, I may be compelled to move to another place. But while I’m here – isn’t it peculiar that I’m writing this at Cornerhouse, of all places?! Am I truly at some kind of corner? And what is there around it?

I don’t know, and I won’t know. Only when you observe one’s life from a distance it may look like a effortless soaring or a roller-coaster. While you’re in the process of living it, you’re always on the road, and you can never know where it takes you. Is it good? Probably not, if you end up at the dead end. But it’s the most fascinating journey if you arrive to San Salvador instead of India.

The Spanish girls have gone, as did a lot of other people. I know that once I finish this I’ll go to an internet café in St Ann’s Sq and type this text in Los Cuadernos. I’ve just thought that all I wrote has originated in the moment, and that later tonight or tomorrow or later in life I might change my mind. But how, and will I?

The truth is that even when we – when I – speak in favour of loneliness, there are different meanings to this. Which makes me question the nature of a union (of any kind). Can there be such thing as complete acceptance of the other? Or does acceptance imply insincerity for the sake of a union?

I know – and so do you – that everything complete, ideal, perfect only exists in theory. To ask ‘is complete acceptance possible?’ is to paraphrase the question from Jacques Derrida: ‘is absolute forgiveness possible?’ To accept is to forgive another person for not being what you want or expect them to be; to forgive is to accept that the other person will never become what you’d like them to be; to forgive and to accept is to forget – not to cast into oblivion, but to draw the line between the other’s essence and the cloak of their “identity” and your expectations that conceals the essence.

Forgiveness, acceptance, forgetting can only be absolute and mutual. It isn’t enough for someone to look past the others’ “identities” – others have to recognise that identities, like paradigms and art movements, are fleeting. They come and go in order to shed the light on that part of the essence that has yet remained undiscovered. In the words of Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, ‘everything flows and nothing stands still‘ (panta rei), and if there is any true lesson of history, it is the lesson in change. Life is that very perpetuum mobile (perpetual motion), and so is everyone as a particle of it, if only we recognise that our human essence is the only constant thing for as long as the mankind lives. It is possible to change views, religion, or gender; it is possible to be inhumanly cruel; but it is not possible to regress to become a monkey. It is probably possible to never start thinking, but once you’ve started, it is impossible to stop. And as we’re being told, this capability of coherent and creative thinking is exactly what makes a human being.

I enjoy being human. Even my mistakes and those severe moments of self-doubt – would I be happier without them? Is it not those moments that produce the hours that I spend at Cornerhouse, as if in a café in Montparnasse? Is it not in these hours that I understand why, of all novels and stories, Maugham’s Theatre is the one to which I most closely relate, though far from identifying myself with the protagonist?

Like Julia Lambert at the Berkeley, so I at Cornerhouse think that all we, people, are trying to do is to find a role to stick to, and it’s only art, by touching the deepest layers of one’s being, can lift the curtain off this stage, to show that the only true, inimitable, constant thing about us is our human individuality, unique by definition. It is to this individuality one really belongs, and any change that occurs serves the purpose of staying true to this essence, to the feelings and thoughts that lay hidden beneath the stage persona.

You know, it’s strange how people differ. Mrs Siddons was a rare one for chops; I’m not a bit like her in that; I’m a rare one for steaks‘.

Indeed, I am a rare one for salmon.

Notes:

I left Cornerhouse around 8.30pm. I did go to St Ann’s Sq, and I did log in, but the keyboard proved to be the worst I’ve ever used: the space bar didn’t work unless I stumbled upon it, and if I didn’t, then words were joined together. I went home, which is where I have now finished typing the text at 11.10pm.

error: Sorry, no copying !!