Reflections: Solitude and Wisdom

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As I sit poised to launch into the first work-week of the new year, I am thankful for the acquisition, at the tag end of 2010, of a new literary / spiritual / philosophical mentor – Robert Lax.

I admire Søren Kierkegaard. I am fascinated and at least partially convinced by Carl Jung and some of his disciples (e.g. Hermann Hesse). I enjoy reading the critical theory of Harold Bloom and share some of his interests (e.g. Gnosticism). And there are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of other creative writers and thinkers whose oeuvres I admire and have studied in their entirety. But, until my recent discovery of Robert Lax, Simone Weil inhabited a category in my regard of which she was the sole member.

Weil and Lax were very different. One was male; one female. One was primarily a poet; the other primarily a philosopher. They were alike in each having been a solitary. But very different types of solitary they were. Lax was gregarious in his solitude – living alone, but enjoying the company of friends and strangers alike. Weil was largely a true loner. Her primary association with other people was in the role of teacher.

So much do I admire each of these human paragons, that I most value in myself those things in which I detect their faint echoes. So much do I learn from studying their very different lives and modes of solitude, that I’ve come to an understanding that I probably went wrong in my life by not seeking solitude for myself.

Here, from a work of Lax’s entitled A Greek Journal, are two entries with which I strongly identify and which I admired greatly when I read them yesterday morning:

sometimes, i have conversations with an imaginary guru, naturally one who lives inside me. he used to be a psychiatrist: at least in the old days a lot of my conversations were started with, & a lot of my problems heard out or resolved by, an imaginary Viennese who listened carefully, often accusingly, & showed me with a few apt technical phrases how far i had erred in my thinking, or behavior. the Viennese fellow has disappeared; comes back if ever for very short visits; but has been replaced by chuang tzu (sometimes merton, or sometimes chuang tzu in merton translation) who tells me other wisdoms: usually the wisdoms of abstinence & avoidance; of retreat, prayer & preparation, of non-attachment, of “sitting quietly doing nothing,” of seeking smallness, not greatness, or of seeking nothing at all.
[…]
what he promotes is wisdom, what he promises is grace. zen wisdom, perhaps; zen grace, but certainly wisdom & grace.

Amen.

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Reflections: Lovely Revenants

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Below is an excerpt from Samuel Beckett’s quirky novel, Watt, which I recently finished reading. This particular passage struck me in an odd way, making me aware, for the first time in a long time, of a mental gizmo I’ve intermittently recognized as part of my own apparatus.

The excerpt from Watt is lifted from one of the last few pages of the novel. The novel’s plot is too minimal to require much of a summary by way of setting up a context for the passage to be quoted. Most of the book is, in fact, much like this passage: a noting of mental events, often so fleeting and so experientially “disembodied” that they would go almost unnoticed under normal circumstances. The circumstances in Watt are, however, seldom “normal.”

Briefly, then, at the beginning of the novel, we see the character Watt setting out for new employment in the home of a Mr. Knott (“Not?”), a personage who sometimes (as when he walks in his garden) might strike us as some kind of a “God” figure (or Knott, as the case may be). One apparently holds the position towards which Watt (“What?”...”Wot?”) is travelling, until one day another man comes, unannounced, to take one’s place. Then it is over.

Toward the end of the story, Watt’s replacement has arrived, and he has therefore set out by night, carrying with him the two valises that he carried when he first embarked for Knott’s house, sometime in the indefinite past. He has now arrived at the train station, just as the night station master, his shift over, is about to lock up. After some deliberation, the night man decides that Watt may be admitted to the station to await the dawn arrival of the day man, so long as Watt remains locked in the Waiting Room. And so, in the Waiting Room Watt...waits:

Part of the waiting room was faintly lit, by light from without. …The waiting room was empty of furniture, or other objects, as far as Watt could see.
[…]
Whispering it told, the mouth, a woman’s, the thin lips sticking and unsticking, how when empty they could accommodate a larger public than when encumbered with armchairs and divans, and how it was vain to sit, vain to lie, when without the rain beat down, or the sleet, or the snow, with or without wind, or the sun, with greater or lesser perpendicularity. This woman’s name had been Price, her persona was of an extreme spareness, and some thirty-five years earlier she had shot, with colors flying, the narrows of the menopause. Watt was not displeased to hear her voice again, to watch again the play of the pale bows of mucus. He was not displeased either when it went away.

It took me a minute to realize what is going on here. The disembodied presence of a woman named “Price”—a person from Watt’s distant past—has for no readily apparent or causally-related reason, manifested, and is phantasmagorically explaining to Watt why the Waiting Room is devoid of furniture. Watt can “see” her familiar lips as she “speaks” and “hear” her ghostly voice.

This passage made me realize that my own soul is haunted by such female presences who float up from the submerged past to deliver instructions such as “Squeeze from the bottom!” when I pick up the toothpaste tube. Or, who chant “Home again, home again, diggy-diggy!” as the car pulls into the driveway at the end of a trip.

Just as they are familiar to Watt, so these presences are familiar to me; yet they wax uncanny, if consciously contemplated. Why, for instance, did Beckett choose to name this female apparition that comes to Watt “Price?” Is it not because of the price that these lost relationships demand of a man’s soul? Is the price not those points subtracted by the referee, Necessity, for what we must now consider to have been our unforced errors? Is this not the price we pay for having played and lost? And does this all not explain my fondness for the Steve Earle song, I Still Carry You Around, a stanza of which laments:

You’re with me everywhere I go
xxxIn my heart and in my soul
Down every road, no matter where I’m bound
xxxI still carry you around.

I think so. Yes, I do. And it has also occurred to me now, thanks to Beckett, that I had once fictively described this mental phenomenon myself, in a story entitled, Solitude. To wit:

But I had already gone too far. Inadvertently, I had strayed too near the crushing gravitational pull of that merciless black hole. For I heard a voice, a soft, barely audible, whisper of a voice, distinctly female, though disembodied, that said quite clearly, “Want to smell something funky?” And simultaneously I saw, wavering before my mind’s eye, the vision of a lovely, ghostly little hand; a hand that had slipped through the tiniest crack in the ramparts of memory; a hand that extended an index finger freshly withdrawn from the very fundament of my physical being to emerge redolent of the forbidden aroma of erotic misconduct.

If you have come with me thus far, I invite you now to see and hear a video of I Still Carry You Around here, and/or to read my story, Solitude, in its entirety, here. You deserve no less.
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