There is a gigantic hole in the middle of my philosophy

Over the last eighteen months or so I have been working out a new approach to life. Not new in general terms, as there have been plenty of misanthropes before, but one new in relative terms, because... one new to me. In short, I have decided to stop wasting my time on human contact. The strategy is undemonstrative: I am not going to move onto an uninhabited island or into a tree; as far as the outside world is concerned there won't seem to be any difference: I continue to be friendly and polite; I say hello to my neighbor and to my fish monger; I attend some new year and birthday parties; and I answer -- briefly, but not by any means coldly -- the correspondence I continue to receive; I am still prepared to run small errands or lend money. But, unlike before, I put no psychic energy into any of these interactions; and I limit my investment in them to the bare minimum: I smile, I say Happy New Year, and Fine, thanks!, send a card, and -- move off. In other words, the way I used to handle my interaction with 98% of the human kind -- polite but stand-offish -- I now apply to 100% of them. No more intimate conversations, no more bosom friends, no more lovers. I now live my life totally alone, in silence, between myself, my books and music, my journal and the occasional blog entry -- whose only reader I am. The only person I ever talk to about anything important is the only person who has ever had anything interesting to say to me -- myself.

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The theory has been that since no one I have ever met in the flesh (including all the commentators on all my blogs past and present) has had anything interesting to say to me (and with good reason, most being less intelligent than I am, less well-read, less well-informed and less well-traveled); and since most of those I have met though their books have likewise proven undeserving of my intellectual attention (vast majority of books having been a disappointment); indeed, even many of those who have written great books -- books which I consume with passionate pleasure -- Thomas Mann, for example -- have likely been dull in personal contact; I would simply be better off not wasting my time on any of them. And, so far, it's working. The most difficult aspect of the plan, I had expected, would have been the absence of women in my bed, but even that I do not seem to miss. I no longer have disappointing conversations, I am not bored, I do not have to stoop to low intellectual levels, I do not have to unravel hidden agendas, I do not have to please. There really is such a thing as zhu-che, it turns out, self-sufficiency.

The success of this plan has led me to entertain a kind of extreme philosophical position: that the existence of other people is totally indifferent to our happiness.

But, of course, that is not true.

A typical happy day in my life will be filled with two kinds of experiences: nature and culture. Nature -- sunbathing, riding a motorbike in the mountains, watching reflections in the water, sitting through a sunset, dusk and nightfall while listening to birds and breathing in the perfume of tropical flowers wafting on the evening breeze, strolling in my garden in the moonlight or at day-break -- seems to prove the point: in those experiences the fewer people around the better, zero being the ideal number. But culture disproves it. Opera, film, drama, ballet, painting, calligraphy, philosophy, architecture -- all of these take up at least half of my time; without them my life would not be as rich or as happy as it is; and they are, alas, the work of -- men. Not the sort of men I have known, or ever can; and, if Thomas Mann is any guide, not the sort of men one would want to talk to in person any way, but men all the same.

So, it proves, that men are essential to my happiness.

And that is a very disappointing thought.

More on loneliness

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1.


My aunt – an elderly childless widow living in exile – feels lonely and phones me up to chat. "What are you doing today? And what did you eat for lunch?" I stifle my benign yawn, put aside the book - or perhaps the porcelain cup, or the snuff bottle, or the Ten thousand li of mountains and streams - and humor her: I am nothing if not filially pious, and if this sort of verbalization eases her loneliness, then I am glad to provide the outlet – be her receptacle, so to speak, when she needs to go. Yet, I do not have the slightest clue why or how this act of conversation should serve to make her un-lonely: I, for one, do not usually derive much spiritual gratification from learning that others have had, say, an oyster pancake for lunch. Do you?

A friend also feels lonely – despite having good, frequent relations with her family, gobs of friends whom she meets several times a week, and a job where she interacts with dozens of customers everyday. Frustrated, she’d overcome her loneliness, she is sure, if she only had a man to live with her. Taking walks together, she thinks, would splendidly do the trick.

But this is far from certain, as the case of yet another friend proves: he is married: he has a wife with whom to take his walks, a wife with whom, he says, he is intellectually compatible. Yet, he too, feels lonely, complains about his inability to connect (with her and others), and remembers wistfully some occasion on which he exchanged glances with a stranger; and another on which he told some insignificant other how he felt about this or that, stuff, he says, he couldn’t have told wife. "We connected then”, he continues downcast, as if that exchange of glances could possibly have meant a damned thing; and as if he could not have confessed his innermost feelings to a cat, or a fish, or a wall with the same result.


2.


Loneliness is one of the most basic concepts in popular psychology: it is used as self-diagnosis, as explanation for the actions of others, as a mechanism for successful business plans (e.g. Friend Finder et al.), of political ideologies even ("alienation"). It might seem therefore that we all understand it -- the term being so ubiquitous and so easily used by everyone; but the truth is that -- we don’t. The term’s dictionary definition -- “absence of others” -- how very Aristotelian of the Webster! -- seems weak. Furthermore, it does not appear to have an antonym, meaning that it is unfalsifiable (and thus, some might say, nonexistent): “presence of others” means nothing, certainly nothing good, and sure as hell does not cure the disease: as every other pop song will tell you, one can feel desperately lonely in the midst of the thickest crowd.

(OK, pop songs do not use big words like “desperately”. Still, you get the point).

The truth is that the term “loneliness” is used automatically, mindlessly, out of habit, to cover every instance of unease and discomfort for which we do not have some other, immediate explanation. If we have not eaten, we are hungry; if he have not drunk, we are thirsty; if we lack money, we are poor; if we want to take a holiday, but can’t, we are burnt out; if we experience sexual desires but have no release, we are frustrated; if we break our leg, we are in pain; but if we feel a kind of unspecific blah – well, then, we say, we must be lonely. It is a catch-all term, and like all catch-all terms, it means perfectly nothing.

"Loneliness" is a word we use out of intellectual sloth: when we do not feel like peering deeply into our souls to see just what it is that is really wrong with us.


3.


Watching The Wire (it may well be the best drama produced for TV ever) in the company of a pop-psychologists (i.e. every normal person) is instructive: observing the frustration, the drinking, the desultory sleeping around, the catastrophic marriages of the heroes and heroines, the couch pop-psychologist, if s/he gives it a thought at all (which s/he almost never will), will say:

"These people are -- oh -- so lonely".

And, having said that, s/he will get a chorus of appreciative murmurs all around from all the other pop-psychologists couch-assembled:

"Yeah, dude! Lonely!"

But the pop-psychologist is of course bullshitting us -- and himself (or herself): these people are not lonely, they are dumb. They work a frustrating, exhausting job -- in itself enough to make anyone unhappy and which therefore they should quit forthwith and god only knows why don't; but, as if it were not enough, crucially, when they are done with it, they don’t know what to do with themselves; a problem which could easily be solved if they learned how to read, for example. Really, would not an evening with Dem Zaubergberg be more satisfying than drinking and whoring and feeling miserable afterwards?

Alright, perhaps reading is not their forte, maybe they are dyslectic, or just not verbally minded -- they do all seem to know but four words of English (though they conjugate them rather well). But are there no other options? How about chess, for crying out loud, or Argentinian tango, or pickling cabbages, or collecting bottle caps?

Contentment, says Czikszentmihalyi, comes from performing an absorbing activity; but in order to discover what that activity is for us, we must be what he calls autotelic -- i.e. capable of setting ourselves our own goals ("telos"). The Wire illustrates what happens to people who can’t -- which is everyone around, it seems.

To call this problem “loneliness” is thus not just to misdiagnose it – which is bad enough, since a misdiagnosed disease is per force maltreated; it is also pathetic: an attempt to blame other people for these people's own failures. It is to say: "These folks do not feel bad because they are stupid and do not know what to do with themselves" (which comes down to saying, in simple terms, "they are so damn boring that they bore themselves"); "Oh, no! They feel bad because they are lonely!", which is to say, if you parse it with the help of the same Webster: "because nobody loves them". There: it is their parents’ fault, their wives', their girlfriends', their siblings', their colleagues’; everyone’s. Poor little unloved they. What did they do to deserve this, eh?

The maltreatment of the condition which follows from this misdiagnosis is the prescription of a relationship – usually understood as romantic love – as cure; which is bound to failure: take two bored, helpless, unhappy people, who have no inkling as to what to do with themselves, put them together and – presto! – you get... happiness? How is that supposed to work?

But the prescription is eternal: people have always and everywhere sought happiness in love -- without any proof positive that it is to be found there.

Says a philosopher: when someone tells us “I love you”, the correct reaction is to ask “what do you want?” Cute, but not especially insightful. After all, it is not necessary to ask. We know what they want. They want us to un-bore them.

Loneliness

I found myself this morning explaining to my old acquaintance why it is that I do not plan to acquire spoken fluency in any of the three languages which I am currently learning. To illustrate the point I described the party I went to last night: there was not a single person there whose thoughts or opinions about anything I was interested to hear; or who would have understood the least bit of what I had to say has I chosen to say it. So we talked about going bald, hair cuts, and the sexual habits of our hairdresser. (Blah). Arguably, the conversation would have gone more smoothly if they (Dutch speakers to a man) spoke better English, or German, or French, or Chinese, or Japanese, or even Italian; but it would have been exactly as contentless, empty, and dull. I had known this before I set off for the party. I only went to be polite; and conversed to be polite; and then, feigning work, left early but also, I hope, politely. Had these not been my neighbors with whom I have to deal daily, I would not have gone and I am relieved to think that I shall not have to go again until New Year's Eve.

Loneliness is something people oft complain about in their lives; and the motivation commonly ascribed to their actions: meeting with the lads for beers, moving in with him or her, attending parties of last night's sort -- it is all explained by loneliness and the need to overcome it. But loneliness cannot be overcome: think about it: there is no adjective that describes its opposite, because its opposite does not exist. Loneliness is the essential human condition and the only way to deal with it is the way T. E. Lawrence dealt with his match trick (he lit a match and held it between his fingers until it burnt into a cinder, burning his fingers in the process). Ouch, said someone to him, having tried the trick and burnt himself. What's the trick?! The trick, old man, answered Lawrence, is not minding that it hurts.

Avon says

I had proposed to Brianna four or five meetings a year in various exciting and exotic locations: Paris, Istanbul, New Delhi; I said I'd cover all expenses and on each occasion give her a nice parting gift; and in between, I said, we could stay in touch by internet and phone every day. (Over the last several months I offered her plenty of emotional support and intellectual entertainment that way, which she seemed to appreciate, having no one else at the moment to do that). Now, you'd think a girl of her looks and prospects would jump at the offer. But no: she'd thought about it for a long time and at long last said that she can't meet me four of five times a year for a week or two; she needs, she says, to be emotionally involved for sexual intimacy to take place. That can't be quite true since she also says that what happened to us on her parents' couch was a one-night stand, she never thought it would repeat, and she was OK with that -- which all goes to say that emotional involvement is not really necessary. No, she admits, but she adds that for more, for anything regular, she needs to be emotionally involved. When I ask what that means, she names hugs and conversations; but what she really means is cohabitation: she wants someone full time, all the time. In other words, she wants -- everything. She'd rather have less of a man, less of financial security, less travel, less interesting life, and no gifts, but have that less full time; indeed, she'd rather take the risk of having nothing at all (as seems the likely outcome) than to have what I offered. How strange.

More Mourad

Though Mourad tries to sound funny, her description of her childhood does with time begin to sound whiny, and from time to time borders on that famous (and tiresome) anger of modern liberated women.

Whence does this anger come?

Perhaps her lack of understanding of her Indian family offers us a clue. Their -- Indian -- lives may be dull, enslaved even, but they are orderly: they know what to expect and how to behave in most situations; but Mourad -- a modern European woman -- is free and -- without a clue how to use that freedom. She has no access to the old models of being a woman; and the new models which she wishes to follow are incomplete, they are a work in progress, largely informed by ideas of justice and equality, they have not been sufficiently tested by life. We do not know whether they will work, or even whether they can. Many may not, especially the ones which assume that to be truly the equal of men a woman must be like a man in all ways, which probably can't be right, but which further assume in a simplistic manner that men are like this rather than like that, an assumption which is often insufficiently grounded in empirical observation, or at best based on poor sampling.

As a result the lives of modern women -- lives lived by the lights of the new ideologies -- are a work in progress, a living experiment; there are insufficient clues to know which experiments are likely to pay off and which will not; failures are frequent and painful; and the worst of it is that, given how short our lives are, and the irreversible nature of some experiments (such as having children), a failed experiment has a huge cost. Are modern women as a result more or less happy than women were in former times? Who knows; the truth is, that modern life is hard and full of pain and failure and disappointment.

And then there is the anger, intentionally released by feminist ideas, to be used as a weapon against oppressive males. It is a double edged sword: anger hurts the angry as much as it hurts those against whom it is intended to turn -- perhaps hurts the angry even more.

As was to be expected

Cette pense m'a long perturbee --

writes Mourad a little further, describing how, in the midst of the Second World War in Europe, by near-miracle she was saved from public orphanage and taken into a well-off family after her mother's death --

qu'avais-je de plus que de milliers d'autres enfants abandonnees, envoyees a l'Assistance publique ou les plus faibles mouraient? Sinon le fait d'etre une petit princesse?

Est-ce pour cela quel'on m'a gardee? Qui donc aimait-on? Ou etait-je, moi, dans tout cela?

The note is wrong -- in as many sentences -- on three accounts:

first: true princes (and princesses) do not bewail the injustice of their elevated social status, but see it rather as a call to duty (noblesse oblige, to whom much was given, etc.): our good fortune is supposed to give us a titanium moral spine, miss Kenize;

second: there is no such thing as "moi-meme" -- a person, an individuality -- apart from being the prince or princess that we are; one does not love a princess the way one may love any other girl; no princess who expects to be loved like any other girl deserves to be one; why: no such girl is one; and,

third: what is this base whining (in itself bad enough) to one's social inferiors (ie. the general public) about being unloved and unappreciated?

You are not a princess, Mme Mourad. I don't recognize you.

Reading Mourad with trepidation

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Cover art: John Frederick Lewis (1805-1876)¹, Lilium Auratium;
the vase is an Iznik (?) Imari²

Kenize Mourad, granddaughter of the last Sultan of Turkey, and daughter of the former Raja of Badalpur, comments early in her book³, while describing her father's obsequies in the old family seat somewhere "near" Lucknow:

De compassion, aucun de ces paysants n'aurait l'idee d'en eprouver pour cette homme qui fut leur maitre mais sut aussi les proteger, les aider dans l'infortune et accompagner leur vie non sans bonte, les exploitant moins qu'il n'est coutume. Car ceux qui exercent le pouvoir ne sont plus consideres comme des humains, de par leur puissance ils appartiennent a l'univers des dieux. Et qui aurait pitie des dieux?

Suddenly I am seized by fear and foreboding: what does Kenize Mourad, raised and educated in France-egalite, know about divine kingship of the feudal society? In her first chapter she discusses frankly her emotions: anger at the family for not having notified her earlier of her father's critical condition, grudges at her brothers for having been brothers (and thus more important in her father's eyes), at her father for -- as yet we do not know what.

But do we -- do I -- want to know?

Mme Mourad sounds like a modern French woman: confident, proud, and prepared to bare her emotional entrails which she is convinced are important and deserving of universal knowing. (Georges Sand comes to mind). Modern French women are no doubt interesting in their own right; but there seems to be just one way of being a modern French woman, and we already know what that is... More importantly, can one expect them to tell us anything truly insightful about the lives and minds of real kings and princes of another time and place, even if they should be their own flesh and blood?

I will read on Kenize Mourad, but gingerly and with trepidation. I have already heard everything westerners -- especially women westerners -- have had to say about Indian divine kingship, religion, love and family relationships, and I am sure I do not want to read it yet again.

*

This is just the gist of my misunderstanding with Angelica, too. I had told her that the emotions and the inner states of knights are a closed book to pretty much everyone knights ever meet in the modern world. She did not believe me: "If you behave in a certain way, she says, people will always understand it". But then -- how could she possibly believe me?

Akhila has known me longer and closer; she is also older and more perceptive: "I don't get you", she says with a winning smile. That, of course, is what one aims to achieve: since to be known is to be available: to be scrutable is to be common.


¹ Lewis was a so-called Orientalist, and long dead and forgotten before that term was thrown into opprobrium. In fact, the fortunes of his art revived suddenly in the 1970's, just about the time when the infamous essay by Edward Said was being hatched; from nothing his works quite suddenly began to command seven figure prices. (Indeed, was Said perhaps responding to Lewis's reviving fame?) I'd like to read more about how Lewis was revived. Anyone can recommend a book?

² To this day the most popular style of pottery decoration in Morocco is a kind of homw-grown variation on Imari. Is this the case across the Arab world?

³ Le Jardin de Badalpour, not, apparently, available in English, though, like the Kawabata-Mishima letters, you could read it in half a dozen other European languages any day of the week.

On sharing

(This post is obliquely related to my post on the feelings of connectedness).

Someone has recently extolled to me the deep satisfaction which followed upon his having shared with someone -- a rather emotionally distant acquaintance as it turned out, but (perhaps not insignificantly) one of opposite sex -- his feelings in the matter of the impending birth of his first child. "I could tell her", he tells me, "things I could not tell my wife".

When I probed further in order to to establish just what was so great about the experience, I learned that the person of opposite sex in question (shall we say, "the receptacle of the sharing activity"? or perhaps "the sharee", for short?) did not really have anything significant to contribute in return, and that her entire role consisted of nothing other than having heard out the sharing verbiage and then responded "adequately" to my acquaintance's sharing activity (which was, it seems, something along the lines of: "oh, that's wonderful, thank you for sharing", or: was it "I know, I know!"?) When probed further, my acquaintance admitted that the whole experience was not a matter of him learning anything interesting in return for his sharing efforts, but a matter of, er, "emotional intercourse" (as he described it, though his formulation resorted to significantly cruder terminology).

When he then, in the course of our conversation, accused me of not sharing -- being "closed", as he put it, or "secretive" -- as a matter of character, he said -- I answered that I simply saw no point in it. Bland drivel like "That's wonderful, thank you for sharing" (or "I know! I know!") has no therapeutic effect on my soul; I prefer my titillating interactions with members of opposite sex to be more consciously erotic in nature on both sides (even if it leads nowhere); but, most crucially, I can never ever ever expect any sharee of mine to have anything in the least interesting to contribute to any description of my internal states. This is, in part, because of my seven languages and nine countries (and forty-six years) on three continents (I do not know anyone who can match this sort of experience); and because of my vast reading in numerous fields (how many people do you know who read 1200 pages of non-fiction a week?); but mainly because everyone I ever speak to appears to follow the same age-long thought models which I have long since discovered to be false.

(These models assume all sorts of wrong things about the reality that surrounds us: such as that human beings search for love, that love is selfless, that parents selflessly love their children, that religion develops in us a high moral tone, blah blah blah).

Thus, in my last engagement on the subject of sharing, I described to someone my efforts on behalf of my aunt, who needs to find an apartment, a telephone, a computer, etc., all in a strange Asian country and tongue and who relies for all these things on me. Now, I genuinely like this aunt of mine, even though she bores me to tears with her conversation: I engage in that conversation, all the same, I told my interlocutor, with the sense of filial piety: yes, I am bored, but, what the heck, let her have it, I think to myself.

Replying to this, the sharee in question observed that my aunt being the only member of my family to give the least care about me, I better feel filial towards her. This, as far as I was concerned, exhausted our conversation: I had no intention of telling the sharee that human motivations are a mysterious tangle of all sorts of threads, and that not even Confucius himself could ever hope to disentangle just the extent to which my aunt actually cared for me for my own sake and to what extent she simply needed my help in her new, strange home.

Nor was I going to tell him that there was not a damn thing I ever wanted from my aunt, nor could I think of anything I might want from her, my aunt having very little of practical nature to offer; and that therefore I was indeed acting out of pure, unalloyed filial piety: not because she cared for me, as he put it, or more accurately speaking, was nice to me, but because I am generous and kind and filial and loyal. Which are, all of them, things that I am because I am a chivalrous knight.

Which is something no one I have ever met -- no living person -- seems ever to know diddly squat about.

Which is another reason not to bother sharing: what is the point of dumping on a sharee whose mental capacities are guaranteed to be exceeded by the dumping action?

Angelica says people will read the way one behaves and treat him accordingly; Angelica is mistaken: the so called people, having no conception of knighthood, cannot possibly treat me according to my behavior because they have not the brain capacity to understand it. To them I am merely odd.