is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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A Fair Amount of Being Alone.
Recently at an academic dinner gathering in the QB neighborhood (which, though it was assembled around a scholarly talk, and paid for by a local college, consisted solely of people who had at one time or another studied in the Rhetoric department at Berkeley, and so was fun in the way of familiarity and shared history, unlike most academic dinner gatherings), the topic of being alone kept coming up. That�s not so odd. We�re all academics who have had to move from place to place, and that always involves a fair amount of being alone. And, I suppose, most people who have chosen to become academics have already lived lives that involve a fair amount of being alone. We are contemplative types, withdrawing into our brain-spaces for the sake of some lovely truth, only to emerge in a dirty, complicated world where we feel (and often act) like social retards.
There�s more to it than that. Loneliness of a sort is built into a profession that produces specialized knowledge. Lonely people are people who have something to say but no one to hear it, or no one who comprehends. (And that is possible even without specialized knowledge!) There are ways around that aloneness, but it is shocking how rarely even someone who has dedicated her life to the pursuit of ideas might end up in a real conversation about ideas.
I know, it�s hard for you to dance with me what with the cross on my back and all. But at least I�m dancing!
Anyway, at said gathering, I told one of my many, many �anecdotes of Jill�s aloneness,� not thinking there was anything very alarming about it, thinking even that it would prove charming or funny but not pathetisad (as was once spoken on The Drew Carey Show, when Drew Carey was asking his female sidekick how some plan of his seemed to her and she said, �oh, I don�t know, is �pathetisad� a word?� His reply: �I don�t know. Is �sarcastibitch� a word?�. Heh heh, I�ve just worked a Drew Carey reference into a description of an anecdote about loneliness that interrupts an academic dinner gathering. How promising for us all!).
My anecdote. I lived in San Francisco long enough and steady enough to see friends of mine leave and return, and there were years that were low, years when I didn�t have many good friends nearby, and so I spent a lot of time alone. When Halliday left town and Liz and I stopped talking to each other (for the second two-year non-talking period in our 20-year friendship) and Heidi left for New York (the first time), things were pretty sad in the life of Jill. (Out of that crucible was born h2so4. Sometimes you have to kick your own ass. Other times you have to pour your aloneness into a fantastically demanding project. I�ve never been good at extended wallowing, though I�ve always been good at remaining alone. That�s not a skill I�d recommend, but I have it.)
Oh, but I digress. My anecdote, in short. At a diner where I used to eat weekend brunches by myself fairly often worked a semi-handsome waiter who used to bring me my pepsi and then open the can with a flourish and pour it for me into a lovely glass of ice. I love pepsi so much and was so alone that I had a crush on him because of this, his tiniest act of kindness, of opening my soda for me, and pouring it. I still think of him fondly sometimes. I never knew his name.
That strikes me as a winsomely cute little story, nothing to inspire the terror of the abyss or anything.
Anyway, I told this story and one of my colleague/friends was horrified by it. I saw it in her face. She said something to the effect of my having weathered some severe storms or something. And sure, I have had better years and worse years. And that year or so was pretty bad. But there is still much about that year that I remember fondly, including some of the aloneness, which can become its own fetish.
However, this colleague of mine is also someone who within one month of arriving in the area managed to have a party gathering together more people than I had met in the year and a half I had been here before her. We are different people. Perhaps when we stare into the abyss, we see entirely different things. That�s the other thing about loneliness. What it misses and what it seeks can be very different, from person to person.
Speaking of loneliness, I still want to write about Pan�s Labyrinth. (The film�s not so much about fascism, more about loneliness and escape from a world that isn�t so good. (Ofelia says to her brother-in-her-mother�s-womb: �things aren�t too good out here but soon you�ll have to come out.�) Fascism is a two-dimensional backdrop to something much more moving, storywise, for me.) Man, it really did a number on me, and I see now, having had a few discussions about it, that the number it did on me is slightly idiosyncratic�it reaches into my early years of aloneness (I have so many extended and intensely detailed memories of time spent alone as a child, much of it in worlds more made-up than real) and yanks them out as if it reached into my gut and pulled out an unwritten history hidden there. Like I said after I first saw it, it affected me on the level of childhood memory. And that�s what makes it hard to write about. However, there is no way I am wrong about what I�m thinking about this movie. I know because I TOOK NOTES during my second viewing. Did I mention I am an academic? Anyway, last night I had an interesting discussion about the film during commercial breaks at an Academy-Awards-watching party. Basically I felt like I had seen an entirely different film from the one being described by my host. But that�s the thing about loneliness, and, I suppose, about reading and viewing art and watching films: what we miss and what we seek can be very different, from person to person.
So perhaps this week I�ll have to go see it again.
Ha! I was just on the phone with someone and, in the course of a varied conversation, he asked me whether I had any compulsive behaviors. I said I was sure I must but couldn�t think of any. He said the same. But this tendency I have toward repetition, and toward sudden intense love of certain things, excess and repetition, obsession and compulsion, I suppose it fits, no? However, it is usually the case that once I cling to something, it never gets discarded. I�m loyal and PLAY FOR KEEPS.
12:15 a.m. - February 27, 2007
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