TheWorldJournal.com

Virtue of Being Alone
By Manuel Yang, TheWorldJournal.com

There are few things more delectably enjoyable than going out and carousing in a sumptuous feast of conversations among your close-knit friends, colleagues, comrades, set, what you will. This communal experience, particularly when the rhythm of your thoughts and words syncopate at tremendously synchronic wavelength, yields an incomparable effervescence and delight that can only happen in such a group context. But dining or going to the movie by yourself is also equally pleasurable if you know how to do it. Some who find these latter solitary activities awkward or uncomfortable perhaps have not yet discovered the art of conversing with themselves in public.

In my early teens, I remembered that a "loner" was one of the most embarrassing appellations that you could receive, a veritable stigma of unpopularity that branded you as a social defect. Charles Bukowski recounts his growing up with the "lumpen proletariat" of his school during the Great Depression, the so-called scums and losers of his class; this led him to his anti-social flirtation with the Nazis in his community college days (he describes the composition of this youth group upholding the supremacy of the Aryan race to consist of some of the ugliest, most physically screwed-up people he'd ever met). During my first year in junior high, I also hanged out with the residual elements of this dispossessed class, although its membership was Jewish and Italian (one terribly fat and the other lankly, both dressed awfully, customarily picked on by the other kids). Later I went onto sharpen my identity as a "loner" by way of complete disengagement even from these de facto outsiders, spending most of the time reading alone and, progressively, cutting school on my own and daydreaming along the coast of the Pacific Ocean, which was located right next to our fenceless, now-defunct school (later, the library, the movies, parks, and the streets, when I moved to the city and had access to a bicycle and, during last year of high school, a car).

This continues to today. For example, I used to take a repast at a neighborhood restaurant specializing in omelets called Marie's by myself, especially on those mornings when I nursed a lightly pleasurable hangover. You observe people and think your thoughts at such places. Photographs of Kaneko Mitsuharu and Jean-Paul Sartre writing alone at a cafe spring immediately to mind. The joy of writing in public places stems from the displacement of what is ostensibly a private act--writing--into its antithetical context; this displacement infuses a degree of self-conscious exhibitionism that can intensify the pleasure of writing in a way similar to couples who fetishize sex in public.

Going to movies or concerts alone is wonderful, too; you get to completely focus on the "art" at hand, uninterrupted and undisturbed. Bukowski didn't even like going to classical music concerts for this reason, all the fake hauteur and aesthetic snobbery of manners getting in the way of listening to each bar of the music for what it was and letting it directly penetrate your solar plexus like a primitive spear of undiluted magnitude and power; hence he preferred the radio, which gave him a purer experience (the pianist Glenn Gould, for similar reasons from the perspective of the performer, left the concert circuit and concentrated solely on studio recordings). I myself don't mind so much the crowd, maybe because I didn't have to go through as hellish an experience as Bukowski did growing up, with his sadistically go-getter of a father, acne vulgaris, and ruthless solitudes.

Last year I drove under a surreally gargantuan red moon to a Mekons' twenty-fifth anniversary concert: driving alone through the U.S. freeways across the state unleashes in your nerves the reverberating echoes that still powerfully emanate from the whole edifice of American romantic individualist ideology that has led many--from the masterless journeymen and Walt Whitman to the Wobbly bums and John Reed to Jack Kerouac and the beatniks--to solitary backpacking, road trips, and perpetual wanderlust. The purity of the road and consciousness that goes with it contain something ineluctably intoxicating that dissolves your quotidian sense of self. Such as the time when I drove to a conference on international terrorism two years ago. The road was dark. I was talking to myself, pointlessly rehearsing my presentation. And you could shut off talking and play the music loud like the purity of dying and not giving a damn about it, as if your identity was getting obliterated under the rapidly vanishing borders of speed and ephemerally disappearing headlights.

The samurai code of death, hence, does not appear to me at all nihilistic or feudally suffocating, as it does to earnest believers in the superiority of modernity who falsely assume that the latter exists independently and freely of values, ideas, and practices from previous modes of production. Reading _Hagakure_, the seventeenth-century bible on the proper conduct of the samurai, not only do I admire the stance embodied in the text but also find great affinity with how I'd like to approach many matters of life and death. I find distasteful much of the contemporary Japanese rightwing vulgarity that is symbolized by the loud and obnoxious Yakuza-backed _gaisensha_ cars mobilized to intimidate leftist and civil rights groups. But there is a spirit within the Yakuza, as emblematized in the word _ninkyô_, which parallels this determined stoic attitude to death and sense of loyalty, that reminds me of the astonishing solidarity of powers circulating and coalescing from below, whether in East Timor or Palestine, demonstrated in the face of massive monopoly of state violence. Hence, at those points of convergence between the Japanese radical right and left, I find this resolute "hardness" of spirit, unassuming, silent, and unconcerned with self-preservation, one of the finest expressions of humanity saying "No" at its absolute limits of duress. Zeami's famous dictum on the logic of performing Noh, "hisuru wa hana nari" ("to conceal is the flower"), captures the inexpressible beauty and impermanence that meet at the crossroad of this decisively irrevocable moment of selfless self-conflagration. I wish I could take on such attitudes at my most intense moments of crisis, but, regardless of whether I can or not, the ideal remains, rescuing me at the last instance from an elementary nihilism that dangerously marks some of the uncertain footsteps of my thoughts.

And that is the virtue of being alone: you learn to resolutely come face to face with the imminence of your own death and, irradiating the imprint of this encounter throughout the rest of your life, you become capable of unsentimental solidarity in which conversing with your intimates and with yourself blends seamlessly into a visceral friendship that is indistinguishable from self-annihilation.

© July 3, 2003