Believe It or Not!

I was brought up quiet, amid strangers’ debris.

When I was young, each week my parents and I visited the Wellesley (Massachusetts) Recycling and Disposal Facility. Monstrous containers held every kind of color-sorted glass, metal, paper, and earth.

Beyond the bins was a cleared lot where my parents found tables and chairs and I found board games and skis. There were stage lights, painted plaster animals, and always a pile of crutches and walkers, as if a miracle-spring bubbled nearby. Sometimes you could find jade lamps and silver plate, and only the townspeople, whose cars wore official stickers, were allowed in. It was like a country club.

Beyond the swap lot, as if an afterthought, was the place for actual noncompostable garbage, and beyond the garbage, up a steep hill, was a book swap housed in a lean-to — what we called the Dump Library. It was better than the local town library, a former one-room schoolhouse with a dirt basement, little money or space for new books, and a card catalog hand-typed by the obedient dead.

The Dump Library’s long shelves held geography magazines and abridged encyclopedias, that core collection seasoned with law school textbooks, pharmacology references, and back issues of financial journals. There were floral- and foil-jacketed novels by improbably named women and men, and several copies apiece of curricular novellas endorsed by the old as stimulating to the young.

The rest of it was a wormhole. I brought home a thriller on whose blessed page 168 I found a man described as being stiff as a flagpole; I assumed this referred to his fine posture, though in the scene, inexplicably, he was lying down. I brought home a geometry notebook written in pencil in an Arabic language and a carton of letters sent from one teenaged girl at summer camp to another teenaged girl back in town. The letters contained numeric codes. The coded parts were about making out. (Making what out?)

The best book I ever found was a 1929 edition of Robert L. Ripley’s Believe It or Not! bound in green cloth stamped with red ink. On the title page was an inscription in thick black fountain ink: To Gene Cugnet with all good wishes from Rip “Believe it or Not” Feb. 27 New York 1929.

My mother told me I should claim Gene Cugnet was my uncle, as if further personal attachment to the book were necessary to impress my friends, but I had no interest in Mr. Cugnet beyond the sound of his name, which I have known for thirty years and never thought to locate in humanity.

Who was Gene Cugnet?

From the U.S. Social Security Death Index:

Gene CUGNET
Birth Date: 12 Mar 1884
Death Date: Aug 1962
Social Security Number: 017-12-3308
State or Territory Where Number Was Issued: Massachusetts
Actual Death Residence:  Massachusetts

So he was forty-four, more than halfway done with his life, when he met Rip in New York City, maybe on a trip with his family. Why not? It was the Roaring Twenties.

The book didn’t turn up at the dump until fifteen or twenty years later. Maybe for fifteen years Gene’s offspring dutifully enjoyed the bound memento of their dear father’s New York trip, then tired of it. Maybe the books surrounding it on the dump library shelf had also been Gene’s. Or maybe — imagine this — the book had been brought there in 1962, right after Gene’s death, then picked up by some unknown reader and enjoyed for twenty years, then brought back to the dump a second time. It is not improbable that the book stayed local. My parents have lived within five miles of the dump for a combined total of 141 years.

I remember almost every page of that Ripley book, from the Cyclops Girl to the Eyeless Girl to the shape of Rameses II’s nose, which I found in 1998 on the face of a man in my graduate program and immediately took to bed. How could I not? He had the nose of an immortal!

I remember Rabelais’s will — I have nothing / I owe much / The rest I leave to the poor — and I remember that the man with the shortest name in the United States of America as of 1928 was Ed Ek, of Brockton, Mass.

The book is just in the other room, but I’m showing off, writing this from memory.

A pound of feathers weighs more than a pound of gold.All female rulers named Jane were murdered, became insane, or were deposed.All the names of God have four letters.There is no cork in cork legs. (The name comes from Dr. Cork who invented them.)Red snow falls in Japan.

Rip’s beautiful ink drawings often included text at the bottom, its arrangement on the page rendering punctuation unnecessary.

            Henry Lewisplaying billiards with his nose                           made a run of 46

            A catadopted and            mothered                        a rat

There was the eight-year-old mother, the ninety-year-old mother, and the great-great-great-great grandmother, whose tombstone read:

The Mother to her daughter spake:            “Daughter,” said she, “Arise!They daughter to her daughter take,            Whose daughter’s daughter cries.”

Thirty years after I first read the book, I can find, in a few minutes, with the aid of telecommunicative tools, the probability that one of Mr. Cugnet’s distant relatives was a woman named Marvelous Tytlandsvik of Maxim, Saskatchewan. Her surname is Norwegian, named for a town in the county of Rogaland. Page 94 of the 1903 Baedeker (8th ed.) for Norway, Sweden and Denmark reads We next enter the Hjøsenfjord, with its wild and grand rocks, somewhat resembling the Lysefjord, and call at Tytlandsvik or Tøtlandsvik on a bay of its S. bank, and at Valde on its N. bank. . . . The town is known today as Totlandsvika.

I felt calmer and more myself back when all of my friends and I had each collected fewer than a hundred books of our own to read. When we spent time together, we told each other about them. Then we went home and drew a picture on a newsprint pad, or walked into the woods to look for red and orange leaves.

I remember the photo of all the Chinese people walking four abreast out to infinity, with the terrifying statistic that if they walked past a fixed point, they would never stop:

            If all the Chinese in the worldwere to march 4 abreast past a given point            they would never finish passingthough they marched forever and ever            (based on U.S. Army marching regulations)

And I remember the cipher that begins U O a O but I O thee, O O no O but O O me . . .(You sigh for a cipher but I sigh for thee, O sigh for no cipher but O sigh for me . . .)

The ink of Rip’s line drawings is dark black, fading to charcoal at the edges of the lines, and the paper is thick eggshell pulp. I never thought to take special care of the book, and I am sure that at least some of the rings on it from wet drinking glasses are marks that I left while sick at home, sipping ginger ale to calm my nervous stomach, brought on by anxiety, which often kept me home from school and was always called a stomach ailment.

I learned as much from that book as I learned in nearly all my years of public school, though perhaps because I had terrible attendance, something I never thought necessary to measure — unlike the longest fingernails in the world, the tardiest postal letter ever delivered, or the heaviest lemon ever grown — until graduation, at which I learned that there was such a thing as a Perfect Attendance Award and that my classmate David Robertson hadn’t missed a day of school in thirteen years. Perhaps not coincidentally, he had been raised a Christian Scientist. (Believe it or not!)

Rip’s antique English and archaic jokes entered my lexicon insidiously.

I have traveled in 64 countries — including Hell (Norway), and the strangest thing I saw was man.

Strange Is Man When He Seeks After His Gods. Therefore the strangest places on earth are the holiest. And the strangest and most remarkable city in the world is the holy city of Benares on the muddy arm of the Ganges, India’s holy river . . . 

Rip met and sketched an Indian juggler who was able to lift a sack filled with poisonous snakes by suction cups attached to his eyeballs. The ragged man on the bed of nails is hardly impressive next to the drawing of the even more ragged man who had been a galley slave for one hundred years and a day. The most dated believe-it-or-nots were the most believable. So what if Frau C. Worth, owner of a large apartment house in Berlin, did not collect any rents from her tenants for twenty years? So what if, at the age of eleven, Sidis (his first names, William James, were superfluous in 1929) matriculated in Harvard and astounded his professors by discussing the fourth dimension?

Ripley was a cartoonist, entrepreneur, and amateur anthropologist. He wrote about hundred-pound pumpkins with the same blithe wonder as he described the Kewawngdu, the Giraffe women of Burma. According to the reference I am now reading, in 1929, the year he signed my book, he published the following in his long-running syndicated series of newspaper cartoons: Believe it or not, America has no national anthem.Two years later, President Hoover signed a law designating “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the national anthem of the United States.

Rip also ran a chain of Odditorium museums, hosted a radio program and then, in 1949, a television program. Other shows on the air in 1949 included Missus Goes a Shopping, Foodini the Great, Champagne and Orchids, and The Family Genius. Rip died on set, during the filming of the thirteenth episode. Before his death, he had been voted the most popular man in America by the New York Times.

It is tempting to conclude that children should be given only the cast-offs of the dead to read, with no duplicate copies within a hundred miles, but I can’t know what it was like to be the other kind of child.

*

Editor’s Note: “Believe It or Not!” first appeared in Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book, edited by Sean Manning and with a foreword by Ray Bradbury.

There Is A Certain Kind Of Light that You Can See Too Much Of

When I was a child my dad worked on machines that measured the flow of natural gas through pipelines. Similar to how mercury was once used in thermometers, the machines used mercury to measure the pressure in the pipelines. When the pressure changed, the mercury would move and the machine would move and a little pen would mark the movement on a piece of paper. Sometimes the machines would leak tiny amounts of mercury causing the machine to become inaccurate. My dad would fix the leak and replace the lost mercury and re-calibrate the machine. The field office where my dad worked had a special drain in the floor that was designed to collect mercury that fell out of the machines when they were brought in for repair. One time my father brought some mercury home, and my brother and I were allowed to play with the tiny balls of liquid metal. We pushed the beads around on our kitchen table. We could see our faces stretched out over the surface of the poisonous metal as our fingers prodded these little round mirrors.

*

From the silver, mirror-like cover, to the use of symbols and glyphs, Mercury, by Ariana Reines, is a work of great design. It is divided into five sections:

LEAVES
SAVE THE WORLD
WHEN I LOOKED AT YOUR COCK MY IMAGINATION DIED
MERCURY
0

Each section possesses a unique form and content, but they are made of the same reflective material (like a liquid taking the shape of its container). A large part of the pleasure of Mercury comes from its slipperiness of form, style, and content all enacting its namesake.

Mercury’s poems show, on their surface, the face of the reader and the writer, but intrinsically they have properties that tell much more about our world and the pressures of its people. I know this sounds like a grand, ambitious, and reaching statement, but Mercury is a grand, ambitious, and reaching book of poems. Every edge of Mercury oozes our desires and flashes our excesses back at ourselves while emitting ancient logic and radiating some secret religion from inside its amorphous substance. This quality is best exemplified in the poem, “Baraka”:

I CAN’T WAIT FOR MEXICO TO CONQUER AMERICAN

…

I CAN’T WAIT TO GROW THE DECAPITATED FLOWER

I CAN’T WAIT FOR UPENDED PIGEONS

REVERSED RAINBOWS AND SNAKE-EATING LIQUID GOLD

I CAN’T WAIT FOR THE DEW TO FALL, TOMORROW, TODAY

I CAN’T WAIT FOR MY TITS AND ABS

I CAN’T FOR THEY WON’T GO WHEN I GO

I CAN’T WAIT FOR MY HIGH ASS AND MAC MOUTH

I CAN’T WAIT FOR A THICKER COCK

I CAN’T WAIT FOR A MODEST APARTMENT UNDER THE HOLE IN THE ROOF OF THE PANTHEON

“Baraka,” like the rest of Mercury, is equal parts shamanistic chant and confessional purge. Reines’s confessional lyrics are a spectacle created for the reader. The spectacle of Mercury ranges from internet porn and contemporary film, to discussions of the apocalypse with the sun (referred to as ‘lord’ in the poem “Truth or Consequences”) brought about by the lack of cattle roaming the surface of the earth. All of it through a fairly consistent first-person speaker who compulsively divulges everything. Reines’s speaker is also very aware of this spectacle being performed for the reader. She often points out the reader’s voyeurism at the peak of the spectacle:

You just texted me two cock pics

It used to be more artful

The way you did it, the composition.

Like last week, it just stopped raining.

I have a cold quicksilver feeling.

I could put this in a place where you could find it

But I’m hiding it here.

In moments like these, you realize that you are not just watching the poet watch someone else, but you’re watching the poet watch you watching her watch someone else, like an elaborate set-up of two-way mirrors and video cameras. The voyeuristic element of Mercury pushes the lyric beyond confession to exhibition: this isn’t the real, this is a performance. Even if the sex in “WHEN I SAW YOUR COCK MY IMAGINATION DIED,” the most graphic section of Mercury, is “real” or “true” it was still performed as if it was pornographic film:

“when i get your cock like a bag my face is scarred i make my nails long around your cock that goes in and your balls jump fast like a dirt sack hop hop to her pussy like a pink gum crusted with durt”

*

“It is more important to affirm the least sincere,” Frank O’Hara writes in Meditations in an Emergency. Ariana Reines must have been taking this to heart as she was composing Mercury, because like O’Hara does in Meditations, Reines endears us to the least sincere. Like the little pools of metal across my table as a child, the lyrics of Mercury roll around inside my head, and over my tongue, knowing its ability to get through my pores.

This Is the Book For All of Us Ready to Confront Our Own Complacency: Kate Zambreno's Green Girl

If you follow other blogs and websites about independent literature and publishing, you may have seen Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl cropping up on a number of lists as one of the best books of 2011. And for good reason — Green Girl is without question one of this past year’s fiercest texts.

In 2007, when I completed my undergraduate major in Women’s and Gender Studies, I had a certain idea about what it meant to work as an artist in service to feminist and social justice movements. As a fiction writer, I felt like it was my responsibility to restore complex, three-dimensional subjectivity to marginalized and “othered” groups, that is, to use the tools of traditional, character-driven storytelling (whether realist or fabulated) to elevate voices that are often silenced and to dispel stereotypes. But after engaging with an array of transgressive and outsider artists past and present, and in the process developing my own vain and at times abrasive queer aesthetics, I have discovered there are other modes and practices that appeal more to my sensibilities. One of these is to write into, rather than counter to abjection, objectification, and stigma.

This is terrain in which Kate Zambreno excels. Her debut O Fallen Angel (which was actually written after Green Girl) was a cartoon grotesquerie, with deliberately performative, confrontational, and one-dimensional characterizations that shined a garish spotlight on American militarism, patriarchy, and conformist consumerism. Green Girl is perhaps more concerned with subjectivity, experience, and emotionality, but a subjectivity that is “shallow,” or is made shallow (by patriarchy, “the culture,” etc). Her protagonist Ruth fashions her identity after “superficial” consumer fashion objects and images from French New Wave cinema. A young American woman living and working abroad in London, Ruth is everything your most narrow-minded creative writing workshop classmates told you wouldn’t work. Rather than initiating her own dramatic arc, she is passive and reactive. Rather than having a clear objective, she is never clear what she wants, nor is it fully clear to the reader. She welcomes our gaze, then shuns it. She is the young girl as described by the poet Kate Durbin: “She is begging to be loved; she is grossed out by your attention.”

Zambreno presents us with a girl subject whose lived experiences of depression and alienation many of us would prefer to avoid. In her blurb for the book, Durbin says Zambreno implicates “Ruth’s vacancy as our own.” But so too does she implicate us as possessors of the gaze, or as those with the power to pull the young girl’s strings: Green Girl is brilliantly narrated by a maternal figure who is alternately sadistic and nurturing; this narrator self-consciously pokes and prods Ruth to see whether there is any “there” there, then holds Ruth together to prevent her from cracking.

Author Lidia Yuknavitch says Zambreno’s language creates its own “poetics of desire.” Nowhere is this more evident than in her rendering of Ruth’s job in retail, hawking a celebrity fragrance that is itself cleverly named “Desire.” “Would you like to sample desire?” is Ruth’s futile chorus to disinterested passersby, and her failure to move product becomes her failure as an object of desire.

More than anything else I’ve ever read, Zambreno’s prose captures, in a visceral way, how retail invades the bodies and psyches of its workers. And of course retail is not just retail. Retail is capitalism, patriarchy, misogyny, adultism, stigmatization of mental illness, and perhaps most importantly, lest I make this to macro and silence her yet again, retail is the context in which we as readers encounter a particular type of abject girl subject, in which we encounter Ruth. As an artist, Kate Zambreno is profoundly non-complacent, and this is the book for all of us ready to confront our own complacency.  This is a vital book, a necessary book, a book I will long treasure.

Reading Log(jam)

Why can’t I ever read one book at a time? Start, read, finish, and put away? Is it like this for everyone? On my desk are at least thirty-five books that I am at least two chapters into, some far more, but I cannot seem to finish any of them. Knowing that they are undone keeps them alive somehow and still in the process of deep communion. Once the cover is closed and all the words are read, there is a death.

I’m reminded that John Irving’s passion about Dickens includes an unread book. I don’t know if it’s still true, but I recall him saying that he’s saving Our Mutual Friend, the great author’s last completed novel, until his deathbed. Irving wants Dickens to ever be an ongoing pleasure that is never finished, a hunger never completely satisfied.

Of Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock I have only two stories to go, but it lingers, I think, because I want its gritty aura to spread on my other reading. I’ve recently gotten the new Van Gogh: The Life, along with the Penguin edition of his letters. After visiting this summer the house north of Paris where Van Gogh died, I could not resist the gargantuan acclaimed study. And, well, his letters are revered as any that have come down to us.

I collect short books, but they are apparently no easier to finish. Train Dreams by Denis Johnson and Brooklyn Is by James Agee, both beautiful little hardcover volumes of 116 and 50 pages, respectively, have been sampled, more than sampled, yet I know that when I finish them and would be free to remove them from the pile of the “living” to a shelf behind me, a loss will inhabit the desk. So I refuse to do it, and have learned to read books paragraph by paragraph.

As if I needed to add anything else to a worktable straining under the weight, I picked up at a local bookshop on a recent trip to Ohio Philip Roth’s Nemesis, his novel about a fictitious polio epidemic in Newark in the summer of 1944. I remember polio victims. There was a girl in my class in Cleveland when I was growing up a decade after Roth’s story. He is a writer I find extremely easy to read. The narrative flows like a river, and you find yourself twenty, thirty, sixty pages into it before you come up from air. This book I will probably finish, just because he rarely lets you do otherwise.

Recently — why, oh, why? — I’ve begun to read Bernard Malamud after decades. His biography by Philip Davis, an excellent work that did something, but apparently not enough, to raise the novelist to his former stature, is riveting and supremely intelligent. Now I find that I can’t help but dredge out the novels and stories I read so long ago. They are dense. No hope to skim and put away. They’re now taking up real estate on my desk.

The Civil War, anything on the Civil War! The Great Rebellion, the War Between the States, the War of Blue and Gray was far more my war than Korea, under which I was born, because I was eight at its centennial and my brother and I played Civil War in our backyard, in the woods across the road, in our shared bedroom, in our minds. And to truly know the war, one must know what lead to it, so now . . . The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War 1848-1861 has taken its place in the stack — right between Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hendrickson and Thomas W. Nason: New England Virtues Aged in Wood, a monograph on the woodcut artist by Charles Price, published by the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, CT, a place I was happy to visit a couple of weeks ago.

And it never ends. Which is how I prefer it.

An Author Who Was Trying To Transcend Plot: On Henry James's The Wings of the Dove

A number of years ago, I became very interested in what I thought of as Henry James’s best book, The Turn of the Screw­­. In particular, I believed that one hundred years of critical study had missed the point of it completely, and I had a better idea (which I still believe to be true).  It’s only recently, however — in the wake of completing the manuscript for a short book about the correspondence of Henry James and his philosopher brother William — that I’ve come to realize that I thought of The Turn of the Screw as Henry James’s best book only because it was the one I could understand.

James had a lot of problems with people understanding him — most notably, William — and to this day he has a kind of writer’s-writer grudgingly granted Master-status. Tooling around on Facebook, I’m surprised to see him so infrequently listed (as in never, so far) among folks’ favorite books or authors. If he is discussed these days, it’s for his famous ghost story, which mostly gets used to justify the recent glut of crossover literary/genre books.

But there’s a problem with that: James didn’t think a whole lot of The Turn of the Screw. No, scratch that. He did like the book, he thought he’d executed it perfectly — he just didn’t prefer it. It was too obviously commercial. James wrote a lot of things for money in his life, and occasionally he was craven in doing so, but he always recognized it for what it was. He didn’t like unambitious writers, or writers who wrote only one kind of thing, and he criticized “vulgar,” tasteless audiences, too — ones that wanted to be told only stories that were exactly like stories they had already been told.

So what were James’s new stories? Well, they were the big novels that I didn’t think were his best work. I had told myself that my problem with them was that I just couldn’t get all that worked up about whether some young girl was going to marry. Without really knowing it, I was signing on to a familiar take on James — his fascination with the lives of young women spoke probably to some latent facet of his psychology or personality. AKA, he was gay. But the truth is, that’s stupid. I don’t know whether James was gay, and neither do you, and neither of us should care. And more important, these books are much better than The Turn of the Screw, and I had to write a book of my own to figure out why. (It’ll appear, by the way, from the University of Iowa Press in Fall 2012!)

And that brings me to my real recommendation here — The Wings of the Dove. I’m not going to bother telling you the plot of the book at all, because that’s kind of the point I’m trying to make. Most book reviews these days are ninety percent plot summary — so is it any surprise that we have trouble understanding an author who was trying to transcend plot? The plot of The Wings of the Dove doesn’t matter; it’s how the story’s told that makes the difference. Which means that if you’ve seen the movie, then you don’t understand anything at all about the book.

How’s it told?  It’s almost entirely without events. That is, it’s almost all character interiority — you’re in the mind of a character, riding sidecar to their consciousness, as they mull away on some upcoming event, and then suddenly, whoosh, the event has come and gone, and now the character is recalling the event, characterizing it in retrospect. Through almost the whole book — and it’s a big book — almost nothing just outright happens.

To understand why he would do this, we have to go back in time a little bit. For James, just about everything returns to Balzac (e.g. the plot of Eugenie Grandet sounds so much like a Jamesian plot it’s not even funny). Late in his life, in an essay called “The Lesson of Balzac,” James described Balzac as a “painterly” writer, and a monk. It’s the painter part I want to focus on (though if we were to all think of James as a monk, too, we’d probably have much more intelligent discussions about him).

Henry and William James were both more or less reared in the nursery of museums, and you’ll have to take my word for it that Henry said on a number of occasions that what he wanted to do, as a writer, was what he thought he saw happening in the history of art. What was that? Well, after the invention of perspective — depth — paintings were divided into foregrounds and backgrounds. Often you had a portrait in the foreground — Virgins and Jesuses — and in the background you’d have some kind of landscape, maybe some ruins. As time passed (art historians, please sheath your sabers — this is not an art history lecture), artists started to get more and more interested in that background. The background, in other words, climbed into the foreground: thus, the shift from portrait painting to landscape painting. In the avant garde — though Henry didn’t know this — something else was happening: even though the background became the foreground, it didn’t come into any kind of focus. Hello, impressionism!

Now that’s a terribly, terribly, terribly simplified version of things — but it does seem to jibe with how Henry James basically thought of it, and he articulated as much in a story that described the illustrations of a particular edition of Sleeping Beauty. In short, he noted how the blurry background of an image seemed to tug on the imagination, how it triggered something like a stream of thought, a reverie of images. That’s what he wanted his fiction to do — inspire readerly reverie.

So how does The Wings of the Dove do that? Well, in a story, the plot is the foreground — the events, the dialogue, the action. What’s in the background, often unstated (think Hemingway, Carver, etc.), is the meandering minds of the characters who have mulled these events in advance, and who will reflect on them in retrospect. The Wings of the Dove, like the art that Henry wanted to emulate, inverts the background and the foreground so that all we get are blurry impressions of events — blurry impressions that are truer to a reality the confusion and ambiguity of which we fool ourselves by denying.

When I reread The Wings of the Dove for my book, I started to see it like this, as James wanted me to see it — I started to make out the shapes in the fog. My old anxieties faded away. I found that I cared a whole lot less about who was going to wind up marrying whom than I did about recognizing the mind wheeling there on the page, streaming and reverieing away — didn’t it seem a little similar to mine? That, I realized with a jolt, was the whole point.

i've been lonely my entire life

i can write about my depression. i do it without a second thought. i do it because my disease even has a fancy medical term — dysthymia — and my disease requires medical treatment. it’s beyond my control, you see. more than that, decades of research and countless papers and medical journal articles have documented effects and treatment of depression [even, to some degree, the cause].

loneliness, on the other hand, doesn’t get that much. it’s regarded as an individual problem — that is, the individual is expected to heal his own loneliness. and let’s not get into the social stigma of loneliness.

on second thought, let’s.

from Lonely:

“So much ink has been spilled about the need to not judge the depressed or socially anxious person, and to not see emotional problems as indexes of flawed characters, that many people don’t notice that these misconceptions — mood as character flaw, the sufferer as somehow off — are still alive and well when it comes to loneliness. Loneliness is still judged harshly in our society, and it’s the trick of balancing this judgment against their own experience that lonely people have to confront at every turn. The lonely, in other words, have to do battle not just with their state, but with the very loud and widely communicated sense that there’s something wrong with them for feeling it in the first place.”

*

i’ve been lonely my entire life. my secret shame — easier to admit than depression and bisexuality and infidelity: my life is, if nothing else, [un]charmed.

few people understand this, or can comprehend what i mean when i say such a thing as “i’ve been lonely my entire life.” many people dismiss it as the histrionic rant of an anti-social man; i don’t blame them since, to this point, i’ve done a poor job of explaining the loneliness. or what it means for me. or for you, the reader who tries to connect with me. for you, my lover. for you, my parents and siblings. for you, humanity.

loneliness, on the surface, is a social malady. humans are social creatures — we need each other as much as we need sex and food and water and oxygen and sex. something goes awry and haywire in us when we’re disconnected from other humans — when we can’t connect.

connection is achieved through intimacy. and what is “intimacy” but the energy between me, you, and trust?

i trust few people. i find it hard to trust people. i can’t explain why. i haven’t experienced childhood trauma which would prevent me from trusting people. well, no trauma i can actively remember. anyway, without trust, there is no intimacy. no intimacy? no connection. i’ve been lonely my whole life.

alone in my marriage[s].

alone in college.

alone in love.

alone in artistic collectives.

alone while surrounded by friends and family.

and i said something to the effect of, “something goes awry or haywire — when we can’t connect.”

i don’t think much of myself. i don’t deserve love. i don’t deserve happiness. i feel lonely because i’m unworthy of other people, of connection, so there is always space between you and i — the space which should be filled with intimacy.

those are my thoughts when i’m lonely — like right now, two days before Christmas.

but i fight on. i look for answers. and my lover said, “read Lonely. . . . it helped me” and i reached for the book because i believe in lovers and literature. i’ll believe in anything, short of religion [buddhism excluded], to end this loneliness which, as i read and finished White’s memoir, i understood as a lifelong battle, like depression and accepting my bisexuality and infidelity. so goes the [un]charmed life.

Lonely told me i’m not so alone. in White’s personal story, alongside interviews conducted with other lonely people, i found kinship and, in a sense, comprehension: through her, i discovered a clearer understanding of my loneliness. White’s narrative threaded her childhood and adolsence, her college years and her previous life as a lawyer: through it all, she felt “stalked” by loneliness, as though it were a shadowy monster preparing to end her life or, at least, shade it in darkness.

that’s my life.

“’Emotional loneliness deals with the more intimate difficulties one may have,’ says Enrico DiTommaso, a psychologist at the University of New Brunswick. . . . ‘for example, with your family or romantic partner. And that’s a different kind of loneliness from the loneliness you may have in regard to your network of friends. Emotional loneliness means your emotions are internalized, and you keep them to yourself. You don’t engage in sharing those emotions with others, and they don’t share with you.’

“[. . .] While [Dr.] Weiss is now saying that some people can find companionship in intimacy, it’s still the case that most people who lack a specific tie will, at one point or another, feel socially or emotionally isolated. If they try to mend their isolation by substituting a friend for a lover, or a lover for a friend, the loneliness will persist.”

the loneliness will persist.

the loneliness will persist.

the loneliness will persist.

*

loneliness explains my presence on the Internet: my literary magazine, the collective i’ve formed, my twitter timeline. here’s where i disagree with White:

“To state the obvious: you can’t cry on a digital shoulder, you can’t hold a digital hand, you can’t take comfort in a presence that isn’t actually there. As humans, we’re hardwired to seek out a sense of togetherness and community, and it’s unlikely that Internet communications can satisfy this need.”

sometimes, people need to know that someone cares, that someone is listening to them. words have power. emails from people including Ashley Bethard and Alana Voth have, at times, saved me. i never met these women. i never cried on their shoulders or held their hands, but i found comfort.

and since White would acknowledge that forming friendships — the actual, tangible steps required to form friendships — is an unknown, unsolved equation for us all [because sitting in a coffee shop or attending a literary conference doesn’t mean strangers will clasp hands and skip away happy and beaming with friendship], sometimes we take comfort when we can get it.

that aside, Emily White successfully merged the memoir with social and pop culture analysis, medical research, and interviews. the result: Lonely is a damn good book. it’s an important book to tackle and possibly approach loneliness as a disease. and look, real talk for a moment: sooner or later, we all experience loneliness.

the next time you’re at home, alone, beating yourself up because you have no social life and people — if they knew this about you — would laugh and laugh at your loneliness, you might want to read Lonely and understand two things: you’re not alone in your loneliness and there’s no reason to be ashamed.

and find me on Twitter if you need to talk.