On Solitude

essay and verse

ON SOLITUDE

The city was full of noise yesterday; noise from various parts, all conglomerated into a big, constant roar. I live near a football stadium, and there was a big match too….

And I begrudge none of it, however, I am never comfortable with crowds and noise.

It is said that wanting solitude and quiet is a terribly middle class vice. I think that is a terribly ignorant idea. Some people, no matter what circumstances they are born into, just need time alone. Not because we’re special, or of some exalted intellectual capacity, but because our minds are so unruly, and it can get so loud inside our heads that it becomes necessary to keep them away from further excitement.

In my case, the consequence of not getting away to some secluded place is that I can become very angry very quickly, and it is a hideous thing. They say that anger has its uses; maybe, but not the type that shows up in me. It has brought nothing but destruction and a lot of suffering. So I like to be alone, and in relative quiet.

I found myself re-reading Plato’s “Phaedo” dialogue (a post here on substack whetted my interest in the text). It is a dialogue set on the prison cell where Socrates is being held – a death row apartment. He is surrounded by his followers who are trying to come to terms with his looming execution.

The conversation is fittingly about the nature of the soul, and it’s destiny. He makes his famous case for the immortality of the soul, by means of showing it’s affinity to the realm of true Being, in contrast to this world of constant change. This time in reading, I noticed a similarity in his argument to the way certain Buddhist teachings say that the true nature of things, including ourselves, never really appears, and consequently, cannot disappear.

Having made his case, Socrates goes on to describe, in what seems to me to be a mystical vision – neither literally true, nor false – the Earth, the true Earth, of which our realm is merely a part, a part set within one of it’s hollows. It is a beautiful piece, though by beauty I mean powerfully evocative, dreamlike. By Earth, he really means the totality of realms; the various planes of existence, a great variety all integrated into a living, breathing whole.

It struck me that his description may well be attuned to the aphorism; “as above, so below”, and that this great world-being, the god, is the macrocosmic image of the human being; mind, body, heart, soul, all , and that the various realms – heavens, underworlds, dark, bright, beautiful, terrifying – are analogue to the internal states of the human body, mind, and soul.

If this is so, it is a stunning vision full of wisdom. Have we all not some awareness of how extreme the aspects and conditions of our inner life can be? How heavens, hells, paradises of fleshy delights, and worlds of vicious warfare and hideous cruelty lurk (or maybe we have seen them surface) within that most intimate of universes, our own being?

There is a song my father loves, and I remember it as being a sizable hit on the pop charts from childhood – it is called “Working Man”, sung by the Canadian, Rita McNeill. It’s a beautiful, haunting song about the hard and dangerous life that miners lived (and live)-

“In the dark recess of the mines, where you age before your time”

I can’t pretend to be able to relate to that kind of hardship. But hardship of another type, yes, unfortunately – though I imagine we all can to varying degrees. Perhaps if the lyric were made-

“in the dark recess of the mind, where we age before our time”

-that would fit well for us.

DONN¹ OF THE DEAD

Bolted oakwood, black as night

the deepest door where only faint

the broken cracks of waking light

can creep, no more than barely taint

***

Death is he, the king inside

but wearing life upon his throne,

is never gone, awaits the tide

to swing the latch, and bear us home

1. In Gaelic mythology, the lord of the dead and ancestor of the living, possibly an aspect of the highest divinity, known as the Dagda, the great father god