Autre

As forceful as desires usually are, they change overtime. They wax and wane, crop up and leave, sometimes in forms of fetishism, sometimes as mere ‘leanings.’ And often times you’re so sure of this particular desire that you make it a habit of repeatedly admitting to its presence, embalming its otherwise variant longevity. After all, don’t we all like to say something along the lines of “I’m the kind of person who..” (A craving for any form of categorical clarity must be a common human condition, right?) In the process of insisting on a mode of existence through the mere utterance of a word, you enter into that murky area where you become someone before really becoming someone.

Solitude is like that for me. I’m sure I’ve started off with truly preferring solitude, back then not even aware of any of the weight the word holds for me now. It was simply a penchant for being left alone, a light-heartedness in being given some extra alone time during summer camp and brittle pleasure that was found in staying up all night while assuming the whole world was asleep. It is then that you conveniently categorize that you’re a solitary person. And the liturgy begins. I find myself chanting, either to myself or to an acquaintance, my fondness for solitude, ironically as if it is a badge of humanism.

My insistence on solitude has been so religious for so long that now, acute discernment seems to be far removed from the discussion. It is at this point where I drivel with confusion about the coexistence of both great anxiety and pleasure in being solitary. I don’ t know if I like it or not, if I should like it or not. I’m surprised that it’s even become a choice.

What is solitude any way but the compressed act of secretly comparing yourself to the other? Introspection seems like a gaze upon a version of the self that restlessly scuffles with the world and the other, but do you really get to gaze into any other version? Solitude is perhaps only parasitic (on the world, the other) at best. Isn’t it a mode of self-consciousness that stands only as a backfire against the perception of/interaction with the other? Is this why you hear about all these reclusive writers and poets who weren’t really recluses? Would this partially explain the annoying antinomy of angst/pleasure in being solitary? To put in a lumpish order of words, it seems as if one must be constantly surrounded in order to be left alone.

So I don’t know if I’m a solitary person as much as I enjoy intervals of solitude. And perhaps I should leave it at that from now on. Consistency lures me, but at the moment what seems more alluring is that little margin for chaos. This is not to say that chaos is what we’re working towards, but to say that we only start from places of the chaotic. Places where antinomies are norms. Perhaps future paradoxes will be less bothersome if I start with that supposition. (And it’ll prevent me from making futile pseudo-intellectual remarks trying to weave the two paradoxical poles.) That would give room for a tenacious charm of a blade of grass between the cobblestones.

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