Being in solitude means thinking about freedom, something we probably don't do enough or do badly. I mean that last phrase to apply to both solitude and freedom -- we do neither of them enough or well.
I recently was lucky enough (or cursed, some might say) to house sit for a friend of mine who was going on vacation with his family. He owns fifty acres with a river running through it, a mill pond at one end of it, and a wonderful comfortable house by its banks. My duties were small: feed five sheep, two goats, two geese, ten cats, a dog and a pony, water the flowers, and empty the dehumidifier once a day. They would be gone for two weeks.
I had plenty to do: reading and writing to catch up on, my daily cycling. There was a small city nearby if I needed food, and they had a substantial video cassette library to keep me entertained. I looked forward to the haven. I had been telling myself for some time that I needed time by myself, and here was the perfect chance to satisfy my self-announcement.
I had, essentially, complete solitude. My nearest neighbor was at least a quarter mile away. Train tracks ran just along one border, and sometimes, twice a day, a freight came through, but I never saw anybody on the train and its passage never lasted more than a few minutes. I could just hear, if I strained, the buzz of the traffic on the highway. Except for the dog, who never went out, I had no companion whatsoever. I was as alone as alone could be without losing my comfort and my social identity.
Thoreau, in Walden, states that one of the consequences of leading lives of quiet desperation is that even fun becomes strained, that we try too hard to force what should come naturally. I thought that with two weeks I could let time take me, rather than have me take time. There were certain things I knew I wanted accomplished by the end of the two weeks, but I thought that it didn't matter in what order or at what time they happened. I would just simply flow, let my mind clean itself out.
But we don't go into the wilderness unattended -- we carry with us the cultural equivalent of C-rations, those habits and schedules that nourish us along from day to day. I was no more equipped to "flow" than I would have been to take over a running farm and handle it, or track grizzly. Despite my resolutions, I set the clock the night before so I would rise at my usual hour. When I did wake up and tried to loll around a bit (after all, I had two weeks; what was the rush?), I felt this almost physical tug from my psyche that stood me erect and propelled me to the word processor. So much for leaving things to go as they will.
That first day was hard. All day long I found myself checking the clock to see what time it was. I know why I was doing that. In our corporate mechanized society the worth of one's work and the worth of oneself are so intertwined that we cannot feel good about ourselves unless we have laid up treasure for some corporation (and we usually give little thought to the worth of that treasure, much of it being simply paper transferrals and the re-arrangment of illusions). The only way I could "flow" was from discrete task to discrete task, from scheduled behavior to scheduled behavior. Anything looser than that was foreign, and no matter how strongly I cajoled myself to do things differently, I could not overcome that urge to measure the worth of the day (and thus the worth of my self) by how much I had accomplished: had I written enough, read enough, walked or cycled enough?
Like Thoreau's desperate people, I could not get outside the criteria my culture used to sum up accomplishment, and I applied those criteria to activities even when I knew that doing so would kill off the enjoyment for which I was looking. Day one had ended with a strong reminder of just how much a slave I am to the time and place in which I live, a good slave, so to speak, because I don't question enough and follow pretty much without resistance. I had already known this about myself, but it didn't help my enthusiasm to have it thrown so accurately into my face.
That first day reminded me of a digital recording. I've just bought a compact disc player and, as preparation for that, did some reading about the process of digital recording. Apparently a musical wave is sampled some thousands of times a second so that the sound can be mathematically placed (like assigning a value to a dot on an x axis/y axis grid). This means that the music can be reproduced without error time and time again. An analog recording (the usual album) captures the whole wave, but because of the vagaries of vinyl, auditorium, humidity, and whatever, the music can never be exactly reproduced. (Please forgive me if the electronics of this is not exactly straight.) Technically, digital recording is more accurate and durable.
One thing struck me as I read about this. The digital recording, no matter how many samples per second it takes, can never give the listener the full music. It gives a reasonably clear approximation of it, and for most ears that's good enough (after all, how fine tuned can we get?). But for every sample it takes there is a sample it doesn't take, and there is that much music lost. We cannot hear these absences in the recording process, but they're there; our deafness doesn't negate them.
Our cultural upbringing acts in much the same way as a digital recording. We all sense a reality around us that seems pervasively strong and indubitably real. If we bother at all to think of the realities of people different than ourselves, we usually think of them as variations on our own reality, superficially different but organically the same. While in a familiar setting, in a setting unchallenged by outside assumptions, we can get along just fine on these pretensions. But put ourselves outside that setting (and it doesn't have to be far -- two weeks of solitude in a country house will do just fine), we can begin to see the selectiveness of our cultural vision. What our cultural allows us to sample we call real, but we also have to see that "reality" is both what we see and don't see. (Even if we have no word for or understanding of this unseen cultural residue, it still exists.) We are as much defined and limited by what we have lost in the cultural sampling as by what we have gained.
The absences in ourselves, music untasted, define the starting point for our freedom because our freedom to be who we are begins in knowing what we are ignorant of, not what we know. Only in solitude does this ignorance surface, and its surfacing causes a great deal of anxiety. Day two was coming.
Day one was a lesson in seeing, very starkly, how controlled I was by my own conditioning when faced with a playing field of free space and time. I don't mean to judge this conditioning as either good or bad; we all need rules by which to play. I was struck more by how limited and unflexible I felt because of the conditioning. And, to be accurate about this, a bit desperate as well.
Freud, for all his own cultural blind spots, offered us a very interesting way to look at ourselves. We acquire, through our lives, various traumas, psychic scars. These come with life itself, part of the accouterments of being human. Sometimes these traumas can be worked through, but usually they are not. For the most part we all work very diligently at repressing the pain caused by these unfinished portions of our lives. If things stay at a fairly even keel, and the cultural and psychic butlers in our lives don't get too out of line, then we can say we're "normal" and get on with the business of whatever we're supposed to get on with.
Yet, like the unsampled music of the digital recording, these traumas, and their attendant anxiety, are still there even if our daily lives don't play them out. (Freud noted that the way we live our daily lives is one way of working them out, but we won't go into that here.) Our ability to repress deadens their noise. Yet every once in a while all of us are attacked by anxiety, not just a little worry occasioned by not getting all the chores done, but something which seems to flense our hides and make us feel unlimitedly vulnerable. This can happen at any time, bubbling up like magma out of fissures and vents we didn't even know existed. These unresolved psychic passion plays, Freud said, are not to be denied utterance, and that while they may not apparently govern our lives in our day-to-day travels, they do in large part determine our itinerary and speed of travel.
Our ability to repress, for the most part, keeps these things under control. But what about a situation where the repressive mechanism is not well supported, is more on its own than it has the power to be? One need not look far for such a situation -- two weeks alone in a country house will do. Repression works partly by distraction -- if there are enough distractions in our daily lives, then there is less time and energy to spend pawing through our medicine cabinet of traumas, and the repression can guard the gate without too much effort (perhaps even getting an inflated notion about its supposed abilities as a jailer).
But if one puts oneself into a situation where there are no distractions in the usual sense of the word, then a good measure of that unheard but still vibrating music will wend its way into sensibility. What is "normal" briefly breaks down, "normal" meaning all the distractions and busy-ness we asssociate with living our lives well, or at least not wastefully. Two weeks of solitude means a taste, sought after or not, of the rising cream of anxiety.
I hadn't come to this house expecting this to happen to me, actively encouraging the last of the seven veils to drop, but it did. Part of it came from what I mentioned before, the cultural equation that defines self-worth by making a ratio of out things done and time spent. I felt a great deal of anxiety at first because I had no way of measuring if I had done "enough," or, more accurately, the only measure I had was my own satisfaction or lack of it, and I had little trust in that as a valid ruler because I've been taught, as we all have, that internal satisfaction is only useful as a spur to get the job done; the real judgments, the ones that matter, come from somewhere else.
But for some reason I couldn't bring my sense of humor, my sense of proportion, to bear on the problem. Why couldn't I just say to the whole notion of "worth" for these two weeks? After all, I wasn't doing a job for somebody, and I'd told myself before coming out to the house that I was going to use the time to get started on some new projects -- so why worry whether the stuff I was writing was polished enough or not? Something about not being able to use my own satisfaction as a guide touched some of those hidden volcanic springs and caused them to bubble up. And the reverse is probably true as well: something about those subterranean flows made the rule of self satisfaction unusable.
How do I know this? How can I say this? I can only talk about my experience. For almost the entire time I was there I had a churning in my stomach, the kind Tums commercials talk about. It was low level; nothing ever hurt. But it ruined my appetite. I found myself eating simply because that was what I should be doing at a particular time of day. (And, to cap the body's perversity, it would make me hungry: if I didn't eat, I would get dizzy and a headache; if I did eat, I was unsatisfied.) The churning was similar to the butterflies one has before walking out on stage -- some nervousness about performance. I also had upsetting dreams, dreams full of odd twists of violence and plenty of running from what appeared to be enemies in the faces and clothes of my friends. I woke up exhausted, but every time I tried to take a nap in the afternoon, as soon as I closed my eyes the running would commence, and as if it weren't already working overtime, my stomach would twirl on blasts of sleep adrenalin.
It's not relevant to this essay why this was happening to me. The important thing to note is that when our known mirrors are taken away from us, those reflecting surfaces that tell us and remind us who we are (or who we think we are, or who we should be), we are suddenly faced with unknown mirrors in which lost or exiled images of ourselves come back to claim their authority. Actually, this is too passive an image. A better one is the genie's bottle. Our usual self is the stopper on a bottle full of dark and flexing spirits. Once that stopper is pulled (and it doesn't take much to pull it), everything that once was in is now out, abroad and demanding. Or, maybe to put it even more graphically, we are visited by voices whose throats we thought we'd cut a long time ago.
We tend to call these unwanted visitations evil or psychotic (the 20th century synonym), but that is to take too dim a view of them. Assuming that one is not overwhelmed and captured by these spirits, we need to view them as a kind of truth in the process of becoming, those alternative and sometimes pestilential annotations of our usual self we would rather not (but need to) confront. This kind of self-knowledge is not sweetness and light. It is, to use more traditional symbolism, the dark side of ourselves, the closeted mask that only erupts in dreams. Its coming is more dangerous than the plagues visited on Egypt because we must receive it in the small foyer of our brains, must receive it alone, and, as far as anyone can tell, must receive it until we die.
Thomas Hobbes, in his political treatise Leviathan, talks at length about "the state of nature." To Hobbes, two qualities characterized the state of nature: in it, people were entirely free to do as they pleased; in it, people were in a constant of war with one another. People gave up a certain amount of their natural liberty in exchange for security from assault. In somewhat the same way, we make compacts with ourselves. Aside from any genetic programming we have, we are all born existentially free (even though we are physically dependent): that is our state of nature. This freedom, despite its many benefits, is also quite terrifying because it has no bounds, and therefore no way we can share risk: we are thoroughly responsible for ourselves. So we demand limits (though we don't always like them) in order to be able to have bounds and therefore security. We in essence make a compact with the world (our social/cultural world, our own psychological world, the world of nature) that for the price of some of freedom, we will become people who can get along. And then we plunge headlong into learning what we need to learn and repressing what does not fit.
Being alone as I have been is a way of returning to that state of nature, or, another way to say this, is a way of returning to a freedom I long ago had given up, along with all its attendant terror. Our ignorance of ourselves can be frightening, not only in fearing what we don't know but also because it is scandalous for a creature that prides itself on its intelligence. It is not easy labor trying to find strength in being attacked by all the things one has feared or loathed all one's life. No wonder we avoid such a gauntlet; no wonder we build such thick skinned veils called our beliefs, our pride, our obligations.
But if we are interested at all in a self-knowledge that is insightful rather than just descriptive, then we must affirm that our self-knowledge begins not only with what we don't know, but also with what we do know but have chosen to hide. To do this is the first solid step toward re claiming that freedom we long ago gave up.
If, of course, one wants such freedom. Not everyone wants, or needs, a dark night of the soul.
(September 1995)