Olivia Laing
The Lonely City was a book that had been on my list for a while now, thanks to quotes from it reaching me from various sources. I now realise why a lot of people hold it in high regard. It’s not just the deep and poignant insights about loneliness, and its connection to art, but also how this relates to our humanity.
Olivia Laing uses the loneliness she developed when she moved to New York in her mid-thirties to explore the city and the feeling through art. In eight chapters, she fixes her gaze on the life and work of artists, some well-known and some unknown (to me) who have used their art in different ways to cope with their feeling of loneliness.
The connection between all of them is the liminality in which they operated – the edges of society’s discourse. I found two of them especially poignant. Henry Darger, born in the slums of Chicago in 1892, and who at the age of eight was sent first to a Catholic boys’ home and then to the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, and later spent almost six decades rolling bandages and sweeping floors in the city’s Catholic hospitals. It was only posthumously that he was recognised and attained fame. A lonely person who lived on the sidelines of society but whose art radiated unique perspectives.
The other is Valerie Solanas, who appears in the narrative of Andy Warhol (she attempted to murder him in 1968). Except for a few years, her life never really looked up. Hers was a vicious cycle of loneliness, her own mistrust and withdrawal fed by the society which shunned her. Her life just kept spiralling downwards until her death, alone in a welfare hotel, with her body being discovered after three days.
But towards the end of The Lonely City, Laing also shows how art is not only a medium of expression, but also a way in which the individual is trying to connect with those around him/her. An excellent read if only for the many perspectives of loneliness.
As she writes in her dedication, “If you’re lonely, this one’s for you”
Some of my favourite sections in The Lonely City:
Talking so much you horrify yourself and those around talking so little that you almost refuse your own existence: demonstrates that speech is by no means a straightforward route to connection. If loneliness is to be defined as a desire for intimacy, then included within that is the need to express oneself and to be heard, to share thoughts, experiences and feelings. Intimacy can’t exist if the participants aren’t willing to make themselves known, to be revealed. But gauging the levels is tricky. Either you don’t communicate enough and remain concealed from other people, or you risk rejection by exposing too much altogether: the minor and major hurts, the tedious obsessions, the abscesses and cataracts of need and shame and longing. My own decision had been to clam up, though sometimes I longed to grab someone’s arm and blurt the whole thing out, to pull an Ondine, to open everything for inspection.
What is it about masks and loneliness? The obvious answer is that they offer relief from exposure, from the burden of being seen what is described in the German as Maskenfreiheit, the freedom conveyed by masks. To refuse scrutiny is to dodge the possibility of rejection, though also the possibility of acceptance, the balm of love.
People who hoard are often socially withdrawn. Sometimes the hoarding causes isolation, and sometimes it is a palliative to loneliness, a way of comforting oneself. Not everyone is susceptible to the companionship of objects; to the desire to keep and sort them; to employ them as barricades or to play back and forth between expulsion and retention. On an autism website, I’d come across a discussion on the subject, in which someone had encapsulated the desire beautifully, writing: ‘Yes, very much a problem for me and while I’m not sure if I personify objects I do tend to develop some weird sort of loyalty to them and it’s difficult to dispose of them.
Sometimes, all you need is permission to feel. Sometimes, what causes the most pain is actually the attempt to resist feeling, or the shame that grows up like thorns around it.
Like Harris, Warhol could see that technology was going to make it possible for more and more people to achieve fame; intimacy’s surrogate, its addictive supplanter.
The relief of virtual space, of being plugged in, of having control. Everywhere I went in New York, on the subway, in cafés, walking down the street, people were locked into their own network. The miracle of laptops and smartphones is that they divorce contact from the physical, allowing people to remain sealed into a private bubble while they are nominally in public and to interact with others while they are nominally alone. Only the homeless and the dispossessed seemed exempt, though that’s not counting the street kids who spent every day hanging out in the Apple store on Broadway, keeping up on Facebook even – especially, maybe – if they didn’t have anywhere to sleep that night. Everyone knows this. Everyone knows what it looks like. I can’t count how many pieces I’ve read about how alienated we’ve become, tethered to our devices, leery of real contact; how we are heading for a crisis of intimacy, as our ability to socialise withers and atrophies. But this is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. We haven’t just become alienated because we’ve subcontracted so many elements of our social and emotional lives to machines. It’s no doubt a self-perpetuating cycle, but part of the impetus for inventing as well as buying these things is that contact is difficult, frightening, sometimes intolerably dangerous. Despite an advert then prevalent on the subway that declared ‘Your favourite part of having a smartphone is never having to call anyone again’, the source of the gadget’s pernicious appeal is not that it will absolve its owner of the need for people but that it will provide connection to them connection, furthermore, of a risk-free kind, in which the communicator need never be rejected, misunderstood or overwhelmed, asked to supply more attention, closeness or time than they are willing to offer up.
That’s the dream of replication: infinite attention, infinite regard. The machinery of the internet has made it a democratic possibility, as television never could, since the audience in their living rooms necessarily far outnumbered the people who could be squeezed into the box. Not so with the internet, where anyone with access to a computer can participate, can become a minor deity of Tumblr or YouTube, commanding thousands with their make-up advice or ability to decorate a dining table, to bake the perfect cupcake. A prepubescent in a sweater with a knack for throwing shade can grip 1,379,750 subscribers, declaring it’s hard to explain myself so those are what my videos are for!! And then you run the hashtag lonely through Twitter, can’t vibe with anybody lately #lonely, seven favourites; I love seeing people that I asked to do things with not reply to me and then do things without me. #lonely, one favourite; I’m having one of those nights. Too much thinking time #lonely I sound like a fucking sook with lots of cats. I wish I had a cat, no favourites.
