Secretive bands, reclusive writers and sculptors and artists. Cults and cult like activity. Cults that are not just religious cults but that revolve around something that is totally unusual, like a set of sculptures or a pop star or a stock symbol. Anything like this. The public delusion. The masses pulled aside and into their heads. Hyperstition. Mass hysteria. Our capability to lie to ourselves, to create a great lie, so many great lies layered on on top of another. How we see other great lies and find them to be so ridiculous, rail against them, rage against them but then settle back happily into our own lies again and again. How this is not some aberration, but just the human condition. How this is not some fault, but just the way things are, just the base state of human society. How these lies have always existed, more or less, how their strength and influence and variety grow proportional to the size of a society and how we can easily look back and see them, and study them and critique them but are still ignorant (not even willfully, more like inherently) of our own. How the recluse can be a sort of delusion of one, or how solitude and isolation are perhaps the only way to fight against this, that only in solitude and isolation can be found the remedy, the antidote, the serum, the truth, the evasion of these delusions, of these lies and myths and insanities.
Art, as it almost always must be—at some point or another—generated in solitude (the lone painter, writer, sculptor, director) is perhaps the only other escape from this. In another’s solitude, conveyed through sufficiently well made art, can we get a glimpse into this mind state. Of course not all art does this, in fact much of it falls into the old patterns, the old mass delusions. But that art that is created totally in solitude? Agnes Martin, Thoreau (even though his solitude was more fiction than fact, more veneer then vessel). Two examples, one good, one bad, but the heart is still there. Wordsworth and Stevens on their endless walks. Perhaps a window or the passing road, another voice far off, but so, so far off. The brief image of another body, but just a head or tuft of hair and then nothing. The wind, the rain maybe. Then the sun and the sun forever. The night sky. Ansel Adams and the endless west. A single body lodged in a place with no anchors. And then whatever you want to call it, so close and so near. The Carthusians, all of them. So many with words in their hearts which they know will be spoiled in the telling. The endless rage of the hermit, a rage born out of love and confusion. The door so close, and the door open! Trying to push back the noise, trying to outrun the noise. They sink and seep. We rub against each other like stones, but some stones hard and others soft. It is endlessly fascinating because it is endlessly exhaustible. This is because the hermit loses themselves in their solitude. The don’t focus on themselves, they focus on everything else. They lose focus. Being around others we find or form the boundaries on ourselves. We have these boundaries put into place. This in not an inherently bad thing, it is conducive to some things but not others. Beckett alone in his mother’s room. He had to be alone. If she were there he’d have had no epiphany. The epiphany can only come in solitude, the epiphany can only be found in perfect and absolute emptiness and emptiness. A single person in a room lit only by the low light of the rising sun filtered through a thick layer of clouds. It seems so dark but so much light can be let in there. Even the smallest sounds take on the weight of a great creature. Even the smallest changes hold a monumental gravity.
Institutions are inherently antagonistic to this sort of thinking, to this sort of work. It might now seem so, but it is the case. We are drawn to these institutions out of fear, out of confusion, out of a thrashing and grasping. Like a drowning person. But the drowning is the thing. The drowning is the challenge. One must fully drown first. One must drown eternally in the solitude to enact something worthwhile, something great.
There are no sayings that can do this justice. No words or wisdom needed to support this. At every moment the true artist must feel the pain of the drowning and say: ‘This is what I came here for’. They must say, ‘I am doing my job, I have done my job. I have drowned in solitude and let the waters filled my lungs and died to the world.’ One must be totally inundated, but revel in the pain of solitude and the silence of the waters around them. It is the only way.
To grab at a life raft is to abscond (and this can only happen for a short while) from their true duty. It is to give up the work for a short while, to paddle at the surface, to waste energy struggling, kicking before the waters take over again. Perpetually drowning in the waters of solitude.
