Care for some Loneliness?

Care is bound up with Loneliness. Care is what establishes what matters to us, what we know, are attracted to, and to some extent, have developed an affinity for or knowledge about over the course of extended years or some period of experience.

Care and Community are intertwined so much so that a feeling of community comes from a collective or shared sensibility about and regarding care: that is, what matters and what does not, what finds its way onto the agenda as something worth discussion and what does not. These matters are so often reflective of social positions.

While the collective experience of many residing within the Valley involves a concern for (care) about water and its lack, this fact also stems from what is talked about and how it is talked about, about the discourse [ways of speaking about something] enveloping and regulating it. This also explains, in part, why some (but not all) tragedies are far from outcomes of ill-intentioned action but the product of what the community does not want to acknowledge or fails to based on what matters to it and what it has educated its people to emphasize, notice and labor and think on.

Care and Community are also intertwined insofar as a community might only come to feel a sense of shared identity in and through express, actions and demonstrations that might elicit a feeling of care. A shared struggle might suffice, whether intense, local and brief or extended, sustained and generalized. These terms are imprecise, but the general sense is that a People is not a given but an intentionally constructed, felt and operative, in-process term. And likewise, given time and apathy on the part of some (or many), such communities may dissolve, whether out of their own felt purposelessness or a feeling their efforts and attention are required or warranted elsewhere. In this way, the Care of and for a Community is bound up with what it does, what it does not and with the contradictions, fallacies and depredations it might very well (and does) produce, and the only way to access this sense is in and through the phenomenology itself: of considering the felt nature of these identities and inclinations (not to mention, how to talk about, discuss and attempt to understand them in words and actions).

Loneliness, to some extent, is the result of a community’s inability to care for some or many of its participants. Some basic, functional practice precludes it from bearing a moral sense of obligation or responsibility to that participant, or, in another way, that participant might merely “fall through the cracks” so to speak, not ignored but neglected. Importantly, neglect should not carry the negative, charged feeling and meaning that it does, for ill-intentioned, maligned neglect is not neglect but avoidance or evasion, terms which refer to a different category of neglect that involves a calculation on the part of the moral actor regarding what is important to them.

A Statement of Intent (To Blog)

Loneliness is a peculiar but predictable (and often times familiar) feeling that tells us much about our placement in the world, what we do routinely and what we might very well expect from the near future. It is something we run from and run to, but that is always there with us, in some way.

There is a saying: “better to be alone than in bad company,” a phrase coined and utilized and then passed down mother to daughter like a family jewel or some tawdry mantelpiece (or even a 1965 Dodge Mustang Charger…if such a thing exists).

It’s risky to make broad, sweeping claims regarding this experience, even if doing so might yield something very insightful. Unlike what a recent local poet claimed, I assert (Kant would corroborate this) that we share many of our basic faculties for coming to and appreciating the world, the irony being that, when one says something and another raises their head in assent, that that they may still hold this conviction, for the form belies the content. Even then, minor disagreements often give way once further discussion is pursued, although spatial and temporal ‘distance’ and more discrete, particular differences in individual experience are nevertheless worth consideration.

This blog intends to discern some of the darker, more frustrating and endemic aspects of loneliness, but I will not approach it with any kind of scientistic lens. Descriptions of loneliness that involve chemical imbalance or some kind of physical internal interaction on the part of actor or the acted may well be useful. But use is determined by the end, no? For the rest of us who feel and live and wonder about the implications of these feelings, dopamine and serotonin are not friendly tools for self-interpretation. The scientific perspective, importantly also does not make good on its promise of giving us a final explanation (but merely extends and misleadingly delays others) and so I will not feature it here for that reason as well. I do not discount these perspectives outright or completely, but they are not my concern, and frankly, I feel them unnecessary for a better interpretation of our own selves, the kind that might make it easier to live us and our bodies on a daily basis.

Moreover this blog fixates on a particular experience of loneliness, rooted in a time and place. Theory requires place and time (whether or not it is stated). I speak specifically of a loneliness produced by a town that is not yet a city (and may likely never be). It is a place which holds a profoundly delusive and schizophrenic misinterpretation of itself and an unwillingness to admit to its own existential equivocation and uncertainty. Here, I speak of Modesto, California.

Meanwhile, in many places, it fails to purport to be anything resembling a community, more  a loosely-conglomerated series of residential areas and city-sanctioned mass-marketed commercial-institutional encroachments. This place is not without hope, but it might very well lose all direction if it doesn’t begin to reflect on itself and what it is not doing and what it could be doing better. Confronting such failure is not easy, but it is only in confrontation that overcoming is possible.