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.