If William Wordsworth hadn’t wandered lonely as a cloud he might never have come across his daffodils. The poet had clearly worked out what it takes some of us years to realise, if we ever do: that loneliness is a precondition for creativity. He understood the bliss of solitude.
This idea is developed in The Lonely City, a new book by Olivia Laing, who will be discussing it, with her fellow author Amy Liptrot, at Smock Alley Theatre, in Dublin, on May 26th as part of International Literature Festival Dublin. Laing's book is part a memoir of a period she spent alone in New York and part an examination of how artists depict, are beset by, and occasionally thrive on solitude and its close cousins loneliness and alienation.
It’s an intense read, as she explores her own experiences being alone in a populous city and through them finds herself wanting, in both senses of the word. “I wanted very much not to be where I was. In fact, part of the trouble seemed to be that where I was wasn’t anywhere at all. My life felt empty and unreal and I was embarrassed about its thinness.”
The flip side of this is expressed by Virginia Woolf in her diary of 1929, as she writes about her inner loneliness, her sense of being alone even among others: “If I could catch the feeling, I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world.”
For Laing loneliness is a more tortured thing, and she explores how a range of artists, including Alfred Hitchcock, Nan Goldin, Billie Holiday, Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger and David Wojnarowicz, have made work through, about and because of it.
But if loneliness is so creatively potent, why do most of us fear it, run from it and find it deeply painful and troubling? Why do we spend time and money filling the space for introspection, and the creative thought that it opens up, with distraction, social-media chat and time spent with people we may not care for? Why do we seek encounters that, as Wojnarowicz, a writer, artist and Aids activist, wrote in his collection of essays, Close to the Knives, offer the empty promises of freeing us "from the silences of the interior life"?
One reason, which Laing explores in her chapter on Warhol, is that society has been structured to maintain rules, systems and hierarchies. Even though organised as a collective, society is not necessarily benign. Reading Laing’s description of Warhol’s circle at the Factory, seeing “society as centrifugal force, separating the elements, policing division”, I’m reminded of the subtle and overt cruelties of groups as they bind over the boundaries of who’s in and who’s out. This touches a primal nerve, which Laing picks up on when she describes the sense of being ultravisible, and the hypervigilance of the lonely.
Psychologies of creative people explore how artists are frequently outsiders, seeing themselves as being at odds with the mainstream. The discomforts of that position are obvious, but they’re made more potent by the insight of the psychologist Edward Tick that “in our form of culture, one’s contribution to the marketplace determines one’s worth to the community . . . The creative person, whose work cannot be measured by marketability, is likely to feel worthless, detached.”
His response is to “affirm the necessity of solitude”, but how can that be achieved in a society where it is hard to find a set of arguments that can be understood, where everything is predicated on, and balanced by, sets of economic measures?
Towards the end of her book Laing looks at the seductions of social media: “It’s easy to see how the network might appeal to someone in the throes of chronic loneliness, with its pledge of connection, its beautiful, slippery promises of anonymity and control.” And she dwells on ideas of observation, privacy and the impoverishment of our interior lives through the experiments of the internet pioneer Josh Harris. His two great experiments in New York in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Quiet and weliveinpublic.com, looked at what happens to people and their relationships when their every move is observed. In the latter it was Harris and his girlfriend living under 24-hour online scrutiny. It didn’t end well.
Internet and smartphone promises of constant connection are a fake salve to loneliness. “There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too,” Laing rather brilliantly writes. “With a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings – depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage – are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed.”
Through her own experiences and the work of the artists and writers she explores, the book is a call to make friends with ourselves and to see loneliness as a consequence of both structural injustices and the more existential conditions of living in this world. Whether we live in the city or the countryside, make art or simply enjoy the works of others, it’s worth thinking about.
