Another Kind of Loneliness
by Frank Soos
It is dark outside. I’m alone in the ski hut, adding layer on layer to my ski clothes. Though some trails at the university are lighted, I will take the longer, darker path through the woods. The last thing I do is strap on my headlight, feeding the battery pack down my back under all my clothes so it will stay warm next to my skin.
This may be crazy, setting out alone when it is already 20 below. But I know these trails so well that when I cannot sleep one of my tricks to overcome insomnia is to ski them in my mind. Each hill, each turn, I travel behind the science buildings, the student apartments and married student housing, across the small lake, then seemingly deeper into the woods on the other side because I am never really that far from a road. It’s there I have sometimes met the great horned owl, heard it first and then spotted it. Once it spit down one of its compacted regurgitated pellets, sending it tumbling into the snow at the base of the big spruce where it roosted. A gift? A judgment?
In America it is almost a criminal offense to be lonely. At the very least it’s unhealthy. Crazy, as I’ve said. Roy Orbison (bleating): “Only the lonely know the way I feel tonight/Only the lonely know this feeling ain’t right….”
I need to be here alone in these woods.
For 30 years I made my living as a teacher, a reluctant public man. Teaching has its many pleasures. It also has its costs for a shy person. Somehow I knew I could teach in the way that equally shy people know they can go on stage and act. The two are not unrelated. Up there in front of a class, I was a performer with a clear role. Up there, I spent a good bit of energy keeping myself inflated. Students have a right to expect you to be pretty much the same person every day. I could do that; it was something I was good at. But to do it, I had to go away from people to get my self back.
I am a most moose-like man, tall, gangly, clumsy and slow, above all an animal given to loneliness. Moose, except for those moments when the urge to mate comes over them, would rather be alone. You might see them in any weather, nosing in the snow browsing for willow shoots, standing in lakes reaching to the bottom for weeds. You will rarely see them, male moose particularly, in the company of other moose. Moose are ruminants.
My wife Margot’s son has recently returned from Africa, from Ethiopia and Namibia. He went to India as a junior in college and has returned many times. I have no interest in these places. Rightly or wrongly, in my mind they stand for crowds of people. Here are places I imagine myself going to: the high desert of the American Southwest, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the open ocean. Having been to the Refuge once, I would go again, stay longer in a place where sometimes a person can go for hours without hearing another human sound, that of a passing airplane.
Having tried once unsuccessfully to take part in a Quaker meeting, I know I am no good at what the Buddhists call sitting. I cannot be still, cannot quiet my mind. Though I tried a time or two, I see now I have no interest in quieting my mind. That people can and do amazes and baffles me.
I am a ruminant, too.
Once on my skis, I step into the set tracks and begin. At first, I am inclined to move too fast, to rush through the glide that makes skiing skiing, not just running on boards. When I come to the first long flat, I double pole and kick double pole, then return to a stride and begin to find a rhythm I can relax into. I seem to myself to be going slower, but actually I am moving faster than the herky-jerky way I began.
Rather than a skier, I was made to be a basketball player. In my fashion I was. I could run the floor, jump high, block shots and rebound, even shoot a little on some nights. Basketball, though, is a social game, as socially complicated as any game I know. Each player is endowed, at least in principle, with all the same powers, to go anywhere on the court, to pass, to shoot from anywhere. Each player must share these powers with his teammates in complex proportions in accordance with his skills. The only hierarchy on a basketball floor is one imposed by the players themselves and their coach. Here is where I got into trouble. With every missed shot, every bad pass, I imagined my teammates passing judgment on me, and deservedly so. Some games, I got so I wouldn’t shoot the ball at all. Who was I to be taking another shot when I had just missed one two feet from the basket?
Every Sunday in season, I ski with a group of guys, the SCUM, Sugai’s Class of Uncoachable Men. Incrementally, Susan Sugai has made us better skiers. Along the way SCUMs have become a social institution as well. The old Birch Hill ski hut has become our defacto clubhouse. Sometimes we come together to clear trails, have a season-ending potluck, go on summer bike rides. These are good people, good friends. We kid around; we sometimes work out pretty hard; nobody blames me for skiing poorly or envies me in the unlikely event I ski well. But the SCUM probably stretch me to the limit of my sociability. In the jostling give and take, I find myself yearning to hit the trail, to ski away to quietude.
In that quiet, what do I do? What do I think about out there, my headlight bobbing along in the dark? What should I do beyond putting one ski ahead of another? Sometimes, I am ashamed to say, I review perceived slights and recriminations, fresh quarrels: things somebody said or did that seemed hurtful to me somehow. I grind away at such an event over and over, review every detail of what was said and what I might have said or done in return. I grind it to dust, wear it out. I just can’t mess with it anymore. Somehow the hurt is made to go away. Is this what the psychologists mean by “working through” a problem?
If I truly am like a moose, it seems like I should have a tougher hide.
Maybe instead I should seek better to know myself. Samuel Beckett believed we could never come to know ourselves fully no matter how hard we tried. I think I believe that as well, but I think, perhaps like Beckett himself, a person still has to keep seeking to know. But where? And how?
I could do like Montaigne and ceaselessly fork over every thought that goes through my head. Montaigne compared his own restless mind to a field left fallow and allowed to go to weeds or to “masses and shapeless lumps of flesh.” In other words, a mess-making machine.
What’s up there in my head is like a big balloon. Skiing along, I fill the balloon with words, images, things seen, things heard, things imagined. Many of these thoughts must be so private they can be shared with nobody else. Not because they are banal, sexual, or self-aggrandizing and therefore embarrassing, morally questionable, possibly crazy if exposed to the light of day, but because they are just so many shapeless lumps. Taken altogether, they make a landscape that exists in my head and my head only. In this way they are like the paintings of Yves Tanguy. What are some of those strange tuberous things? Those figures that could belong on cave walls, in kindergarten drawings, in art-as-therapy? Those shapes that look like jigsaw puzzle pieces, parsnips, amoebas, architecture from another planet? It would be wrong to call them misshapen because they rarely attempt to represent anything we know. Their titles, “Extinction of Useless Light,” “The Mood of Now,” say, are jokes against any viewers who might try too hard to make meaning when the paintings are meaning in themselves.
When I stand in the yard while the representative from Bigfoot Pumping and Thawing drains the septic, I want a full report on the state of my plumbing. Nothing serious, the guy assures me as he works his hose around, just a few solids. That’s it, solids. I’m looking for solids. I think this matters. I’m looking for solids, lumpen shapes that will become somehow meaningful. I persist in the belief that the mind is capable again and again of taking itself by surprise, thinking new, fresh thoughts, at least new and fresh to me—and possible to others. Who can know?
When I was an undergraduate, I spent the better part of a summer reading Beckett’s great trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable in a Grove Black Cat edition with eye-burningly small print. Determined to soldier through, I only realized later, rereading in bits and pieces, that in many places these books were funny—funny in a special sort of way. Molloy shifts his sucking stones from certain pockets in his greatcoat to his mouth, back to certain pockets. Not exactly a Sisyphean labor, but in the ball park if you look at it in the right way, a kind of struggle with the question of how to be alone with yourself, with the question of how to fill your life in the face of the howling void.
One of my professors from graduate school days had a serious drinking problem. When he turned up for writers’ workshop drunk, he’d wail to us: “We all die alone.” One of the women in the class whose problem was pills, would wail back, “Why, John, why?” I don’t know why, either, but I do think we do die as we pretty much live, alone.
When I am in a running race or ski marathon, a century bike ride, despite being in the presence of others, I am essentially alone. Once here in Fairbanks, I found both my hamstring muscles cramping in the last 10 kilometers of the Sonot Kkaazoot, a 50-kilometer ski event. I could see my fellow SCUM Dave Bloom suffering in much the same way. But seeing his pain did nothing to alleviate mine, did nothing to make my own struggle to the finish any easier. I have never asked Dave whether my presence did anything to help him along. To do so would be out of character.
What do people think when they see a moose browsing along a road or trail on a cold day deep in winter? Do they think, say, that this animal is unhappy out there? That it is lonely? There is no getting around the fact the moose is alone, but it’s we people who think too often of being alone as a desolate state, that being alone is in itself an unhappy way to be, “So lonesome I could die,” as Hank Williams put it.
Recently, the famous socio-biologist E.O. Wilson was on the radio extolling the virtues of ants. Ants may be the most socially connected of all animal species, and, E.O. Wilson would say, one of the most successful. Why, he wondered, were there not more species behaving like ants?
I have had varieties of moose encounters on the trails. Like me, their habits are irregular; they prowl the trails by day and night. Once on the baseline trail, I passed a cow lounging in the snow; she hardly gave me a glance. Once I encountered one on the Beaver Slide; she turned toward me, laid her ears back, put her hackles up, and lowered her head making it clear I could not pass. I turned and went back the way I came. Moose don’t much like my headlight; it sometimes makes them bolt. Most of the time, though, moose go their way and I go mine, each of us alone with our thoughts.
If we are not knowable even to ourselves, my errands into the wilderness wherein I seek to know must only alienate me more from the rest of the group. Why, I wonder, can’t I be like an ant instead of a moose?
In our town, there is a man who lately can be seen trudging up and down Farmers’ Loop Road or University Avenue with four shopping carts. In each he has built a tall cardboard tower. Who can know what he has inside them? But one-by-one, or sometimes two-by-two, he pushes his carts along. I may see him sitting beside the four all neatly aligned; I may see him pushing one to meet the others as if he is continually making and remaking a train. Not so different from Malloy’s sucking stones in his greatcoat pockets.
In much the same way, each Beckett narrator from Malloy to Malone, to the Unnameable himself in his urn set on a bar is not always alone but is always alone. Each man is charged with the same chore we all have been given, to make a meaningful world out of what? Of the contents of our own heads?
Those are the lumps, misshapen only if we attempt to assign them given shapes. Stray thought is shapeless. If we invent names for what they are, haven’t we achieved a kind of freedom?
Some may believe in the talking cure, but I believe in the walking cure, or more specifically the skiing cure. Peace is best found through movement. Kick and glide, my pole snapping out of my hand and back again, the steady rhythm that scarcely alters at all except on the steepest hills. It is while striding that I find myself clipping off the kilometers, traveling stretches of trail with no later recollection of having passed over them at all. Surely I did; otherwise, how could I be here now?
In better times, I think bigger happier thoughts, thoughts that may carry me far away from myself and these ski trails. Some of these thoughts slip out, but they slip out the way air can be carefully released from a filled balloon. The rest evaporate, sublimate, dissolve. They are gone. Even those I’ve selected to save, trivial and profound, will be gone by the time I put my skis in my ski bag, climb in my truck and go home. And the rest, those I might commit to paper or a computer disk? When I am gone will they go with me? Just as lost?
I do think it is possible to use exercise to wrestle the mind to exhaustion from time to time. It is possible to stay out skiing long enough, to find myself far from the ski hut or my truck that I have to concentrate on every stride to get myself back, to concentrate on the downhills especially, since nothing is worse than falling at this point. Every bit of energy I have left will simply drain into the ground. When I do fall, I lie there on the snow thinking of nothing except how to untangle my skis and poles, shift myself around and get up. In this strange way, I have achieved a kind of tranquility, the mind finally at rest, empty.
There is some of this fear of losing everything meaningful in Beckett’s narrators, maybe in Beckett himself. Words are frail, words are nothing. But if anything can, words will save us from nothingness.
Montaigne’s essay “Of Idleness” ends with a little joke against his readers, and on reflection, himself: He says of his “chimeras and fantastic monsters, …in order to contemplate their ineptitude and strangeness at my pleasure, I have begun to put them in writing, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself.”
That’s the trick, the joke both Beckett and Montaigne are in on. Thoughts find some sort of order once they are consigned to words on a page. No matter how baggy and rambly Montaigne’s thoughts may seem to be, no matter how desolate Beckett’s narrators’ stories may be, they represent the mediated word. As Montaigne would have it, if not a cultivated field, at least a carefully weeded one. No matter how disparate my own words seem when committed to the page, they have more order than my rambling night-ski thoughts. We’ve all picked; we’ve all chosen. While I can’t speak for Beckett or Montaigne, for me it may be a small victory, but it’s all I’ve got.
Frank Soos is author of two collections of short fiction, Early Yet and Unified Field Theory, the second of which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. In addition, he is the author of a book of essays, Bamboo Fly Rod Suite, featuring two essays that appeared initially in Sport Literate. His most recently completed manuscript, The Team We Got, is a meditation on basketball as played in the Southwest Virginia coal fields in the 1960s built around his hometown team, the Pocahontas Indians, featuring the writer as admiring fan and mediocre player.