Sanctuary

 

Take the cotton
of the mind's doom-ridden chatter
out of your ears.
- Rumi

I miss friendship more than I miss sex. Rather, since I do not miss any particular actually existing friend, it is friendship in a more abstract or nebulous sense that I crave. There are people out there who lose the love of their life and do not subsequently love ever again. That isn’t my story. I stumbled through relationships like there was nothing at stake and my partners noticed. In the words of poet Marianne Moore: “the cure for loneliness is solitude.” In solitude we have the rich luck to commune with the heaving totalities. It’s the only actual way to do art. You need at the very least, like Virginia Woolf, a room of your own. “The measure in which your solitude is hard is the measure of the reward it offers,” writes Fenton Johnson in At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life. What did I do to receive this brute but noble gift? I became the person I was all along becoming. I could not have forced it, because I did not have any idea what I was doing. Did you? No supplementation is required and it is too stupid for words to outsource one's sense of worth to other people. Many days my recovery from addiction is almost entirely about dropping out of pulsed time so I can slow down and remember how to breathe like a creature. In a time that hovers I can attain my tenuous balance. In William T. Vollmann’s heartbreaking and intermittently brutal masterpiece Lucky Star, the transwoman Judy, who has modelled herself after troubled superstar Judy Garland, but who does not pass and regularly feels like a freak, sees stardom and adulation as the only drugs that could possibly save a person like her. Romantic love has to be one kind of torment or another, and Judy has no shortage of proof. Humiliation is the cost of doing human exchange in any form heretofore known. “Just as the Wicked Witch of the West was the true friend who slipped Judy Garland her amphetamines on the set of The Wizard of Oz,” writes Vollmann, “it might fall out when Francine declined to play savior that Snake Goddess Shantelle supplied the other Judy with just the right happiness pills, thereby profiting not only in cash, but also in entertainment, because when the transwoman got high enough, whatever humiliations her loving public inflicted quickly slopped out of her consciousness, so that the fun could continue all night, in the spirit of children torturing a small animal for hours, careful not to let their victim escape into premature insensibility. To tell you the truth, this was more fun than Judy’s so-called act.” You court disaster when you face your public saturated in need and want, drugged so that you can handle the burn and the blowback. Neither Judy nor I ever figured out how to turn this infernal machine off so long as our public keeps looking at us with those prepossessing faces.