“Instead of obtaining myself by fleeing, I find myself forsaken, alone, tossed into a dimensionless cubicle, where light and shadow are quiet ghosts. In my interior I find the the silence I seek. But in it I become so lost from any memory of a human being and of myself that I make this impression into the certainty of physical solitude. If I were to scream – already without lucidity I imagine – my voice would receive the same, indifferent echo of the walls of the earth.”

– Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

Sometimes the solitude feels like a life-sentence and all the pacing feels hollow. The walls the chairs the scenery — it all feels so dull and permanent and shallow and not even Brahms can stir some romanticism me. It’s just Don Henley singing Desperado, “Freedom, oh freedom well, that’s just some people talkin’. Your prison is walking through this world all alone… Why don’t you come to your senses? Come down from your fences?”

Fucking bastard. You come to your damn senses Don.

But he’s always talking about the devil and that speaks to me, even at times like this, especially at times like this. Where is he? That little red demon? How much does he want? What’s the asking price? Take my soul, it’s yours, I’ve had enough of it. Take it away. Do what thou wilt with it.

I think of Cincinnatus C in Invitation to a Beheading, sentenced to death but never to know the exact hour, made to wait in a cell indefinitely until the day of his beheading to wait and think and go mad. He writes, “I am here through an error – not in this prison, specifically – but in this whole terrible, striped world; a world which seems not a bad example of amateur craftsmanship, but is in reality a calamity, horror, madness, error – and look, the curio slays the tourist, the gigantic carved bear brings it’s wooden mallet down upon me.”

What a comforting thought, to be in reality only a tourist on this massive spherical rock and thus sentenced to death for not fitting into the grand design. To never have been a real part of it all and thus relinquish all responsibility for the dispassion of it all, the dirt, the sterilization, the perpetual cycles of maintenance — and for what?

I think of Peggy Lee singing, “I know what you must be saying to yourselves, if that’s the way she feels about it why doesn’t she just end it all? Oh, no, not me, I’m not ready for that final disappointment.”

Even as a child I was never haunted by death so much as how sickening it would be when it finally came and I found that in fact it is not climactic at all — just routine like everything becomes sooner or later. Still sometimes it’s only this horrifying thought which keeps me from wandering bridges alone at night or standing too close to the edge of the train platform.

Is this all there is? You see them all, on all the screens, what are they all doing in there? Little busy bees in a little box doing all sorts of things, producing, performing, talking, running, going god knowns where but they’re just there, projections in a little hand-held box, and presumably they’re also out there somewhere on this obscene hurling rock. And you’re here, wherever this is, here where the dimensions have gone flat and even the ghosts are staying quiet today. Of course you’re in the little box too, but it’s too late for that talk tonight.

And then I remember Peggy, “If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing. Let’s break out the booze and have a ball.” And today maybe that means cheating on the moon and crawling into bed already, let the search for meaning clock out early this once. For isn’t Patti Smith always saying, “Tomorrow something wonderful might happen.”