Tats à Rotterdam

I am a bit curious what do you mean when you talk about relation to world and expectable reaction of nature.

I think we create worlds alltime, both when we are alone or with others. I remember when I was little I used to draw and change the stories I was reading in my favorite magazines and I could be alone for hours and feel nice and immersed.

Solitude is surely different from loneliness, and maybe is a state that gives strength and helps to discover one's uniqueness and triviality in the same time. But is something that someone chooses to be, because if isolation comes from the suroundings is very heavy, and then people turn to alternatives, which is not always creative.

Funny enough, yesterday we had a nice discussion with Ivan about some close family that faces isolation or feeling empty. Ivan mentioned the film of Wong Kar Wai "happy together", about a chinese gay couple beeing excluded by the society of Buenos Aires, and how their relation is built up.

Today I remember the book "sexing the cherry" by Jeanette Winterson about a gigantic woman, her fifty dogs and the boy she found on the river and raised. She was isolated and couldn't find a lover cause of her size, but she was a very powerfull character, even when the boy left her to go travelling.

extract:"what I loved was not going on at home. I was giving myself the slip and walking through this world like a shadow...Occasionally, in company, someone would snap their fingers in front of my face and ask, 'Where are you?' For a long time I had no idea, but gradually I began to find evidence of the other life and gradually it appeared before me." this is more or less in the begining of the story.

Waliking back home yesterday I was thinking how the choice of not having a long-term relation or children through life could be sad or whether is a perspective coming from the outside world.

The Wikipedia definition of loneliness makes it distinct from the concept of solitude, thus describing loneliness as "unwilling solitude".

I think this does not change my project whatsoever, although it adds to it the concept of solitude. In that case, loneliness would correspond to the state where the object seeks company while being alone.

Also read this psychology article.

Here are a few links that I read about the topics. With accompanying notes:

Loneliness (wikipedia)

Extract: "Loneliness is an emotional state in which a person experiences a powerful feeling of emptiness and isolation. Loneliness is more than just the feeling of wanting company or wanting to do something with another person. Loneliness is a feeling of being cut off, disconnected and alienated from other people."

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - The Downward Spiral of Loneliness

Search for "loneliness" in Google points to several essays on the topic of loneliness in Shelley's Frankenstein. All of the three main characters (Walton, Frankenstein, and the creature) suffer loneliness from being abandoned by their peers. Mary Shelley also suffered from this because of her personal history (she was kind of a social outcast, all her friends and family abandoned her).

Extract: "There is, however, one particular catalyst to the Creature's emotional deterioration: its rejection by the DeLacey family. When the Creature describe its need for companionship, Shelley's own desire for a loving and attentive family is written between the lines: "The more I saw of them, the greater became my desire to claim their protection and kindness; my heart yearns to be known and loved by these amiable creatures: to see their sweet looks directed towards me with affection, was the utmost limit of my ambition""

Of Mice and Men - The theme of loneliness

This essay is about the famous Steinbeck's book Of mice and men and argues that its main theme is loneliness. Lonely characters in Steinbeck's novel are numerous.

Crooks is the only black man in the ranch and suffers from discrimination: he lives apart from the rest. He has no friends.

Candy is an old man and he has an old dog that everyone despises just because it is old.

Curly's wife is the only female on the ranch. She is lonely and flirts with the workers for attention. "The workers think she is a "tart" but she is an insecure, lonely woman and this is shown when she tells Lennie "I never get to talk to anyone, or else, Curly gets mad"."

...

(Extract): "Steinbeck uses George and Lennie as a contrast because they are the only people to have anyone to talk to. To demonstrate this, Lenny exclaimed "But not us because.........because I got you to look after me and you have got me to look after you and that's why"."

Since I'm in Rotterdam, I've started playing a rather interesting game. When I arrived, I was alone and, say, I liked it in a way. There is a huge mirror in my room and one evening I decided to have dinner in front of the mirror. And (yes, you can laugh...) I began to speak with myself, to ask questions and to answer. And it was marvelous! All of a sudden, not only wasn't I alone anymore: I was speaking with, indeed, a very interesting and surprising person!

When I was young, I remember that I was also very much enjoying loneliness. I was playing board games with myself, mimicking a virtual opponent (that, in the end, always ended up making quite poor decisions and always lost). There was a sense of safety I guess in that.

Think about other activities that you do alone, like programming a computer, listening to your iPod, masturbating, or writing a blog. I feel like they all end up with building some kind of relation with someone else, nature, or just yourself.

But then what about your relation to the world? Is it not "enough"? Does the hermit feels lonely? Or does he find, in the rather expectable reaction of nature, the completeness he seeks? And by the way, aren't humans also very much expectable, especially those you know well?

In the discussion exercise we had (see this entry) I tried to come up with a functional definition of loneliness and company which basically equated to:

company = reaction

Actually, I think the definition "company = reaction" is failed in a way. The idea was first given by my conversation with Maria, who pointed out that you could be alone even if there was proximity (like, feeling alone in a crowd).

But reaction doesn't seem to be sufficient either. Suppose that the thing is put in an automatically reacting environment (say, just beside a microphone and a speaker, that thus basically repeats any sound that the object emits). Then, the object might be fooled.

I guess the real point of company is about feeling another consciousness nearby and having a truthful exchange with it/her/him. Feeling a relation. Which leads me to propose another definition:

company = relation