Bioloneliness
Why human company will never be enough
There is a fir tree standing sentry over my parents’ house, northeast of Toronto. It’s huge, several times the height of our two-storey house, its canopy so wide you can duck under it and stand as under an accidental pagoda. We’ve named it Randall, as in: let me say hello to Randall. One sec, I just want to see how Randall’s doing. Ah, Randall! I miss him.
Randall uses he/him pronouns and is the older brother of a smaller evergreen shrub in our front yard, Renee. Renee is squat and shapely, and during the holidays we wrap her in a gentle vortex of lights. Renee likes that: to be lit up like that, to have her curves accentuated by Christmas decorations and a fluffy layer of snow. To the naked human eye, it looks like Randall and Renee don’t touch, but underground I’m certain their roots are communicating, passing messages back and forth like synapses in a brain.
To some extent, naming the trees in our front yard — and my houseplants, and my succulents, and certain landmark vegetal beings on public land — is an extension of my penchant for naming things in general: cars, Roombas, statues, knives. But to another extent, the naming of living beings is different, because one is always aware of foisting a narrative onto something with its own sense of life, even agency. Once, I named a stray cat Juliet — a grey tabby, she wandered into our backyard one day, and then our laps, our chairs, our home — but only later found out, after my brother found a Lost Cat posting, that her name was Storm. We argued dispassionately about that for some time, my brother and I — her name is Juliet! No, it’s definitely Storm! — but in the meantime there she was, probably nameless in her own mind, or at least named in the language of a smell or a mewl, licking a paw and waiting to be picked up.
To a culture obsessed with talk, obsessed with language and disclosure as the basis of intimacy — what therapist Esther Perel calls the “feminization of intimacy” or “talk intimacy” — naming can feel like a natural way to express closeness.1 We give our lovers pet names and shiver when we they call us by our full, government names. We try to get close by telling each other secrets, or by being linguistically precise about what it is that we want from one another.2 But as the lexical mind busies itself with talk and its attendant fantasies, the body forms its own conclusions through the careful dance of touch, proximity, risk — and the passing back and forth of feelings through pheromones, tension, heat and shape.
It is important to me to have a linguistic marker for the closeness I share with Randall, and that marker happens to be a name — a name so human, it usually strikes me as funny. Thus, I can say, “I’m going to go see Randall!” when really, what I need is an exit from conversation altogether. To “see Randall” is not to tell him about my day, or to ask him about his — I know Randall experiences time in a very different way than I do — but to work my fingers into the groove of his trunk, waiting for my presence to be registered, and to feel presence pulsing back like a warm flood of life: generous, omnidirectional, and assuring.
I have been thinking a lot about loneliness lately, not because it’s a particularly rich line of inquiry, but because thinking is one way I like to manage the enormity of my own experience. So much has been said about loneliness in its very contemporary forms: its historical preconditions, the erosion of institutions of shared meaning; the particular indignities of it as refracted through Internet culture; its very Americanness, even. Still, it strikes me nonetheless that we continue to speak about loneliness as though the experience of it is a given, some homogenous emotional low that comes from the absence of human connection. We write, and think, about loneliness as though it is a special speciation of sadness — and I don’t think that’s quite right.
For what it’s worth, and it may indeed be worth nothing, my loneliness has turned out to be rather odd.
For starters, I’ve found that loneliness is not exactly the absence of closeness. One can feel lonely — exceedingly lonely, in fact — while speaking with a very close friend on the phone, even a romantic partner. On the other hand, loneliness can sometimes be cured for an entire afternoon by walking to the local thrift store and making small talk with the woman behind the counter. Has the hat sold yet, Elizabeth? How was your trip to Paris? The point of such a conversation is not to pass the time, or to be merely pleasant; it is to strum the web of mutual need that binds us to one another. The curator needs her audience, after all, and vice versa; two can thus make a little solar system of meaning, each dimly aware that without the other, the entire project could not exist.
Loneliness, then, may not be a lack of intimacy: it may in fact be a lack of embeddedness. We may, in fact, be utterly “seen and known” by our friends and family. But more than that, we want to be required, to be held taut in a web of interchange that is aware — by necessity — of our talents and our resources. We want to be held close, but for that closeness to be selfish on the other’s part. We want our closeness to be mutually beneficial, not merely a favor or an expression of generous love.3
And then there is this, perhaps a natural outgrowth of the idea of “embeddedness”: it seems to me that certain activities are disproportionately curative of loneliness, in ways that cannot be readily explained. A shared meal, for example. There is something in the mammalian warmth of sharing a meal with another person, even a stranger — something about the restoration, the body repairing itself, digestion, that yearns to be done in concert with another being. One somehow feels more readily accompanied when sharing a meal than, say, when running a marathon; it is as though rest yearns to happen-with, but striving can be just as easily and healthfully done alone.4
But finally, here is where the orthodoxy seems to run the deepest, where the assumptions lay the most sacred: loneliness is so often figured as a longing for other human beings. Friendship, acquaintanceship, love, sex, even generative conflict and social violence. Loneliness, when it is talked about, almost always refers to the negotiation of connection within the bounds of our own species — and not beyond.
It is a shame that trees cannot use our Internet. Notably, they do have their own massive communication networks, but all the same — I’d love to see the memes that trees circulate, the forum posts and catchy songs that infect a forest’s imagination. It is probably to their credit, though, that they do not communicate at such a register. The Internet makes me feel lonely, and trees do not. To talk to trees is to restore myself to a sense of embeddedness that predates market-mediated relations of mutual need — and predates, too, the need for talk that is so characteristic of this micro-epoch.
Can I say exactly what Randall needs me for, and what I need Randall for? No, I can’t. But I feel it. And to feel that — to feel the way in which we need each other — is to cure my loneliness (pardon the pun) at the root, as it were: to recognize my loneliness as not just a longing for human society and embeddedness, but as a longing for cosmic embeddedness, an ecological belonging. Bioloneliness: the longing for one’s place in a plurality of life.
I want to be careful here, because so much of ecological writing can read as a kind of utopian waxing, a lyrical gesture towards a fancy “what-if.” This is not that. This is not Sundog’s brief, limp gesture at a pro-climate fantasy; rather, this is an unsentimental report: when I feel lonely, it helps to touch the trees. When I am sad, and I am thinking of this breakup, or that human abandonment, it helps me to observe the wolf’s bane in a neighbour’s garden, its cap of unrepentant purple, and beside it, the ditzy black-eyed susans in rows and rows and rows. It is not even “medicine,” because to say “nature is medicine” is to imply that the cure is active, that nature is a virtuous actor doing combat with the actors of illness. Rather, like water, ecological community is a basic condition of flourishing. And when we are distanced from it, predictably, we grow sick: infected not by some alien agent, but by its very absence. We need ecology so much more than we need society, so much more than we need to be loved, or seen, or listened to. We need it to exist.
How often, then, do we try to cure our bioloneliness with the touch of another human being? How often do we turn to “society” for what might better be cured at the level of a connection — however brief, however untranslated — with a being of a very different sort?
Nature is not always in repose, but we like to imagine that it is.5 Through landscape paintings, the pastoral imagination, even the way we talk about vacations in National Parks — we imagine “nature” as this mythical place “out there” where unself-conscious beings scamper and glide in primordial cycles beyond toil. In contrast, we are the workers: we are the ones who sweat and labor and produce new things. We get up, we turn off the alarm, and we struggle over products, systems, policies — we grind the gears of history. If civilization is a collective ship with a purpose and a ready, heaving crew, nature never changes: it is always silent, always receptive, and always beautiful.
It is this conception of Nature that is waiting for us to name it, to interpret it through human language.6 Convinced that our semantic world is more real than any other, we feel we must clear a space for non-human beings to exist through taxonomy and scientific nomenclature, which then form the basis of research, environmental protections and policies, public discourse. From an anthropocentric perspective, to be named is to exist. Thus we know the names of invasive species but not the individual trees that are dying; we can speak knowledgeably about the rise in sea-level but have conscientiously avoided the flooded marsh, the overheated nest. Mothers and their unending project; lovers and their will to survive.
So, to return to our original starting place, could it be that naming things is also a way of holding them apart from us? What do we lose when our way of connecting with other living beings is filtered primarily through a medium that emphasizes their separateness?7
There is a Pollyanna-ish ending to this essay, and I’ll bet you’re even unconsciously familiar with it. It goes like this: let us connect with Nature then. Let us return to Mother. Let us return to embeddedness in ecology, and in so doing, heal ourselves and heal other living beings, let us restore the world to its rightful balance, and it will feel wonderful, it will feel just like coming home. I could write that ending to this essay, ending on a poem by Wendell Berry or Mary Oliver or Gary Snyder, but I won’t, because I don’t think that ending is enough. I’ve seen the consequences of embeddedness — as a woman, as a woman of color — and I believe those consequences apply even to ecological embeddedness, and we are right to fear them, on some level. I empathize with our collective paralysis.
Embeddedness has consequences. (Think about feminism, and its bloody struggle to free women from a certain kind of embeddedness.) One of its first consequences is responsibility, and with responsibility comes grief.
I think now about my friend D, who told me that after truly letting in the climate crisis, after truly sitting with the statistics and the realities and the inevitabilities of collapse, he fell into a grief so deep it became major depression. Enshadowed in his room for nearly a year, he careened with the months, losing the edges of his own being, his own sense of what made his life worthwhile on this planet. He quit his job and buried himself in books. In a small but important way, he let some part of himself die with the planet he mourned.
It may be difficult to empathize from the outside, but D’s pain was real. And it’s a pain that may be waiting for us if we allow ourselves to belong to this dying world: suddenly, it’s not some landscape “out there” that’s in crisis. It’s our family. Our home, and our very body. It’s understandable we want to avoid this, because we avoid the grief of human loss in the exact same way.8
What’s more, we have much to lose in our mental landscape too, in our way of orienting ourselves in the universe. Remember I said earlier that we like to imagine “nature in repose”? We know, rationally, that nature is not some silent, docile, state-of-innocence where all is well. But perhaps we continue to believe it not just because we are misinformed, but because we need to believe that somewhere, that state-of-innocence exists. To fully encounter nature as it is, then, may be to suffer the loss of an idea that had given us great comfort; to open ourselves into a fundamental disorientation in which we ourselves are no longer innocent. Cast out of Eden and into the polluted world of our own making, we will have to make our own way now.
But if there is hope, and I think there is hope, it is here: this comfort cannot last, my friends. Whatever numbness industrialization has bought, whatever pleasures it has wrought upon us, they are cracking, they are breaking before our eyes. Loneliness is a name for one fatal flaw in the project of man’s brief dominion over the earth, but there are more. However gratifying this manmade paradise has been, it is coming to an end, ready or not.
And speaking as a rather lonely person lately, I believe I know now two things: loneliness is inevitable in human life, but it is also no way to live. One cannot be lonely forever. One seeks the company of others, one seeks an end to loneliness as surely as birds seek the curved comfort of flight. But where will we turn to now? We are post-everything, it seems, and the great institutions seem to collapse before us, each day bringing a new ruin, a new indignity. Perhaps this ruin can be the opening for a different kind of collectivity, one which does not insist upon the primacy of Homo Sapiens. We are lonely, yes, but perhaps the call is not to rebuild what we had before — its sequestrations, its carefully policed borders.
Perhaps this loneliness is for the world entire.
Discussion Questions
Feel free to reflect by yourself, with loved ones, or with other readers in the comments.
Have you ever had long stretches of being lonely? What helped you during those times, and was there anything that surprised you about the experience?
What is your closest relationship (or memory of a relationship) with a non-human being? If it’s with a pet, what about outside of a pet or household companion? What was, or is, that relationship like?
Do you think it’s possible to get strangers to mourn together? Have you ever seen it happen? What are the necessary ingredients? Are we ready — as a nation, a culture, or a set of individuals? Why or why not?
If you liked this post, you might like this piece on collective nostalgia, or Wendell Berry’s actual poetry — which is damn good, or Jenny Odell’s entire tender opus, How To Do Nothing. As always, here is the complete archive of past essays at Sundog.
Acknowledgements
To my friend Peter: I still hesitate to text folks when I’m in trouble, but when I was super lonely, I texted you, and the scroll of love and encouragement you sent back was so intricate, so thoughtful and generous, that I felt wrapped up in it and carried away. Also, thank you for telling me — very nicely — to put my fucking phone down and get outside ;)
To David B Lauterwasser, I don’t know you but your rewilding project and this bold essay on human supremacism were large in my imagination as I wrote this. Good luck with your work, radical stranger.
To my friend D, thank you for telling me about your climate grief. Then, as now, it stands out to me as a fantastic example both of your sensitivity and your courage — may we all live both in greater measure!
And finally, thank you to Randall, who will never ever read this, nor care very much, but will be happy I hope in his own way to know I am strumming the part of the web that binds us together. You have been my shelter.
Esther Perel writes about this in the third chapter of her fascinating treatise on domeestic security vs. erotic risk, Mating in Captivity.
One of my last essays, “The Memory of Justice” is about verbal contract-seeking in love and dating, and the ways in which it inevitably falls short.
In fact, I had started thinking about the idea of “embeddedness” after publishing the very first Sundog essay, on being a woman tourist in Pakistan, “Knots and Bubbles.” My friend M, who has the most thrilling and annoying habit of reading my essays and immediately seeing what they lack — an angel sent from heaven to wrestle me, surely — asked me, after reading it, whether I was trying to express that I was grateful for the freedoms I had in Canada. I realized I was, but also that my feelings about those freedoms were extraordinarily ambivalent, even troubled.
How do we make sense of freedoms that are necessary, utterly foundational to equality — but potentially corrosive in the short term to embeddedness? It’s lovely that I do not have to raise children at home in order to be valued by my society. On the other hand, now that I can do anything, I sometimes wonder if the world particularly needs me to exist at all.
(I know, I know: it is dangerous to pit these two things in direct relation, as though feminism has been directly responsible for the widespread alienation that is felt not just by liberated women, but by nearly everyone in Western, industrialized society. It’s almost as though something larger than a civil rights movement, something as large as an economic system and total way of life, may be to blame…)
Two things: firstly, I know this is an egregious simplification, and I request your generosity for that, dear reader. Secondly, if you are a scientist and know of a paper that might explain this or refute it, please, by all means, drop it in the comments or email me. I’m aware I’m fully in the realm of phenomenological conjecture — ah, the literary scholar’s absolute favourite! — but I’m amenable to being schooled by a different set of facts.
In fact, we may be the ones in repose: in a spiritual nap so long we may never wake up. Senses dulled by the predictability and comfort of industrial development, we literally pay other human beings to experience sensorial variation — scented candles, television shows, music — instead of leaving the environments that exclude it by design.
I remember once, seeing a lovely spider web while travelling with family in Iceland. Moved to admiration, I said to my father, “I love spiders. They just work so hard, never complaining — not even if you break their web. They just get back to work and build it again.”
My father, well-attuned to the vagaries of the natural world himself, scoffed and said, “Maybe the spider is complaining, and you just can’t hear it.”
There is an argument here, a very compelling one I think, for evacuating ourselves from the great castles of language and returning to the realms of the felt sense, and the body’s knowledge. I wrote about that briefly here, in my recent essay on somatic knowing, but there are reams of books on this — usually in relation to the treatment of trauma.
Can we see climate change deniers in this light? Obviously, it’s not the only explanation — we have to look at how political power is accrued through certain ideologies, and also the pleasure of being a part of an in-group too — but it’s one small element, I think, of the whole picture: it just feels better to pretend that nothing’s wrong.
If climate change was real, how shitty would that be? What would we even do?!
This was exquisite – and motivating, not only to continue to try to, well, fix things, but to write about it. Easy subscribe. Thank you for this.
“Move Slow and Fix Things” - thank you, we should make flags and bumper stickers. I enjoyed this rich and nuanced essay, lots to slow down and think about.