about loneliness and making stuff

For the past month of so, I've been very obsessed with Patty Griffin's first album, "Living With Ghosts" (from the 90's.)   It is a beautiful, beautiful thing -- so bare and powerful, and I have been so moved listening to it.  

The opening track (listen above) is called "Moses", and there is something about this song that has haunted me.  She has this line, "I need Moses/To cross this sea of loneliness, Part this red river of pain".  I first heard it sitting at my desk at work, and had to excuse myself for the restroom because tears were filling my eyes -- it is so desperate and so lonely.  

With that musical prompting from Patty, I've been trying to pay attention to the theme of loneliness that stitches itself across so much of the music and movies and novels and poems that I love.  It is undeniable that so much art is made by the voice of isolation, that so much of it calls out from that place. 

I've been thinking lately that maybe, ultimately, loneliness is the thing that prompts us to create. By that I mean that when we feel things so intimately within ourselves, like pain or beauty, we are desperate to share it, to externalize it.  Our creations are little propositions to enter into the things we feel the most, like Patty calling out for someone just to guide her through her aching.  

And yet, what's sort of cool and sort of extraordinarily terrifying about loneliness is that even our art cannot fully satiate it.  We are created so uniquely, and have experiences and thoughts and feelings so unique that there is always a lingering loneliness in being alive.  This is bittersweet to me -- I sort of love the thought of experiencing the world in a way no one else can ever 100% relate to, but I also sort of fear that thought.  And maybe the fear is what prompts me to write! 

So anyways, all of this to say, there are a few things I wanted to share, and those are  1) listen to Patty Griffin and 2) think about your loneliness.  What are the things you feel the most deeply, and how can you share them and create from that place?  

P.S. The following is a poem I started while I've been thinking about these things, about loneliness and the hurt and beauty of it. No title yet (because titles are the worst part of anything)

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you’ve asked me three times what I’m thinking, 

to give thoughts that don’t belong to you, who

haven’t lost the things I’ve lost.   

do you come at this pain having had soup and grapefruit

for dinner? having felt, the first time your hand was held,

the universe collapse backwards into the original atom? 

having woken mornings straight with damp-forehead, 

fitful from memory of driving with you to a county fair

talking about some future life? 

I could tell you what I’m thinking, 

speak across this middle console 

what will never fit into the boxes of your

experience or the words of your mouth or the 

thoughts of your heart 

to fill the silence of goodbye.  

Getting out, I realize I was never in your car

on my street, with the neighbor lights

familiar and the house key pressed to my palm.  

I’m with rows of bulb-lights hanging beyond, 

sitting at the Ferris Wheel top.  I’m where 

all things are far from me, and I give

only my exhale to the cool of the night.
I wait on the awkward first-lurch forward, 

I wait to come back down to life.