Loneliness

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

He who is alone is either a god or a beast, said Aristotle. Logic would ensure that loneliness is either  divine or bestial . If your loneliness is divine, you may load and bless the needy and despondent  people around. If it is bestial, you may kill and torture unsuspecting people. But man is midway between god and beast   and his loneliness cannot , I hope, be stretched up or down. A  lonely man is not a scarecrow, "A tattered coat upon a stick" as Yeats wrote  or  a demented man prowling  the midnight streets. He may be a discernible face in a crowd. He maybe a  mountain peak gazing at the vast sky for a kindred  soul. He may be a Hamlet questioning in silence the logic of the palace .He may be a genius searching for an answer to the oft - asked  question, ' whence we came whither shall we go'. He may be a responsible  President or Primeminister searching for revelations of a different kind  to save  his people from untimely death. He may be  a lonely poet scanning a word for his poem beyond all lexicons. Or he may be a sexcited man in a different city needing release of his urges. He may also be a T.S. Eliot who failed to connect  nothing with nothing. Loneliness is not being alone  without companionship, it is most often a state of mind, self chosen to ponder over a disturbing question concerning life's mystic challenges.

A political prisoner in a single cell or a Napoleon in an island is not necessarily lonely. Loneliness in the social  sense often means physical isolation. If a person is removed from his familiar reality he feels lonely as the landscape or the people do  not register on him. No memory is evoked, no  drama of live experience is re enacted. But this is not  loneliness . It is a temporary feeling of abstraction from reality which can be reinforced when the mind adjusts to the new scene. The left and the right brain, the creative  and the analytical will function together to create a new familiar reality,  Sita in her exile, her abandonment was not lonely. She was conscious of her motherhood and moved forward. Loneliness comes only when  person surrenders his freedom to respond  to his physical  or mental state. If a bird accepts  the cage and surrenders to the confined space and gets mentally prepared to lose  her birdness to controlling hands she loses her being forever. She is removed from her destiny  and   she compromises. Such creatures cannot understand loneliness. A lonely man is a revenge hero  biding his time to act. He is hopeful of change as he does not seal  his mind. He may shout in agony or seal his mouth  as though he has lost the power of speech but inside his mind his world moves faster than the earth's diurnal motion. But loneliness is not all these. God is the loneliest creature or divinity if you prefer. Loneliness is a virtue inculcated by a few fortunate men who create alternative worlds .   

The enforced loneliness in this Corona lockdown today is however, painful. I cannot walk on the road I built? Shops are closed. Sitting in a corner room I watch the sunset . I am a nobody here. I cannot touch my ailing mother, cannot talk with my grown up children. I have no work except the usual repetitions of the animal habits . What am I now?  An animal in a cage ? Have I lost my freedom to participate in the lila of life. I have lost my identity. If I connect my cell phone the voices on the other side sound like aliens lost in a world forlorn. I am no more  a part of the history making process- and history has come to a stand still . Time too is blank, not even a palimpsest to receive the new vocabulary of alienation. Man has always chased time to a future or dissected with analytical    scissors the palm leaf, heaps or walk back to the origins. But now time and space are both like imaginary hail storm full of lightning flashes and sterile thunder. Man closes whatever is open in the room, door or window, to shut out the fury of the elements. Where are those poets, sages, scientists who always goaded us  to fight? If I want to fight - I am always ready - but who is my enemy? A lifeless virus  who finds life in me, inside my wonderful body , grows in me -  is that virus worthy of my heroism ? I don't seek bubble reputation  in my allotted time. I have a face, a head, and a name; Yes a name; should I stake that name just for mere survival ? No, I will live. Man has lived in the world, climbing its peaks, swimming the seven seas, building bridges to heaven. Man has sung sweeter than the birds and air; man has created beauty on stone , strangeness on the prehistoric rocks. He has written epics, discovered all secrets of creation- almost -:   will he now die a secret death in a room which will be fumigated after he  stiffens?  

But man has conquered everything with love. Christ, Buddha, Gandhi  won all human wars with love. Can Corona understand  My Love ? If I sing - come my love, live in me, together we will love the mountains, valleys, slopes, gradiants of the earth, shapely, luscious and seductive like Uravasi - Meneka. We will keep the rivers crystal clear, mountains and virgin forests eternally charming like dew washed buds at dawn. We will eat whatever the earth gives and never shall we greed for more. We will sing for our love from distant shores and never admit separation to our perennial union. We will love man for all his shortcomings irrespective of his caste, religion, nationality.  We will hold the banner of peace in the hands of love.  Will Corona respond?  If not let us break this lockdown and do what we have been doing  with greater vigour. Let's bury loneliness in the Choric song of life and wish victory to man.