The Apotheosis of Solitude

PART III: Analogue Heart in a Digital World

I changed the route of my nightly walks. No more did I walk past the door of the fateful greeting. No more did I allow the mere sight of that side street stab me in the heart. And so, when it appeared, I did not see the poster announcing that Solitude had been engaged to perform there again. I did not see the small, fax quality, picture of her beside her name.
I did, however, know about the gig. I read the announcement on her webpage (to which I kept a scrupulous and hungry eye).

When the night of her performance arrived, I’d resolved not to go. I’d spent many hours in the nights leading up to it in fretful argument with myself: Why would I, what was the point?? Did I really think that anything would be different?! I hadn’t heard anything from her since I’d failed to respond to her first and only email. What if she recognised me…how could she possibly recognise me?!? How can I subject myself to this self-torture?

This delirious dialectic continued till the very hour of her performance and so I was late arriving at the bar. When I entered, she was already onstage; singing her first, or possibly second, song. The bar was full; obviously her internet fame was growing. I could not get a seat and could barely see the stage and its sole inhabitant beyond the throng of merrymakers. I found the crowd and the heat of the room almost overwhelming; I wanted to go to the bar and get a glass of cold water, but the press of the crowd held me in place. I thought I’d caught sight of an opening, a clear path in a gap in the mass of bodies near the bar and was about to make a break for it when…something changed. The music had stopped. Solitude was speaking into the microphone; there was something new in that sound. It was hard and brittle and angry.

As I listened closely for the first time since thirst had overtaken me, I realised that she was telling them about me! She recounted how, the last time she had performed in this bar, someone had dropped a poem into her unattended guitar case. Try as she might, she could not ascertain the identity of the poet. But a few weeks later a second poem had been sent to her via email. There were jeers and yelps and whoops from the crowd at this but, unperturbed, Solitude went on.
She now asked, demanded, that the poet reveal himself. The noise of the crowd rose at this as a number of the more lubricated patrons now declared themselves to be her poet-suitor. Unfazed and unconvinced, Solitude challenged them to tell her the name that he had given her.
Jimmy! Dick! Penis-breath!! came the replies.

Think of him, for now, as Peregrino

The room began to wheel as Solitude waited for a semblance of calm to re-emerge. Was this really happening? Was she really asking me to reveal myself to her in front of all these people?!
Her amplified voice sliced through the general hubbub of the room once again. This time she asked the poet to identify himself by reciting the first two lines of his second (emailed) poem to her.

If drops of salted water from the sea;
matured by time: mayhap conceive a star

The words sang in my head as less considered phrases were thrown at her from the floor. I’d been particularly pleased with these opening lines. It referred to an old Latin spoonerism concerning the Virgin Mary. One of the epithets attached to Our Lady is ‘Star of the Sea’; the original Latin for which is Stella Maris. However, that is the bastardised version of the older Stille Maris, which means a drop of water from the sea: which makes a little more thematic sense, but isn’t nearly as poetic. The changeover, whether by accident or design, happened sometime in the middle ages; making it little more than a medieval typo! Either because of the poetic ring of the new version, or because it served the church’s increasing interest in deifying Mary, the mistake remained unchallenged.

There was, however, a new challenge coming from the stage…from Solitude. Now she was castigating Peregrino for not revealing himself. She said that, having given much consideration to the situation, she’d concluded that he was just some weirdo trying to trap her.

At these words, a terrible despondency washed over me. I made for the door as a new roar from the crowd greeted Solitude’s fresh attack on her guitar. The opening chords of her song Dark Eros died away behind me; the door of the fateful greeting swung shut in my wake and the cool air of the night was scant relief as I stumbled fitfully home.

The email was a mistake. I know that. Emails, text messages, all electronic communications…it’s all one big mistake. We’re creating a world of electronic ephemera; flickering words on a flickering screen with no tangible context.
In fifty or a hundred years, no-one will be able to dust off a bundle of old love letters, tied up with red ribbon, carefully pull open the bow and spend a melancholy afternoon poring over the fading ink and crackling paper. No splotched watermarks where long-forgotten tears once fell will adorn the texts and tweats of tomorrow. If the love notes and letters of the future can be said to exist at all, they will be lost forever behind the closed gates of misremembered usernames and inaccurately spaced passwords.
And even if you could find and read them once more, they would still be mere flickers on a screen. A letter, a real letter, takes time and effort to craft; thought and care go into its making. A letter is a physical testament to the attention put into communication. It makes a journey from the hand of the author who crafted it to the hand of the reader for whom it was crafted. It makes that journey through real space and real time and when it arrives before the intended reader’s eyes, it bears the unique imprint of its author and the dust collected on the journey.

The email as a mistake. I know that now. I should have made real contact. Real communication. I should have written the sonnet on a page with my own hand and put it before her own eyes. I will not make that mistake again.

End of Part III