The Apotheosis of Solitude

PART V: A pebble’s views on Love

I found myself thinking about Selene more than a friend strictly ought. Sometimes I’d catch myself rummaging round the stacks of a second-hand bookshop, find a book that I knew she’d like and ask myself: “Shall I get this for Selene?” I never did, of course. Even several months into our friendship, I could never be sure how such a gesture would be taken; or perhaps I was, but didn’t want that impression to be given or inferred.

Then one day…she gave me a pebble. I was sitting down to lunch at my usual table in my usual (cheap) bistro when she passed by the window, saw me, and hurried in: all smiles and feigned surprise. She’d been walking along the strand that morning and found a perfectly smooth pebble which, she said, immediately reminded her of a Blake poem. She gave me the pebble as a gift and asked if I could guess the poem in question.

…But a pebble of the brook
warbled out these meters meet:

‘Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.’

I shouldn’t have lied. I shouldn’t have said that I was unfamiliar with Blake’s work and that a pebble, perfectly smooth as it might be, conveyed nothing to me as regards his poetry. She seemed crestfallen, replied “Okay, so” and left.

I’d hurt her. In some small barely perceptible way I’d hurt her. I felt bad; even slightly ashamed: but she’d taken me so by surprise and the breezy, matter-of-fact way that she’d insinuated herself into what was a quiet moment irked me. I should have gone after her. I should have apologised for my abruptness and explained that I prefer to eat lunch alone. Instead, I sat there staring at the smooth little stone in my hand, the words of the ‘pebble of the brook’ warbling around in my head. It was the credo of a stalker, a sociopath. Someone for whom other people were there merely for their amusement and gratification. This was not how I saw love; this was not how any of the poets I adored ever saw love. And yet…
I had, of course, shown Selene the sonnets I had written; ego would not permit them to sit unread. I didn’t tell her of the circumstances under which I had come to write them, but I did read them to her and print copies for her to take home. Perhaps she’d misread, misunderstood?!
I read them to myself in my mind, as I sat there looking at the pebble. I could see how she might misconstrue the meaning of the first two, but the third clearly described a rift between the poet and his lady which had simply not occurred between Selene and me. She couldn’t misunderstand that, surely…could she??
The pebble was remarkably smooth and strangely attractive. Though initially cold to the touch, it was now warming in my palm. I dropped the pebble onto the table beside my plate.
Thud! There was a finality to that sound.

Nine days passed. Nine barren days with no word from Selene. No talk of poetry or poets or any of the myriad other things we’d share in our time together. No Puccini. No chips. Nine days of nothing. On the tenth day, she knocked on my door. She had a piece to prepare for her composition class and had been hopelessly stuck for over a fortnight. Could I help? It saddened me to think she might not have come back were it not for the fact that she needed my help. It saddened me. And it angered me. I stifled my anger, asked her in, and we set to work on her clumsy little effort.
She had five foolscap pages of her scribblings: images, turns of phrase (some nicely realised) ideas lost in a cacophony of chaos. Formless. I tried to govern the ungovernable. I tried to impress upon her the need for order, the beauty of meter and rhyme. The chill in the air now between us meant that my (well intentioned) words froze on her cold ears.
She said that if I wanted to write it for her, then that’s exactly what I should do. I refused. I wouldn’t do her work for her; it must be hers and hers alone. She said that what was on the page was her work and I said, No…what she had was the beginning of a work, nothing more.
I tried to make her see the importance of structure and form. Tried to explain that poetry was more than jotted down feelings; more than words arranged on a page to give the vague impression of true thought, true art. True poetry is fashioned from the beginnings of feeling, it doesn’t merely end there; from the tiger of inner turmoil and vision and despair must be honed, into the form of a sonnet or a pantoum or a villanelle: the cage. The same energy that goes into creating the tiger, must also go into creating the bars.
She seemed to listen.
She worked at my desk for over an hour, as I paced the room in silence. Occasionally, she would show me the latest effort, I would make encouraging noises, then she would work at refining and remoulding. From that initial miasma of chaos and confusion, she slowly honed, condensed, refined and sculpted her feelings into a poem. Eventually, she was done.
I read her final draft, smiled and said: “Now you’re a poet!”
As she left my house for the final time, Selene turned at the door and pressed a few banknotes into my hand, thanking me for my help. I accepted the money, graciously.
Then she was gone. The door closed behind her.

Thud! There was finality in that sound. The image of the pebble falling onto the table flashed in my mind as the door closed on my only friend in the world. I should have felt bereft. I didn’t. I should have felt demoralised. I felt invigorated. The sound of that door…of that damned pebble invigorated me! It was like a randomly falling stone which precipitates an avalanche in the mountains. Nothing is the same afterwards. The landscape of the entire mountain range has changed and new patterns and formations have emerged from the cataclysmic rockfall.
That was how I felt. No more would I sit in the shadows, contemplating the views of pebbles! Now…I was ready to do something.

Solitude was making a name for herself. Several of her songs had been played on the radio and she had been giving interviews on music and arts programmes on television. There was talk of a soon-to-be released album. Unlike most new pop or rock stars (neither epithet could comfortably rest on her shoulders; Solitude was unique) the album would consist of a series of thematically linked songs on the theme of Cupid & Psyche; the story taken from Apuleius’ The Golden Ass (Books IV, V & VI): some of the more infantile interviewers had had some fun with that!

I was happy for her. Delighted, in fact, that she would no longer be forced to make a living by playing for baying crowds of drunks in dingy bars in nefarious parts of the city. Had anyone else of my (sort of) acquaintance suddenly become famous; if, say, one of the talent vacuums I’d attended class or seminars with in college had become famous poets, or playwrights, or novelists: I would have felt envious, jealous, even a little aggrieved. But not with Solitude. She deserved every good thing that life could bestow upon her.
I was happy for Solitude; happy that her dreams were coming true. I was happy…and hopeful; hopeful that soon my own dreams would start to come true.

Rumour had gone out that the rising new star, Solitude Macready, had already acquired for herself a stalker; a stalker who communicated with her in a rather unusual way. She’d been asked about this in one or two of her most recent interviews but batted the questions off; dismissing the very idea of a stalker. I took heart from this. At least, she could see that I was no stalker; I didn’t follow her around, watching her from the shadows, photographing her in bars and restaurants, in her own home. That was already beginning to happen to her, but those were professional stalkers with expensive cameras who were paid a handsome sum for their pictures by the bottom-feeders in the tabloids. I was nothing like that.

Then one of the bottom-feeders hacked her email account and my sonnets were splashed all over the papers and on the internet! I was outed…my very heart exposed for all to see!! A reward went out to discover my identity: there was even a direct plea for me to present myself to one of the papers. They said that if I could prove that I was the ‘stalker’, I would be generously compensated with money, publicity for my poetry and a candlelit supper with Solitude herself.
Within minutes of that last piece hitting the news sites, Solitude had publicly disabused them of any notion of having supper with her stalker. She said that I was a piddling little nobody who inflicted his dreadful poetry on people he didn’t know and had never met to get attention.
That hurt.

The whole thing had cascaded out of control.
The thought of being so cruelly exposed was worse than fading into nothingness and despair; spending my life knowing that I’d had a lucky escape, but secretly wondering what might have been if things had been a little different…if I’d been a little braver that second night in the bar.

I had to talk to Solitude directly. I had to explain to her how I felt about her, about her music. I had to tell her how and why it had come to this. But first I would have to prove to her that I was the poet, Peregrino. Giving her copies of the poems was not enough, everyone had those now. There was only one way to do it…another sonnet!

Sonnet IV: Chiaroscuro

This time I would have to stand before her, look her in the eyes, and recite the poem to her there and then.

End of Part V.