This essay was supposed to be about loneliness, somehow. The texture of it, the quality of its light. This essay was supposed to connect the experience of loneliness to the moods and soundscapes of New Age music. The kind of abstract idea that would work as a poem, that sounds good as an essay, until you start to get into the actual writing of it. I’m not a poet, after all. I ordered a Vivian Gornick book, a collection of essays about being lonely and a woman, and then experienced a moment of panic because the book won’t arrive until later this week. I originally wrote “panick” in my notebook (anticipating “Gornick”), which I’m noting because I like it. Panick would be my Crowleyian religion. But really, it’s okay. What does a single woman in NYC (let alone in 2015 or whatever) have to tell me about loneliness? I’ve already lived that story, and found it a bit trite. NYC as Personage, Event, Catastrophe, Cultural Device intrudes, bullies. NYC as the fifth character in Sex and the City, the old one, the dying one, the ugly one, the one who’s rotting bottom-up and inside-out, starting from her reeking, decaying bowels, spraying sewer water on commuters.
Is William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops perhaps the only piece of cybernetic 9/11 Art? By cybernetic I mean not representational (no exoticized terrorists or ticking time bombs or clash of civilization grand narratives here) and emerging from process – in this case, from the process of magnetic tape decaying.
I used to listen to these constantly, all the way back in 2008, 2009, snuggled up in my cheap apartment room in Bloomfield, snow falling on the treeless street outside, incense burning, spun out from psychedelic drugs, deep in the first Real Relationship that I would get lost in, stuck in. Strange loops, indeed. I had no idea I would take the LSAT in just a couple of months, can you dig it? The LSAT. Basinski’s oeuvre isn’t really New Age, though. He’s a bit more highbrow than that, serious, abstracted, New York, aspiritual. His music is (at least as far as I can tell) meant to be art, not technology of the self. Late at night I would sometimes walk to Ritter’s, just to have a cup of coffee. Put Patsy Cline on the little jukeboxes at each table. It feels like remembering a different universe or regressing to a past life. Talk about loneliness. Today, the same landscape feels voided. Voided of color, content, and meaning, and also of actual people. Things close early. People stay at home, on their phones. “There is a world inside the world.”
I learned just the other day that a restaurant called PileZ, opened less than a year ago in the old South Oakland Mad Mex “space” (everything is a “space” now), is closing. Whatever its culinary merits, PileZ was, as I have learned in my researches, an attempt to offer late-night dining, perhaps to capitalize on the proximity of college students, who – some market research has to have shown, right? – still want to be out after 9 pm. Something was off at PileZ, though. Apparently the service at the restaurant, named after a type of hemorrhoid, was alienated and automated, a sort of fluorescent-lit waiting room liminal zone where you punched your food order into a screen and waited for it to be thrust out of some chute.
I used to listen to the Hearts of Space (https://www.hos.com/home) radio program late at night on the Pittsburgh NPR affiliate, back then it was WDUQ. I must have been a kid or a teenager. (When did WDUQ stop being WDUQ? I don’t remember.) I do remember liking it. I especially remember just being delighted to find it, something so far-out on the public radio station that I could receive with a good signal. It was, on the whole, a richer time for loneliness. Part of it could be that I was just at a younger age where it’s easier to romanticize and aestheticize everything, but I don’t think that’s the entirety of it. The world in general was less enclosed and ruthlessly privatized than it is now. I do feel pretty guilty thinking, as I sometimes do, that the 1990s were probably the best my life will ever be. It was not a good time for Pittsburgh, barely a decade into the annihilating freefall that WDUQ commentators and their WESA successors call “deindustrialization.” There was, at that time, more than a glimmer of communal life, an esprit of live and let live; park anywhere, walk wherever, use the space, come see us, buy our weird shit for a dollar – what do we care? Depop didn’t exist, hustle culture didn’t exist, content didn’t exist. Long-haul truckers would call in constantly to Art Bell’s Coast to Coast program. “You’ve been riding shotgun with me for some years now,” one said to Art. Art, of course, responding with the characteristic graceful and understated respect that he afforded to all his callers and guests. It’s immensely comforting, the knowledge that somebody else is also up, that as you toss and turn in bed, count the trains that pass every 20 minutes, you’re not completely alone in a world closed for business. It felt like: stuff can still happen, is still going on, even when a microtransaction can’t be squeezed from it. (Art Bell used Ray Lynch’s The Oh! Of Pleasure as the theme music for Dreamland; can we classify this as New Age? I think so. I believe Ray Lynch was/is a Mormon.)
Guys criscrossing the country alone in their big rigs, driving all night, listening to fantastic UFO stories on Coast to Coast, delivering styrofoam cups and plastic stirrers to the seminar rooms of the big universities where educated people denounced the likes of Art Bell, nominated him for satirical awards, reveled in their superior knowledge. Gotta laugh. Now gnosis is the name (the gname) of the game. I know what I saw. I know what I know. It’s my truth. What direction is left but “inward,” when a microchip clocks how long it takes these guys to piss, transmits the information back to some boss somewhere? When you have to be on Teams all day, which keeps track of how many minutes your work display is idle? Enclosure. It’s harder to be lonely now. Partly this is because, paradoxically, even gnosis is enclosed behind paywalled seminars, programs, “trainings.” Trapped like a lab rat pushing your buttons for a pellet at PileZ, refreshing the timeline, adding to cart. Sevens signs of narcissistic abuse. Morning routine as a mom of 5. Six steps to unlock your higher purpose. Your Meyers-Briggs type, your enneagram, your tarot birth card, your sun/moon/rising. At least you could buy New Age tapes in the ‘90s, is what I’m saying.
What do I mean by “technology of the self”? I mean: listening to Japanese kankyō ongaku (environmental music) specifically to chill myself out while working in graduate school. Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Quiet Forest was a favorite.
I listened to more American New Age music then, too. Via a “cult music” program on WFMU, I discovered Steven Halpern in a roundabout way… in my own explorations, I came upon the Chakra Suite, which I realized I recognized as bumper material for Music of Mind Control. Switching on the pink salt lamp I kept in my brightly-lit windowless cubicle (gotta laugh), logging on for a retina-obliterating marathon session of coding, debugging code, copying and pasting and copying and pasting, running code, filling in tables from code, discovering mistakes and starting from scratch, rebuilding the whole Jenga structure from the ground up. Is this learning? According to at least one line of thinking, my anthropotechnical musical strategy for surviving graduate education “works.” The basic idea is called biofeedback. Here, I am resisting the urge to detour into Grey Walter, cybernetics, EEG technology, the discovery of different EEG wave profiles associated with different brain states. The so-called “theta” wave pattern is associated both with getting angry and falling asleep; the “alpha” pattern, with rest or meditative awareness. Steven Halpern’s Sound Healing album features compositions titled both “Deep Alpha” and “Deep Theta.”
See also Michael Hammer’s excelled Traveling in the Soul Planes, to which “DEEP THETA SOUND FREQUENCIES HAVE BEEN ADDED FOR ENHANCED MEDITATION EXPERIENCE.”
The idea of biofeedback is that you can train yourself to modulate your own EEG profile, even if not consciously. There’s a family resemblance here to a brand of pseudoscience that emerged much later, called neurofeedback, based on Stephen Porges’s insane “polyvagal theory.” The basic concept seems to be that you can bypass conscious processing and heal your “trauma” by listening to different frequencies of sound, which will rearrange your nervous system and make you whole again.
Sky Douglas’s superb “super-serene spiritual space music,” with and without John Mazzei, comes with instructions: “not to be played while driving.”
But of course, I do play it while driving. Driving up one of Pittsburgh’s miserable, traffic-strangled highways, chutes to the ‘burbs, only after 9 pm, when traffic is the least maddening, to walk the aisles of the grocery store in relative peace. A huge grocery store, whole wings of it decommissioned for the night by the time I arrive. The weird little cafe – who sits there? The separate area where, per PA’s weird liquor laws, you can buy alcohol apart from your other groceries. The darkened bakery, the empty meat and seafood counters. When I worked at a different store in the same grocery chain, long ago, the seafood counter manager was a brassy blonde woman named Sue, mid-40s, who chain-smoked in the break room (you could still do that then). Single, I don’t know if she was ever married, complained about men in a way I felt privileged and a little mischievous to hear. Little did I know.
Vivian Gornick could walk up Columbus Avenue and, in her solitude, observe 100 couples, take the elevator back up to her apartment and write an essay about them. I could walk for hours around my neighborhood – giant postal facility, blocks where only about every third house is inhabited, even along the blighted north-south avenue dividing my neighborhood from the adjacent, home to the Worst Gas Station in America where grizzled yinzer guys rip cigs while they pump, and never see another person. One time, late at night, I saw a buck, mincing along the chain-link fence around the empty swimming pool at the abandoned community center by the railroad tracks. What are you doing down here? I wondered. As if this were still our city, and not theirs. The extreme solitude is bearable, if you’re like me (if you’re like me, you come to treasure it eventually) but what rankles is the thought of just how pleased your exes and haters must be to see you so profoundly alone, a professional failure or close to it, and obviously a personal wreck. Obviously because – well, just look at her! The only other person that wanders the streets on foot like I do is the psychotic woman whose peregrinations take her all over my neighborhood, mapping out a secret pattern, tracing a labyrinth only she knows, tall and statuesque and bald, Grace Jones-like in her schizoid-chic getups of towels and tablecloths wrapped around her hips and shoulders like a toga, tottering with a stiff-kneed gait and grumbling to herself. Her affect is scowling and mean but her actual words evince the deep terror of schizophrenia – “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there. I just didn’t see you.” It’s okay, mama.
It could, in all honesty, be worse. I could still be someone for whom social etiquette dictates endless conversations about property and mortgages, home improvements, cars and which cars are good or bad, cool or gauche, what a car says about you and your accomplishments in life, about petty professional rivalries, about The Schools. A living death, but they’re all still pointing and laughing at me from the grave. See? I don’t need Vivian Gornick after all. My work has not appeared in Harper’s and The New York Review. My latest book of essays is not forthcoming. Vivian Gornick has NYC as an enframing device. Lonely Jewish lady in NYC, she’s a feminist, she’s out of sync with Dominant Cultural Values, we can all connect with the resonances that’s supposed to have. She ends up coupled or she doesn’t, either way, we get it. But how about for those of us in the great flyover object-mass?
Pittsburgh as a character in the story – laughable. Imagine writing about anything here in the rapturous, mythical tones people use for New York. Still, though, even here, it used to be that you could go out into the world alone and the world would sort of push back on you, give shape to your emptiness. Now, not so much. Everything closes at 7 pm anyhow. You need a reason to go anywhere. I did used to go to that Mad Mex on Atwood, with that boyfriend, late at night when nachos and things were half-price. (That boyfriend lived in a grim, damp, freezing apartment a block over, rank with old dishwasher smell.) It was always busy. I used to go to places alone all the time, to eat and drink alone, to read alone, coffee or beer, lunch or dinner, shoot the shit, or don’t. These days, I feel like I’m trespassing anywhere I go, without the requisite alibi for appearing in public – friends, or better yet, partner, children, family. A 37 year old woman with no children, no husband, no career to speak of, is unsightly. No one wants to see a 34 year old woman in a crop top. No one wants to see a 37 year old woman at all. Nothing to show, even a PhD (especially a PhD) counts for nothing. No opinion on The Schools, no right to speak. What else would anyone even speak about? Most of the time, when I go out, I feel like an organ grafted onto a mismatched world that is inflamed specifically at me. Still, I tell myself, it’s good to get out.
It’s good to get out because I’m so very comfortable being alone, because it’s so easy for me to go days and days without traveling very far from my apartment, certainly without seeing anyone. More people are looking for Barney Mayerson on Mars than text me in an average day – a sudden thought that is not distressing. Maybe a little bit forlorn. I have learned that being alone inside a structured social institution, like a family or a marriage, is much, much worse than being truly alone. Vogelfrei. Birds – crows – circling and warping on the cold wind in a brilliant-blue winter twilight sky. What a worn-out metaphor for the dual quality of solitude – absolute freedom and absolute loneliness. If I died tonight choking on a Cheez-It, or tomorrow morning trying to take the garbage out down the icy back steps, how many days would it take for anyone to notice? The single lady’s song, the song that never ends. I know we’re all out here, women that the Marriage Machine or the Rat Race or just the World has gnawed up and spit out like a knuckle of indigestible gristle. My mom’s old friend who lived on a lonely, frozen farm up north near the Allegheny National Forest. I remember going to visit her once, I couldn’t have been more than 9 or 10, in the apartment she had rented in some rural apartment complex. Pink carpet, some nameless town in the in-between part of Pennsylvania. Living room furniture: one lawn chair. A cat. Free women, as Doris Lessing would say. But they had universal health care, social provisioning, psychoanalysts over there. Not in America, baby. A free woman here is more free in the negative than in the positive sense.
So of course, single or coupled, we’re all alone, and we’re all doing technologies of the self now, big time. Explicitly. The wine mom who is turning to adaptogens, weird mushroom powders bought off Instagram. The academic, embodying frictionless fusion between mind and machine, not a sexy fascist spyplane this time but a Dell laptop computer, only notionally portable, working-from-home. The body as machine in the recursive loop of self-care, this body is a machine that turns clean dishes into dirty dishes into clean dishes into dirty dishes into clean dishes into dirty dishes… etc. Yoga, the ur-technic of the self. My (online) yoga instructor recommends doing pigeon pose when all the days feel the same, because it’s always different. The thing is, she’s right. Technologies of the self, technologies of personal pain with which we no longer have the cultural apparatuses to deal. Religion is over, replaced by statistics; statistics can represent but not hold these huge volcanic island systems of pain. Hypothesis: neurofeedback and the more hippie-dippie “emergent” methods for dealing with “embodied trauma” are popular because the conscious processes are too painful, or too hard.
The conscious processes still happen, with or without your consent. I speak from experience. Working on this essay has been unexpectedly hard, because I keep veering into the story, the story that is slowly unfolding within me, developing, rearranging and transforming my understanding of what happened, what things were like, what I thought I knew and what I really know. The story is pressing on me from the inside out, wanting to be told. Problem is, it can’t be told. It can’t be told publicly – too complicated, too many stakeholders. It can’t be told privately either. Too much exposition, too much rehashing of familiar background, risking bitterness, boredom, repetition, exhaustion. Your friends are not your therapists, says our privatized culture incarnated in the scolding yapping head of an Instagram mental health influencer, front-facing video, wearing stupid glasses, if you want somebody to hear your story, you need to compensate them. This is called, somehow, justice. It can’t be told in words, straightforwardly, at all. I keep reminding myself that I don’t have to say anything here, that the story in words is like, if anything, an endoskeleton organizing the surface parts, the deep structure connecting the paragraphs of this essay, that only I have the x-ray vision to see.
There is a different kind of telling, one more akin to fiction or poetry, but even more abstracted and veiled. This is the telling that comes from just existing, just being in the world in a different way than I was before. For example, I check in with specific trees when I walk in the park now. The squat baby evergreen in the park driveway that someone – city employees – carefully garland with fat-bulb faux-vintage multicolored lights for the holiday. The younger trees at the mouth of the park, this one at the bend in the path, this one that grows at an impossible 45-degree angle over the street, the much bigger, taller ones, nestled deeper in the park, down in the folds of the hills where you can’t walk up to them. I say hello to them. Trees have lived through a lot. My best friend, best described as a “science witch,” told me that trees can, in some meaningful way whose details I forget, see. The things they’ve seen are vaster, deeper than anything we can see in this lifetime (though I’m sure I’ve seen a lot more ads than a tree) – trees are wise. The destruction of trees, I have come to feel on a deep level, is truly violence, in the everyday vernacular sense of the word.
For example, how I exist in the world, socially; how I treat other people, better, more mindful, more aware. For example, the private parts of the telling, the narration of the truth, in how I treat and act upon myself. I don’t castigate myself anymore, scream at myself internally, ruminate endlessly on what a piece of shit I am, cut myself off at the knees to prevent myself from feeling feelings that aren’t suitable or admissible. Not like I used to. Now, if I don’t feel well, if I have a headache or a sore back, or if I’m upset or sad, I’m allowed to just think, I’m in pain, and let that be – no reason and no supporting documentation required. I’m allowed to go more slowly, allowed to be happy or unhappy about that, and let that be. If I don’t like something, I change it; if I need something, I arrange it, no fight, no argument, no crying, no fruitless haggling and negotiation, no issue at all. So much of my earnest leftism was so insincere, it makes me wince to think about it. Working so tirelessly for the dignity of all people except myself, exceeding my limitations and silencing my thoughts and doubts, dissociated adherence to made-up deadlines and guidelines. What made me think I was the only person on earth unqualified for and exempt from grace and self-respect?
I wanted to say something smart about the guided meditation tape Resurrect Yourself, narrated by Kristina Nomeika and scored by Laraaji.
I don’t know that I can. I keep getting sidetracked when I listen to it, swirled up in an eddy of my own emotions. Even though I don’t believe it literally. I don’t believe that by meditating on difficult and painful experiences from the past, I “change the other person as well.” Love you, Kristina, but fat chance of that. And yet, I find myself crying every time. During one particularly harrowing visualization, she instructs to just listen to the music if you can’t conjure images. Music is a way of telling, communicating, narrating, healing without the detour through words. This is the real trick of New Age music, not any specific representational content about the music or what it’s doing. This is why particularly spun-out Deadheads treat Jerry like a kind of God. Maybe something to the biofeedback music after all?
New Agers caught in the representational game are the ones that are running around, chasing their own tails, trying to find an answer to a question that nobody is asking. In Psychotherapy East and West (interesting read!) Alan Watts says that existence is not a problem to be solved. The Zen insight that never quite makes it all the way into even the most Eastern-inflected New Age stuff. (If existence isn’t a problem to be solved, then how can you sell all-inclusive retreat packages?) Frantically “seeking” – the answers, the truth, the One Weird Trick that will get everybody conscious, “emergent strategy” – is ultimately just silly. Watching Breath of Fire, the kundalini cult documentary, I remember thinking – but of course. This is the shape spirituality takes in this social order, the shape of a scam. People don’t really have time to do anything they’re not making a living doing. The New Age moment and the searing loneliness it attends to, yin to yang, are of course parts of the same whole, both products of progress, the alienating, ingrowing creep of that old bugbear, “the logic of capitalism.” This has been the case since before the ‘90s. Still. Something has happened over the past few years that has totally squelched the spirit of creative enterprise.
There was an affinity between the earlier New Age stuff (which Sounds of the Dawn painstakingly chronicles on their awesome YouTube channel) and the punk music I grew up around in the DIY, self-release aesthetic and praxis. That is, as far as I can see, gone. Everything has to exist for a reason, everything needs an alibi, a simple point that can be condensed into a take and communicated instantly. Numero Group, the reissue label, is now in the game of reissuing some of this New Age material. It’s about time Laraaji got the bag, some kind of bag. They acquired Valley of the Sun, a California-based New Age label that produces beautiful but unsettling tapes. (One time I smoked too much weed and listened Upper Astral’s Upper Astral Suite through headphones. Bad idea. I don’t know if it’s just the rudimentary engineering setup or sinister helter skelter intentionality but you can hear all sorts of weird shit in the audio, breaths that are pitched in a different register than the rest of the music, bumps, shudders.)
I tried and failed to get my hands on a copy of the New Age issue (from 2019) of their publication, Periodical Numerical. If anyone has it, or has a way for me to get a copy, please let me know! I would like to read the Laraaji interview. I would like to see the Don Slepian profile. I would like to read the rare Iasos essay, the never before seen writing by Joanna Brouk. I really would. But part of me also resists this language of rarity and exclusivity and choice. More privatization, more enclosure, it serves one purpose which is to try to juice sales. All this does, ultimately, is void art of any meaning but the twisted ones that spiral out from the imperatives of the market. This shit is a small part, but a part nevertheless, of why the fabric of life is so lonely and goddamn exasperating. Vangelis: “Success and pure creativity are not very compatible. The more successful you become, the more you become a product of something that generates money." I’m glad to see Iasos get his due, but Iasos was a channel, not a product – Inter-Dimensional Music through Iasos.
Loneliness isn’t a fable, it’s an experience. An experience isn’t a take, it’s an unfolding. There’s not a nice little just-so point to tie this off, not that I don’t feel the pressure to come up with one. This would be the point in the essay where I insert an inflated platitude by way of a summary sentence, to signal to readers that it’s done. But I’m not trying to sell this to anyone, or make an argument to anyone. This just is. Isn’t that enough?