Loneliness
Loneliness can be sonorously serene as Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, or as sharply intricate as Paganini's Concerto No. 6.
How does one cram the expression of loneliness into a few paragraphs? Overseas workers usually call this "homesickness" or"boryong". Loneliness is more than this, though. It is too much of an insolvable problem to cope with, because it cannot be assuaged by good food, luxurious quarters, fine music and clean sports.
There is incompleteness of feeling. The need for intimate companionship is there. I know that there's no need to write about it since everyone who have been away from home country feels it. Yet, there must be my expression of it; I need to communicate the feeling I had during the complete isolation I suffered years and years ago. Maybe it is the desert that magnified the cosmic oppression I was burdened with. When I stood in the desert with the mountains out of sight, it is as if I was on the outer skin of the earth and in direct touch with the emptiness of the universe. Nothing mediated between me and the heavens. I had become lost in space. And the oppressive feeling of cosmic loneliness weighted me down with Stygian tenacity. It is very unlike the feeling when you see the cloud cover in the Philippines that is so like a security blanket over you.
Being alone in feeling shut me off from humanity although I knew some Other feels it too. I became confronted with memories. Why is it that when we conjure past joys we suffer most agonizingly? All memories are agonies to be suffered -- unrequited love; lost love; secured love; memories of the anguish of a hopeless war in Vietnam; of the Vietnamese people I've learned to understand even with my scant knowledge of their tonal language.
But the happy moments are the most painful to remember. And most obsessive. Like the memory of a year-old girl trying to pirouette even as she struggled to make the few steps she had learned to take. Or the memory of a quavering voice of a five-year-old daughter singing a plaintive love song the words of which she had yet to understand.
Even as I am back with them... but they are so grown up and have their own lives to live. Ah, but there is still the loneliness for the past. The yearning for things that are not retrievable and cannot be relived.
To keep busy is to momentarily drown out the pains of remembering. Loneliness, far from home and in the society without women, is its own excuse for weeping.
Years hence, back home, and counting the dwindling number of contemporaries who like me creep to their end, I will again be lonely. I shall feel loneliness once more for the loneliness of Saudi Arabia ... for its invisible women, and the forlorn men gripped with anguish and desire for their lost youths and embraces.
How does one cram the expression of loneliness into a few paragraphs? Overseas workers usually call this "homesickness" or"boryong". Loneliness is more than this, though. It is too much of an insolvable problem to cope with, because it cannot be assuaged by good food, luxurious quarters, fine music and clean sports.
There is incompleteness of feeling. The need for intimate companionship is there. I know that there's no need to write about it since everyone who have been away from home country feels it. Yet, there must be my expression of it; I need to communicate the feeling I had during the complete isolation I suffered years and years ago. Maybe it is the desert that magnified the cosmic oppression I was burdened with. When I stood in the desert with the mountains out of sight, it is as if I was on the outer skin of the earth and in direct touch with the emptiness of the universe. Nothing mediated between me and the heavens. I had become lost in space. And the oppressive feeling of cosmic loneliness weighted me down with Stygian tenacity. It is very unlike the feeling when you see the cloud cover in the Philippines that is so like a security blanket over you.
Being alone in feeling shut me off from humanity although I knew some Other feels it too. I became confronted with memories. Why is it that when we conjure past joys we suffer most agonizingly? All memories are agonies to be suffered -- unrequited love; lost love; secured love; memories of the anguish of a hopeless war in Vietnam; of the Vietnamese people I've learned to understand even with my scant knowledge of their tonal language.
But the happy moments are the most painful to remember. And most obsessive. Like the memory of a year-old girl trying to pirouette even as she struggled to make the few steps she had learned to take. Or the memory of a quavering voice of a five-year-old daughter singing a plaintive love song the words of which she had yet to understand.
Even as I am back with them... but they are so grown up and have their own lives to live. Ah, but there is still the loneliness for the past. The yearning for things that are not retrievable and cannot be relived.
To keep busy is to momentarily drown out the pains of remembering. Loneliness, far from home and in the society without women, is its own excuse for weeping.
Years hence, back home, and counting the dwindling number of contemporaries who like me creep to their end, I will again be lonely. I shall feel loneliness once more for the loneliness of Saudi Arabia ... for its invisible women, and the forlorn men gripped with anguish and desire for their lost youths and embraces.
posted by myvja at
1:57 AM
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