Out of Time (33 page)

But objecting to the narrow limits of conventional success is one thing; preventing the destructive impact of ‘failure’ on those judged as ‘losers’, especially when considering the sphere of intimacy, is quite another. Halberstam was among the small group drawing up and signing the manifesto
Beyond Same Sex Marriage
, who in 2006 hoped to start a movement calling for visionary, creative and practical alternatives to marriage, whether heterosexual or same-sex. They wanted to see public recognition of
and
state assistance for all existing domestic arrangements offering shared intimacy, social care, and support for dependent people, whatever the form of the household. Included among the alternative households they mention are those of ‘senior citizens living together and serving as each other’s caregivers’. Importantly also, they stress the need for ‘recognition of interdependence as a civic principle’.
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Admirable as this manifesto is, however – and with some highly visible public figures such as Gloria Steinem, Barbara Ehrenreich and Cornell West in support of it, alongside numerous well-known scholars of all sexual proclivities – it has yet to have any impact on traditional family rhetoric in the USA. Indeed, it has yet to convince the majority of gays and lesbians eager to sanctify their unions with a marriage ceremony. It is easier for critics to express shock and alarm at the eagerness of many gay and lesbian organizations to enshrine traditional marriage as a priority goal, than it is for them to find any adequate way of creating better facilities for the majority of those in most need of care, whether inside or outside traditional families.
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Meanwhile, the vast numbers of those living alone, especially
among the elderly, may find it hard to locate themselves in this debate, queer or straight.

The lesbian and human rights activist I have mentioned before, Amber Hollibaugh, reflecting on her work for SAGE representing elderly LGBT people in the USA, argues passionately that the actual lives of older people have been ‘achingly absent’ from queer priorities and agendas. In her view, this makes it almost impossible for them to participate in collective activities: ‘the progressive LGBT movement is shaped in part by this silence, this ignorance, and this fear of the old’. She points out that 70 to 80 per cent of LGBT people age alone, while urging that a movement once able to tackle the HIV/AIDS crisis ought to be able to find innovative ways of fighting for the needs and desires of the ever growing number of older people living outside traditional systems of kinship and community support: ‘It will require massive, effective, and powerful advocacy and education regarding the needs and realities of this diverse nation of the elderly.’
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First up, however, it requires the queer imagination to try to surmount its own obsession with youth and its deep fear of ageing – usually far greater, it seems to me, than even the fear of death, which it has often been far easier to romanticize.
⁵³
It is clearly hard to form or maintain ‘families of choice’. But perhaps it is true, as Matt Cook suggests in his
Queer Domesticities
, that at times the queer imagination may at least keep alive hopes for expanding the places and spaces where alternative forms of community and commitment might be cherished. Such at least was the symbolic weight, the wild hope and partial delusion, of the open, unfenced, alternative space created by Derek Jarman (with the love and support of many friends) in the home and garden he built and tended in Dungeness on the Kent Coast,
Prospect Cottage. This is where, shortly before his death, he was ordained as Queer Saint, one determined to encourage ways of questioning entrenched norms around intimacy and exclusion: ‘My garden’s boundaries are the horizon’, he wrote, which he saw as contrasting with ‘the castle of heterosex’ and its ‘walls of tears and dungeons of sadness’.
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The Strengths of Solitude

Images of those dungeons of sadness continue to haunt reflections on ageing alone. ‘How terrible to live alone!’, Michael Cobb, a gay man in his thirties begins his essay, ‘Lonely’, in the collection
After Sex
. Challengingly, he is explaining why he
chooses
to be single, now that his ‘queer-theoretical self has crept’ towards a place that ‘others might call or presume to be [that of] the person who is lonely’.
⁵⁵
He explains that his friends and acquaintances constantly express the desire to see him coupled up, no longer a member of that ‘despised minority’ of single people. I think he is right to suggest that this common attitude makes it all the harder for single people not to feel suffocated by the apparent pity the coupled up are likely to project onto them. In his view, couples need the safety valve of displacing this ‘bad affect’ onto singles in order to survive themselves.

However, in the face of what he calls ‘the perpetual “
Sex and the City
panic” ’ over failing to find a mate, Cobb wants to assure his readers that ‘The loneliest of us are not necessarily those of us who are alone but rather those of us trying not to be alone.’
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In his subsequent book,
Singles
, Cobb expands upon his view of the inevitable ‘fatality’ of ‘couple love’, which he sees, provocatively, as ‘an ideological apprenticeship in loneliness’, since
it calls for a kind of exclusive intensity that is almost impossible to sustain and hence always vulnerable to failure.
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Cobb is right, of course, at least in the more limited claim about the possibility of a bleak loneliness that can exist inside marriages or relationships; agony aunts are used to hearing from women telling them: ‘I am married but lonely.’
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As we have seen before, Cobb’s views echo a claim made by many an ageing feminist, sometimes quoting Germaine Greer: ‘Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.’
⁵⁹
Greer wrote this in her most famous text,
The Female Eunuch
, when she was a young woman, although as we have seen she remains publicly insouciant about living alone into old age. Less blithely, from New York, Vivian Gornick wrote of recalling past relationships that had ended because in them she had begun to feel ‘more alone than when alone’.
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Yet while it is clearly a staple of novels, film, theatre and song, not to mention clinical case studies and family courts, that couples can themselves be lonely, bickering and destructive, it is rather different to ask, as Cobb does, whether it is really possible in societies as we know them to be alone, single, often feeling isolated (especially when older), but
not
lonely.
⁶¹
For as Cobb takes pains to illustrate, happy or not, marriage and couples remain ‘the
foundation
on which society is built – they are society’s life support systems’.
⁶²

His question is, therefore, how or whether the person who rejects the underpinning of intimate bonding, even in its most alternative, open or fluid forms mentioned in ‘Beyond Same-Sex Marriage’, can be affirmed as genuinely part of the social fabric, whether as celibates, widows, or whatever. What Cobb seeks is ‘a comforting, non-menacing, form of isolation’, in which
the solitary person no longer symbolizes a form of ‘terrifying loneliness’, and no longer confronts the ubiquitous propaganda – ‘It takes two’ – suggesting that the single person must inevitably, sooner or later, feel abandoned, deserted and lacking in what is everywhere seen as the only ‘significant’ connection to others: the couple.

One answer, as Cobb suggests, and we have seen others affirm, is to realize and convince the world of the importance and joys of solitude. He tells his readers of his solitary journey out into the awe-inspiring Arizona desert, to discover, like many others before him, the landscapes of the infinite unknown, thereby gaining what he writes of as a sense of ‘the sublime’. It is in such places that the single person, however secular, as Cobb is, ‘stares at a vast, oceanic, and religious distance’, feeling a sense of immortality. Such images of beauty strike Cobb as in some sense ‘divine’. At the same time they assure him that however difficult his life may be as a single person, and he agrees that it is difficult, it can also offer up a type of romance: ‘that is not marked for tragedy, fatality, and failure from its beginning’.
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Many an intrepid voyager has set off in search of the life-intensifying experiences of solitary adventures, determined to find those spectacular spaces of isolation that can trigger a contemplative, even ecstatic, immersion in landscapes or other combinations of stunning silence, serenity and beauty. Or it may be forms of blissful absorption in music, sounds, or any number of overwhelming experiences that are sought out to delight the senses and, for a while, offer feelings of transcendence quite beyond material concerns. It is even possible, like May Sarton, Rosalind Belben or Jonathan Dollimore, to experience such sublime moments closer to home.

Yet, pondering these ecstatic experiences, it seems to me that even in the midst of life-enhancing solitude one is never really outside the social – though it is certainly the shedding of our awareness of the everyday that allows us to feel most confidently at one with the world. The very sense of being outside of our usual selves takes us back to those early encounters with the world, before we were weighed down by any strong sense of ourselves as separate beings, that is, before our conscious egos were formed, all too soon directing and constraining almost every move we make. Such total absorption is evident in the social explorations of young children, although in fact they are never truly solitary, and could not survive if they were, being as yet barely detached from the other, or others, watching over them. It was again Freud who emphasized the permanent traces of such experiences, prior to the capacity for conscious memory or language, leaving their indelible psychic residue that one way or another could always be encountered anew, as if for the very first time. It is this historical ‘truth’ of lost pieces of experience that is perhaps what seekers of solitude more easily stumble upon, bringing the return of those unknown intensities of the past.
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In a short essay, ‘Alone’, the much-admired Scottish poet, John Burnside, elegantly expresses some of this. He depicts his own intense love for, and annual treks into, the wild and silent beauty of the Nordic Arctic Circle, a place that seemed to him like ‘the edge of the world’, and strangely also, a place where he felt completely at home: ‘There are places where we can make out the curvature of the earth and I always think I can see it out there.’ But what is most compelling for me about his narrative is the wisdom he claims to have learned from a friend he made in the Arctic, with the very same love for the region, one who
had actually moved to live there decades earlier. What you have to remember, this friend had taken pains to explain, is that the supposedly solitary existence of romantic isolation is actually the opposite of what it seems: ‘ “Here, it’s not about solitude, it’s about having a real community. Once you have community,
then
you can be alone … When you go out to the edge of the world, you have to have something to come back to. You may not come back very often, but you have to know that you can. Otherwise, you’re lost”.’
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I agree, and this returns me to Cobb who, after completing his book, said he had become a more confident advocate for the possible joys of singleness, stating in his acknowledgements: ‘If writing this book has taught me anything, it’s that a single person doesn’t have to be lonely, which matters because sometimes we’ll each have to confront the worst heartbreak, in our own solitary way.’ Of course we will. Yet, as he continues, when that happens, as it happened to him with the death of his dearest friend, Will Munro, from brain cancer in 2010, ‘you’re lucky if you can see and embrace the wide world of friendship, interest, work, pleasure, and love that might just help you not collapse’.
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Quite! What we learn from his acknowledgements is another of the important, if implicit, aspects of his text. With or without occasional oceanic feelings of sublimity, what matters, especially when you live alone, is the support and love of friends, all those friends, he tells us, who were always there, and expressing their concern for him as well as for his companion, as he sat beside his own dying friend. Friends who will always be there when you need them, who are also part of a community to which you belong, are precisely what often becomes harder to find for many as they, as we, age – our oldest friends may depart or die, our elective affinities may reside with
communities that have faded away, just when we are most in need of personal support. It is the calamity and cliché of ageing.

The Limits of Friendship

What concerns me here, therefore, is the nature and limits of friendship. Inside the sanctified region of the couple, whatever its joy, misery or extreme fragility, one knows one is allowed to love. This is the case even for the lover who lives only with the fear of perpetual rejection. We might recall the quivering worshiper in Barthes’ fragments,
A Lover’s Discourse
, where adoration is not only permitted, but inevitable:

Every contact, for the lover, raises the question of an answer: the skin is asked to reply. (A squeeze of the hand – enormous documentation – a tiny gesture within the palm, a knee which doesn’t move away, an arm extended, as if quite naturally, along the back of a sofa and against which the other’s head gradually comes to rest – this is the paradisiac realm of subtle clandestine signs: a kind of festival not of the senses but of meaning).
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