Alienation is Too Easy

Truth time: I don’t like the blog entry I published yesterday. I slept badly wondering if I had gotten too far from my own belief in kindness, in looking for the best in everyone, which it turns out, isn’t for the just the moral in some Disney movie I’d let my kids watch, or something to pay lip-service to, while turning around and gossiping with friends in the corner. I see it as a spiritual challenge and conscious choice, a battle fought against the darkness and indifference of the universe. There are more unkind things than what I wrote on Amazon, of course, and actually, the internet abounds with unkindness and cattiness, but that’s one of those things that I find toxic about the internet, people not imagining that what they write could wound, might very well be read by the person who they’re writing about, or thinking that being unkind about somebody more famous than themselves is the way to get noticed. Also, I tried to write about the book, and not the writer, but because the writer was writing about himself it got blurry for me.

Raven’s in London this week. He is going to bed as I get the kids from school, getting up as I go to sleep, and working the rest of the time, so I don’t have my reality check. I feel disconnected from the world of people who are not my children, a little disconnected from myself. And the second to last sentence I wrote about the book, that I found an underlying note of alienation in it sort of resonating with me, may be the most true thing I wrote.

Alienation it turns out is what happens to me when I stray from kindness and from looking for the best in everyone. I start to wonder if my own existential despair is cheapened by being shared with angry, black-wearing adolescents, I start to see the punk rock snarl, the frat boy smirk, and realize they are masks for the Edvard Munch Howl-like expression my own face is concealing with the nicey nice smile I wear dropping off the kids at school. I wonder if everyone around your seems to be living a happy life of television and barbecues and shopping and talking about politics while I struggle to figure out what it all means. I wonder why I haven’t outgrown my existential despair and turned into a grown up like all the grown-ups around me.

And I was ready to weep with relief when words started echoing through my head and I realize that besides kindness and looking for the best in others, I have one other small antidote for alienation in my shelf:

I celebrate myself
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belong to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul
I lean and loafe at my ease… observing a spear of summer grass.

Seriously? I am considering getting myself a “WWWWWD?” bracelet, to remind myself “What Would Walt Whitman Do?” Leaves of Grass is the opposite of alienation. I know it’s a bit tricky to ascribe personalities to those long dead whom one only knows through a handful of poems, but Uncle Walt lives in my head, a mad populist, nudging me “Alienation is too easy. Do better than that. Every atom that belongs to me as good belongs to you.” He reminds me that we are all made from the same dust and filled with the same longings. That life is too short when our pulses all beat a music together, that when we are so connected, when memes spread faster than any epidemiologist could comprehend, what hurts you, hurts me, what I celebrate you celebrate. He makes me see the holiness of the human spirit in even those people who don’t get me, reminds me of that new mother feeling of awe that every human being I encountered was once a tender newborn.

Alienation for me is fear, fear that I am disconnected and will never connect again. It’s being protected, aloof and rejecting the million ways around me to connect. It is pretending that my inability to accept myself at the moment is instead an inability to accept others. And it’s something I cannot afford. So, um, I’m going to go read some poetry for a while.