On Solitude and Silence: Dealing with loneliness as a creative
Isolation and connection as two forces of equal importance.
Last year, in the peak of summer, I went offline and gave up my phone for a month. This was not entirely my idea. Rather, it was a key component of an Arteles Artistic Residency based in Finland. I sent out final missives before the blackout.
One reply read: ‘Cool, I’ll just Whatsapp you!’
‘No,’ I had to reiterate. ‘I will not have a phone. At all.’
The concept was totally alien. Many replied with suspicion: Why would you do that? Isn’t that a bit extreme? A bit unsafe? Are you joining some kind of cult?
It’s a fair enough reaction. In this day and age, our mobile phones are very much an extension of our anatomy. The last time I’d been without a phone, I was probably around 10 years old. And the last time I went without an internet connection for a whole month, I was more like 6 years old. I’m in my thirties now, and so I have lived the majority of my life with ‘connection.’
The idea of a month of solitude - and silence - from the noise of the modern world was unprecedented in my adult life. As you might predict, it taught me something invaluable.
But first: What is ‘solitude’ anyway?
The pressure I face (and perhaps many others too, whether we are creative folks or not), is summarised well by Deborah Levy in The Cost of Living:
I want everything from life, I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and have loneliness, to work much and write good books and to travel and enjoy myself...
This is the paradox at hand.
I can see all the options with a simple scroll, and in the process of wanting to engage in the world, I can find myself using that scroll as a stand in for getting to grips with what I really, deeply want or need.
As social creatures, we crave connection. At the time of my self-imposed exile, I was a foreigner living on the other side of the planet from my home country of Australia. I have no family of my own here, and live alone.Solitude is a familiar feeling. Relying on friends made in a busy, transient city can feel risky. And despite living in one of the biggest cities on Earth, I can go weeks without talking to another human, if I so choose. What would ‘connection’ even look like in a place where your solitude is reinforced by the robotic voice at the checkout of every Sainsbury’s?
Arriving in Finland, however, I realised something important: I had been filling my time and space with as much noise and activity as possible. I was hoping that, in this way, I might artificially create the connection I craved. I still felt lonely.
But in the forest, where I watched the woodpeckers in the trees outside my window, where the sun never quite set, and where the moss was a delicious soft carpet beneath bare footed wanderings, I didn’t think at all about solitude. I did not crave connection. Everything seemed simplified. There was no paradox. I detoxed from the scroll, living with other artists who could be in turn highly social and deeply introverted and focused. If we wanted to speak, we could do so easily. If we wanted to be alone, there was a vast expanse beyond our shared quarters (or the easy closing of a door). Balance was suddenly so possible. What unlocked this?
Deep connection, not more connection
This is not an original point to make. But for artistic types solitude has often been equated with a kind of spiritual quality that has also long been associated with the ‘magic’ of creativity. Hermitage, and the vow of silence feels like a way to access that other plane.
In Paul Auster’s City of Glass, the character Stillman locks up his own child, keeping him away from outside influence, in order to unlock ‘the original language’ - something close to the word of God. Auster draws upon a concept here that for humans to access this higher understanding, a traumatic degree of silence must be imposed. But for most of us mere mortals, a painful degree of solitude can’t be tolerated; we are sponges. We need to absorb. Without the noise, we go blank. At some point I’ll expand on this further as a response to the concept of ‘writer’s block’ (or any creative block). It is my view that there is no block, only emptiness where inspiration is required. But I digress…
While I require some degree of silent processing, the idea of being imprisoned in my solitude is unbearable. There is a reason we impose solitary confinement as the harshest of punishments. And yet, by voluntarily choosing silence for a while, I fundamentally altered (and so did my practice).
Things that changed in the silence…
Here’s what I noticed:
I was a lot calmer and less anxious, particularly when trying to sleep
I had way better access and recall when it came to my own vocabulary
I felt happier and more balanced overall
My values shifted
Time to think, create and either talk or remain entirely silent at will, was life changing. That last point, about values, was particularly important. Let me unpack it a little further.
Real intimacy =/= togetherness
Here is a quote from Richard Bach:
The opposite of loneliness isn’t togetherness, it’s intimacy.
We have all been in rooms where we are surrounded by people and yet feel entirely alone. What the forest brought out into stark relief is that I didn’t require more bodies. I didn’t need more friends or texts or notifications. What I needed was intimacy.
I was lucky to have made some truly deep and important connections in my time in the Finnish forest. In particular, with two artists with whom I often shared hours-long conversations in the communal kitchen. When we left the forest and reached out to each other from across the Atlantic, the subject line of the first email read: ‘I need a four hour conversation in the kitchen.’ It wasn’t just us three: people came and went in those conversations, and we had people from ages 27 - 60+, from all over the globe, all of whom were dealing with the same sorts of questions.
In those conversations, we went deep on art, life, love, lack, money, time… These were intimate discussions. We grappled with the things that impact purpose, values, and the way we each live our lives. There is nothing more important to enabling creative work, I think, than that. Realising our place in the vast human net is humbling and inspiring.
I have often been caught up in the idea that more input will mean more output. This is a false notion. We need connection to create - we need to value intimacy to even bother making things, I think. But then, we need silence, to process those thoughts into something that might really help us to connect more deeply.
Becoming more intimate, with art
Elaine Auyoung wrote in the Unspoken Intimacy of Aesthetic Experience:
Because verbal and visual artists who seek to convey multisensory, social, and affective information must do so indirectly, they implicitly establish distance between themselves, their subject matter, and their audience. Our ability to comprehend implicit information in spite of this distance can in turn become the grounds for a tacit sense of rapport.
In other words, it is the very ‘otherness’ and distance of art-making that offers up this potential for real deep connection to occur. It’s like talking to someone new in a kitchen for the first time and discovering just how much you’ve got in common.
Except you’re not just sharing a kitchen in the present moment. It’s way bigger and riskier than that. When I look at this picture below by John Singer Sergeant, many things are possible: I feel I understand something about the artist, a man who likely had very few common experiences with me, his being an American, living at the turn of the 20th century, and a painter, and a man (while I am none of these things). And yet, in his work I see something familiar about the way we look at the world. What we care about. I also understand something about its subject, the Lady Agnew of Lochnaw. That look in her eye is also familiar to me.
To quote Auyoung on a more direct point:
Our engagement with verbal and visual art produces a tacit sense of intimacy.
In other words: art can be a cure. Art can give us intimacy with people we have no business understanding. Your creative expression makes that intimacy possible. And while we do not all have to be artists - and we won’t be - there is something magical about realising the potential of art, as a true source of intimacy. Artistic creation requires the solitude and silence to distill our experiences into something that can be heard and seen and understood, beyond the span of our lifetimes. It is profoundly connected work. It is a cure to the endless scroll to simply stop and contemplate. It is a cure for the pain of loneliness to realise that our work can help us matter to each other.
Balance is always tough to find. Being alone, being together, speaking and remaining silent. We can’t always get this balance right. But hopefully, by choosing the noise we listen to carefully, and the people we spend time with thoughtfully, we can get a step closer to the ingredients that keep us hopeful.
Weekly extras and joys to share… 🌿
From Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
On the power of ceremony…
It marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine. The coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle…
What ceremonies are you creating in your practice to help you turn what might become a slog into something sacred? I wonder about this a lot, and I would love to know your answer.
Until next week…
Be well,
CCx