Ah! To be all alone, in a little cell, with nobody near me…”
from “The Desire for Hermitage,” tenth of the Hermit Songs. Words 8th-9th century, trans. Sean O’Faolain
Isolation and solitude and loneliness seem to be the buzzwords of the COVID-19 pandemic, but those words describe the opposite of my experience. My spouse has been working from home, and in one of the strangest springs on record, the weather has not been favorable for either one of us to get outside for any significant stretch of time. It’s been windy and chilly if not actively raining.
When he works from home, his co-workers might as well also be there. It’s not like they can see anything I’m up to, but I can hear his phone calls and meetings, and I find it nearly impossible to get into that intense state of creativity that only comes from true solitude. By which I mean that sometimes I can’t even put up a pile of laundry, much less even think of revising an essay or singing anything.
There are a few ways I normally escape this situation. One is to go to a coffee shop or a library, where there is noise, but it’s background noise made by strangers, all blending together into a sort of murmur. Obviously not an option when everything is closed. That leaves outdoors.
Outside is my natural habitat. I’ll say I’m going “to my Rock Creek office” and find a place to camp out for hours with my laptop while a spider weaves a web on me. Since I don’t work traditional hours, I’m used to having many of the natural areas of the city to myself while other people are at work. Some weekdays, I can ride my bike for ten miles through Rock Creek Park, right through the middle of DC, without seeing another human. (Of course, my singing work is mainly evenings and weekends, so that’s a trade-off.)
Once the weather got nicer, people started discovering not only the beaten path but also what’s off it. They’re home instead of at work or commuting, and a lot of people have more free time to get outdoors. Closures of other parklands mean that everybody has been corralled into the spots in the center of the city that are usually mine.
The trails and the roads that have been closed to traffic are so crowded with pedestrians and cyclists that I have to make a decision every time I see another person. Getting lost in thought, writing and rewriting a sentence in my mind until it’s right, or memorizing lyrics are not options when we all have to make sure we’re far enough apart. Along with the adults, there are children out as well, running and screaming through the trails. It thrills me that people are getting out with their families and enjoying the natural areas, but I feel like “my” space has been a little invaded!
It was on Maundy Thursday that I first volunteered to do food delivery to elderly and disabled neighbors in my area of DC through a government program. In the absence of church, helping feed people seemed like quite an appropriate way to celebrate that holiday which centers around a communal meal. This became a regular volunteer job that lasted into June. I love meeting people (from a distance), and this pursuit has allowed me to see some areas of the city I wasn’t familiar with. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it can be draining.
Since we call everyone before coming to their doors, I’ve had to have a smartphone as my constant companion. I don’t know if you have one of those things, but it wants to be your one and only, and it does a pretty good job of it. It doesn’t help that I’m wearing medical gloves and misdialing every other number.
I’m trying to call somebody for the second time because they didn’t pick up their phone because they don’t recognize the number, and I’m holding two meals in one hand and the list of delivery addresses in the other and getting COVID because the phone (which I have touched with my gloves that may have also touched germs) is mashed between my shoulder and my face, and the person I’m calling doesn’t know how to use their voicemail, but I figure if I call twice in a row they might pick up. This is when a string of group texts is going off about a choir project, and I get a call from the credit union about the query I sent, and one of the food delivery clients calls me back to thank me.
I get in the car and plug in the phone. It always wants to override whatever’s playing, whether it’s a CD or the radio or silence, and it starts playing one of the things on the phone like an audiobook or podcast, and I nearly wreck the car trying to stop it. And the contagion in the air feels all-pervasive. Is it helpful to sanitize my gloves between clients? Does hand sanitizer even work? Much less on gloves? And it’s raining. And now the phone is wet.
I get home, and I have to decide what’s potentially contaminated. I take off one glove, and the hand it was on is now clean, right? Until I touch the other glove to take it off. I use a series of rags and things to open the doors and turn on the faucet, and I even change my shoes before going anyplace besides the first sink I can get to where I can scrub my hands and wrists.
But then I touch the phone again, and that’s surely contaminated. Now I take it out of its protective case, very carefully, and now the phone isn’t contaminated but the Home button might be. Is swabbing it with alcohol enough? Did I touch the uncontaminated phone with my contaminated hand? Did I wash my hands again? Did I remember to do the full twenty seconds?
Did I wash my hands before washing my face, which the surface of the phone touched? Do I have to wash my face for twenty seconds? Which parts of it? Can I open this mail? Has it been quarantined long enough? What day was it that I last used that shirt as a face mask? Is it even effective? Is the milk still under quarantine, or can we take it out of the bag? Okay, I think I’m good. Now it’s time for Zoom happy hour. My hair looks weird.
It’s like I’m on all the time – on call, on camera, on guard – and that has zapped my creative energy. I’ve lost my ability to predict my emotional state. I sing some of the most sublime music in the Western canon into a laptop camera with no feeling whatsoever, then I turn around and see a teddy bear in someone’s window that says “we’ll get through this!” and I start weeping. I know my experience is nothing compared to what other people are facing due to the pandemic, but it’s still real.
And I just want to be alone. Really alone. For a long time. Not for hours, for days. I want to sing alone and write alone and weep alone and be alone. I want to breathe without a mask because there are no other humans around.
“Ah, to be all alone, in a little cell, with nobody near me…”
The last of the Hermit Songs is “The Desire for Hermitage.” I think I can say that of all the art songs I’ve learned, it’s one of the very closest to my heart. When life gets to be too much, when human relationships are complicated, when to-do lists seem endless and pursuits of pleasure are diminished because of a ticking clock, how beautiful it would be to be all alone. No phones or clocks, no eyes or ears, no voices or speakers or cameras or leaf blowers.
The piece begins with the piano droning on a solitary note and a few ornaments, a very concrete portrayal of aloneness. As the singer enters, Barber sets the parcels of sparse but colorful poetry almost as if each phrase were a sigh of longing. The music gradually builds in emotional intensity until the singer, left speechless in his world of fantasy, simply stops (“far from the houses of the great…”). At that point in the piece, I’ve always visualized this monk at the moment of enlightenment. He’s in the Seattle Art Museum, but I saw him in an art exhibit at the Atlanta Olympics that was highly formative for me.
With the singer now speechless, the piano continues to carry the feeling of ecstasy through to a loud climax before suddenly and dramatically shifting back to the single note motive from the beginning of the piece. As the singer regains composure and the voice re-enters, the piece – and the song cycle – ends in a coda of calm resignation.
Last week I got to go to a natural area and had what seemed like acres to myself. I stayed all day and saw three other humans and heard none. I have described that day to a few people, and I imagine that the expression on my face looks exactly like the one on this monk’s face.
You can hear “The Desire for Hermitage” at Spotify or wherever you get your streaming audio, or purchase a permanent digital download from your favorite music service.
