In
‘Bluets’, Maggie Nelson writes that ‘loneliness is solitude with a problem’.
What that problem might be? And where might it originate from? We, as human
beings, are social animals. That’s basically the reason behind our whole
success story of becoming the ‘supreme species’. But while our world building,
progress, and achieving greatness might require tireless amount of corporation
and working together, when we turn our gaze inwards, there hardly remains any hope
for an external aid. Gazing inwards, we see something that we not only can
understand, but cannot possibly convey either – therefore, it remains a tedious
challenge for each and every one of us who introspects, to bring anyone from
outside anywhere near to what resides on the inside of us.
What need,
then, is there for us to gaze inwards, given how problematic the nature of such
unnecessary activity tends to be? We aren’t the only social species on planet
Earth; after all, we come from a line of monkeys, who can also work in groups
beside many other animals that also have a social bonding and function in
groups. So, the reason behind our supremacy isn’t only our ability to work
together towards a common goal, but something more abstract that sets us apart
from all other living beings on this planet: consciousness.
Consciousness
can be explained, not defined, in many ways: it is the mind in our brains, it
is our ability to remember and analyze, to carry a past with us, to think
abstract things, to reason and to understand, to question and seek answers, to
feel pain and be aware of it, to seek happiness and wellbeing, to defy the
general order of nature, to meddle with things, to go beyond and seek further
still – to question, to question, to quest.
And it is
our consciousness that, when allowed, takes us on a lonelier path. Paths where
we have to ask question that aren’t common, that don’t serve a practical
purpose in our lives, but questions that we cannot avoid. When did it all
begin? Who began it? Is there God? Who am I? Why is there anything at all, and
not nothing at all? What will happen after I die? Is there an afterlife? When
will it all end? And so on and so forth. These existential questions point
toward our innate need of trying to understand the essence of our existence, or
lack thereof. Tired from the busyness of the world, with its hustles never
ending, when we turn to look within, such thoughts then come to occupy us, and
we realize that all of what we’ve been doing has only been a distraction – nay,
a cheat!
The very
first shot of this documentary reached somewhere deep inside me: a lonely lady
walking in rocky desert; a lady alone and the vastness of desert. Haven’t we
all felt so lonely, so tiny, and so on our own at times? I was downloading the
subtitles for this documentary, not knowing that the video file already had one
attached with it. It is a documentary about this lonely lady who collects and
breeds honey from wild bees, while caring for her bedridden mother in a middle
of a rocky desert, somewhere in Turkey, I believe. She is Turkic, and she has
refused to move along with the world, or her village in fact, when all of it
moved and she chose to stay behind. Her aptness of skills in extracting honey
from beehives (half only, and leaving the other half for the bees), and
breeding bees for seasonal extractions, has helped her survive and make a living
in the harshness of the desert. She is so natural at it; she respects and cares
for the bees, and the favor is returned handsomely.
While we may
come to this world alone, we are, if fortunate, born amongst a bunch of people
we later call family. They care for us, raise us, and we remain attached and
dependent upon them until we are adults ourselves. And then, one by one, they
either die or leave. Friends, a new bunch of people that we come to live with,
although of our own choosing, to a variable degree – also meet the same fate.
They either leave us, or die – but mostly they leave us because they have to
start on their own lives. Growing up isn’t an easy business. So, who
stays? Work buddies change, and they
hardly care for us, and if so, only by courtesy. Love remains, probably the
only place we don’t feel lonely or afraid. But it too is an agonizing business
– too few a joy, shit ton of pain. Love is one of the only occupations that
lasts a lifetime: family and friends fade, works end and you get retired, but
love and its memories stay with you – more as a punishment than anything else. Very
few of us get to keep that which we love: we either lose it by loving it too much
or we stop loving it under the curse of familiarity.
Yet we are
never alone – lonely, but rarely alone. Everywhere you go, you’ll meet people.
Lots of them, all of them busy living, and all of them lost about themselves.
If we humans hadn’t made living so closely linked to busyness, what would so
many of us be doing, if not going mad? But there aren’t a lot of us in the
deserts, mountains, remote islands, jungles – and what a fate to be born into
one of those. Watching this documentary, I was continuously struck by how
lonely such a life would be and engaged in thinking, what would one do with
that mundane of things: time? Seriously, how would you pass time? Chores for
one thing, eating, sleeping, caring another – but what then? What about the
plentiful empty hours? Will you sing? Or go on walks? Will you dance or talk to
yourself? Will you sit and observe or will you think things? Would you try to
remember your dreams or wish you were living a different fate? Will you get bored
or just accustomed?
But
solitude wouldn’t be as frightening as loneliness. In loneliness, you are
missing something, you feel like something has gone terribly wrong. Solitude is
a more peaceful state. It is when you are more used to and prefer to be with
yourself than anyone else. Your brain gets more attuned to find engagements
that involve your own company and consciousness, rather than being dependent on
the people outside. Yet the very reason that solitude seems so remote and
unpopular an idea to us, and we only come to feel lonely when left alone,
points towards a problem: a problem of bringing people too close together, and
involving them in constant projects that never end – nay, should never end.
Towards the
middle of the documentary, after our lonely lady comes from the nearest market
place having sold some honey, she finds that she’ll now be having neighbors. A
large family, consisting of the parents and numerous children, come to live
adjacent to the lady, in hopes of settling there. They have a lot of livestock:
sheep, cows, goats. But the husband is also quite interested in the extraction
of honey. He sets up many boxes with beehives inside, and the bees get busy working. The lady isn’t threatened by it, if only pleased. She mingles
with the children and talks with the husband and wife, where we get the only
snippets of her previous life. She also shares her expertise in extracting
honey. But the husband gets greedy when offered to produce some fifty kilos of
honey that the purchaser promises to buy from him immediately. He takes all the
hives from the boxes, leaving none for the bees – and soon enough, there aren’t
many of them left to make honey at all.
‘Hell is
other people’ wrote Sartre. And whether he meant that what makes our lives hell
is the presence of other people, or the fact that it is eventually in the
perception of other people that we remain after we die, and there we shall burn
mercilessly under their judgements. But it is often so: while our lives are
made stupidly easier by the people working together, it is also made more
difficult in other areas. The civilization, and its constituent societies then
come to adopt norms, and values, and goals, which while appearing for the
general good, only serve the ideals of a few. Then, all are made to aspire to
those ideals, and suffer. Love, status, money, prestige, comfort, luxury,
beauty – these are but only the evil makings of men, and our lives have become
nothing but an endless pursuit of these standards.
The lady is
greatly distressed in seeing the bees shrink in numbers. She cries to her
mother, exclaiming what the neighbors have done. Her mother can but utter only
a few words: they will pay, my sweet daughter; God will make them pay. While we
are on the topic of her mother, let’s talk more about her. She cannot see
anymore, since her right eye is damaged and the other too infected to see. She
is always on her bed, and mostly lying down, asleep. She only sits to eat and
drink, and when her daughter washes her hair. There’s a fireplace near her bed
to keep her warm, and a few blankets always covering her. They have occasional
conversations, but it mostly involves a lot of shouting. At one point, the
daughter asks why wasn’t she married if any suitors had come, her mother says
that it was her father that didn’t give her hand. But she confesses how she
would never marry, for who would take care of her after she’s gone. You’re a
good daughter, her mother says.
And God,
unlike Himself, or maybe not His deed after all, does make the neighbors pay.
The calves die, there’s no honey left, their children and wife rebel against
the husband: they see the worst of it all in so rapid a time. They leave. But
the winter arrives. One day while adjusting the antenna for the radio
connection, the lady calls for her mother repeatedly, asking if the radio is
singing: no reply. The next scene we see her crying by the bed; her mother is
no more. She buries her, exclaiming what she would do without her. And yes,
what would she do? One less task for her to do, yet one that occupied most of
her day. It was heartbreaking to see this, and I kept wondering how was it all let
to filmed so raw, so original, so life-like, so true? Children getting stung by
bees, boy pulling a calf out of a cow’s ass, cursing left and right, and the
rawness of it all. It fascinates you, shifts your perspective about life.
In the last shot, the lady returns to the mountains, where she knows a few natural beehives, and extracts the leftover honey. Sitting under the setting sun, she eats the beehive honey while also feeding her dog the same thing. It is a peaceful ending, one that reminds how life reforms itself even after the most damaging of events. I admired and was in awe of the greatness of this documentary; its grandness. How quiet it all was, and how peaceful. Woe to us living this addictively hallow lives, always busy, always doing, with our futile ambitions and past full of regrets. Our philosophies, our achievements, our progress, our cities, the internet – none of it measure up to the quietness or wisdom of the life lived in solitude, without the human problem of turning it into loneliness. She is great and none but she.