Being alone for long is not supposed to be a happy state in our society where so many individuals have fled lonely existence for the crowd. However, even without rubbing shoulders with the herd in order to directly participate in the stampede to consumption, a lonely individual may at least have the comfort of losing himself in mass culture. No-one has to lose touch now that everyone can be connected to the gigantic escape mechanism that makes chatterboxes of us all. Never mind for now the nagging doubt that the mechanism is absurd and that all methods of escape are lies because there simply is no escaping the fundamental fact of human existence, the inseparable individuality of the personal subsistence.

For the scholastics, subsistence, or under-standing, otherwise known as the hypostasis, or the personal union of existence and essence in the form of a crossed man, was a convenient bridge between ideality and reality, between the world of immutable universal essences and the world of fluctuating singular contingencies.  Indeed, may God forbid, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Mother as One, that a mere bookman would be God, as the Egyptians thought of their pharaohs - the Monophysites followed suit, eliminating the Father in the Son; never mind the Mother, the spiritual bridge.

But the Supreme Being was atomized when existence was placed before essence, wherefore individualism is now a flux of changing perceptions within windowless, basically incommunicable monads, not one of which can be responsible for itself, no matter how much existentialists want individualists to answer for their own fates. The faithful are left with Occassionalism, the vestigial notion that everything is an occasion directly worked at once by an invisible hand, and that the appearance of cause-and-effect relationships are somehow miraculous, for one thing cannot really act on another. Yet the existentialists have eliminated the essence of the essentialists altogether, and with dire consequences, for a life worth living takes a relationship between two, or it takes two to tango, and without essence, existence is dead. If essence may not be recovered by the Death of Godders, who believe that it is God who must be raised from the dead to save everyone from the crux of existence, let existence rest in peace, for we are zombies that merely think we think and communicate with one another.

My favorite way of staying in touch with essences is to curl up in a corner with the world's greatest literature and thereby converse with the greatest minds that have ever communed. I have always been a very slow reader because I like to listen to each statement and to silently respond to it with one of my own. This evasive technique has pleased me for many years, and, eventually, it pleased me so much that I almost forgot the real meaning of the word "lonely." How could I be lonely for the distractions of physical company when I had the pleasures of the finest spiritual beings?

That is not to say that I had completely rid myself of the nagging doubts of alienation. Even when immersed in the mob or its culture it is impossible to completely lose one’s self except for a few riotous moments. But I did not frequently suffer the anxiety of loneliness: it seemed to me that loneliness is propaganda. Rather than the basic anxiety or fear of abandonment, I specifically feared the crowd. I did not want to run with the herd, nor did I want to constantly be with somebody. I wanted to be alone with my spirits. What I dreaded was that I would not be able to pay for my aloneness, that I would have to take that job at the homeless burger franchise where all my spirits would be jostled then trampled underfoot. For as far as I am concerned, real homelessness is not in being alone without a defensive shell: homelessness is having to work for a consumption franchise.

Of course I had to return to the franchise occasionally. Woe is me, there are no safe homeless shelters with private rooms, free sandwiches and word-processors. At least I found none, having failed where professional freeloaders had succeeded. Getting hungry for money instead of love, back to work I went.

I am not a burger-flipper at the franchise; I am a part-time bean-counter: that is my role, the definition that accidentally presented itself to me one day as a viable alternative to starvation or armed robbery. Although I count beans very well with an automatic calculator at hand, I am not really a bean-counter, as every legitimate bean-counter acquainted with me knows; they know I am a wordsmith at heart and wish they had not given me their email addresses. Alas, when assuming my homeless-burger franchise role, I am a liar. I want to go home and curl up with my spirits, get up and pace around my magic carpet for awhile, then sacrifice a few essays on my Altar Ego. Therefore, when I have accumulated a few beans counting beans, I am bound by my conscience to resign to that end.

However I regret to say that I am never quite at home with my voluntary homelessness when I am home alone with my spirits. You see, the spirits I converse with are not up to date. Neither am I, nor do I really want to be even though I would be better off being eternal or forever here and now – if I lived entirely in the here in now, I think I would be a tomato, and I would rather be a cucumber, or as cool as one.

As eternal as essences may be, they require updating from time to time, for space alone, the order of things, needs reordering here and there or life would be void. Alas, I happen to exist despite my essence, and I am, if I am anything, behind the times, alienated from my idea future, wherefore I must confess that I have my desperately anxious moments, where I think I should subscribe to the Miami Herald or the Honolulu Advertiser so that people will know of my body’s death as the papers pile up by my door.

That is why I advise you, although I may not be as lonely as you, to just say “no” to being forever me if you are in fact almost up to date. Perhaps someday my spirits and I will coincide with you and yours in the Other World, where everyone is 35, healthy, has a PhD and is fully employed in loving work, and we shall all shake hands by the Milky Way if not embrace in the Field of Honey, and rejoice once and for all, in the name of the past, the present, and the future as one. But today I am out of kilter with your time, so although I am at home alone, I am somewhat discontented because I am not alone with your aloneness. That sorry fact of the subject matter is the impetus for my present sacrifice, this very essai or nonsensical experiment.

One cause of my disjunction is my early preference for souls that existed in miserable times of war and want. I was actually growing up in times of peace and plenty, notwithstanding the forgotten war in Korea and the police action in Vietnam. The atom-bomb scare was due cause for anxiety if one did not have a bomb shelter like rich people did, but I was not actually suffering the ravages of war and poverty. I admired the so-called existentialists who survived it and were discovered hiding by American journalists in cellar cafes in Paris. I marched for peace in the Midwest, yet at the same time I sorely wanted to be in combat. I was given a toy machine gun at an early age, and Combat would become my favorite television series. I wanted to be a warrior president like General Eisenhower, or at least a war romantic.

As I mature to my conclusion, I sometimes think I should have been killed in action, that to die in battle in some godforsaken place is better than death in a hospital; or on the toilet in the morning, where they say many heart attacks take place – I tried to stay off the toilet until noon, but that aggravated my anxiety and caused me to enroll in an expensive course in modern banking. Martin Luther, you might recall, discovered that works really do not work while sitting on the toilet in the tower.

The existentialists and their ancient forerunners were so dedicated to suffering extremes to obtain salvation that at first I did my best to make myself miserable for the same reasons they entertained, and I fancied myself an extremist, a radical revolutionary, a heretic. Yet, in the relative prosperity which served as my foil, I was inauthentic. I was not really suffering. I was afraid. I was, it now pains me to think, a coward whose bark was much bigger than his bite. I envisioned myself as a symbolic hero, a great existentialist hero who would write freedom manifestos while sitting out the war in a homeless camp. Inauthentic as I still am, I refuse to condemn myself for my barking maneuvers; I console myself with the thought that the world needs barking dogs, and that my instinctive function is to bark at the big wheels rolling by so people can get out of the way. I am a muckraker of sorts. Therein lays my redemption. Beware if I sell out and become a politician’s speechwriter.

Just because a dog barks does not necessarily mean he is entirely unhappy. Nevertheless, as I have implied, even in the tranquility of solitude, the pleasure of being alone with myself and my beloved spirits, I have experienced some real existential anxiety. I have referred to my disjunction: I am not yet a man of my times; I prefer to oppose contemporaneity with past times in hopes of reviving the existence my heroes and heroines. Alas, every existence is stillborn absent essence. Even worse in a culture that makes money its god, I was dismayed to discover there is no market for my existentialist musings, moanings, and groanings. Existentialism is passé now that essentialism is dead.

It has been my latest conceit to match the likes of Dostoevsky's NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND with my own confessional tract entitled SCRAWLINGS FROM LIMBO. My effort to reach out and shake the hands, wring the hearts, and disturb the minds of my ideal hence fictional public has fallen flat on its dismayed face. The reading public, other than a few old fogeys, is not slightly interested in the old brand of existentialism. Existentialism is of course inauthentic in this time of abundance, something swept away by bourgeois progress along with communism. Fortunately for the memory of existentialists, they did not know what existentialism really was but decided to embrace the term when it became popular in the press; so we don’t know what we have lost – maybe our existence.

You will be happy to hear I have not lost hope for and faith in my ultimate happiness. The happiness package is wrapped with great expectations bound to provoke disappointment when the gift is opened, thus providing another good opportunity to strive for happiness. It occurred to me that, although my type of suffering had been outmoded and was therefore unpopular not to mention inauthentic in my particular case, all was not lost. What was lacking in my work was the true expression of my present anguish. I confess that I have always been an essentialist at heart, and trying to be an existentialist grieved me. Somehow I always knew that I do not really exist as an “I”. Existence is a myth. I am really not an existentialist nor can I become one no matter how hard I try.

Why?

Existence is dead.

May existence rest in peace!

Long live essence!

-X-