Life lived is a life loved; a life so lived and loved is a life as monologue. I would even go as far as to postulate we become Monologue in our truer (even truest?) form when we learn to let go of the need for external verification of our own intrinsic self-worth. We need no other voice than our own to declare unequivocally “I am.” And we look out from our singularly unique point in the universe to respond to the whole of said universe, “You are.” We as Monologue create monologue, and at the leading-edge of this there is dialogue with Dialogue. That so writ …
We in the role of our minor monologues are all simpleton utterances, moments sluicing off from the next and into the next. We finish one flowered delivery only to begin again, cue cards tucked behind shirt-sleeve, prompting our way through scene after scene, play after play. We stand, light piercing our eyes, blinded into believing this our theatre full; an attentive attendance to our every performance. However, while the bill may be printed ink dry and nailed and posted even the crickets are figments, phantom attendees to our great strut upon the planks of a rose stained stage. We are neither truly heard nor seen by anyone or anything; more are we but an imagined perception of a blind deaf mute Universe. We become both actors and attendees in this, the descending arcs of our own passionate play. We awaken from undreamt dreams, a languishing sigh of eyelash on roughened cotton as we are caught glimpsing another, any other, near us. Here now we hear the more exuberant sigh of a passing smile nailed to our faces, moments later comes the fervid rustle of hair run through by crippling hands. On their lips lingers the moist scent of Lethe. We taste then we nibble then we bite and then we gorge off of each other. We offer a limb to get a limb, to cling one more day to our wandering in this our corporal hinterland. We stave off starvation, hunger driven by our transcendent angst, through these small shared mercies and these intimacies of nearness. We hunger. We hunger never knowing for what; never knowing that the feast to sate this hunger is waiting for us to but sit and partake.
I think we have it in us to spend a lifetime next to, never with, others. It is easy, I think, to let the fear of being alone—more particularly the sensation of loneliness—drive us to never sit in our own bones comfortably. The fear we often feel deepest is the fear of being alone. Let us be honest. This is an incomplete statement: “fear of being alone.” There are two words that trail along that we rarely mention in the company of others, or even to ourselves. And that is key, is it not? We fear being alone with ourselves. Because this is what being alone is. And it is this fear of ourselves that drives us to have an endless parade of dialogues with others, all are vain attempts to avoid having a monologue with ourselves. Worse, we not really having any meaningful dialogue with others. We are just having a rather convoluted conversation with ourselves, needing to know ourselves but failing to do so miserably. This is the true source of loneliness. It is not that we are alone but that we do not know (accept and love) who we are.
The universe is a cross product of an infinite set of moments with an infinite set of experiences framed by an infinite set of perspectives, these each splintering into an infinite set of separate universes. And ocean of oceans that we ultimately haul ourselves up and out of and back onto to our life’s beach, itself a sand-grained infinity of all this all over again. Here we might hear the waves, our hands no longer to carry clarion call but conical shell for us to listen to Life, it all allusion. There are dialogues. And then there is Dialogue. Dialogue begins the moment we stop having a monologue with ourselves through others. Dialogue is not mere egos co-conflating each through proximity, though. It is not an exchange of words. Or of ideas. Or even eternal sacrosanct emotions. Dialogue is the empathy of a sole soul to another. It is the cohabitation of existences, of opening up and stepping out of, and stepping back into one another. Dialogue is egoless; devoid of “I” and “you” even as this union itself then becomes its own “I” pronounced as /wi:/.
Maybe it is rare, theoretical even; nevertheless, I believe I have glimpsed it between moments in life; this thing called Dialogue. And how I do hunger for it. And how I am willing to wait for it, willing to wait for another person, we both as Monologues, in order that we might have dialogue, become Dialogue. Nevertheless, I have had enough “dialogues” in my own life to know I am still simperingly blind on stage waiting for this monologue to end and me as Monologue to begin.
EXIT stage left indeed.
