Scott Walker’s
Eleven Kinds Of Loneliness
by
James Caig











“You can be lonely anywhere,” writes Olivia Laing in The Lonely City, “but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people.”

We’re lonely not because of the absence of other people, Laing claims, but the absence of connection. “An inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired.” An inability, of course, that’s most palpable in a crowd.

A brilliant book about loneliness that makes you feel less alone.


Laing wrote the book during a period of loneliness in New York City. She found solace in art and in the example of the artists themselves. By exploring the lives and work of Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Klaus Nomi and others, Laing found a way to understand, process, and even alleviate loneliness.

Scott Walker doesn’t appear in the book, but he could have done. To listen to Scott’s music — his voice, his words, the world he created with his songs of the late 60s — is to inhabit loneliness, to feel its contours from the inside. His art alone might have qualified him as a subject, but his own life and journey reinforce the case — he’s almost an antecedent to Laing. He made art of others’ loneliness so that he might process his own, his career a Russian doll of masks, exiles and retreats. First as the lead in the Walker Brothers, none of whom were brothers, or called Walker; then finding fame, like Hendrix, as an American in London. Then the escape, an existentialist with his own TV show, the popstar aesthete with dwindling record sales, before a numbed life as a better-read Matt Monro was rescued by the angular, weird Walker Brothers revival in the 70s and then one edgy album in the 80s until eventually he just… faded from view.

By the time his stock was rising and I first heard (of) him, it was the early the 90s. He was portrayed as a recluse then. Return seemed unlikely, but not as unlikely as the nature of it when it came: a series of strange, abstracted albums from the very outer edges of music. Over the course of 50 years Scott had managed to leave fame behind, and on the way the characters he wrote — invented and imagined or observed and recorded from real life — reveal an artist obsessed, like Laing, with the absence of connection, and how to live without it.

In her book, Laing quotes Virginia Woolf describing what she called an inner loneliness, something she thought it might prove illuminating to analyse. ‘If I could catch the feeling, I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable world.’ That’s what it sounds like to listen to Scott. Laing understands Woolf to mean that loneliness could be a passport to “an otherwise unreachable experience of reality.” I think Scott believed that too.

Before he reached towards the truly ‘unreachable’, he made his reputation with his work of the late 60s period. And it’s this Scott that I love. The Scott of albums all called Scott. The Scott catalysed by Brel to write about outsize girls and the outskirts of life. Scott: the writer with the cineaste’s eye for a street scene and a novelist’s ear for inner monolgue. The master of poignant portraiture.

Ian Penman puts it best. In his essay, A Dandy In Aspic, he describes Scott’s lonely city and the people who live there:

“A wide spectrum of the dispossessed, overlooked, looked down on: old soldiers, single mothers, lonely drag queens, ridiculed eccentrics and loners. Life at a lower volume; a quiet murmur of disappointment, like rain falling on a river. Alone in your room looking out through smeared windows, or isolated in the passing crowd. A sense of listening to voices on the margins, the sadness of other lives, that is glancingly political. Scott’s prostitutes, hustlers, transvestites are not lumped together, but dealt with in individually tender portraits, emerging as if from discreet eavesdropping, in and out of time.”


This is the book where you’ll find that roll call. Penman’s as good on Scott as he is on anyone.


Of course, Scott didn’t invent this kind of thing, not even in the pop world. Paul McCartney was already devestatingly good at it. In 1966 alone, the Beatles sang of Eleanor Rigby and Father McKenzie, the wannabe paperback writer, the abandoned lover of For No One. Scott, I like to think, took this empathy for lonely souls and ran with it on his escape route from fame, somehow freed to make it both more mainstream and more subversive. His songs feel like late 60s pop albums than they do easy listening for outsiders. Like a Diane Arbus exhibition in musical form: formal art that’s obsessed with people usually put outside the frame. It’s like someone decided to adapt Last Exit To Brooklyn with an MOR score.

***

Which brings us back to New York City. Scott’s world was itself a lonely city, but a nameless one, and too Europeanised to be New York. He was American who spent most of his life in London. He quoted Camus on an album sleeve and distilled Bergman’s The Seventh Seal into that same album’s opening song. His city is hard to place in time or location, its terrain referencing at various points cobbled streets, tower blocks, brothels, rivers, fire escapes, trains, rainy windows, indifferent neighbours and “cellophane streets”. It could be Dublin or Copenhagen or Weimar Berlin or Swinging London, but it all feels of a piece. Like a short story collection — that uniformity of mood coupled with the infinite variety of life. It really does make you think of the New York of Hubert Selby Jr, and of Richard Yates.

The short stories that Richard Yates published one year after Revolutionary Road in 1962 were about Manhattan office workers, teachers hated by their pupils, would-be novelists working as hacks, confused men and disappointed women. Twenty years after its publication, by which time it was a book loved only by those in the know, The New York Times compared the collection to Joyce’s Dubliners, describing its “exposure of the small, fiercely defended dignities and much vaster humiliations of characters who might have been picked almost at random from the fat telephone book of the Borough of Queens.”

This too is what it feels like to listen to Scott Walker. It feels like that because his is a poetic vision that bends nature and the built enviroment to its will — there is an incredible sense of place, and mood. Scott paints his world for us, sometimes with pointilistic dabs, sometimes on a backdrop rollered in great arcs. It’s a pathetic fallacy that swallows the world like the world sometimes swallows its inhabitants’ dreams.

Yates’ collection was called Eleven Kinds Of Loneliness. Each story was a poignant glimpse into a different shade, you could feel its contours from the inside. Just as you can with the music Scott made between 1968 and 1970.


Read about Richard Yates and his ‘unhappy people’ here. I found this book in a charity shop in Finsbury Park.


And so in tribute, I propose Scott Walker’s Eleven Kinds Of Loneliness.

Eleven songs, taken from that run of albums in three years that starts with Scott, then runs through Scotts 2–4 and finally ’Til The Band Comes In. I’ve picked lyrics that only he wrote — the ones that feel like short stories or portraits in song form. All life is here — it is in Woolf’s words “the feeling of the singing of the real world” — and you’ll hear some “small, fiercely defended dignities” alongside a few “much vaster humiliations.” What makes it all so poignant, of course, is that all whatever their scale to us, or to the person suffering them, the character has little choice but to endure their loneliness. Sometimes it is accepted. Sometimes it is flaunted. However it is processed, it’s clear when listening to these songs that the absence of connection felt by each person is its own peculiar knot to unpick. Every person’s loneliness is unique. It is a cloak only they can wear.

It is Scott’s genius that he can make us feel their particular sorrow, every time...

***

1. The Amorous Humphrey Plugg (from Scott 2)

Humphrey doesn’t reveal his loneliness so much as his total disconnection from the real world and the life around him.

He gives himself pep talks in mirror (“Hello, Mr Big Shot, my you’re looking smart”) and replies with a self-pity born of domestic drudgery (“I’ve had a tiring day, I took the kids along to the park”) and a desperate need to escape (“leave it all behind me — screaming kids on my knee and the telly swallowing me”).

Once he does “slip away on the newly waxed floor,” the outside world affirms how special he is at every turn. As he makes his way towards a brothel, he dominates the built environment..


I’ve become a giant. I fill every street.
I dwarf the rooftops, I hunchback the moon, stars dance at my feet.


..and he imbues this decidedly seedy encounter with grandiose visions of death and his own legacy.


Oh, to die of kisses
Ecstasies and charms
Pavements of poets will write that I died in nine angel’s arms


He’s conviced of the genuine connection he has with the women — as if for them, with him, it’s not work, and they see him for who he really is, or was:


And they all were smiling, still seductive as sin.
In their eyes — the man I had been


But the over-riding impression is of a narcissist or fantasist, who for all his preening is in some dissociative thrall to his behaviour — he brags, but he also seems helpless. The brothels themselves are “buildings blazing with moonlight” and they exert a mystifying power over him (“their very eyes seem to suck you in with their laughter”) and, in a rare moment of awareness, he admits the women do too — “Anne owns my smile and Mary’s my shadow”.

It’s a siren call he can’t resist. “You’re all right now,” the women and even the buildings say to him, “so stop a while behind our smile.” Back there lies some kind of peace, some kind of meaning perhaps. Humphrey seems trapped, like so many, compelled to affirm the very weakness that separates him from the world.



***

2. The Girls From The Streets (from Scott 2)

Early on, Scott wrote a disproportionate amount about sex workers. Maybe it stemmed from wanting to reject the mainstream, wallowing instead in the most unseemly subjects he could find. Maybe it was to signal his literary ambition as he dared to visit the same places novels could. Maybe it was inspiration from the florid, richly-painted world of Jacques Brel (Scott covered three Brel songs on each of his first three albums). Or maybe it was something more obvious and more problematic.

In this song, his nameless narrator seems lost and uncomfortable in this night-time world. He’s out of place, complaining that “suffocating eyes and fast hellos and last good-byes surround the night of me,” and spends the first half of the song observing his knowing male companion, who offers himself as guide:


His brandy-brimmed voice whispers
Come with me I hold the key, the city’s ours tonight


After a swirling chorus, full of anticipation and nouvelle vague romance..


Now, two blazing leaves burning up ground
The tiny waltz of a merry-go-round
Cascading lights for every heartbeat
Tonight we’ll sleep with the girls from the streets


..the rather more grim reality hits him. He can’t ignore the past sins and abuses these walls have seen. Any sense of romance dissipates.


I ride upon this giant storm
Through rust-red rooms where shadows breathe from every board


He immediately sees the gloom and the unspoken tragedies it hides, the nightly pretence played out for men like his companion, for men like him. He sees the transactions and the price they exact..


The world is up for auction sales
A thousand lies descend the women’s tear-tracked cheeks


before finally he wills himself to dismiss the reality, to submit to the pretence despite the truth he sees in these women’s eyes, the truth he can’t unsee. Scott inverts the swirling romance of the chorus with a final bleak hang-it-all hurrah.


Quick, give us your lips, give us your thighs
Give us your sad and devouring eyes
Cascading tears for every heartbeat
Tonight we’ll sleep with the girls from the streets


Here, says, Scott. Here, men, are both sides. Here is the loneliness you create. Here are the sadnesses you propogate and the truth you choose not to see.



***

3. The Bridge (from Scott 2)

Scott could do licentious, he could do quietly tragic, and he could do wistful. In The Bridge, he does all three. The protagonists are a drunk (“before the bottle dulled my eyes and made me so I couldn’t stand”) and the vivid memory of his love, Madelaine (“I knew her when she danced with dreams”), who, it seems, worked in a brothel. Scott’s poetic eye paints poignant flashbacks with jumpcut economy..


At night the people’s faces danced
Like pearls colliding on the breast
Of fat Marie whose thunder laugh
Was just a thread from crying.


..going from bawdy romp to suppressed sadness in a single breath, then back again, conjuring Marie’s domain as a place of hedonism, charged with lust for the girl everyone wanted:


Her sailors stained her cobblestones
With wine and piss and deaf desire
And sometimes blood for Madelaine
Whose laughter was the night.


But for all the visceral imagery, there’s a sense he was forced to love from afar. He “watched her from the riverbanks” and would “overact and play the clown when Madelaine would cry” — her shy protector, perhaps, the good man always left alone at the end of the night. And now, looking back on that time, here’s still by the river, there now to “watch it weave its memories,” remembering Madelaine, as both of them float faintly through the song, damaged and alone, left to dance no longer with dreams, but ghosts.



***

4. It’s Raining Today (from Scott 3)

The stories on Scott 3 are different. Less populated, less choreographed, less ornate. The city’s bustle is far behind and instead we sit on porches and nose through windows to listen to the lives being endured inside. It’s quiet, the sound of dreams denied, or buried. The extended narratives are gone, in their place are brief sketches, moments of regret, loss and memory which invite the listener to backfill the stories. Scott 3 is an album of stolen looks at someone else’s family photographs.

It’s Raining Today is first, and best. It’s the sound of a mind wandering, yet trapped. The rain outside triggers a memory of an old love affair, and of how it started, seeing each other behind glass, separate but somehow connecting.


It’s raining today, and I’m just about to forget
The train window girl — that wonderful day we met.
She smiles through the smoke from my cigarette.


Note the present tense; the memory feels alive. You can almost feel the film fade, see the director fuse the hazy present with a smoke-wreathed past. The montage cuts:


It’s raining today, but once there was summer and you
And dark little rooms, and sleep in late afternoons.
Those moments descend on my window pane


You can feel them, these rivulets of regret, with the gentle edit back to the window, and the bitterweet pain of remembering. He conjures a careless past in which he was once so present. You wonder what happened. You wonder if he wonders what happened.


I’ve hung around too long, listenin’ to the old landlady’s hard-luck stories


You wonder if he still lives with the same landlady who owned those “dark little rooms” from back then. But as the song snaps, and he berates himself, the narrator looks at this affair, his life, the failings perhaps of both. “You out of me, me out of you” he sings, a line that Eimear McBride says, in her foreword to the collection of Scott’s lyrics, not only “conjures the amorphous physicality of romantic or sexual closeness, it hangs a question mark over the individuation of identity itself.” Who are we? it asks. When we fall in love, do we change, or become our true selves? And how do we love again? Why do we love again? Perhaps love is nothing more than an existential hunger.


We go like lovers, to replace
The empty space.
Repeat our dreams to someone new.


Here is the pursuit of love as a cure for loneliness. There’s no bitterness, just acceptance. Only a stillness which makes the sadness more pronounced as he reconciles the benefits of being alone.


It’s raining today, and I watch the cellophane streets.
No hang-ups for me, ’cause hang-ups need company.
The street corner girl’s a cold trembling leaf.


And so he’s here again. Alone again. Behind glass again. And, perhaps, about to forget again.

Outside it’s raining.



***

5. Rosemary (from Scott 3)

Rosemary’s is a life with no life in it. No sense of identity, no past. No story.


Who are you and where you been?
Suspended in a weightless wind
Watching trains go by from platforms in the rain


The movement of others is everywhere. She’s suspended while she watches the trains — you might say stationary — but also..


She hears the boats as they move down the river
She sees a dog straining hard on his leash to get away
She hears the clock and it strikes like a hammer.


..movement everywhere, sweeping past and away, and none of it reaching her. There’s nothing to cling on to, no force exerted upon her. We observe her life as proof of Newton’s First Law — Rosemary is a stationary object destined to remain stationary until something happens.

It won’t.


Evenings with your mother’s friends
Pregnant eyes, sagging chins
Swollen fingertips pour antique cups of tea


Instead, her future prematurely haunts her present. She’s like Scrooge, only wide awake, with no way out, no penance she can pay. She’s a ghost in her own life. She lives in dreams.


Look at the photograph, dream back last summer.
Dream back the lips of that travelling salesman, Mr. Jim.
He smelt of miracles with stained-glass whispers.
You loved his laughter, you tremble beneath him once again.


Oh the impossibility of Mr Jim. Those miracles and stained-glass whispers disappeared as quickly and as quietly as they arrived, I bet. Mere tricks of the light that poor, sad Rosemary mistook for something real. She still does, living the moment over and over again, her only solace in a life she lacks the will to change.

“That’s what I want,” she says at the end, “a new shot at life.” For a moment you feel Rosemary may rouse herself. There is hope. “But,” she sings,


My coat’s too thin, my feet won’t fly
And I watch the wind and I see another dream
Blowin’ by…


Sometimes an object must create its own force, but doesn’t believe it can.



***

6. Big Louise (from Scott 3)

If Rosemary’s is a suburban existence — the kind of place with a porch and a community of her “mother’s friends” drinking those “antique cups of tea” — Big Louise lives a life back in the hollow heart of Scott’s nameless city. “All alone” as she “hum[s] softly from her fire escape in the sky.”

Louise cuts a pitifully lonely figure. She’s a mess, and, it seems, deteriorating by the day.


She’s a haunted house, and her windows are broken
And the sad young man’s gone away.
Her bathrobe’s torn, and tears smudge her lipstick
And the neighbors just whisper all day.


She’s empty, abandoned, and Scott writes her like that house: from the outside. We don’t know her dreams, her story, what went wrong. You imagine Scott driving by the building one day and seeing her, knowing that the image itself, without context, the emptiness that signalled itself from afar, was what made it so sad. Even the way he names her — Big Louise — seems dismissive, the plainest, least imaginative visual adjective. I find the description of her on the fire escape almost unbearable:


She fills the bags ‘neath her eyes with the moonbeams
And cries ’cause the world’s passed her by.


Here is the epicentre of Scott’s lonely city. Up on that fire escape, lit only by the merciless moon, ostracised, feared even, by the strangers who surround her, and the terrible knowledge that this is it from now on. Bereft. Alone. This seems to me the kind of loneliness Olivia Laing was holding off in New York. It is perhaps the loneliness we all fear could happen to us, or has at some point. The loneliness when it’s all aftermath and no future and no hope of connection here and now. The loneliness we never really realise is coming until it does.

When Scott sings the chorus, such as it is, of..


Didn’t time sound sweet yesterday?
In a world filled with friends you lose your way.


..we feel the bitter pang of hindsight, of realising too late, painfully late, that maybe it isn’t only other people we’ve become alienated from, but from ourselves.



***

7. Hero Of The War (from Scott 4)

The characters of Scott 3 were alienated by urban life, but the most poignant stories on Scott 4 are of people caught in the grand sweep of history as it turns their lives upside down.

In Hero Of The War, Scott addresses Mrs Reilly, a mother nursing her bed-ridden son just back from Vietnam. This is smalltown America at the end of the 60s, and it shows. “All the neighbourhood’s talkin’ ‘bout your son” and “you can see his picture in the local news” but it..


Seems the girl next door is nowhere to be found
Once you couldn’t keep that whore from hanging ‘round


and you feel her tense immediately, bristling at the contrast between the label the outside world is happy to place on her son and the burden he’ll soon become. Attention will fade. Isolation looms. She’s both defender and carer now — it’s the two of them against the world. Occasionally Scott gives Mrs Reilly lines and they’re the saddest moments: “Never mind dear,” she tells her son, “you’re with your mum once more.” You wonder who she’s really trying to convince.

Mrs Reilly, it’s clear, is a hero too, the sort that’s never mentioned or thanked, only commiserated with, even as life repeats itself. And it’s brought it all back: her son’s tragedy just “like his dad who gave his life the war before”. She’s brought him up on her own…


…with no husband there beside you through it all.
‘Ring the bell if you get hungry, or you fall.’


In that shift of voice, from the empathetic listener to the sympathetic mother, we hear a life condensed into two lines, a life of tragedy and selfless duty, remembered and renewed. This is all that’s left her now, except for the question she perhaps refrained from asking of her husband but, cannot hold back second time around:


And what made him leave his mother for a gun?


It’s a question with no good answer.



***

8. The Old Man’s Back Again (from Scott 4)

In Yates’ Eleven Kinds Of Loneliness there’s one story not set in New York City. In it we follow two young men to Cannes, with a particularly American brand of racism in tow. In our equivalent Scott compendium, there’s also a song where the lens shifts elsewhere.

The clue to just where sits in the year the song was released (1969) and its impossibly clunky subtitle (Dedicated To The Neo-Stalinist Regime). We are most likely in Hungary, or maybe anywhere in Eastern Europe at that time, wherever a metaphorical Soviet invasion (“shadow crossed the sky”) to crush a vison of freedom “just like a beast”. The song, like Hero Of The War, leaves out the Cold War geo-politics to linger on its human fall-out.

We see no violence, no active repression. Only the resignation, the sadness, the crazed responses of its victims — we’re left to infer the horror, reflected in their eyes and their minds. We see..


The crowds just gathered, their faces turned away
And they queue all day, like dragons of disgust


..and know we’re witnessing a desperate survival instinct take hold, as society is torn from itself. We see “a woman, standing in the snow” and “a soldier, standing in the rain,” each of them helpless, each triggered by the trauma of previous generations, by memories. The soldier is “devoured by his pain” and “bewildered by the faces who pass him by.” He seems tragically beyond reach. For her part, the woman..


…was silent as she watched them take her man
Teardrops burned her cheeks
For she’d thought she’d heard the shadow had left this land.


There are few losses worse than those you’ve already recovered once. It’s created a world where people are deprived of all but their teardrops. There’s not only no connection, there’s no hope. There’s an apocalyptic reference to the Soviet-era poet, Andrei Voznesenskii, and his poem Anti-worlds, which envisioned other ways of life.


And Andrei V. he cries, with eyes that ring like chimes
His anti-worlds go spinning through his head
He burns them in his dreams, for half-awake they may as well be dead


This is a world so lonely, so bereft of anything positive, that even a poet’s visions of freedom are worthless if all they can be is visions.



***

9. Joe (from ’Til The Band Comes In)

The ’Til The Band Comes In album is a microcosm of Scott’s world. Mostly set in one building, we observe a different apartment for each song — the template for Kae Tempest’s Let Them Eat Chaos. There’s a war on, and most inhabitants are confined to their rooms. They watch the news and call the speaking clock and reminisce and drink.

Joe is only recently dead. He was old, and lived alone. The song is addressed to him, the attention and empathy a subtle contrast with the indifference that characterised the end of his life. As he’s dying, someone’s holding a party own the hall and a baby cries — night-time sounds of life and connection he only gets to hear from afar these days. There was one guy — the one “you told tales to” — but he left the other day “with no goodbye.” Old friends are long gone too, shrivelling in the sun: “A postcard from Sun City was found layin’ by your side, a kind of desert place where old folks dry away.”

Joe stayed, and in his own way found some peace. There’s a portrait in here of age as a kind of wisdom — of a retreat, having seen through all the madness of the world and futile noise of youth.


You’ve been beyond the boundaries
Understood it all and thought of nothing
The ultimate was simple to your eyes
Just watch the world make madness
As the youth cried their replies
An old man knows far better than to try


Joe had a sense of calm, it seems, of knowing what was important. Meditative, zen even, appreciative of the impossibility of the world.


You gazed out through the window
At the wonders of the sky
As if it were the first time every day


But there’s still the poignancy of the end. The undeniable contrast with life as it was before — a life, no matter how full of wonder, shrunk to the scale of these four walls.


They say towards the end
you hardly left your shabby room
Where once you loved to go a walkin’ thru’ the day
Sit back and watch a spider,
weave your window ‘cross the moon


No friends, no partner, no one to share memories with. Only visits as formal as they are functional.


And meals on wheels laughed kindly when you’d say
There ain’t no one left alive
To call me Joe




***

10. Time Operator (from ’Til The Band Comes In)

How lonely is the guy in Time Operator? He phones the speaking clock for someone to talk to. Sadder still, he even tries to flirt with her: — “Take the time to take the time, to come over here.”

His loneliness has transported him to a fantasy world, or the kind of denial that helps him believe an automated female voice is someone he might connect with:


We’ve got so much in common
Seems it’s hard for us to sleep
With all the razzle dazzle in the street


The “razzle dazzle” is another way in which, as in most of the Til The Band Comes In songs, that ‘outside’ is cast as another place. The characters are all hemmed in, hiding, rejected, and their existence is in contrast to an outside that forces its way in to their psyches. In some songs there’s a war on, in others a character has holed up here, escaping another life. These are minds and lives under siege, the building either cover or else a prison. As in Joe, outside makes itself felt in poetic terms..


Moon breathin’ in through my window,
The curtains are sighing, dust of the day
Oh, but I’m not alone, no, like all my neighbours say


..or in the form of poignant reality — a municipal visit from somone doing their job..


The man come to shut off my water
And the man come to shut down my lights yesterday
Yeah but I’m not one to moan
I made the bill for the telephone.


It reads so sadly, a man prioritising contact with a simulated person over life-saving utilities. Then I think about those memes that add wi-fi as a layer to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the atomised world enabled by our current technology and think, maybe Scott wasn’t being too far-fetched.



***

11. The War Is Over (Sleepers — Epilogue) (from ’Til The Band Comes In)

And so, finally, briefly, some light. A chance, perhaps, to connect with others. To share in something. The war from ‘outside’ has ceased — “everything still, everything silent, as after the rain” — and everyone seems pensive, unsure:


We lie here listening to night close down
Stare like a child,
wait for the signs to decide once again
Just when they looked here to stay


And yet, to the lonely, the moment might not be so welcome. The residents seem ambivalent:


We’re to leave our world, our air.
It really isn’t fair.


The prospect of having to “leave our world, our air” is an imposition. Where might this reticence come from? Scott’s camera pans to one of the apartments.


A distant waltz turns in the head of an old lady’s night.
Waiting hands unfold within the dark.


Quiet, waiting.


Lighting her lamp, seeing Prince Albert,
recalling the sight
They waltz again through the park.


Caught in the past, caught in her own thoughts, like Rosemary. Like Big Louise. Like the man on The Bridge. Like Mrs Reilly. Is it raining today?


Floorboards creak beneath the moon.
The room below just sighs.


There’s a calm about this old lady’s night. The pools of moonlight and the room’s breath. The creak and the sigh — familiar, inviting even. As though her isolation has become a haven. As though her loneliness is a cloak she wears. It keeps her warm.

Do we embrace loneliness if it’s forced upon us? If we find ourselves asked to hide, retreat, lockdown, what happens to us? And how do we feel when we are free? Maybe we’ll be ready to meet the world, perhaps we won’t. When the war lifts, when the threat recedes, when the cure is found and the streets open, freedom may be something we don’t feel able to grasp. The world will have changed, and so will we.

Though the chorus we hear “Outside they sing, The war is over!” Some people have grasped the moment. Yet, as we hear straight after, some long for the quiet to which they’ve become accustomed. “Let me get some sleep” they sing. They withdraw to dreams and memories. Others offer advice: the world isn’t something you can resist forever. Loneliness can get comfortable, they say, but don’t be fooled. You have to move on. You must let go.

When the moment comes, they sing, “Tell your deepest dark ‘goodbye’.”




***


Author bio: James Caig is a writer who works in advertising. He co-edits A Longing Look which publishes love letters to lyrics, and writes occasionally about stories and culture and his day job in a newsletter called More News From Nowhere. On Twitter he is: @jamescaig