We think loneliness is in our heads, but its source lies in the ruin of civil society
____
Robert Christopher Lasch
"June 1, 1932 – February 14, 1994) was an American historian, moralist and social critic who was a history professor at the University of Rochester.
He sought to use history to demonstrate what he saw as the pervasiveness with which major institutions, public and private, were eroding the competence and independence of families and communities.
Lasch strove to create a historically informed social in criticism that could teach Americans how to deal with
rampant consumerism,
proletarianization,
and what he famously labeled "the culture of narcissism". "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Lasch
***
"the tendency to individualise social issues, whether poverty or unemployment,
to view them as psychological dispositions or even as moral failure.
Loneliness, too, is frequently framed as a psychological condition, or mental health problem, the product of narcissism or self-obsession."
"Cameras and recording machines not only transcribe experience but alter its quality,
giving to much of modern life the character of an enormous echo chamber, a hall of mirrors,”
he wrote in The Culture of Narcissism. "
"his psychoanalytical eye often overwhelmed his social vision and what many took from his work
was less his social critique than his delineation of a new, narcissistic personality type.
The end point of his analysis
(the emergence of a public disconnected from one another and so more self-centred) became, instead,
the starting point for explanation
– that people’s narcissism and self-obsession explained their disconnectedness
and the erosion of communal bonds"
____
The old woman sits on her knee -level stool, a pail of cut roses
A cardboard sign advertises
Single mother please help roses $5
She's 60 she's an immigrant who speaks out loud not to herself here at the front entrance of the farmers market
She says she's talking to her sister
Wrinkles befitting her age she could be a great grandmother for the never seen children, family, or co-worker community she lives with
Umbrella, patient as a fly trap, collects the pity drops, no one ever gives her coins, few give her actual food
I play violin four hours just across from her, entertaining rain snow or searing heat, two thousand dollars worth of fragile equipment, a violin I've had over 40 years, a battery powered amp, my skills be what they may of playing my whole life
I watch people give her money walk past me with their children or their fancy dogs, some thank me still not a dollar as they depart to mansion or luxury car to jet away
She looks lonely, she old, she eastern european, perfect
Who can ask her to beg on the sidewalk rather than at the entrance where vendors subsisting on sales pay rent, their tomatoes lettuce jam and honey and cut flowers all the market exists to sell
It's capitalism
She sells her lonely image sometimes several roses at a time
The lonely buyers pay themselves on their vogue backs, they have a story to smell and put on Instagram
I play a gypsy song that I wrote and live, I can't berate her like the others chasing petition signatures or just a moment for children or Save Nature only $30 a month
We all have a phone bill
My stork beak keen is as old as this vase and her parable
My boots held together with luck stitches made for actual combat
I'm not economic soldier just a tomb of an unknown poet
Put a rose from mexico on my grave here's my Venmo we're all tempted to follow suit
Not me
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