The Lonely City (32 page)

If I sound adamant it is because I am speaking from personal experience. When I came to New York I was in pieces, and though it sounds perverse, the way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing by way of this contact the fact that loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive.

There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult
feelings – depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage – are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.

I don’t believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it’s about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.

Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.

NOTES

BACKGROUND MATERIAL ABOUT DAVID WOJNAROWICZ’S
life and work comes from the wonderfully rich David Wojnarowicz Papers (MSS 092) at Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries (hereafter Fales). Cynthia Carr’s extraordinarily detailed, beautiful and acute Wojnarowicz biography,
Fire in the Belly
(Bloomsbury, 2012), was also indispensible.

The ACT UP Oral History Project, founded by Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman, was of great assistance in understanding both the progress of AIDS in New York City and the work of ACT UP.Transcripts of all interviews can be read at
www.actuporalhistory.org
, and footage can be viewed at Videotapes, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library.

Unpublished material about Darger’s life is drawn from the Henry Darger Papers, American Folk Art Museum Archives, New York (hereafter HDP).

I’m particularly indebted to Gail Levin and Breanne Fahs, the biographers of Edward Hopper and Valerie Solanas respectively, whose meticulous biographies bring into print the remarkable
details of their subjects’ lives, including many previously unpublished letters and interviews.

CHAPTER 1: THE LONELY CITY

4
‘
a chronic disease without redeeming features
 . . .’: Robert Weiss,
Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation
(MIT Press, 1975), p. 15.

4
‘
If I could catch the feeling
 . . .’:Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell,
The Diary of Virginia Woolf
,
Volume III 1925–1930
(Hogarth Press, 1980), p. 260.

8
‘
Loneliness is a
 . . .’: Dennis Wilson,‘Thoughts of You’,
Pacific Ocean Blue
(1977).

CHAPTER 2: WALLS OF GLASS

16
‘
It’s nothing accurate at all
 . . .’: Gail Levin,
Edward Hopper:An Intimate Biography
(Rizzoli, 2007), p. 493.

17
‘
The loneliness thing is
 . . .’: Brian O’Doherty,
American Masters:The Voice and the Myth
(E. P. Dutton, 1982), p. 9.

17
‘
Are your paintings reflective
 . . .’:
Hopper’s Silence
, dir. Brian O’Doherty (1981).

17
‘
certain kinds of spaces
 . . .’: Carter Foster,
Hopper’s Drawings
(Whitney Museum/Yale University Press, 2013), p. 151.

20
‘
our most poignant
 . . .’: Joyce Carol Oates,‘Nighthawk:A Memoir of Lost Time’,
Yale Review
, Vol. 89, Issue 2, April 2001, pp. 56–72.

22
‘
brilliant streak
 . . .’: Deborah Lyons, ed.,
Edward Hopper: A Journal of His Work
(Whitney Museum of American Art/W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 63.

23
‘
the exceedingly unpleasant
 . . .’: Harry Stack Sullivan,
The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry
(Routledge, 2001 [1953]), p. 290.

24
‘
The writer who wishes
 . . .’:Frieda Fromm-Reichmann,‘On Loneliness’, in
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy: Selected Papers of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann,
ed. Dexter M. Bullard (University of Chicago Press, 1959), p. 325.

25
‘
Loneliness, in its quintessential form
 . . .’: ibid., pp. 327–8.

26
‘
I don’t know why
 . . .’: ibid., pp. 330–31.

26
‘
possessed
 . . .’: Robert Weiss,
Loneliness:The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation
, pp. 11–13.

30
‘
The man’s the work
 . . .’: Katherine Kuh,
The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists
(Harper & Row, 1960), p. 131.

31
‘
I’m being very biographic
 . . .’: Interview with Edward Hopper and Arlene Jacobowitz, April 29, 1966 from ‘Listening to Pictures’ program of the Brooklyn Museum. Gift of the Brooklyn Museum. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (housed at Edward and Josephine Hopper Research Collection; Whitney Museum of American Art, Frances Mulhall Achilles Library).

33
‘
I’d heard of Gertrude Stein
 . . .’: Brian O’Doherty, ‘Portrait: Edward Hopper’,
Art in America
, Vol. 52, December 1964, p. 69.

33
‘
It seemed awfully crude
 . . .’: ibid., p. 73.

34
‘
They are not factual
 . . .’: Interview with Edward Hopper and Arlene Jacobowitz, April 29, 1966 from ‘Listening to Pictures’ program of the Brooklyn Museum. Gift of the Brooklyn Museum. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (housed at Edward and Josephine Hopper Research Collection; Whitney Museum of American Art, Frances Mulhall Achilles Library).

34
‘
The interior itself
 . . .’: Gail Levin,
Edward Hopper
, p. 138.

37
‘
without a stitch on
 . . .’: ibid., p. 335.

38
‘
Any talk with me
 . . .’: ibid., p. 389.

39
‘
Should be married
 . . .’: ibid., pp. 124–5.

40
‘
the most exact transcription
 . . .’: Edward Hopper, ‘Notes on Painting’, in Alfred H. Barr, Jr, et al,
Edward Hopper: Retrospective Exhibition, November 1 – December 7, 1933
(MoMA, 1933), p. 17.

40
‘
to force this unwilling medium
 . . .’: ibid., p. 17.

40
‘
I find in working always
 . . .’: ibid., p. 17.

41
‘
I haven’t gone thru
 . . .’: Gail Levin,
Edward Hopper
, pp. 348–9.

43
‘
seems to be the way
 . . .’: Katherine Kuh,
The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists
, pp. 134–5.

CHAPTER 3: MY HEART OPENS TO YOUR VOICE

48
‘
The silent adjustments
 . . .’: Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
(Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1922), p. 39.

51
‘
I only know one language
 . . .’: Andy Warhol,
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
(Penguin, 2007 [1975]), pp. 147–8.

52
‘
To me good talkers
 . . .’: ibid., p. 62.

53
‘
And my brother
 . . .’: Andy Warhol,
The Andy Warhol Diaries
, ed. Pat Hackett (Warner Books, 1991), p. 575.

55
‘
“ats” for “that is”
 . . .’: Victor Bockris,
Warhol: The Biography
(Da Capo Press, 2003 [1989]), p. 60.

56
‘
He had an enormous inferiority complex
 . . .’: ibid., p. 115.

56
‘
just a hopeless born loser
 . . .’: ibid., p. 91.

59
‘
all the Cokes
 . . .’: Andy Warhol,
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
, p. 101.

59
‘
If everybody’s not a beauty
 . . .’: ibid., p. 62.

60
‘
The reason I’m painting
 . . .’: Andy Warhol, interviewed by Gene Swenson
,
‘What Is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters (Part 1)’,
Art News
, Issue 62, November 1963.