Matthew Rohrer's "There Is Absolutely Nothing Lonelier"

Thoughts on loneliness, of all things.

There Is Absolutely Nothing Lonelier

There is absolutely nothing lonelier
than the little Mars rover
never shutting down, digging up
rocks, so far away from Bond street
in a light rain. I wonder
if he makes little beeps? If so
he is lonelier still. He fires a laser
into the dust. He coughs. A shiny
thing in the sand turns out to be his.


from Surrounded By Friends (Wave Books, 2015)

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Sometimes I get in a little poetry rut and maybe, too, in a bit of a life-rut in general, and, in those moments, such as now, I turn to what I know, these little footholds I have placed, over time, in the wall of the well I find myself living in. This poem today, by Matthew Rohrer, is one of those footholds. I think of it often. I remember when it first appeared, shooting-star-like, on the inter-webs of nearly a decade ago, and how frequently it was shared, this kind of ooh and aah thing, this beautiful reminder of the holy shit that can still be brought forth from our lips, this gentle whisper that goes what the fuck, I can’t believe someone wrote that. It’s a thing that sometimes happens with a poem. You encounter language used in a way that makes your lived life feel exultant, that makes your loneliness feel shared, that makes everything sorrowful hover closer to the possibility of joy — a gift, you might say, if you are into that sort of thing.

One thing — of many — that’s wonderful about life is that the poem remains, even after the initial reactions subside. And that you can return to it. This poem remains. And it holds true. When I first read it, I was struck by the personification, the metaphor, the “little Mars rover” who “makes little beeps.” I found it cute. Endearing. Adorable. And tragic, too. Yeah. I still do.

And I found it real, despite metaphor, or maybe because of what metaphor makes real, because of what it connects across distance. The wondering. The trudging. The desire to connect to something out there when you’re feeling lost in here. I found it real, too, because of something Leslie Jamison points out in her essay about the loneliest whale in the world, 52 Blue, who sings a song for someone who never comes:

52 Blue suggests not just one single whale as metaphor for loneliness, but metaphor itself as salve for loneliness. Metaphor always connects two disparate points; it suggests that no pathos exists in isolation, no plight exists apart from the plights of others.

In Rohrer’s poem today, he connects disparate points — a Mars rover on a different planet and a person walking on “Bond street / in a light rain” — to remind us, as Jamison suggests, that no feeling “exists in isolation.” Metaphor is the work of constellation-making. It is age old, I imagine — this part of us that looks out at what is not us and reaches across the gap. And maybe there is a kind of possession there, yes, and a kind of ownership, too. Not our best qualities, no. But there is also — alongside that — a humility, I think. A wonderment. I wonder if a tree can feel. I wonder if a whale is lonely. I can feel. I am lonely. I wonder if I am not alone. I hope not. Sometimes I feel so alone.

When I first read this poem, many years ago, I found myself so struck by its comparison, by the way the poem drew my attention to something — the Mars rover — that I hadn’t thought of before. I found it endearing, to think of the little beeps. And I found it sad. I thought, yes, how terribly lonely it must be for that machine up there.

Reading the poem again, I can’t help but think of loneliness as a defining trait of our lives. I no longer think of the Mars rover as some distant figure making little beeps somewhere out in space time; no, I think of us — you and me, sitting here today. I think of us, and the beeps we make and the lasers we fire into dust and the things we gather that we call our own. I think of our loneliness; I think of how real it is. And I think of how, when that comparison is flattened, and when there is no distance between ourselves and Mars, then we, too, are the subject of this poem. We, too, are the people who are absolutely lonely.

Perhaps the most tragic part of this poem today is this moment:

I wonder
if he makes little beeps? If so
he is lonelier still.

There’s something here about futility, yes? Something about how this little machine, making his little beeps, becomes even lonelier when there is no one to hear him or recognize him. And yet he toils on. He never shuts down. And us, here? What are we doing?

I am reminded, in such a moment, of something Hanif Abdurraqib said when he visited my school a year ago. A student of mine asked, in a Q+A, the most important advice he would give children their age, and Abdurraqib said something about figuring out how to deal with and cope with one’s sense of loneliness. There was a marked hush that fell over the room. I think people were expecting — as I was — something about selfhood, or identity, or belief, something about confidence in the face of the world’s repeated tries to bring one down. But no. Abdurraqib brought up loneliness, and I haven’t forgotten it.

In one of his poems, Wendell Berry said the following:

To work at this work alone is to fail. There is no help for it. Loneliness is its failure.

And so, I am thinking of loneliness today. I am thinking of it for a number of reasons. I am thinking of it mostly because I feel it, which is a circumstantial thing. I am feeling it now because some things in my life aren’t quite working. My body, for one — how it has found itself injured right before I was supposed to run the Boston Marathon, with a calf that seizes up on me with a steak-knife’s sharpness only when I run, as if to say and you thought you were okay, didn’t you?

I will get over that; injury has happened before and will certainly happen again — uncertainty and fragility being two of the most true things of our lives. But it’s a small loneliness now, a missing out, that feels connected to something greater. I turned 34 this past week, and sometimes birthdays are a beautiful thing and sometimes they are a pain and sometimes they are both. Sometimes they fill me with longing; sometimes they fill me with joy. Sometimes I can think about all I have become and sometimes I can only think about all I am not — this mix of shame and wanting, this almost-ness that life sometimes feels like, this why can’t I or why didn’t I or what’s wrong what’s wrong what’s wrong. This year I felt a wish, I think. A desire to be a little different than I am. And then everything fell into the pit that such desire makes of me.

There is a loneliness that arises when we do not meet our own expectations, when the self we want to be doesn’t quite mesh with the self we are. Sometimes we reconcile that distance quickly. Sometimes we allow it to grow. Sometimes we narrow it. But whatever we do, no matter what, there is at first, I think, a loneliness. It is the loneliness of realizing, with a kind of certainty you can’t quite shake, that you are not exactly who you think you are. Distance is one of the great isolators of our time. We pretend at intimacy so often in this world; we are, at every second, merely a click and a millisecond away from the presumption of knowing ourselves or someone else. But really we are, at all times, so far away. And sometimes, we are so far away from ourselves. That distance is a loneliness. And it is a hard one to bear.

In the final lines of his poem, “The White Fires of Venus,” Denis Johnson describes this distance:

I'm telling you it's cold inside the body that is not the body,
lonesome behind the face
that is certainly not the face
of the person one meant to become.

It’s cold, in other words, to be inside the body that we wish was not our body, but is. And it’s lonely, too. Earlier in that poem, Johnson writes:

The remedy for loneliness
is in learning to admit
solitude as one admits
the bayonet: gracefully,
now that already
it pierces the heart.

The remedy, in other words, is part of the work of poetry. It’s the work of transcending and reimagining. Of calling loneliness solitude. Of considering the fact of hurt with grace. Of coming to terms, but with new names for terms. And new understandings.

This is hard, though. When you are feeling alone in New York City, and when you are walking along Bond Street in the rain, this street of cobblestones snuck into a neighborhood, with restaurants that come out to the curb and glitter in the damp light of street lamps, and with people endlessly talking in voices that rise into the air the way that birds do, in unison, as if everyone is in on the same joke except for you, and when you hear their silverware make a kind of tickling, shining music that is the name of a song you keep forgetting, and when a child is jumping into the small puddle formed between two stones laid by people who have since disappeared, and when the city is both beautiful and nameless, when it is a painting you are walking through but can’t quite feel a part of, as if the painter ran out of paint at just the moment he was going to paint that thin, little dash of you, a shadow between lampposts — when all of this is happening, it is hard, I think, to reimagine the world or the words within the world, to consider something new, or to call your loneliness solitude. It is easier, I think, to disassociate, to dig yourself a deeper well, to make more distance out of yourself rather than to reach across that distance and find someone or something — anything, really, a tree, a person, a small machine on Mars — to hold your hand.

I don’t think that work ever becomes easier. That is why, I think, the world has crafted and sold us technology that imitates intimacy without creating it. That is why, I think, it is dangerous to allow so much else to do our thinking and our creating for us — because it is thinking itself that will save us from the distance we make out of our loneliness. It is the work — never easier, really — of reaching, of connecting, of looking back out at the world, even and especially when we are tired of ourselves, and wondering what might understand us, what might feel in the way we do. When I read this poem today, for some strange and magical reason, I want to hold this little machine. I want to cry. Absurd, maybe. But those are real feelings. And I remember that I, too, want to be held.¹ And I, too, might need someone — anyone — to cry with me.

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Some notes:

1. Here is a website — put together by volunteers — that tracks the jobs lost and lives affected by the de-funding of USAID. It’s worth reading in order to fully understand the severity of what is happening, who it is affecting, and how to help.

2. I have found that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing great work in building solidarity and awareness and justice in this contemporary moment. You can find a list of their resources and areas of further support here.

3. Workshops 4 Gaza is an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine and in awareness of a more just, informed, thoughtful, considerate world. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

4. If you live in NYC, I have found Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor to be inspiring and empowering. You can find ways to support his campaign or get information about it here.

5. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.

1. Larry Levis: “A body wishes to be held, & held, & what / Can you do about that?”