My last post was about Social networks and the paranoia that these evoke. Are we dehumanised in the way we interact? This got me to thinking about masses of people connected by the click of a button, masses of people in a global village, and the fact that it can still be a very lonely existence. I like to confront alternative perspectives when I feel as though my position needs to be refined. One such perspective is in the title peice poem by Charles Bukowski, who explores aloneness in a very bleak, almost suicidal way:

Alone With Everybody

the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.

nobody ever finds
the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills.

This piece feels brutal in its depiction of the life and fate that awaits us all, but has just enough reality in it to not be disregarded as completely unreasonable. I like the way he describes our humanity - "flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh." I get a sense of our human desperation in this - that we experience ourselves as being more than the flesh covering bone; that we search endlessly for "the one", but because of our entrapment in a singular fate, death looms endlessly ahead. His earlier reference to crawling in and out of beds as well as his framed portrayal of a male role and a female one made me think that his "the one" was a romantic partner or "soul mate". Bukowski tells a story about his views of human existence - it is lonely, but the individual does not willingly accept the loneliness; they search for the one in the hope to be "filled". For Bukowski, the poem ends in hopelessness. He sees all of the earlier searching and hope as futile; he informs the reader of what does happen, and it is a sad array of bleak singular fates - garbage, insanity, illness and death. I find myself relating to that search in Bukowski's Alone with Everybody, if not with his conclusion.

One of the things that I was thinking about when I began this post about aloneness despite the masses, was that those people we love don't even know every detail of us. I am talking  about the people we absolutely love; I mean the people we love so much that we could crawl into and curl up inside their hearts for a while when we need a little comfort. Those people don't really know everything about us. My next question was this - what is the worth of being known? I think that a means by which people feel more connected and at home is by being known. Dan Foster, a personal development coach, describes it in this way:

"when we are known we feel a sense of completion and wholeness that brings inner peace. To be known requires not only a level of transparency on our part but an act of engagement on the part of those we wish to be known by. When we are recognized for whom we are – no masks, no titles, no judgement – we experience a freedom to grow and develop in all areas of our life. Being known gives us the freedom to be all we are destined to be."

Of course, in Foster's depiction of why we need to be known (so that we may experience freedom to grow and develop), the instances where one is not known lead, I would assume, to poems like Bukowski's. Is it possible then, to be known when no one on earth can ever fully know someone else? In his partial autobiography, Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis describes his theory that if a person is born with a desire, then satisfaction for this desire must exist. He suggested that if people have desires that no experience on this earth can satisfy, then there must be a supernatural extension to the life we have now. This book chronicles Lewis' laborious journey from atheism to Christianity, and his assertion that the inherent desire in people is their desire for God.

I think that one of the most captivating aspects of God and my particular God concept is in the idea that God is sovereign, and Omniscient (knowing everything infinitely, everything that can be known about a character including thoughts, feelings, life and the universe, etc.). I have relationships where I am well expressed; where I am at home and feel understood and known to some extent, but I am comforted by the idea that God knows every aspect of me, that there is a supernatural being that is all encompassing. I find solace in the idea that despite the vastness of the universe, and even of the population, despite the fact that people only insufficiently understand themselves, far less others, despite there being billions of others, God is El Roi, the God who sees me. My impression is that people are vastly important to each other, and maybe those intimate connections to partners and friends and parents help to comfort and console on the lifetime search for more than flesh, but only God is The One who fills us up.