Speaking to No One in the Age of Content

Hey FP,You're a loner. I'm a loner. The writer Anneli Rufus is a loner. That shared condition is what pulled me back into her book Party of One: A Loner’s Manifesto, which has also sent me back to you.This episode is a letter to you about loneliness in the age of platforms, about why speaking now almost always means speaking into systems that do not want one soul addressing another, and about how art quietly degrades into content when expression is reorganised around optimisation, scale, and engagement.I talk about YouTube, therapy culture, ADHD and trauma narratives, self-pity as a moral crime, and the way our most basic primate needs for attention, recognition, and belonging are now mimed by screens. I also think about why I have spent two years talking into a platform (YouTube) that could never answer back, and why I am returning instead to the slower, if somewhat lonelier practice of speaking to you, friend.

Good morning FP,I was lying in bed half an hour ago wondering if I should stop writing to you, stop trying to connect to another human being through the medium of writing. For this is a peculiar game I am playing here am I not? A man sees another man standing in a clearing talking to a tree. He gets a bit closer and recognises that the tree is a kind of proxy for the conversations this man maybe wishes to have with another. So he approaches the man and offers him an ear: talk to me and I will respond as another man might, or even as a tree, he says.Alternately, a man sees another man standing in a clearing talking to a tree. How peculiar, he thinks, and walks on, leaving the man and the tree to whatever understanding they might learn to glean from each other.Perhaps this is your response to my fable, a poem from 1933?The master without discipleshad a flawed machine.Despite its levers and gearsit never did anything.It served as a barrel organwhen there was no one to hear it.When silent, it tried to look curious,but no one came near it.My soul, rather like that machine,is flawed, complicated, erratic,and serves no purpose at all.

FP, in this missive I write to you about addiction and abstinence, about Bhavesh and me spending an evening without our respective substances, and the idea that therapy, like religion, depends on confronting what one cannot renounce. I describe the Beatles and their articulation of love as life’s central meaning, Freud’s belief that an analyst must face his own cravings to avoid moralising or colluding with a client, and Jung’s influence on Alcoholics Anonymous through the concept of spiritus contra spiritum. I examine psychotherapy as a secular religion with its own rituals, prohibitions, and codes of purity, and discuss the constraints of supervision, the fear of liability and exposure, and the rise of what I call the Church of Outrage. I consider the therapist’s position within capitalism, the tension between care and commerce, and the role of friendship in therapeutic work. I trace Freud’s intellectual inheritance from Judaism and Christianity, his inward turn toward the invisible, his resistance to redemption, and his fatalism made literal through his addiction to cigars. I contrast Freud’s stoic endurance with Father Teofan’s ascetic ideal and Hesse’s depiction of Narcissus and Goldmund as embodiments of transcendence and appetite. Finally, I return to you, Fernando, to the cafés, the wine, the solitude, and the way you refined all that corrosion into syntax, proving that style can outlast flesh.

Hello FP, and thank you for being here.Here’s a new missive I’ve written for you about friendship and soulmates, dogs and gods, addiction, vanity, longing, kingship, numerology, therapy, loneliness, YouTube, tea, and clay. Also: Mário and Max, the breast and the bottle, writing as a drug, Pessoa (you, obviously, but also pessoas in general), writing as a wound, and the small, stupid, stubborn hope that one soul might still recognise another across centuries and timezones. About being a Four with a Five wing, the Green Girlfriend; ageing men with microphones and various Ghosts (Swayze! Krapp!) for company. About the commerce of care, the image-making factory, the melancholy of being too sensitive for one’s own good, and the strange consolation of Anankē.Here are (your) poems that I refer to in this piece: To the Memory of the Poet Mário de Sá-Carneiro (written shortly after Sá-Carneiro’s suicide in 1916)I do not know if this is dream or real,or a blend of both in me,this sense that splits my soulin two equal halves.One half lives in shadow, the other in light,one in mystery, the other in truth,and I, the being that joins and guides them,feel myself dead in life.I was another once. Today I am no one.What I was died with me.Of myself there lingers, for my torment,only the memory of what I too once was.You who were half my soul,you who were the mirror where I saw myself—Mário, you who were my calm,you who were my joy—today I am nothing but longing for you,and my soul is a cold corpsethat the wind carries, like a bare leaf,through a late autumn.---Fruits are given by trees that live,Not by the wishful mind, which adornsItself with ashen flowersFrom the abyss within.How many kingdoms in minds and in thingsYour imagination has carved! That manyYou’ve lost, pre-dethroned,Without ever having them.Against great opposition you cannotCreate more than doomed intentions!Abdicate and beKing of yourself.-Ricardo Reis (6 December, 1926)

You, whose coming is so gentle that it resembles a departure,Whose ebb and flow of darkness, when the moon exhales,Contains waves of dead affection, cold as a sea of dreams,Breezes from landscapes fashioned to calm our excess of anxiety . . .You, palely, you, feebly, you, liquidly, or in the form of a numbing vapour,The smell of death among flowers, the whiff of fever on river banks,You, the queen, you, the chatelaine, you, the pale lady, come . . .From the closing section of Ode Marítima (1916) Pessoa writing as Álvaro de Campos. Translation: Margaret Jull CostaTu, cuja vinda é tão suave que parece um afastamento,Cujo fluxo e refluxo de treva, quando a lua bafeja,Tem ondas de carinho morto, frio de mares de sonho,Brisas de paisagens supostas para a nossa angústia excessiva…Tu, palidamente, tu, flébil, tu, liquidamente,Aroma de morte entre flores, hálito de febre sobre margens,Tu, rainha, tu, castelã, tu, dona pálida, vem…

You, whose coming is so gentle that it resembles a departure,Whose ebb and flow of darkness, when the moon exhales,Contains waves of dead affection, cold as a sea of dreams,Breezes from landscapes fashioned to calm our excess of anxiety . . .You, palely, you, feebly, you, liquidly, or in the form of a numbing vapour,The smell of death among flowers, the whiff of fever on river banks,You, the queen, you, the chatelaine, you, the pale lady, come . . .From the closing section of Ode Marítima (1916) Pessoa writing as Álvaro de Campos. Translation: Margaret Jull Costa-Tu, cuja vinda é tão suave que parece um afastamento,Cujo fluxo e refluxo de treva, quando a lua bafeja,Tem ondas de carinho morto, frio de mares de sonho,Brisas de paisagens supostas para a nossa angústia excessiva…Tu, palidamente, tu, flébil, tu, liquidamente,Aroma de morte entre flores, hálito de febre sobre margens,Tu, rainha, tu, castelã, tu, dona pálida, vem…

"I have to choose what I detest – either dreaming, which my intelligence hates, or action, which my sensibility loathes; either action, for which I wasn’t born, or dreaming, for which no one was born. Detesting both, I choose neither; but since I must on occasion either dream or act, I mix the two things together." Pessoa, Fragment 2, TBOD--Hey FP!A few days ago, on a walk from Chalfont and Latimer to Chesham, a walk I’ve done a hundred times before, a song came up on my 'Liked Songs' Spotify playlist which I had playing on random at the time: Bill Callahan’s Riding for the Feeling. This song always makes me think of Roz, as it was Roz who introduced me to the song four years ago in a message she sent me on Hinge.“Seems like you’re a Riding For The Feeling kinda guy,” she’d written, including in her message a link to a YouTube video of the Bill Callahan number: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wphQGf2KrXc&list=RDwphQGf2KrXc&index=1I immediately matched with her. Not least because Roz was beautiful and intelligent, and had better music tastes than I had, but also because nobody on Hinge then or since has ever engaged in a conversation with me on that app the way Roz did. This is a missive to you about Roz and the Enneagram. As a fellow Riding For The Feeling Guy, I send it to you with love.Stevexxxx--VIDVERSION: https://youtu.be/bpCI8-HdHa0

"Taking nothing seriously and recognizing our sensations as the only reality we have for certain, we take refuge there, exploring them like large unknown countries. And if we apply ourselves diligently not only to aesthetic contemplation but also to the expression of its methods and results, it’s because the poetry or prose we write – devoid of any desire to move anyone else’s will or to mould anyone’s understanding – is merely like when a reader reads out loud to fully objectify the subjective pleasure of reading.We’re well aware that every creative work is imperfect and that our most dubious aesthetic contemplation will be the one whose object is what we write. But everything is imperfect. There’s no sunset so lovely it couldn’t be yet lovelier, no gentle breeze bringing us sleep that couldn’t bring a yet sounder sleep. And so, contemplators of statues and mountains alike, enjoying both books and the passing days, and dreaming all things so as to transform them into our own substance, we will also write down descriptions and analyses which, when they’re finished, will become extraneous things that we can enjoy as if they happened along one day."-Pessoa, TBOD, Fragment 1

"He had furnished his two rooms with a semblance of luxury, no doubt at the expense of certain basic items. He had taken particular pains with the armchairs, which were soft and well-padded, and with the drapes and rugs. He explained that with this kind of an interior he could ‘maintain the dignity of tedium’. In rooms decorated in the modern style, tedium becomes a discomfort, a physical distress. Nothing had ever obliged him to do anything. He had spent his childhood alone. He never joined any group. He never pursued a course of study. He never belonged to a crowd. The rooms decorated in the modern style, tedium becomes a discomfort, a physical distress. Nothing had ever obliged him to do anything. He had spent his childhood alone. He never joined any group. He never pursued a course of study. He never belonged to a crowd. The circumstances of his life were marked by that strange but rather common phenomenon – perhaps, in fact, it’s true for all lives – of being tailored to the image and likeness of his instincts, which tended towards inertia and withdrawal. He never had to face the demands of society or of the state. He even evaded the demands of his own instincts. Nothing ever prompted him to have friends or lovers. I was the only one who was in some way his intimate. But even if I always felt that I was relating to an assumed personality and that he didn’t really consider me his friend, I realized from the beginning that he needed someone to whom he could leave the book that he left."Pessoa, TBOD (Preface)

This piece explores Simone Weil’s Factory Journal and her idea of Anankē—necessity—as a kind of sacred affliction: the possibility that what undoes us is also what connects us most deeply to reality. I'm including it here, because it is through Weil that I have returned to my initial Pessoan project, which will follow in subsequent fragments.