Loneliness is the name of the day.

I have heard a psychiatrist say, regarding the isolation incurred by our collective quarantine, that we will need the poets to explain what has been going on. Poet I am not, but I will make my own attempt at metaphor: melancholia has draped over our collective consciousness as a blanket might cover those exposed to winter; the blanket succeeds only partially in obscuring the cold, it succeeds fully in restricting our movements; we know that this strategy is untenable, but we do not know whether to weather the storm or seek some other shelter.

Doctors Fauci et al. may offer us advice, may forecast the future; but, existentially, at our core, we remain uncertain. Loneliness is, perhaps, this very uncertainty, as we lack friendship to reassure us: a kind of harmonious relationship to the world whereby our environments may confirm our experiences, our existence. Our isolation renders our doubts all the more visceral, insofar as its originating event–this outbreak–has ruptured the very notion of “precedence” which we had taken for granted, the linearity to which we had grown accustomed.

In my displaced post-Covid plans, I have been teaching remotely, as a substitute. That word “remote” is an accurate conveyor of my condition, not as the instrument that may control machines from a distance, but as an island which is separated by such lengths that it may no longer be visible, may no longer be visited. My students are mourning a life they no longer have, a teacher they did not get; all the while, I am reminded of the psychoanalytic theory that mourning can only be worked through once one finds an acceptable “substitute,” onto which one may transfer one’s desire for the lost object. As a “substitute” teacher, I am called to an impossible task, and I know that I am failing.

I feel this loneliness most severely when teaching, during those interminable Zoom calls, faced by disembodied and disengaged boxes. Our already commercialized, digitalized world has become submerged even further into the “virtual,” and I cannot help but think of the superficiality of our daily interactions. Life now is flat, lived on a screen. As a result, I continue to ask myself: what is the difference between being in-person and on-line, between a three-dimensional face and a two-dimensional image rendered in lines–an inter-face and an interface? Part of the pain of mourning is its uncertainty: the very absence of our loved object prevents us from knowing what we have lost.

I fear that referring to our collective condition with the term “Zoom fatigue” hopelessly trivializes it. Similarly, regarding the contemporary crisis in loneliness as a “mental health” crisis reduces human happiness to a behavioralist formula, such that there are insufficient quantities of serotonin and dopamine in our Skinner-boxes. Endlessly pressing the button which releases endorphins to their brains, rats do not notice the bars of their cage. By contrast, the horror of our cage–which may overcome us in those insomniac nights when Netflix runs until dawn (‘Are you still watching?’), when its oneiric phantasms cannot adequately substitute for the dreams of our missed sleep, when the images of others’ lives cannot return us to our own–is that we no longer remember what buttons we may press to gain our happiness.

As our loneliness is prolonged, the memory of our former lives fades and yellows. And so our memory is preserved, is re-presented to us most frequently, though still unconvincingly, by the pale mimicry of streaming services. Unfortunately, such images succeed as neither remedy nor intermediary. If the poets are to tell us “what’s going on,” we must meditate, however morosely, on what it is that we have lost, in order that we may better appreciate its eventual return.

When I ask myself the impossible question of what makes the difference between a face in-person and a face portrayed–a question made inevitable by present circumstances, by my present sentiments of isolation–I think back to the words of those who studied photography in its first development, upon first exposure. In the first half of the last century, Walter Benjamin wrote, pessimistically, that the circulated image of an object severs our ties to that object’s “aura:” “if, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.” (The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Production) In the second half of the last century, Roland Barthes makes almost the exactly opposite claim, arguing that a network of light ties us physically to the portrayed object: “the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.” (Camera Lucida)

The joy of the branch is, according to Benjamin, its shade: the absented light of distant stars, the lacuna in Barthes’s theory. I remain uncertain as to what constitutes that missing “aura”: why do my digital interactions feel so draining and listless? can my former interactions ever be successfully substituted under present conditions? The Taoist says that the meaning of a tree is the shade it gives us; there is no further purpose behind our interaction with the world than the attempt to ease our presence in it. Easy enough: but where’s the tree?

It is worth noting that Benjamin and Barthes come at the issue with opposing ends. Benjamin worries that the modern individual will grow passive, living vicariously through the silver screen. His aim is to demonstrate that virtual life can never substitute for the real thing, though our demons of sloth and insecurity may make us wish it were so. Barthes is mourning, through photographs, the loss of his mother; he has a vested interest in creating precisely that umbilical attachment to her, that connection now lost.

However, despite their differences, both Benjamin and Barthes stress physicality, the tactility of presence. For Benjamin, that three-dimensional object exceeds our understanding, our pictorial imaginings: it overwhelms and washes over, surrounds and nourishes us, just as the branch exerts a physical pressure on our bodies beyond its mere appearance. For his part, Barthes recalls us to St. Augustine, in whose writing Plato’s perfect, eternal Idea finds the Fleshly Form of the Body of Christ (or corpus mysticum, for my fellow Latinists): “a skin I share.” The joy of that photo-graphic umbilical chord, tracing a path of light from subject to object, is its capacity to ease the uncertainties of intangible relations with the comforting presence of touch, as if his late mother’s spiritual presence were unquestionably manifest: “light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium.” It may be worth coupling Barthes’s vision with Benjamin’s messianic mysticism, his enigmatic “angel of history,” while paying particular attention to the canonical definition of angels as bodies of light who retain no fleshly weight. Both world views are delightful, if only one has faith enough in the better angels of our nature to maintain them.

I find myself reading Benjamin’s rhetoric in terms of my inability to ex-press myself to my students, to im-press upon them those values which I hold dear. Teaching through Zoom has made me realize the great extent to which all forms of expression rely on controlling and dictating another’s experience. (This is true even if I am not and would not be literally touching my students; although, the professional, supposedly respectful, distance which separates practitioners from their students, patients and clients has increasingly been questioned as of late for its inability to offer comfort.)

We are often in our own respective bedrooms, but the space which I and my students occupy is not the same. In common discourse, this fact evokes my lack of control as a teacher, but only on an obvious level: one student finds my lessons accompanied always by the delightful and distracting soundtrack of her sibling’s violin recitals, another has his lessons interrupted by a parent’s offer of breakfast, some–calling from the car–lack even the stability of a room in which to learn. In different spaces, I cannot control the external factors of students’ home environments.

But, perhaps more important than controlling the circumstances of their environments, the degree to which I control my own projections, how I enter their environments, has ludicrously faded. There is a great difference between an image on a whiteboard and the “shared screens” that my students face, which each have varying sizes and configurations. An extreme example, and a potent one to my mind, is that I cannot yell at my students–not that I ever would. My tone cannot travel in peaks and valleys as a well-directed lecture would: I have no idea the volume at which my students hear my messages.

To some of my students, I fear that I am mute. Eulogizing his former friend and mentor Emanuel Levinas, the philosopher Jacques Derrida provides an anecdote on how, over the phone, in the middle of his sentences, Levinas would suddenly call out: “Allo? Allo?” Both philosophers regard death as a rupture in the call-and-response between souls: an eternal and supernatural dilemma, which Derrida has uncannily represented with the contemporary example of a disconnected phone call. I, along with nearly every other person who has had the misfortune of leading an online seminar, often fear that either I or my students have become a mere specter, as I call on names but yet receive no response: “Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?”

Our worlds are always our own, yes: we can never be sure that others hear our words as we ourselves hear them. To confront the endless questioning of this relativistic subjectivity, we often rely on the objects of our shared environment: the anchors for our communication, the landmarks with which we read our maps. Not much of a positivist herself, skeptical of any eternal or universal Truth, the philosopher Hannah Arendt refers to “objectivity” as nothing more than the firm table which holds us in place, which puts each in relation to the other. Unfortunately, I have never sat at the same table as any of my students.

Though these meditations may explain my unease, the difficulties of digital teaching, they still do not explain the difference between seeing a face on-line and in-person. Is the matter simply that the depth of the image has been lost, that my bifocal vision has been offered only monocular screens? I do not think that this explanation suffices, yet I remain uncertain as to what comprises that missing element.

Beyond these musings on touch, my attention is drawn most strongly to the fact that–in an artificial, post-industrial world–both Benjamin and Barthes take recourse in organic metaphors for their salvation. As Benjamin’s title suggests, the photograph is mechanically produced and reproduced, while such things as branches and umbilical chords (as yet) do not succumb to the artificer’s control, but are instead generated by nature’s touch. Benjamin’s work draws our attention to the multiplication of the same messages and images–whether through the printing press or the daguerrotype–which implies that a greater portion of the world has been molded to take the same form, such that con-formity is the homogeneous repetition of the same shapes. Sharing Benjamin’s indictment of mechanical conformity, the French term cliché–with which we refer to those ideas, phrases and patterns that have become so common as to be inescapable–calls to mind the camera’s “click.” Barthes’s experience of mourning adds to our discussion of nature, insofar as what gives an image its potency, for Barthes, is its unicity. His mother becomes a natural and beautiful image, one for which he mourns, because she cannot be replaced. In Benjamin’s messianic time, beauty is trapped within irreproducible “auras”; for Barthes, Photography’s beauty lies in the photograph’s attachment to death, the fact that each image has-been.

For my own answers as to the difference between artificial imagery and natural beauty, I reflect on time spent with the same sofas and screens, my items and images–times when I’ve wondered whether a hike around Lake Michigan would be worth braving the Chicago winter. As I’ve remained quarantined, many days have passed within the confines of my apartment, even as I have supposedly ventured–virtually, vicariously–throughout the world by means of screens and texts. Breaking these melancholic periods of constancy, I greatly enjoyed the spectacle of driving across country; although, again, I rarely ever moved my legs, but saw the world only through windows. The joy of driving was most powerfully evoked by the many forests encountered along the way–frozen in crystal fractals, shattered tessellations branching off at jagged and unexpected angles.

In a series of amusing and insightful essays, entitled Inclinations, the philosopher Adriana Cavarero makes the powerful argument that the starting point for philosophy is actually a  line: the vertical axis. Once the philosophers have deployed their notion of what it means to be “upright,” and once we have been able to orient ourselves accordingly, the geometers may establish all the proper figures of the world, as the architects erect our cities. The beauty of a tree, especially of a forest, is in the branches: the fact that it lacks such stable and obvious structures, unlike the many boxes of our bridges and buildings. The aesthetics of what is “natural” therefore lies in the tension between surprise and control, uniqueness and predictability. Kant, via Isaiah Berlin, reminds us: “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

The joy of the natural is therefore coeval with the Eternal Spring of Youth, its rejuvenating surprises. We experience wonder, are dumbfounded, made childlike by the great extent to which the world exceeds and disrupts our expectations. Moreover, as any parent may attest, we often rely on the world of children–their delightfully absurd language and games, their linguistic leaps and playful hop-scotches, their poetic non-conformity–for such rejuvenation. I am also reminded of the experience of laughter, joyful insofar as it is utterly spasmodic and inexplicable. I am reminded also of my late great-uncle, the great humorist and retired priest, who suffered, died and was buried of Parkinson’s–in whom the double-sided joy and suffering of our spasmodic bodies was forever manifest. He was ever calm, despite my giggling beside him; these memories of him evoke a passage from Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, which claims that the hardest move for any dancer to master, is a leap with perfect momentum: jumping without wavering, landing completely still. Serenity and vigor, surprise and control, balanced perfectly as the dancer’s springing step–we must exert all our energies into a single act, to never let our thoughts exceed the demands of this absurd moment.

As the reference to Kierkegaard would suggest, such a conception of the “natural” may therefore be tied to the values, made ubiquitous by existentialism, of the “authentic.” For Barthes, photographs are authentic in the extreme, because he wrote before the widespread use of digital photography and its many manipulations. The fact that we could not fully control or create photographic images ex nihilo–that they could only ever be staged and costumed–meant for Barthes that each photograph, even the most artificial, must still display a worldly and historical locale. Barthes saw this beauty as lying in a photograph’s punctum, its sharp surprise: that unconstrained element of the photograph which exceeds the author’s intentions as well as the observer’s expectations, thereby rendering it unequivocally real. However, today’s creation of deeply realistic “fakes,” constructed through thousandfold overlays of dissected and thereby desiccated images, means that we may no longer look at a photograph with the same naive and delighted eye as Barthes. Such is the dual nature of enhancing our capacities to make and model, our fictive potential, with which term I refer to the simultaneously fabulous and deceptive event of telling tales. We make nature’s chaotic divergences more predictable, we learn to mimic and manage its branches and bifurcations, at the cost of being surprised by them.

Of course, we must, at times, take an axe to these dark and gloomy forests. We cannot navigate through our lives without the axes by which we anchor ourselves, lest we fall victim to those vertiginous visions of St. Anthony, as rendered powerfully by John Covert’s “The Temptation of St. Anthony, #2” (1919). But even as the tree’s beauty consoles me, it makes me doubt whether I may ever answer the question as to what separates the face in-person from the face on-line. Indeed, how could I answer such a question, any more than I could predict, could draw the faces with which I will fall in love?

Perhaps because I fear that it is unanswerable, the question of what makes a face in-person less lonely than one seen on-line strikes me as being impertinent. Since I’m currently working as a Latinist, the use of this term reminds me of its etymology: pertinere, to belong, to pertain, but also to extend. The question does not belong, is not worth bringing up, because it is unanswerable. But it is also unanswerable because it does not stick, because my questioning cannot stretch through time, because the question fades almost as soon as it appears. Disappearing so quickly, it is only a moment, a dot: I lack the leverage with which I may grapple with it, turn it over, disentangle it. The question also does much to worsen my impatience, as I cannot wait to test the difference between being on-line and in-person. But impatience, too, has its own im-portant etymology, which it carries in to my thoughts. Patior, to suffer, becomes suffering as patiens; so, strangely, my impatience, though it may be a nuisance, is an absence of suffering. Perhaps my lack of extension or adherence may be tied to my ennui, the non-suffering of my intolerable boredom: I do not have the same attachments, I am not attached to others.

I have tried to resolve this dilemma between stoic self-control and anarchistic disinhibition with an ideal of “sleeping with others.” Now with this term I do not refer to mere coital interaction; rather, I intend to refer to the greater intimacy of sleeping with others, which our sex-crazed society has effaced with euphemism and double-speak. As an exemplary inhabitant of such a society, take the trope of the anxious-avoidant Don Juan who “sleeps” with many lovers but leaves, always, in the night, post-coitus. The intimacy of sleeping with others, which I regard as intimacy in its most visceral form, succeeds insofar as it mingles constancy and movement, the natural and the artificial, the controlled and the involuntary: with respect to such intimacy, I do not have in mind lovers who lie frozen as in their coffins, but those in the pleasant tides and spasms of sleep, as each lover thoughtlessly matches the rhythms of the other.

In a similar vision, the ecological theory of counseling regards successful relationship as synergistic: wherein life-sustained energy is retained in the resonant dance between partners, without its succumbing to destruction and entropy. Or again, to find this ideal of “sleeping with others” presented in a scientific setting, see Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. In this masterly review of trauma research on trauma, van der Kolk relays an important message he received early in his career: “I remember being surprised to hear this distinguished old Harvard professor [Elvin Selmrad] confess how comforted he was to feel his wife’s bum against him as he fell asleep at night. By disclosing such simple human needs in himself he helped us recognize how basic they were to our lives.”

In the push and pull of these lovers’ movements, I think I find the element missing from the face on-line. Affection is an intensification of affect, a series of continuous affirmations and declarations of gratitude. Your witty remark is well-met by my quavering chest, whose chuckle thanks you for your service; and this is received most kindly by your raised eyebrow, noting the vehemence of my laughter–and so, and so, we could go. The various machines of our bodies are so synchronously designed as the watchmaker’s many toys, mere cuckoo clocks of continuous praises. Our joy is expressed as a tennis-match of affirmations analogous to the cutesy cliché of young lovers over the phone: “No, you hang up.” “No you.” no you. noyounoyounoyou. The most literary example of such praises we find in Joyce’s stream of consciousness, as Molly Blooms in song, boldly declaring: “I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

At times I think that the present epidemic of insomnia and melancholia are symptoms of no more complicated disease than sleeping alone, like the lonely interlocutors, the cleaved, predestined pairs of Plato’s Symposium. But then I wonder whether this image of sleeping with others might end the question too quickly, might be sidestepping the genuine attempt to “think what it means to be in the presence of others” with overt sentimentality: a reaffirmation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs no better than the pedantic and bourgeois, heteronormative and materialistic “truth universally acknowledged, that a single bachelor in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Is it all just a hidden conspiracy? Have I just found myself caught within the marriage plot?

I think about the unpredictable lines of another’s face, wondering precisely when those lines become meaningful, and am reminded also of the contours of my own body. Perhaps because the energies and antagonisms of socialization have been bereft of their former outlet, I have been exercising quite a bit more in quarantine than I ever did before it. The contours of my body have been thereby changed, with new concave and convex curves tracing my appearance in the mirror, peeking out of my sleeves. Perhaps these changes, just like the meditations on when a face becomes a face, may be defined only in part, and only as part of that interminable debate over how to trace the body, how to cultivate and present the masks of femininity and masculinity. But I feel these lines not as they appear to others, but as the surprising presence of my body in spaces where it didn’t exist before, the push and pull of new musculature, movements and postures of which I had been incapable.

I often hear, as this question makes its recurrent return to my lonely mind, the gentle song: “the trace, of something in the air.” At the end of My Fair Lady, to excuse his endlessly constraining structuralism for its grammar, its misogyny and its classism, Rex Harrison vies powerfully for our affections with his quiet declaration of love: