Solitude & Antipodes

“I sent my Soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After-life to spell: And by and by my Soul return'd to me, And answer'd: 'I Myself am Heav'n and Hell” ― Omar Khayyam

i.

I notice strange things when I’m alone—cellular plant details, morganite light striking my bath, moss blood rusting over boulders. Solitude makes me shift into a place surreal with intense color and significant light, trapped suns in gems and flowers. I understand things intuitively in this state and can control my eyes the way I would a camera’s focus ring. I sometimes feel the ocean sloshing between my ribs. If I’m outside, trees gain posture and an intimate expression. As I notice more, the knots tying me to our shared reality are unfastened and fall away as I drift further and further out, free.

For years I worried this was hallucination; nobody else saw it. Afraid of social ostracism, I knew to not talk about this experience, but I still had a reputation for having a “very active imagination.” I still struggle to explain this state, but now think that others experience it too. I’ve come to see it not as hallucination, but as an exploration of consciousness.

These explorations of my consciousness mostly happen when I’m alone. Solitude provides me with an intense clarity of vision that allows me to see things I can’t when I’m with others. Daily life is too distracting, too polluting, too full of other people. Their noise makes follow these threads of shimmering light harder than seeing constellations in a city. Alone, I can see well enough to follow them slowly and carefully, like trying to trace a single filament of spider silk.

These threads connect our inner psyche with the outer psyche, and if I can follow them far enough I will leave the realm of the everyday and enter the antipodes. An antipode is literally a point diametrically opposite from another point on Earth’s surface—San Francisco’s antipode is Port-aux-Français. I’m using the word antipode differently, the same way Huxley did in Heaven and Hell. Here, the antipodes are the outer parts of our psyche, places far from the everyday. Getting to antipodes requires journey and expansion of the mind. They’re markedly different and can only be accessed through altered mental states. People use psychedelics, fasting, sleep deprivation, and taping ping pong balls over their eyes to get there. Mental illness and certain medication can take us to the antipodes when we don’t intend to, and I think my access to the antipodes is partly due to my proclivity for mental illness.

The antipodes are surreal. I can tell I’m approaching them when light becomes brighter and things seem to glow; light and color become more intense as you get further from everyday existence and deeper into the antipodes. This is the place where our visions, dreams, and hallucinations come from. Art inspired here typically has an intense clarity. They inspired Nabakov’s potustornnost, the transcendent otherworld that is the keystone to all his creations. I see echoes of the antipodes in FKAtwig’smusic, Ithell Colquhoun’s art, Anna Cabrera & Ángel Albarrán’s photography, and Gary Snyder’spoetry. I also see it in Ming dynasty art, Georges Braque’s still lifes, arabesque architecture, Odilon Redon’sart, and Lewis Carrol’s writing. Most of my favorite artists have some kind of antipodal expression in their art. 

Although some artists are hugely influenced by the antipodes, it’s still very rare to see an entire portfolio dedicated to them. Trying to describe the antipodes is an impossible task and attempting it usually drives people mad. Journeying to the antipodes is exhausting, but the artist’s desire can sometimes overpower the need for rest—sleep deprivation is a sure ticket to insanity. Getting caught up in the beauty of the antipodes can mean never leaving them, which means being markedly different from those in the realm of everyday existence. Art with too much antipodal light shining through is typically perceived as off-putting and weird, especially to people who have never gone past the limit of everyday existence. I think this is a valid criticism! Compared to the everyday, the antipodes are definitely otherworldly. They’re not even always beautiful—as part of our psyche, there are both terrible and incredible parts. 

The antipodes are where our mind goes when we take psychedelics, so people are typically most familiar with those depictions of them. Experience with psychedelics can make exploring the antipodes easier through familiarity, but it’s certainly not necessary—see my childhood experiences or Ann Shulgin’s Spiral in Pikhal. Although allies can lead us down the glowing spider-silk path from the everyday to the antipodes, I think it’s important that we also try to walk it unassisted. I often use solitude to alter my mental state, since it clears my mind enough for me to access the antipodes. This practice is a struggle, because moments of solitude are increasingly difficult to find. I think modern life robs us of the solitude needed to explore our consciousness and damages our ability to be alone.

ii.

Life in modern society is built on a foundation of hyper-connectivity. We are constantly pressured into this state, and the internet enables it. As a result it is now both rare and difficult to be alone with our thoughts. We’ve normalized bizarre behavior to avoid this aloneness: bringing our phones to the bathroom; jogging to podcasts; listening to NPR on road trips; texting whenever we’re awake; sharing our intimate moments for public judgement. There’s an expectation of usually being plugged in. I respond to messages pretty haphazardly, and I worry it makes me a bad friend. People will give themselves a mild electric shock to avoid sitting with just their thoughts for fifteen minutes. I find myself constantly reaching for my phone when life has a moment of stillness and consider it my biggest addiction. 

People who can increase the time we spend online are paid lavishly. Thanks to existence under capitalism and the lucrativeness of ad targeting, some of our smartest minds are now dedicated to making the internet as addicting as possible. Their success has been wild, their payouts huge, and the headlines terrifying. I have no doubt that time spent online is going to increase in my lifetime and I wonder if my retirement will be spent gardening or plugged into some VR experience. It already often feels easier to just mindlessly scroll Instagram than to engage with myself. Technology has permeated my intimate moments to the point where solitary rituals often feel indulgent, especially if I do nothing to share them. The immense pressure to participate in hyperconnectivity makes solitude feel gluttonous and subversive. I hate feeling guilty for taking a long bath! This pressure to hurl ourselves into the internet abyss is dangerous and a part of modern life I am really frustrated with. The constantly stimulating state of hyper-connectivity corrodes our ability to exist in solitude, which is necessary for the self-understanding crucial to happiness. 

Working at Facebook, I constantly see how people think about product use and addiction (without ever recognizing the connection of corporate language to that of drug use). I think outsiders underestimate how metrics-driven this work is, and how hard it is for people to know what impact a new product is going to have. I can think of countless executive projects, heralded as the next big thing, that actually reduced comments or likes so significantly the projects had to be quietly ended. I don’t think that Google or Facebook or Twitter executives have any idea what they are doing to the brains of billions of people—they’re just fiddling with knobs and seeing what comes out, choosing the decision with the highest numbers. 

iii.

Solitude is the antidote to this tech-driven hyper-connectivity and it makes introspection possible. But people fear solitude and perceive it as a painful experience, which in turn makes them avoid it. This happens when solitude is confused with loneliness, but they are fundamentally different feelings and we should tease them apart to understand why. Loneliness is marked by a sense of isolation. It feels like I’m stranded on a barren island and hating every second of it. In contrast, solitude is not lonely or bitter. Solitude feels like watching a magnificent sunrise, peach juice sticky on my fingers. Solitude makes me feel deeply connected with myself and the world in a way that makes me feel incredibly unisolated. Solitude is glorious. It’s a feeling full of energetic light, and we should seek it for the natural access it gives us to the antipodes.  

Making it into the antipodes is a fraught journey, full of potential pitfalls. As lone navigators, the only benchmark we have is ourselves; there is nobody else to blame or give credit to. I think most people only really travel to the antipodes as children, and then they lose the ability to do so as an adult because they become too comfortable with the everyday. Huxley said some “never consciously discover their antipodes. Others make an occasional landing. Yet others (but they are few) find it easy to go and come as they please.” So many fail in this journey—why? First we overcome the fear of solitude. Novice adventurers, we then venture out into the antipodes and are immediately confronted by their light. Our eyes are so adjusted to everyday dullness that we feel blinded. This brightness often makes people recoil back into the comfortable darkness. We’ve made a significant step if we can endure the light, but now we have to deal with what the light shows us. There is a clarity in the antipodes that destroys the illusions we’ve created to make everyday existence comfortable, and life without these fake comforts can feel brutal. The further we venture into the antipodes, the more intense the light gets. Nothing can hide from it, no crack is too narrow or too deep. This process of illumination can be extremely painful. I’ve been forced to confront many realities under this fierce light, and I wasn’t always ready for it. 

Deep journeys into the antipodes require going past the limit of individual existence and dissolving the boundaries of self, an incredibly painful experience when our everyday existence is so ego-centric. Some people call this process “ego death”, but that language never resonated with me. Nothing dies, we just realize that our concept of self is an illusion. Once we realize this, we can pass through some boundary that enables us to connect with the universe at large. We are shown our place in the world and our identities are fundamentally shifted. I brought a moment of antipodal clarity to the dinner table when I was twelve and announced that I was a vegetarian, having realized that my place in the world couldn’t possibly justify killing something I didn’t really need to. My politics and perspective on society are largely the result of examining my current place in the world under this light.

iv.

Some people can travel deep into the antipodes, some only slightly, other people are hardheads. Everyone is different. I am most drawn to people who can unfocus and shift significantly. I’ve found that those people are also usually the ones who have directed significant energy inwards, something that I think is requisite for my love. I struggle to be intimate with those who haven’t spent a lot of time reflecting inwards—the self being presented for loving feels underdeveloped. People are often ostracized for seeking solitude, but those comfortable in it are some of my favorite people. 

I have always been drawn to solitude, but struggle to reconcile this desire with my love of humanity. I want to be alone for a long period in my life, but don’t know what that looks like yet. 

My best writing happens in solitude. In many ways, my writing practice is also a practice of solitude. Solitude can be inspiring, but it is more often a time of creative synthesis where I integrate thoughts and words. I am still constantly guilty of choosing my phone over solitude, neglecting my creativity and often myself in the process.

I want to use this space to write about the character of my antipodes, the tools I use to get there, random fascinations that consumed me this month, book reviews, whatever. Themes that I want to explore deeply in these essays are queerness. kink, nature, brains, poetry, piercings, tattoos, love, sex, and maybe even a photo essay. 

Thank you to Lauren, Luca, and Julia for their feedback.

P.S. Any replies go to my inbox and are very welcome! Ideas, comments, crit, whatever you’re feeling. Next up: tattoos, piercings, and flowers 🌸