This one has been hard to write. I've thrown away many drafts. Many people that know me know that one of my absolute best friends passed away recently. And I have certainly not taken it very well. I don't think it's the kind of thing one should take well. Being sad is not always to be avoided.
And well, I've been trying to figure out how to write about it on this blog - still working this event into a philosophical framework, while still honoring my friend. That's not so easy.
So what I was thinking is that nobody has written about - well maybe someone has, but I don't know them - a phenomenology of friendship. And what my friend Phillip really taught me - well no, showed me - is how a friendship that is genuine can go.
I know how a friendship feels by walking into my local pub and being excited upon seeing someone that draws me in. Phillip could do that as well as anybody. We learned each others habits. I am unforgivably talkative - I monopolize conversations when I'm not thinking about it - and he was the best listener and had the most wonderfully insane hand gestures. Phillip had a sort of sign language. I knew the sign for typing on the internet - I knew the sign for beer - I knew the sign for smoke - I knew the sign for man-you're-being a dick. And I loved them all. Still do. (And he never had to forgive me for talking too much - he just accepted it - which is remarkable. Anybody that knows me will attest to this)
Phillip was the first person I really got to know when I moved back that I didn't already know. We used to inhabit the same bar. And I would sit at one seat - I'm a creature of habit - and finally one day we struck up a conversation about films. We both loved David Lynch and Woody Allen. His favorite film was Star Wars - he would claim that all 6 are one film and asking him to pick one was patently unfair. So I used to give him hell that Annie Hall beat Star Wars out for best picture.
So in about 2008 we started going to movies together - we talked many times about having a Siskel and Ebert type show. See I am far more critical than Phillip. He could take a film that was bad - I mean really bad - and find a moment in it that was beautiful. Even if that one moment was just a moment, literally. He had the same kind of generosity in all his ventures - especially towards his friends.
I guess in that way Phillip made me believe in an authentic way to be a friend. He was always directed to you when you were talking - he was always invested - he was honest. Now this isn't just about me eulogizing my friend, though I'm happy to say these things that are nice. But I am saying them because they are true.
The only time I saw Phillip be "dishonest" was when a person who he didn't know very well - usually someone he just met at the bar - asked about the wheelchair. I heard stories told from a Trapeze Artist accident to saving-burning-baby accident. But these stories were actually authentic - wonderfully so because they were playful. They were a moment of creativity and a friendly way to be dismissive - a way to say - you don't know me well enough yet to ask this question. Or something like that. It's not fair for me to speak for him.
Okay, but so what is the phenomenon of friendship. Well, I know this. It involves commitment. A passionate commitment. It also involves play. Friendships should be endlessly innovative - full of constant moments of renewal.
Early in our relationship - and I'm proud to say this - I literally quit seeing Phillip as someone who was "handicapped." Now, maybe lots of people better than me do this often and quicker, but I had never had a close friend in a wheelchair. Now the thing is that I never didn't see the wheelchair (well this is complicated. In another way I was always forgetting about the wheelchair and rarely saw it. I'll have to think about how to explain this.) - it would be a lie to say that I thought my friend was walking - I still remember carrying him up the stairs to my apartment with a buddy. And I remember carrying him back down after we all drank enough to probably float his tires. I remember constantly loading and unloading the chair in my car on the way to and from movies and I remember the way he could unload this awkward and heavy device out the backseat of his car with one hand and a turn of the pelvis.
But what the phenomenon of his friendship taught me was that there is a bond that is transcendent - I saw the body - I knew the body was a huge part of his world - and I also felt something that went beyond. Now the beyond wasn't vertical; it was horizontal. It moved from him to me and hopefully vice versa. So the moving-through that happens in friendship is both bodily and spiritual. Not spiritual in a godly way necessarily - though it could be, but spirit in the sense that people are spirited beings - they move beyond their bodies, but also always through their bodies. This contradiction - I think - is at the heart of friendship.
Friendship has to be the most fundamental place of meaning in today's world. I don't mean to overstate the problems of communication and technology, but in lots of ways we are living in boxes, through devices like this one, often in ways that are less than the potential for the medium offers. (At least hopefully)
I mean it's just a truism these days that meaning has broken down. Institutions that used to be meaning-bearing have become meaning-barren: The Church; the government; the family; education systems and so forth. So what do we have. Well, not to be too romantic, but what we have is each other - we have our friends. Our friends constitute us and we them. Our friends make life meaningful. And while I obviously - believe me I understand where I'm writing this - understand the internet is not necessarily an impediment, it certainly can be. (and face-to-face doesn't ensure authenticity to be sure) We need the intermingling that occurs with face-to-face interaction.
So I think I am at a stopping place, but I want to continue thinking about the phenomenology of Friendship. I really do think that Friendship is an event, born both bodily and spiritually. This event is intimately singular as all friendships are unique, but it also moves beyond the singular - as we've all had moments when friends meet other friends and the group grows. Now the group, of course, is also singular - so maybe it moves through singularities - hell I don't know - this is all really complicated.
But I do know that thinking about friendship seems like the most worthwhile topic in these days - days that move so fast and feel somehow lonelier and also somehow maybe more hopeful. Maybe.
This is really a beautiful collection of thoughts, and, before I say anything else, I just want to say thanks for sharing it. Friendship is one of the phenomena of everyday life that, for me at least, eludes purposeful reflection. I want to say that this is due to the fact that it's so fundamental to my understanding of myself and, of course, to my well-being that it resists the will to abstraction that philosophical thought requires. Now, if I consider that I've spent, on the balance, whole days reflecting on the peculiarities of space, time, language and embodiment, this is a pretty radical statement. Kant declared space and time to be a priori categories, necessary to the formulation of any thought let alone intuitions. So, how is it that I can freely - well, obviously with some difficulty - take up these concepts as objects of philosophical reflection while finding the concept of friendship so elusive, almost fugitive? I haven't read enough Kant to know whether or not he has an answer to this question. But, personally, I'm tempted to say that there's something in friendship, some truth, which approaches the level of a Platonic idea: an eternal form that, to borrow the Pauline phrase, I observe only "through a glass darkly."
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I think you're right to approach this problem dialectically; that is, through our pervasive sense of alienation. What does friendship mean in a society where traditional social bonds have largely disintegrated? I never really understood when I heard people speak of the politics of friendship, friendship as a political phenomenon, but maybe that idea is appropriate to these reflections. In a way, friendship defies the normative constructions of a society based on self-management, self-maximization. The self-help gurus tell you to dump toxic relationships that hold you back from achieving your potential. Social networking allows us to have "friends" without taking any risks or making any commitments. Corporate culture encourages friendliness but always within a rigidly circumscribed disciplinary code. Our real friendships resist this logic and that resistance opens a vista onto a different way of being in the world and, more importantly, a different way of being with others.
So, I want to say that friendship is political, but political in the best meaning of the term. Friendship contests the roles into which - whether out of fear or obligation - we're forcibly conscripted day after day. And that means that friendship is a sort of liberation, though I don't mean this in the pop-psychological sense of self-actualization or freedom from self-doubt. Nor is friendship inherently good: friends can sometimes convince each other to do terrible things. But friendship is a sort of miracle: the interpolation of our experience by some parallel world of values. Okay, once I start talking about miracles you know I'm at a loss for words.
Thanks again for this post. I hope to have a response to your post on Academia as well.
Thanks for the incredibly thoughtful response. I have a lot of mixed feelings about the word "political" too. I mean I can understand someone saying something like "the politics of friendship" to mean the general rules we operate under when we're friends. I know that sounds way too clinical. And in fact that might be my problem with it. I mean I know there's a way in which you can say everything's political. And I don't exactly disagree - I just think it's more interesting to talk about things with different terminology. I much prefer the phenomenology of friendship. That seems to open up a space for the conversation I want to have. If that makes sense.
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