March 18: Friend
Friendship never had exact parameters. Like love, it can fire up right away, or boomerang into you, someone you first tried to escape or about whom you felt indifferent turning into a pal of top measure. Like the hoods–sisterhood, brotherhood–friendship strengthens under duress and over time. Common interest and shared temperament usually help, though these rarely determine who becomes friends with whom, or how.
One can be either a good or bad neighbor, or lover, or friend, naturally enough. But a person you live near to whom you never speak is a neighbor only slightly less than is Dio, who lets me enter his dwelling to borrow sugar because I know he’s not at home. “Neighbor” defines proximity first, behavior, second. Not so with friend.
Lovers occupy their own country together, a private realm. Behind those borders no one can ever guess what, exactly, goes on. And many folks make love to each other without feeling, or as a thing never to repeat once morning comes and it is time to stand. But friends take comfort in living across each other’s boundaries and do so, as often as not, as their way of being out in the public world. Think of the barbs you will permit your best friend you might permit no other.
In the age before Corona, because of the internet, we let go of many of the essential fibers of what holds one human to another, among these how we understood friendship. To be sure, humans have always been spectacularly good at forgetting these fibers, at dismissing the bonds that both pull us towards each other and up, together, as a community. Greed and avarice, militarism and materialism, human beings ground up as fodder in the name of some state, some cause, an economic theorem or today’s sect of the self-righteous . . . label that evil or see it exposing what Darwin called the lowly stamp of our origin. ` either way, people rarely live up to their best selves, rarely live into history as they do with and towards their best buds.
Did not the internet befoul our definition of friend? Convincing us mutual inter-relatedness and affection could be conjured with a click? Sure, friends discover one another and hold fast through letters and online. Presence is optional. But to think that because how you and I both access the same social media platform will bind us as friends ghosts the essentials any friendship demands. If you make friends with that half-drunk lunatic who offers you a drink at the party you were not sure you wanted to go to, that would be cool and groovy. But if you do, it won’t be because of the shape of the roof where the party took place.
History’s villains could not have imagined the persistent, invasive slitherings of the smartphone and the internet as we mis-used them in the decade before this pandemic. What crusader or conquistador, what king or cretin would have conjured the irony of Facebook? Chop your head off or burn you at the stake? No problem. Believe all you need do to be my friend is click here? Nope. That violates your decency no less than my own.
Facebook conflated friend-worthy–which we all are–with friend, which only a select and delicious bunch can ever be. (We can no more be friends with everyone who might fill the role splendidly than we can love everyone we might live.) Who we choose as our friends and who we end up being friends with is as distinct and leathered as our signature or our smile. Private and particular taste, happenstance and chance, sanctify friendships ground in those persons who latch their spirit and foibles to our own. As an economic scheme, Facebook’s conflation of friend-worthy with friend was a bonanza. As a global step towards conceding that sacred territory, space in the brian and the heart where spirit binds to spirit, that conflation was a vice.
As with everything else, this pandemic will not be worth it even if we learn all there is to learn in the time between now and global health. That day of health, though, will come sooner and feel better if we use this time to remind ourselves of friendships more noble parameters and strive, again, to be worthy of them.
The reason, by the bye, for this incomplete meditation on friendship is to say that the history we make will depend not only on friendship, but , as ever, on friendships great comrade, the citizen.
But to that tomorrow.
For now, stay safe, make, give and be,
–Ted
