Hundreds commented on my previous post with questions along the lines of: how can you be researching friendship, Liam, when you’re a total prick and probably have no friends?
And maybe it’s true, I have borrowed books from people and never returned them. I have disappeared in a cloud of fog. My existence has been called into question by several internet message-boards.
A song I’ve been thinking about alongside my reading recently is Worst Friend by Vic Chesnutt, from the final album he released before ending his life on Christmas Day 2009. Among a host of often hilarious, sometimes uncomfortable, friendship archetypes, we get the eponymous friend in the drawled chorus: When you are down, I'm nowhere to be found/ I'm the worst friend in the world.
In his writing on friendship in Books Eight & Nine of the Nicomachean Ethics, our Greek friend Aristotle (at least in the English translations) talks about three types of friendship, two being lesser & utilitarian types (friendships of usefulness/friendships of pleasure), with only one being the real deal: the virtuous friendship, true or genuine friendship.
Now I’m not disagreeing with Aristotle in a public forum, but I think for our purposes it’s worth noting a couple of things. In what we have of Aristotle’s view, true friendship requires both friends to be characters of absolute virtue, to the point that the philosopher Alexander Nehamas has suggested ‘for Aristotle most of us are actually friendless’, at least in terms of that third big boss of true friendship. This strikes me as clearly untrue, for reasons I’m not going to go into lots of detail about here, other than to say that I think Aristotle’s categories are less options on a menu and more ingredients in a soup; an ethics of purity doesn’t seem especially helpful as a framework.
But I can already see the comments: even if we accept there’s a spectrum of friendships, didn’t you literally write a whole pamphlet of poetry about being a selfish bore who’s barely capable of interacting with another human being?
See, that’s where you’re wrong! Monomaniac was, as well as being a sequence about clinical depression, about our ability to recognise and empathise with an Other. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that with my whole poetic project to date, to some extent that’s always been a central concern. Everything I’ve done, and definitely the reading and thinking I’m doing lately, has been about that encounter with the Other.
Everything has been a rally against individualism, egoism, atomisation, loneliness: the four horsemen of anti-friendship. The four horsemen summoned to action by the clarion call of our present era. I’ll not go so far as to suggest that Margaret Thatcher or Milton Friedman literally blew a horn and unleashed evil upon the world. But I do think that friendship, as a way of encountering the world, has the potential to push back against some of our more destructive social conditioning.
I may have stopped mentioning that book you kindly leant me after I dropped it into a crevasse. I might have, on multiple occasions, left the poetry night or the march or the vigil straight after the last speaker without saying bye to anyone. I might be the worst friend you have, objectively, but I’d love to do better!
More to the point, this isn’t just about me: I genuinely believe that there’s something to this, that friendship has the potential to resist a lot of terrible things happening around us. And that poetry, ecopoetry in particular, can play a part in that. That’s my thesis right there, it’ll just take me a few years to iron out some of the creases.
But I’ll leave you with some more words from Aesop Rock, from Hot Dogs:
I should maybe shake some hands/ I should turn the music down/ Have some people over without/ askin' them to move a couch/ But, since you're here I've got this/ awful futon I could do without/ Should take like two seconds...
Your friend,
Liam