Mind and Friends

(1949)

By Eli Siegel

Men are suspicious of women, and women are suspicious of men because of that great, current, and historical problem associated with sex. But it so happens that even without sex there is suspicion. To have suspicion means that you feel there is something around which can hurt you; and even though you think something is pleasing you, you are not entirely sure. We want to be friendly, but we’re afraid that if we’re too friendly, we’ll give up something in ourselves; we shall donate and receive no donation in return. Then, we also feel that what another person can do to us will be against us.

This is the essential situation that all people have deeply. We want to see the world as a friend, but we can’t do that easily. The world, though it cannot be defined by most people, is a very constant and active factor in our lives.

A friend, according to Aesthetic Realism, is a person who wants from us what we want from ourselves, and is also a person who has pleasure in making us stronger. The only difference between friendship and love is that one of the means of making us stronger is (or are) those phenomena which are called the sexual phenomena. But the word friendship is just as deep as the word love; and it is just as hard. From one point of view, it is harder. When a girl says, coyly, “Oh, what is all this talk; Bob and I are just friends,” the just is very funny; because people can be married for years and they can have gone through sexual orgies, but that doesn’t mean they’re friends. One of the purposes of Aesthetic Realism is to show—and sometimes it is difficult to show—that carnal frenzy can go along with benevolence. That is a hard thing for people to accept, because a good deal of sex occurs not out of good will, but out of a desire to be a conquistador of the flesh. The feeling that good will for another is good for us is a little rarer than uranium. And a person usually goes through life being suspicious of everyone he or she has met.

Proverbs have dealt with friendship. Customary phrases do. A person, for example, takes out his wallet, pats it as a doctor might an infant, and says, “There’s my friend.” And persons have said there is no such thing as friendship: your best friend is number one, and if you have any friends it’s only fractions of number one.

I read “Proverbs on Friendship” from English Proverbs, edited by W. Carew Hazlitt. “When two friends have a common purse, one sings and the other weeps.” This is a way of saying that when two people get together, one of them has to get it in the neck, because if one sings the other has to weep. “Where wealth, there friends,” which means that friends will be around you when things are going well with you. And then we have this very suspicious proverb: “Wherever you see your friend, trust unto yourself.”

However, Aesthetic Realism says very definitely that although it is very hard to be friendly, nonetheless, no person, while he’s alive, will ever stop trying. I have described the three possible situations a person may be in, in meeting even a stranger. Assume that John Rosen meets James Robinson. John Rosen talks to James Robinson for five minutes. John Rosen either leaves James Robinson exactly as he was; or through talking to him he can make him somewhat worse off than he was; or he can make him better off than he was. “I was introduced to him and I talked to him for five minutes. 1. I left him exactly as he was—I don’t like that. I don’t like talking to a guy for five minutes and not meaning a thing, even though it isn’t bad. 2. I did him some harm; I really did him some bad things; I don’t like that. 3. I did him a little good.” John Rosen likes that; everybody would. And this aspect of the ethical unconscious shows that with the field being equal we do want to be friends, because if we have pleasure in doing something good to a person rather than something harmful, we are friendly. It is true that there is something in us which wants to do something harmful, but the point is we cannot look at it. We can only say, “Well, that guy got what was coming to him.”

The idea of doing something harmful as such is repugnant to the deepest thing in oneself, because no one can stand for the idea of meeting a person and not having a good effect. I once said to a man, for example, “So, suppose you were with this girl, and you felt next year it would have a bad effect on her, would you be with that girl?” And he said, “I don’t think it would”; but I said, “Suppose you knew it would.”—“No, I couldn’t.” And this man had the Times Square ethics. He wasn’t given very much to the subtleties of good and evil. All he felt was that he had an urge. Yet if he could see that he was harming someone clearly, without going through any of the shady business to buffalo himself as people will when they think they want something, he couldn’t go on with it. This ethical hesitation is deep in one.  

Friendship, a Waltz

No matter how difficult friends are to find or to be, we can never stop 1. wanting to be a friend, 2. wanting to meet a friend. We can talk all we want about the hollowness of friendship and the hollowness of love, and the hollowness of human nature, but we can’t let it go at that.

I read now from a book called Selected Thoughts from the French, with English translations by J. Raymond Solly (London, Constable & Co., 1913). “Most friendships bristle with ifs and buts, and end in being simple companionships, which subsist with the aid of mental reservations” (Chamfort). This means that every friendship that goes on for a while gets to be a pretty wavering jungle. People will calculate. Two people married, no matter how long married, will ask, what am I getting from this, and what am I giving, and do the two things, giving and getting, really work together proportionately? We are always asking that. And if we feel we’re getting too little we get angry; if we feel we’re giving too little we become guilty. And sometimes we can feel angry and guilty in the same ten minutes.

Because the process of wanting to be good to something besides ourselves and wanting something besides ourselves to be good to us can have so many variations, can make for hots and colds and forwards and backwards in so many ways, every friendship consists of a mystery switchboard. The lights go on, the lights go down; this number is rung up, this number is forgotten; but through it all there are wavering and murk. This is expressed in the sentence of the eighteenth-century writer Chamfort.

This is another sentence by Chamfort: “M.H. . . . said to me: ‘I have renounced the friendship of two men: one because he never talked to me about himself; the other because he never talked to me about myself.’” Wherever there is friendship there is a beautiful interaction between talking about oneself and talking about the other person. In fact, there is a feeling that if one talks about the other person one also is talking about oneself. However, usually there is some disproportion. It goes on in the field of love or sex and also in the field of ordinary friendship. A person will use another to tell all his worries and the other will listen because he feels superior. The proper simultaneity of desire for listening and talking about oneself is rare, because it means that we have to see what is outside ourselves as being just as real as what is ourselves.

People do not see that reality is big enough to include the most hidden interior of ourselves and the most external things, so in a conversation of man and woman there are hidden games and subtle vacancies. But a conversation between man and man or woman and woman can also have games and vacancies—sparring for position, interior jockeying. The motive of friendship and the motive of sex are the same. The good motive is to feel through knowing another, you yourself have come to be more what you want to be; and through that person’s knowing you, that person has come to be more what she or he wants to be. The bad motive is the feeling that through knowing another, you have been able to acquire some power over him, and been able to do something to him without necessarily doing something for him of the kind he really wants. Friendship very often has contempt in it.

This is a sentence from Pascal: “I lay it down as a fact that, if everyone knew what everybody else said of them, there would not be four friends in the world.” This is true. We can be angry with anybody, and if our thoughts were uttered at that time and weren’t seen in context, everybody would be separating from everybody else. If Einstein, for instance, came into a room and happened to drop a flatiron on our toe, we’d forget he was Einstein. The point is that if anything takes something in us which is subject to pain, in a surprising way and in a way unknown to us, at that moment we are angry. We are interested in the world pleasing us, and the persons closest to us can sometimes disappoint us.

A friendship, for instance, is broken because a painter is pointing to a certain angle in his painting, and says “I like that touch,” and all that the other person says is “Pretty good.” That isn’t what he expected. The friendship is over, though the people see each other some more. There can be a friendship broken because one girl bought a dress, let us say, at a certain store on Fourteenth Street, and another girl says, “If I were you I wouldn’t buy dresses there.” The friendship is over. They meet each other, but the friendship is over. Something has been brought into the open: a certain desire to be superior. All kinds of incidents, very subtle, can be the opening moment for the great rift. There is a waltz of coming together and separation in every field where humans meet.

The Warmest Word

In the life of Alexander Pope there was a great desire to be friendly to someone; and one can also see that he had a great fear of it. I read a few passages from the life by Samuel Johnson. Pope is dying in 1744:

While he was yet capable of amusement and conversation, as he was one day sitting in the air with Lord Bolingbroke and Lord Marchmont, he saw his favourite Martha Blount at the bottom of the terrace, and asked Lord Bolingbroke to go and hand her up. Bolingbroke, not liking his errand, crossed his legs, and sat still; but Lord Marchmont, who was younger and less captious, waited on the Lady; who, when he came to her, asked, What, is he not dead yet? She is said to have neglected him, with shameful unkindness, in the latter time of his decay; yet, of the little which he had to leave, she had a very great part. Their acquaintance began early; the life of each was pictured on the other’s mind; their conversation therefore was endearing, for when they met, there was an immediate coalition of congenial notions.

If one looks at the life of Alexander Pope, one sees a certain going forward, tentatively, as a child might; and then the being very, very agreeable; and then the fear. Like a beautiful, mysterious, and magic insect, Pope goes on. It was the same with both men and women. Here was this woman, Martha Blount, whom he cared for and whom he feared. She cared for him and she also did not respect him. The same thing occurred with Mary Wortley Montagu. Though these are women, some of the maneuvers of friendship, of the most delicate kind, are present. In Jane Austen we find the delicacy of friendship, and the wars, and the little skirmishes, between woman and woman. We find this in the relation of man and man in Dostoevsky.

Johnson is writing about Pope:

In May 1744, his death was approaching; on the sixth, he was all day delirious, which he mentioned four days afterwards as a sufficient humiliation of the vanity of man; he afterwards complained of seeing things as through a curtain, and in false colours; and one day, in the presence of Dodsley, asked what arm it was that came out from the wall. He said that his greatest inconvenience was inability to think.

Bolingbroke sometimes wept over him in this state of helpless decay; and being told by Spence, that Pope, at the intermission of his deliriousness, was always saying something kind either of his present or absent friends, and that his humanity seemed to have survived his understanding, answered, It has so.

This is interesting—Pope’s last moments. The person who was thought to be the most delicately, successfully sarcastic of English writers, the person who made more magical mosquito fun of writers than any man had up to his time—this man is asking about his friends as he is dying.

And added, I never in my life knew a man that had so tender a heart for his particular friends, or a more general friendship for mankind.

This is the man who was called the wasp, the wasp in couplets.

At another time he said, I have known Pope these thirty years, and value myself more in his friendship than—his grief then suppressed his voice.

Though this is a relation between two important men of English letters—Pope and Bolingbroke—we find the same going towards each other, the going around each other, the suspicion, the smiles, the depth of feeling, the fear, that we could find in two most subtle animals.

Then, this great statement:

In the morning, after the priest had given him the last sacraments, he said, “There is nothing that is meritorious but virtue and friendship, and indeed friendship itself is only a part of virtue.”

That is a great statement because it has to do with the fact that if you cannot like what is outside—the world—you cannot like anybody, whether in sex or out of sex, in a way that you want to. Pope says that “friendship itself is only a part of virtue”—meaning that to give the outside world what is coming to it and ourselves what is coming to ourselves, is accuracy; it is virtue; but it is also friendship.

Just as a child says to a mother, “Know me. I’ll get your oatmeal; I’ll take it; but know me, know me, know me”—so a man is saying and a woman is saying, “Know me, know me, know me,” though they may not use the words. Not to want to know a person and to be nice to that person is a burlesque. Whom are you nice to? The first thing that is owing to the outside world is knowledge of it, and since every person represents that outside world, that is what is owing to a person. The desire to give a person what is owing to him by seeing him as he is, no less and no more, is friendship. In giving a person what is coming to him under all conditions and in the deepest sense of the word, all warmth will be present. Many persons think that justice is a cold word. Justice is the warmest word in the world. The beauty of justice, the warmth of it, hasn’t been seen. We associate it with the lady with the scales, blindfolded, in stone.

So Pope says, “There is nothing that is meritorious but virtue and friendship, and indeed friendship itself is only a part of virtue.” But if we find it necessary to change a person for our own ends, make him either better or worse or distort him, as we do unconsciously, there is going to be trouble. The other person will say, “Well, I see you want to distort the part of me that you see; you’ll make it better and sometimes worse; you’ll call me nicer things than I deserve or worse things than I deserve; so I’ll keep part of me to myself, and that you won’t have anything to do with.” This can go on between man and man just as it does between woman and man.

It is interesting to see how Pope, who said this, had trouble with his friends, even in his will. Johnson writes:

He brought some reproach upon his own memory by the petulant and contemptuous mention made in his will of Mr. Allen, and an affected repayment of his benefactions….Allen accepted the legacy, which he gave to the Hospital at Bath; observing that Pope was always a bad accomptant, and that if to 150l. he had put a cypher more, he had come nearer to the truth.

So we have a man going for friendship and at the same time being the most delicately poetical mosquito of the time.

What a Friend Contains

A contemporary of Pope, Edward Young, wrote some fine lines on friendship in his Night Thoughts. Young lived from 1683 to 1765. Night Thoughts was first published in 1742:

The question of friendship or good will is one of the oldest: “Know’st thou, Lorenzo! what a friend contains?” While there has been great praise of a friend, there has also been suspicion. In friendship, it is quite apparent we want something good for ourselves, because otherwise we would be sacrificial; and we also want something good for another. The question is: what kind of good; and whether the two goods go on simultaneously or whether we’re bargaining—“I’ll do something for you, and you’ll do something for me later.”

“Twins ty’d by nature, if they part, they die.” The idea of a friend is to have ourselves represented through another and still feel that we’re ourselves. The purpose of love and the purpose of friend- ship are the same. Friendship is a deeper thing than love in its ordinary sense: because to have good will is a job; to have sex is something you can’t avoid. The combination of the two is love. Good will expressed sexually is love, but good will by itself, expressed accurately, is that which is the basic thing in love or friendship. “Twins ty’d by nature, if they part, they die”: in the same way as we need two aspects in ourselves, so we need someone who is different from us to stand for ourselves. Through someone, we can come to be ourselves, just as we come to know ourselves through a mirror.

“Hast thou no friend to set thy mind abroach?” It happens that something from the outside can do something to us that we cannot do for ourselves. Someone can bring out things in ourselves; and a friend is a means of our expressing ourselves. A friend is a person who brings out, and in bringing us out, is also bringing himself out. Where this doesn’t occur, the friendship is that much lacking and that much false.

“Good sense will stagnate.” The constant desire of people is to express themselves, but they also have a fear of it. If other people are more interested in their doing something else than expressing themselves, they’ll consent. That is because, though people want to express themselves, they also want to be like the jewel in the refrigerator on the mountain top. So if another person finds benefit in not having you expressed and just can use you—there will be resentment, but also relief. Yet our deepest desire is to express ourselves. Our desire is like the bud that wants to be the complete flower, only we’re much more intricate buds than the buds we find in the field. In expressing ourselves, we have to do so through something outside ourselves, as a baby begins with cloth or a ball or the skin of another. Through happenings we come to be ourselves. Then, when we feel that the unconscious good will of the world is represented in a person, that is the feeling that someone is our friend. If a person cannot say, “You want from me what I want from myself,” let not that person say he or she has a friend. That is the only criterion.

Where people stand for the bringing out of something in ourselves that we want brought out, even though they may not act friendly, their deepest purpose is to be friendly—they have been friendly unconsciously. I mean by this that a person you don’t like can still be used as a means of feeling the way you want; of knowing what you want; of being as accurate as you want; of being proud of yourself and your thoughts; and therefore the result can be friendly. For example, suppose there were a person who had money that belonged to you and you had to get it by force: the money would be there. Then, you could find money; which means that no one was thinking about you. And then a person could give you money. The amount—let us say sixty-five dollars—is the same. Knowledge too can come the hard way. You have to say, “Even though this person is a wretch and I don’t like him, an honest thought about him, a desire to be just to him in his wickedness, in his malevolence, in his satanism, can, in seeing the vicious thing accurately, do some good to myself.” The result, impersonally speaking, is a friendly result.

Then, you can find something: a man doesn’t intend anything benevolent, but something happens which is good. You also can have it willed to you: that is, a person wills that something good happen to you. That is friendship in its fullest sense. A person is a friend who has a good time doing good things to you; not because he expects good things from you, but because in the process of doing good things to you he thinks it’s good for him. That is the one thing that has to be present in love, too; because love is just friend- ship with some of the more sensational details.

Friendship and Loneliness

One of the things that a friend does is take some of our perhaps stagnant thoughts and possibilities and put them in motion. He changes a swamp into a flowing brook. “Thoughts shut up want air, / And spoil, like bales unopen’d to the sun”: this represents a problem that both men and women have. A man, for instance, finds somebody good company and can go places with him, but the person doesn’t bring out what the man wants brought out. He’s found, perhaps, that his wife doesn’t do that. His wife is very nice, but she does not, as the word goes, stimulate him. Wives have felt, how often, that husbands don’t stimulate them. A girl, for instance, gets a mighty lot of “stimulation” in being praised, but after a while she wants to be stimulated in another way: though she has got her fill of admiration and caresses, there is something still unexpressed in her.

In every relation whatsoever, we want people to do something to us. We don’t know what. On the one hand, we want them to praise us, and to keep us secure, and to soothe us, and to make things nice for us. But if we can’t get criticism, we won’t get stimulation. We have to be discontent in a happy way before we can really put ourselves in motion. Many persons have said to another, “Oh, snap out of it,” but they don’t know how complicated the snap is.

Young is expressing some of this. Our deepest desire, which includes sex, is to express ourselves. From whatever we do, there is something we want to happen to us, and a friend is a person who 1. wants it to happen to us, and 2. has a good time finding out what the thing is and how it can happen.

“Had thought been all, sweet speech had been deny’d.” The same problem can happen with men that are friends as can happen with a man and a woman: suddenly they find they don’t know what to do. They cannot talk about themselves. They can gossip about other persons, and show up many things in politics or literature or music or the arts—but then they have to do something. It happens that people are not sufficiently interested in each other, no matter what kind of people are present. Children can be bored with each other—“Aw, I’m going home”—because there is not the feeling that the other person is really someone who can be known all the time, and that there is an immeasurable beauty which is present.

We have lines like “Thought, too, deliver’d, is the more possest; / Teaching, we learn,” about the feeling that in doing something to another, something is done to us. That feeling must be had as simply as the taking of a cup from a table. A person is sunk if he sees it as abstract. If we do not actually feel that in giving something to a person that he deserves, we are being nice to ourselves, we are incomplete. And if we act as if we felt it, we are being fraudulent.

This means that in being able to be truly friendly to another, we’ll be able to be alone. The persons who are afraid of being alone are the persons who most want to be alone. We are afraid of being alone because we want it so very much, and at the same time we know it can bring out bad things in us.

Every kind of expression of ourselves is an expression that has to do with something outside ourselves. The feeling that to be ourselves we have to deal justly with something outside of ourselves, is the basis of friendship, the basis of ethics. We can be solitary, but if our solitude is amiable about what we’re separated from, then we’re not really in solitude. It isn’t the actual aloneness; it is this question: As we go to bed or go into a hut, what kind of thoughts about things not ourselves do we carry with us? Are they adequate; are they just; do these thoughts give to things what is coming to them; is there a rich accuracy? If there isn’t, we are unfriendly to the world; we are unfriendly to things.

Aesthetic Realism says that all friendship begins with seeing; with nothing else. If we cannot have pleasure in seeing something—whether it is a spoon or a person—and try to get to the depths implied in seeing, our friendship is false. And we have to feel this: the only way to be alone is to accept relation. If we cannot make a one of the effect of other things on us, and our own individuality; if we cannot feel that the more we’re affected by what is not ourselves truly, as the thing deserves and as we deserve, the more we’ll be an individual—then friendship is impossible. The unconscious suspicion that other things exist to interfere with us and lessen us will be present in meeting Josephine or Joe or Josie. The way to be friendly is to feel that reality is a nice guy.