I could say
I see you,
Despite any distance
the view of a face
That can glitch on occasion.
I recognise you with a squint
I could say
I taste you,
in a pact
cooked up between breakfast and dinner
cross-parties, cross-orbits, cross-mercies
I could say
I hear you,
You’re preaching to the choir
Our unsayable stories are caught in whispers
Shuffled mouth to mouth
I hear fence sitters and killjoys
shrieking war cries at each other
Indulging in their racket
I catch you despite it
I could say
I smell you
In the heat and dirt of our world
In lush riots, summers, and practice
In weeds on overgrown paths
Where we once declared ourselves
I could say
I feel you
I believe in you
I walk around with you
And you cannot disgust me
In bodies of work weighted against each other
A slippery language
Is passed by hands
Some clasped in frantic, risky prayer
Some clasped, sweaty, beneath the kitchen table
Some clasped to release into a slow clap
Before assumptions develop, I will say
I’m with you
Across movement and silence
A slow and decisively pooled mass
That mirrors presence and cannot hold its shape for long alone
I see you,
Despite any distance
the view of a face
That can glitch on occasion.
I recognise you with a squint
I could say
I taste you,
in a pact
cooked up between breakfast and dinner
cross-parties, cross-orbits, cross-mercies
I could say
I hear you,
You’re preaching to the choir
Our unsayable stories are caught in whispers
Shuffled mouth to mouth
I hear fence sitters and killjoys
shrieking war cries at each other
Indulging in their racket
I catch you despite it
I could say
I smell you
In the heat and dirt of our world
In lush riots, summers, and practice
In weeds on overgrown paths
Where we once declared ourselves
I could say
I feel you
I believe in you
I walk around with you
And you cannot disgust me
In bodies of work weighted against each other
A slippery language
Is passed by hands
Some clasped in frantic, risky prayer
Some clasped, sweaty, beneath the kitchen table
Some clasped to release into a slow clap
Before assumptions develop, I will say
I’m with you
Across movement and silence
A slow and decisively pooled mass
That mirrors presence and cannot hold its shape for long alone
The bus is still moving so, stumbling like babies, we lurch to the front. It is a season of hurtling, and I’m thinking of my friends. Bare legs on itchy grass, the sounds we make when greeting each other, kissing cheeks, arms holding bodies or patting backs, long goodbyes, delightful foolishness, restlessness, staying up and sleeping in with the windows open, keeping secrets and gossip, sharing our fatigue, filling the sink with dishes, all sorts of overlapping (Melick, 2020). I think of running errands, spending time together within our routines and going the long way back to our houses. The niceness of the unremarkable, that springs from the air ordinary days bring. Friendship is caught in a productive tension between the individual and the communal. In the contradictions of institutionalised life. Amid the ruckus and frustrated shrieks of hard materials in conflict. Amongst compounding crises, old and new ties of platonic love thread the future with the past, keeping us bound to one another and an ideal of ourselves.
To take serious something often taken for granted. To follow friendship around, across senses, movements, and borders. I’ll narrow my terms. I think of friendship as a verb, a doing word. Friendship is not a state occupied unconditionally by generative, positive potential. It can hold us at distance in tension, competition, and ambivalence. I’ve been a bad friend, hanging around and allowing the undefined aspects of friendship, its inconsistent vocabularies, to create silence. Friendship is risky and demanding. We can be tethered for fear of loneliness or in a misguided loyalty to consistency and comfort. Our shared estrangement can push us toward presumptuous resentment (Roach, 2020). Friendship can be unrequited, unproductive, and painful. Despite this, it is essential in vulnerability and triumph, in its troubling traits and benefits.
In friendship we manoeuvre around practiced frameworks for classifying and evaluating human affection. This leg work can make it more demanding than relationships consummated by sex or facilitated by family. Being a friend requires a patience, presence, humour, and keenness to cause trouble that makes space for joy and tolerance. This consistency is easy to neglect amid the complex histories that bring us together. Making good friendship a staunch commitment to understanding others, the self, and the stranger. If we start from this place, far from utopia, both the good and bad form a foundation from which new communal and subjective forms can be imagined. For friendship to be meaningful, disruptive, and constructive, it must begin and remain in volatility. Always becoming.
Undertaking and maintaining friendships can feel radical. An orientation or flinch away from what may sit solid and sturdy in our lives. Though habits of meeting in the margins, are not intuited from nowhere. They expressthe ability of crisis to reveal failures in our all too efficient systems and structures. The pliability of our alliances, their conditions and limitations are importantly incomplete, unconventional, and agile. I am thinking of a photo of construction workers sitting on a steel beam high above the city, eating sandwiches. We are lovers, friends, co-workers, and family forming hybrid support structures that keep us above a rising tide. Friendship is both scholarly and stupid. A slippery endeavour charged with latent power,“ conditioned by the chorus, a formation whose beauty resides in remaining ever-incomplete” (Brooks, 2021). Friendship speaks languages that consolidate a logic inscrutable to spectators. Friendship is an undisclosed annex in the institution which upon visiting can reveal resources for survival and worlds worth inhabiting.
Friendship is also a threat. It’s intimacy, tenderness and camaraderie are troubling to the ways of being presumed and hierarchised by the State. Friendship enacts affection that disrupts neat images of intimacy and at their break creates new imaginings. It refuses alignment on the axis of normative, romantic intimacy. In the rooms of political representation, a more ubiquitous yet less tangible relation such as friendship stands no chance. This might be its point. Friendship is a fissure. As Tom Roach says in “Whatever Friends”; “what seems on the surface friendship’s greatest weakness is in fact its greatest strength: Its very unrepresentability points toward a politics beyond representation” (Roach, 2020). The power of friendship, a peripheral and malleable act, lies in it resembling nothing we have done before. It is new in each iteration. Hand in hand, our fingers never find a particular object or place to rest on or cling to.
References
Roach, Tom. 2021. Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, AIDS and the Politics of Shared Estrangement. Albany: SUNY Press.
Brooks, Andrew. 2021. Inferno. Sydney: Rosa Press.
Melick, Tom. 2020. A little history of fatigue. Sydney: Rosa Press
To take serious something often taken for granted. To follow friendship around, across senses, movements, and borders. I’ll narrow my terms. I think of friendship as a verb, a doing word. Friendship is not a state occupied unconditionally by generative, positive potential. It can hold us at distance in tension, competition, and ambivalence. I’ve been a bad friend, hanging around and allowing the undefined aspects of friendship, its inconsistent vocabularies, to create silence. Friendship is risky and demanding. We can be tethered for fear of loneliness or in a misguided loyalty to consistency and comfort. Our shared estrangement can push us toward presumptuous resentment (Roach, 2020). Friendship can be unrequited, unproductive, and painful. Despite this, it is essential in vulnerability and triumph, in its troubling traits and benefits.
In friendship we manoeuvre around practiced frameworks for classifying and evaluating human affection. This leg work can make it more demanding than relationships consummated by sex or facilitated by family. Being a friend requires a patience, presence, humour, and keenness to cause trouble that makes space for joy and tolerance. This consistency is easy to neglect amid the complex histories that bring us together. Making good friendship a staunch commitment to understanding others, the self, and the stranger. If we start from this place, far from utopia, both the good and bad form a foundation from which new communal and subjective forms can be imagined. For friendship to be meaningful, disruptive, and constructive, it must begin and remain in volatility. Always becoming.
Undertaking and maintaining friendships can feel radical. An orientation or flinch away from what may sit solid and sturdy in our lives. Though habits of meeting in the margins, are not intuited from nowhere. They expressthe ability of crisis to reveal failures in our all too efficient systems and structures. The pliability of our alliances, their conditions and limitations are importantly incomplete, unconventional, and agile. I am thinking of a photo of construction workers sitting on a steel beam high above the city, eating sandwiches. We are lovers, friends, co-workers, and family forming hybrid support structures that keep us above a rising tide. Friendship is both scholarly and stupid. A slippery endeavour charged with latent power,“ conditioned by the chorus, a formation whose beauty resides in remaining ever-incomplete” (Brooks, 2021). Friendship speaks languages that consolidate a logic inscrutable to spectators. Friendship is an undisclosed annex in the institution which upon visiting can reveal resources for survival and worlds worth inhabiting.
Friendship is also a threat. It’s intimacy, tenderness and camaraderie are troubling to the ways of being presumed and hierarchised by the State. Friendship enacts affection that disrupts neat images of intimacy and at their break creates new imaginings. It refuses alignment on the axis of normative, romantic intimacy. In the rooms of political representation, a more ubiquitous yet less tangible relation such as friendship stands no chance. This might be its point. Friendship is a fissure. As Tom Roach says in “Whatever Friends”; “what seems on the surface friendship’s greatest weakness is in fact its greatest strength: Its very unrepresentability points toward a politics beyond representation” (Roach, 2020). The power of friendship, a peripheral and malleable act, lies in it resembling nothing we have done before. It is new in each iteration. Hand in hand, our fingers never find a particular object or place to rest on or cling to.
References
Roach, Tom. 2021. Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, AIDS and the Politics of Shared Estrangement. Albany: SUNY Press.
Brooks, Andrew. 2021. Inferno. Sydney: Rosa Press.
Melick, Tom. 2020. A little history of fatigue. Sydney: Rosa Press
