With a little help from my friends

Je est un autre.

Rimbaud

Friendship, this relationship without dependency, without scenes, yet full of life’s simplicity, implies an acknowledgement of mutual strangeness that does not allow us to speak of our friends but only to them, not turn them into subjects of conversation (or articles) but the movement of understanding by which, when speaking to us, even in situation of greatest familiarity, they reserve an infinite distance, which is the fundamental separation by which that which separates becomes relation.

Maurice Blanchot

For the rocking and grooving feeling of the songs, for Joe Cocker …

Friendship: a sharing without loss of difference; a complementarity without forethought; an identity that passes obligatorily, but without obligation, through an other.  A friend is oneself refracted in the mirror of another’s way of life.  A friend is a lover and loved one for whom life outside of that love is tasteless.

In frienship is discovered the illusion of self-sufficiency; that our selves are composed and recomposed in a liminal reality between self and other in which we are never exclusively one or the other.

Without friendship, there is no freedom, no creativity, no thought. For whom and by whom is one free, for whom is creation, for whom do we think, if not for the other who is me, and for me who is in the other?  The foolish say that my freedom ends at the freedom of another.  But only the friendless speak so, because between friends, my freedom begins with the freedom of another.

It was Plato who taught that without the passion of friendship, there is no philosophy; for outside of friendship, there is but duty, tradition, or empty solitude, not the free bringing into being of what was never before.  In the friend, I find not a spirit, but a soul that becomes my own animus, a common animus.  Friend, comrade, compañeiro … the word fades and diffuses through a plurality of tones and colours; acquires form in endless shapes; but common to all is the relationship of life sustained between people who become who they are in the binding of passion that holds them together, as others who cannot but live as one, while remaining other to each other.  And what sweeter fate between them than to live with each other, to create together, but also to die hand in hand.

Those who remain after the loss of their friends are easily remarked: they talk without end to themselves, or so we mistakenly believe; they are rather the timeless present of a community of voices that only cease to be heard when all have passed away … and even then, sometimes the ghosts continue to speak.  Indeed, without these ghosts, we would become but shadows of our selves, calculable moral machines, condemned to the repetition of the same for the sake of the repetition.

And what is revolution if not the moment when all of the friends of freedom condense into a singular event in which new worlds become possible?  Revolution is the re-generation of friendship.

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