SAINT JULIAN PRESS

Kevin McGRATH ~ ON FRIENDSHIP  

An Intro to Chapter I & II

I ~ I

 

Friendship lies at the heart of what it means to be human, in terms of person, place, and ultimately, in terms of that devotion which has no object.  By friendship I mean an affinity which we elect and not the profoundly driven nor compulsive love that charges us with complex sexual fervor, a behaviour that only reiterates itself.  Friendship in this sense is not evolutionary nor biological but is founded upon the mobility of humanistic attraction which is both indelible and admirable.

 

Obversely, to be human is to experience grief, for loss is the most foundational and generative act of our emotional life.  The conditions of friendship overlay this situation of a deficiency of sentiment, for unlike human love sorrow is immediate and unequivocal and is not born out of physiological imperative.  Friendship always recognises signs of grief, those aspects of a person which are composed of absence, the wordless affective hollows that have been received from life, empty vessels which we bear with us throughout time.  Animals arguably do not experience grief; they can know distress and anxiety but grief is an especially human emotion which is not a component of animal affect.  Such creatures, of course, have no anticipation nor conceptual knowledge of death.

 

 

I ~ I I

 

Understanding what it means to be human goes further than simply living the life of a practical humanist, that is, of someone who attempts to comprehend what he or she is not.  Understanding concerns a movement both among and within language for that is our only vehicle here on earth apart from those rare occasions of sublimity or transcendence when the experience of an uncommon landscape, of a work of art, or even of the affection of another human being touches us unspeakably.

 

All these circumstances partake of a certain nakedness, a psychic nudity where nothing hinders or covers over our living envelope of person.  Such words however, bear their own conventions and convey their own cargo as they cannot become ours to individually possess, that is the dilemma; for if we are to truly understand we need to secure another medium so that consciousness might acquire both support and sustenance.

 

 

 
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