Cicero and Netflix on friendship*

in the tv show Grace and Frankie, we see in action that old trope where a shallow, materialistic, superficial person becoming life long friends with a ‘deep’, spiritual, and obviously caring  person. the trope works because an unexpected connection is forged that overrides the characters’ differences and sustains their friendship despite the odds. it has been said that to truly love someone is to love them despite their flaws, and this trope demonstrates that true love is only present where the beloved’s flaws are outweighed by the lover’s willingness to love, for whatever reason they are capable and/or willing to do so. despite the fact that love outweighs character flaws, it takes work and patience for Frankie to stomach Grace’s nagging and for Grace to stomach Frankie’s hippie bullshit

in Cicero’s treatise on friendship, De Amicitia, he develops a philosophy of differentiated friendship. one category of friendship in his formula is that of ideal friendship wherein there is no place for unsavouriness such as falsehood or lack of trust. the other kind is essentially a bi-partisan contract maintained for the sake of accruing social and political capital. once we look past Cicero’s perpetual concern over the running of ‘Romulus’ cesspit’,** a less political formula of a similar kind manifests itself. by acknowledging our less ideal friendships as exactly that, one can enjoy their benefits without the disappointment that comes with maintaining uniform expectations of every single one of our friendships

the fact that the contingency of the love-encounter, its unpredictability and our lack of control over it are fundamental characteristics of love itself has been pointed out by philosophers. but it has been best expressed by the Urdu and Persian-language Indian poet Ghalib, who once wrote:

عشق پر زور نہیں ہے یے وہ آتش غالب
جو لگائے نہ لگے اور بُجھائے نہ بنے

There is no ruling love; it’s an uncontrollable fire, O Ghalib!
It can neither be ignited on one’s wish, nor extinguished on whim 

Cicero’s second, less ideal, form of amicitia is void of contingency. this is not to say that one does not love a less than ideal friend, but that there is a lack of purely love-enforced commitment to a friend in the less than ideal form of friendship because it is entered into consciously and is maintained on a basis of mutual benefit more than a basis of undeniable love alone

i can become friends with a person despite not loving them deeply enough to keep loving them even after knowing their flaws intimately, i can spend time with such a person and have a lot of fun with them and benefit from good times, good memories, shoulders to cry on, etc. we all have friends like this, friends with whom we might spend a lot of time or friends whom we cherish but can’t quite call our alter-egos in the way Cicero does in a letter to his best friend Atticus (to whom he dedicated this treatise on friendship). this form of friendship can still be rewarding, and not just on impersonal grounds such as the ones Cicero discusses in his treatise. Cicero could enjoy a connection with people such as Pompey not only for the sake of performative amicitia (despite the performative character of political amicitia in late republican Rome). instead, Cicero could enjoy his friendship with less than ideal friends such as Pompey because, once a person modifies their expectations of friendships based on their connection with the friend in question and centres considerations outside the cold utilitarianism of politics, there are warmer rewards to be gained from this arguably more selfish form of friendship. moreover, by abandoning arbitrary criteria for people with whom we we are willing to engage in friendship and challenging our pre-conceived notions of who might fit the criteria of an ‘ideal’ friend, we can allow unexpectedly meaningful connections to flourish in the way of Frankie and Grace

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* inspired by a conversation with a wonderful friend of the ideal sort (she knows who she is)

** as he terms the Roman republic in a letter to Atticus (2.1.8)

Sharbat Gula and the pain of others

Susan Sontag in her essay, ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’ discusses Virginia Woolf’s denunciation of war after seeing images of mutilated bodies sent out by the Spanish government during the Spanish civil war. Woolf used pictures of bodies so badly mutilated that she couldn’t even fathom their sex to universally denounce ‘war’ in the abstract. Sontag comments:

“To read in the pictures, as Woolf does, only what confirms a general abhorrence of war is to stand back from an engagement with Spain as a country with a history. It is to dismiss politics.”

And the same phenomenon can be seen at work in the way images of refugees are used today. See, for example, the iconic ‘Afghan Girl’ photograph of Sharbat Gula, first photographed by Steve McCurry when she was a child in Afghanistan.

As an adult, Sharbat Gula was left responsible for making ends meet for herself and her children when her husband died, a feat that cannot have been easy for an Afghan refugee in Pakistan. Recently, she was deported from Pakistan after being imprisoned for illegally obtaining Pakistani identity papers in order to avoid deportation, a ‘crime’ for which no one can really blame her. The fact that Sharbat is still merely a living symbol to most people is troubling because she’s more than that; she’s a person who must be worried and scared right now, and she deserves so much more than being reduced to an abstract representation of all refugees. Here is where the link to Sontag’s essay is apparent; to think of Sharbat as merely a symbol denies her subjectivity and renders all refugees’ struggles a monolith. In some ways, all struggles are linked of course, but the apolitical way in which refugees are banded together serves to depoliticise the reasons they became in need of refugee in the first place, not unlike the way Woolf’s treatment of the pictures mentioned above made war apolitical and only worth discussing as ‘war’ in the abstract. This is a symptom of how we consider the problems refugees are fleeing to be hopeless and unfathomable. Instead, those circumstances should be understood as ones that need to be investigated alongside each other to understand the linked global systems of oppression that cause them. Then, images like the one of Sharbat would not be considered abstract representations of saddening phenomena.

Isn’t it telling that Sharbat’s voice is mostly missing from the articles about her, that refugees’ voices are usually missing in televised debates about their futures, and that the people in the images Woolf discusses had no subjectivity? Sontag offers an alternative reading of the images in question, whereby they can be understood as an illustration of the necessity of struggle in the face of fascism, and there is more value in ways of seeing images such as the Afghan Girl portrait, ones where we understand Sharbat in terms of her specific conditions.

chimeras

it’s strange how the language we use to discuss our realities comes so much closer to those realities than one might, at first glance, realise

‘we are two parts of the same person, both very real’ says Norma Bates to her son, Norman

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“Language redoubles “reality” into itself and the void of the Thing that can be filled out only by an anamorphotic gaze from aside.” – Slavoj Žižek 

Memento cadere*

Falling down is a reminder. It says ‘remember I will die, and you will too’. This is why it is okay for a person whose death is unlikely in the short term and/or of little consequence to the observer to fall. Jennifer Lawrence is allowed to trip, and her fall is endearing (ahem) because her on-screen image is immortal, she is rich, she is conventionally attractive, she is white, etc, and we probably won’t witness or be particularly affected by her death. If a friend were to trip, laughter edged with nervousness. If a person were to trip in front of their friend after confiding in them about a depressive episode or a chronic headache, their fall would bring an uncomfortable and concerned reaction because their mortality is immediate and threatens their friend’s life as well as their own. Falling is not the only reminder; if a person is dear to you, witnessing them eat/hearing about their physical ailments/etc will on one level or another bring with it a reminder: this person will die, and I will too. Poverty, womanhood, disability, etc, are also reminders of mortality, and those more likely to die are allowed less room to fall/make mistakes. This might explain people’s tendency to fetishise standing again; if you stay down, you will die, and in confronting your mortality, I must confront my own. Of course, it is easier to stand back up if you’re not poor, not a woman, etc.

The immortal ideal (rich, white, cis, etc) is, of course, human. Perhaps this is why we can’t get enough of cats flushing toilets.

(*’be mindful of falling’)

Distance in myth and in reality

It’s interesting how we conceptualise distance, and how relations between those set apart by physical distance colour our perception of that which separates them (e.g. the common rendering of the Atlantic Ocean as ‘the pond’ due to perceived similarities and amicable relations between Britons and Americans).

In Ovid’s Heroides, the unknown distance between herself and Odysseus has Penelope fearing dangers ‘graver than the real’, a similarly troublesome distance has Hero and Leander gazing upon opposite shores in longing, and a short but impassable distance draws tears from Ariadne’s eyes in the way the moon draws forward the sea that carries Theseus away. Each poem mentioned above is breathtaking in its honesty and its emotion but Ariadne’s lament to Theseus is perhaps the most hopeless of the three. Whereas the distance between Penelope and Odysseus and the distance between Hero and Leander holds promise, the growing distance between Ariadne and Theseus at first seems symbolic of little other than betrayal. While Penelope awaits a husband kept away by war, dark arts, and inclement weather and Hero is separated from her beloved by a harsh stretch of water only she can make navigable for him, Ariadne is abandoned by Theseus in her sleep. On the surface, it seems as if the distance between the two is in itself proof of his guilt. But the beauty of the Heroides is such that, while on the surface Ovid seems to place blame squarely on Theseus’ shoulders, the symbolism of the distance between Ariadne and her beloved is actually reliant upon whichever version of the myth you choose to read it in accordance with. Some versions claim that Ariadne was married to Dionysus, which would inevitably have bought great peril to Theseus’ door had he taken her with him, in which case it might have been justified for him to leave her while she slept. There are various other versions of the myth, but the point is this; the realities of phenomena such as distance are subjective within both myth and reality.

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“You think when God created a gulf between Iran and Saudi Arabia he was doing a pun?” – Karl Sharro.

(cw: rape)

The other day, I discovered that Pablo Neruda was a rapist, and reading his account of how he raped a woman while he served as a diplomat in Sri Lanka was disturbing to say the least. His dominance throughout the narrative (on multiple levels) got me to thinking about power. Here, you have a rapist openly admitting to being a rapist in his memoir; here you have an admission of rape in an extract that was then quoted in a book authored by one of the most well-known intellectuals alive today (Slavoj Zizek), and most people still seem unaware of his crime. On the other hand, you have Bahar Mustafa, who is once again in the news because she is to be charged with “sending a communication conveying a threatening message” and with “sending a grossly offensive message via a public communication network” for tweeting the hashtag ‪#‎killallwhitemen‬ and has faced criticism for the tweet and for banning men and white people from an event on diversifying curricula. What’s interesting is that you have a subversion of the norm in that it is usually women who are ignored and it is usually men whose voices our ears can’t seem to escape. In the case of Bahar Mustafa and the “grossly offensive message”, the volume of Bahar’s voice (or tweet) isn’t the only striking aspect of the story. Something else that gets me is that none of the rape or death threats against her seem to have been investigated. It’s unsurprising, but the fact that rape threats, threats that are not merely expressions of frustration at oppressive power dynamics in the way Bahar Mustafa’s tweet was, are going ignored is worth considering. It’s not the first and it won’t be the last time, but it’s worth considering. So what we have here are instances that illustrate how being heard is really dependent upon how your voice might serve power. Neruda’s crime reinforced his dominance over someone who he had privilege in terms of his gender, his class, and race (she was a Tamil maid) and popularising even his own narrative would open up discussions that would call the systems that afforded him his privilege into question. So, of course, the only people who will try to popularise this information will be those who don’t stand to (or perhaps those who don’t want to) gain from the same patriarchal and class structures that afforded Neruda his power. Contrarily, Bahar Mustafa’s tweet expressed a sentiment that does not affirm power, a sentiment that was easily manipulated in order to falsely represent power dynamics and, once again, falsely portray the anger of the marginalised as the cause of ill-feeling between them and their oppressors. I’m not a massive fan of identity politics divorced from considerations of class, but I don’t think that’s all that relevant for the purposes of this discussion, considering that’s not why oversensitive, overgrown babies are going apeshit over a hashtag of all things, and I don’t think Bahar Mustafa is a threat in any way, shape, or form. But, as one astute observer commented over twitter, this seems to be less about curbing any threat she might pose, and more about turning her into a lesson.

how not to make achar

embitterment isn’t all you’ll have to resist – you’ll also have to fight attempts to cut you down and dice you up in order to make you more easily digestible. on top of this will come insistence that you are not enough as you are and that you need a little of this or a lot of that in order to increase your appeal. some days you won’t be able to tell which parts of your character have been imposed organically and which artificially, and distance will remain no matter how hard you attempt to rejoin with your roots, distance you’ll have a hard time navigating in light of false romanticism from those who cannot comprehend poetry. but the warmth of belonging is such that you’ll be able to bask for as long as you need despite everything. something inside you will let you know when you’re done basking and preparing, when you’re ready to own your purpose and, at that point, it may be tempting to introduce a preservative. but, outside of the fact that this addition would in itself alter both your countenance and your comportment, doing so would only delay, and not prevent, your next metamorphosis