The french word “Être” is a multitudinous organism. It has multiple applications but it’s general English meaning is “to be” — yeah, despite French’s concreteness which is shared by many languages the word “to be” is as flexible as the circumflex across its head. The French poet, Andre Breton, had written the poem, The Verb To Be, with all intentions, to talk about the multitudinous ways he feels despair. I am not one who clings to despair much. I think that life is meant to be lived. Hope is important, more Être than despair. This does not mean I do not have periods of despair or mock and condescension those to whom despair is known.
What to me matters is that like the verb “to be” friendships are “to be” as zigzaggy and slopey as that circumflex carrying verb. Friendship is a noun. It has its adjective and its verb. Yet it entails a concept that is not always concretely defined. It needn’t be nor should it be for each person has a flexible way of being friends. However, friendship is more difficult at times than romance and love and erotic engagements. I finally understand why people say it is hard, genuinely so, at times, or maybe forever, to be friends with a lover or spouse. Not that it’s impossible or non-probable. But maybe their friendship styles are not to them definable as successes or things they enjoy all the time.
Friends have a license to be at times inordinately insensitive, narcissistic, self-centered and rude. Of course, your good friends won’t really be this all the time or maybe never. You can’t manage a relationship of the romantic/erotic/love sort with those qualities. Not that romantic relationships are dishonest. They are not designed to be dishonest either unless you make them so. It’s just in those relationships humans automatically attempt to be the best they can be. And that is why love like that is prized.
In friendships we sometimes don’t make the effort. We do annex and arrest a person’s threshhold of understanding. As in we can take advantage of it. This is “honesty” too just not of the best policy sort. Because we inadvertently do at times act pretty mean to our friends, feeling that their patience and love, will undoubtedly not create a rift.
This is to an extent understandable. It is why friendship encompasses the wide berth of empathy and sympathy. However, this is also someething that can get out of control.
We all love Joyce’s Ulysses and maybe even tamper Finnegan’s Wake. We also love Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando. However, those too are given to syntax and grammar of its own that does thoroughly negate the necessity of a common language. The individual inflections pass in between those patchworks and thus a novelistic narrative of friendship is constructed and maintained.
If you circumvent that your friendships will imminently, inevitably suffer.
It is both classical prose with neo-avante grande or postmodernist punctuations that make each friendship. Uniqueness cannot be discrete from all commonality and divorced from the lateral conceptions of attributes as caring and solidarity.
In the video game Outlast: Whistleblower, a prequel and interquel-paraquel of the game Outlast, the protagonist Waylon Park writes in a note that his wife, Lisa Park, had said that he was too “literal” and went for “if-then statements” — he with a lot of gravity realises that things are not like that. That becomes tautological almost. Though Waylon is a mathematician/mathematical genius of sorts I am not. However, I did share this propensity at times with “if-then statements” in certain regards.
It’s like “attention+care=trust”, I was foolish to believe it would always go like that. People can be cruel or I can mess up and then not be forgiven. I forgot that “être” was around and that it was a free radical, a morpheme, a part generative grammar borderlining the boundaries of didactical syntax. People are too complex and complicated. Both in good and bad ways.
Each friendship is like a babushka doll, unearthing each layer takes the pulley system of string theory (romance is also like that but I guess we also correspond to it faster).
This is both a beauty and tragedy of friendships.
Depends on the contexts, subsequent sequences or non-chronological chain of events.
Depends on the words you made known and unknown.
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