Dreaming the Future Closer

[Brief Preface: I do feel lately like my soul is moving up and down the axis of things, jumping from things humble and profane to things lofty and almost too abstract for sense to come of them.  My posting seems to reflect that well, though perhaps a touch schizophrenic from the outside.  I'm not sure what to make of it, just observing.]

Emerson’s essay “On Friendship” serves as an intellectual touchstone for me.  In saying that, I don’t mean to suggest that I accept its contents as given and unadulterated truth.  Rather, I mean the term ‘touchstone’ quite literally.  I return to it, read it, contemplate it, and find myself diverging from portions of it.  Yet I never feel like I’m moving beyond it.  Quite like a good conversation, it inspires and inspiration doesn’t settle well with straightforward right or wrong, settled or unsettled.

So, today, I find myself drawn to this:

Almost all people descend to meet. All association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other. What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted! After interviews have been compassed with long foresight, we must be tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and both parties are relieved by solitude.

I don’t want to dwell upon the message of the passage, I’ll let you do that for yourself, but I want to reference it so that what it inspires makes more sense.

Emerson does an amazing job of expressing the dangers of friendships.  Because we are drawn to those who excite our faculties and return to us a sense of who we are, it makes it very easy for us to model ourselves after our friends.  In so doing, we create an image of ourselves that differs, subtly or not, from who we actually are, from the totality of relationships, spiritual and otherwise, that compose our being and our destiny.

Yet, how many of us have either the temperament or the resources to dwell in splendid isolation?  That dream of friendship seems to rest on deeply bourgeois presuppositions (for once, I do not mean the term ‘bourgeois’ in a negative sense).  It assumes we have or ought to have the sort of life where our home is identical to our self. 

And what of all those people who cannot create this realm of splendid isolation?  Are they doomed to living in the mingled world of mere things, in the realm of mixed affections?  The presumption that solitude is the proper correlate to friendly company seems a bit snobby and a little out of touch.

I suspect that solitude is but one possible answer to the company of friends.  I’m thinking quite a bit about the sort of friendships we develop in religious circles and about what seems a ‘proper’ complement to the shared moments of ritual and divination.

What happens when we, through the preparation of ritual, approach our friends as spirit to our spirit?  I think about ritual work and am struck by how, at its best, when we encounter each other in ritual space, we encounter each other as spiritual beings.  That immediately creates a sort of distance between us, like standing on mountaintops and being magnified, visible, but still so clearly distinct.

We can, in that frame, have something to say to each other, but with a keen sense that we speak as one monarch to another. We may offer counsel, but with the keenest sense that we have no right to demand obedience.  We may heed counsel, but with the firmest sense that it comes from one who has no authority in our domain, nor fully understands its operations.

There’s a concept from Rastafarianism that illuminates this quite well, the concept of the I-and-I.  There are times when two believers will sit and share counsel, but in the understanding that they are approaching each other as spiritual equals, each full of insight and yet separate, being unified only beneath a greater spiritual order that includes them both. 

The ritual trappings, as I understand them at least, are minimal–an acknowledgment of the mutual intention of both parties to approach each other in this light.  Also, the conversations need not be about deep, abstract theological things, but are often of the most pressing daily problems, concerns with proper behavior, right conduct. 

What’s more, in leaving that place, the two people do not withdraw into solitude, but go out into the world, to set their affairs in order according to the illuminations of their conversation.  In other words, they return to the world, to the hurly-burly of it all, refreshed and ready to act.

They return to the world, not in solitude, but wrapped up in their sense of self, wrapped up in their sense of having a proper place and a proper course.  Solitude proper seems less important than the need to act on the counsels made possible by friendship.  For Emerson, writer and intellectual, solitude was an important dimension of that.  He needed time to work the inspiration from friends into the artistic and intellectual works they helped him visualize.

For another, it might be just as well for them to dive into some other action that is very social–perhaps a business deal, settling some family affairs, or building a house.  We need solitude less than we need the time to manifest the wisdom we acquire from those shared moments.  Some of that action may be private, some of it may be communal, but the important thing is to act, to manifest wisdom through the creation of something concrete. 

Truly, the concrete creation is a good deal less ‘refined’ than shared spiritual discourse, requires much work to give form, and gives us much occasion to confront the intractability of the world to our desires.  Yet, in that struggle, spirit isn’t lost or missing, it’s given form, grounding, a channel through which it can be shared with others beyond our close coterie.