When did we meet, on what day? And when will it come again, that day when we met for the first time, at the brink of adulthood? The first time: but did we meet, then? Who met? I’m not sure we met, I’m not sure it happened, but perhaps that non-happening is also our friendship. Perhaps it was the incompletion of what happened then, its failure to come to term, that is the life of our friendship. Or perhaps that is what deprived our friendship of itself, making you less than a friend and our friendship less than friendship.
With you, apart from you, I no longer know what the word friendship meant. Or perhaps I learnt of another sense of that word as friendship seemed to attenuate itself between us, to wear itself to nothing. Perhaps I learnt of what friendship must be, if it is to be anything at all.
But this is not right; I had other friends, and with you, I thought, it was different. Ours was an exceptional friendship, a friendship with the exceptional. But how many times I was disappointed because it was not friendship enough! Perhaps it was the same for you. Then for us both the word friendship echoed in a direction it could not reach. Unless one can learn of friendship by experiencing what it is not and it is when friendship breaks down that it reveals what it is.
What did we share? I remember, then, we disliked the same things, that our retreat pushed us together. I found you outside the house where the party was. No: you found me there. Outside – as I would find you again, on other occasions. In fact, I think whenever we met, by chance or design, it was outside. We were driven outside, each for our own reasons, and that was where we met, and continued to meet.
But now we have made our way in the world; we are settled in our lives, albeit in different parts of the country. I can remember today because I am so far inside – because, now, the life outside has become a spectacle; I remember because I am safe, and will not find myself exiled. And you, what do you remember? You turned to me – a letter would arrive, or the phone would ring – when you were exiled from an affair. Why, with a kind of ceremonialness did I feel I had to seek your blessing when I began a new affair of my own?
Perhaps it is that we need witnesses to our lives, and this is what we are to one another. Witnesses, distant now, but watching still. Distant, but watching with a great and benevolent love. I am here today, tomorrow and the day after that. Constancy: the whole sky – the great night with its stars and contellations, in its great, slow movement. So you to me – so your life moves slowly and vastly like the whole sky. So is your life to me even as it watches me and is turned to me, in its own way. And what is my life to you? A similar sky? A similar turning-as-a-whole, the sky that turns in its entirety?
What is it to live life watched! What it is to have elected a watcher, as I was elected your watcher! But I wonder, still, if this is not too much. It is not that I am watched or that I watch you. What is your life, after all, to me? What do I know of your days and nights, and what do you know of mine? Is it, rather, that your life must be exemplary to me, as one who came in from the outside. That we met when, outside, we had not found a place in the world. That we met so that this same outside would always be between us; that what we shared was just what what we could not share with others. We met outside, and we turn now to the other when we find ourselves close again to the outside.
What is it we share? Each is a sign to the other of the condition that was once their own. And the other to be called forward as witness to that first exclusion, the one that set us apart at adolescence, at the threshold of life. To be called forward by a letter or a phonecall, witness to the bare life that was once ours. But who is called forward as the witness? Not one who lives in the world, who is comfortable there, but the adolescent at the threshold. The outside calls you. Bare life calls to bare life. I heard your voice on the phone, but what did I hear? I heard myself speak, but who spoke?
When when will it come again, that day when we met for the first time, at the brink of adulthood? On the last day which is also the youngest day, when the ordinary becomes the extraordinary. On that day to come which is also today, the day that does not complete itself today and whose non-completion is our life, our living.
Lars Iyer's Blog 