The Pent Umbrage of the Tempy, Part VI
You noticed your best friend wasn’t picking up paychecks (you work in payroll—you’re the boss there) and then you tracked back to discover your best friend wasn’t submitting time sheets, either. You spent a few mornings outside the mail room, where your best friend worked for thirteen years, looking to see if your best friend was coming to work—you observed your best friend was not (coming or going).
Your best friend never knew if your best friend was coming or going, but you always did. Now, your best friend doesn't appear to be coming OR going.
You had observed your best friend for many years. Never from up close—No, No, No. Your best friend probably does not know you are a friend. Your best friend may not even know you exist. (You've never met or been introduced.) That doesn’t matter to you. Or the friendship. You know that you are your friend’s friend—and that’s the only thing that counts (counts,matters, signifies, means, or is observable.)
You don’t need to behave as a friend in order to be a friend—your friend understands that. That’s why you are friends with this friend—it is one of the reasons, anyway. There are, of course, many other reasons. You don’t have time to list all of them—there are that many. You don't need to enumerate how your best friend, unaware even of your existence, could possibly understand anything about you.
You don’t need to ask your friend what your best friend does or does not understand. The friendship is that good. It’s even better, you know from bitter experience, to know without asking. Asking only complicates things—and what if, after asking, you discover you disagree with your best friend? That means the friendship is over—and that’s devastating.
Where is your best friend? Why do you need to know that? Wherever your friend is, your best friend is your friend. And yet it would be reassuring to get a signal of your friend’s –if not intimacy, then proximity (understood as a GPS coordinate.) If your best friend was no longer living, you only then might you need to modify your feelings(for your friend.)
posted by Yusef Asabiyah at 12:13 PM
2 Comments:
That is some of the more crazy stuff .. a castle of obsession.
But, without any willingness to become vulnerable, there can be no action.
And without a willingness to do something, there can be no knowledge.
That fuels the obsession.
Hey Christoffer, thanks for the valuable feedback--but I want to make sure what I'm doing here is coming through okay...
There are multiple-You's in the tempy...You(1): the only You I have any sympathy for, the you who has been employed for 13 yrs and may or may not have recently resigned; You(2), You(1)'s direct boss; You(3), a friend, not necessarily a fellow employee; You(4)a psychiatrist; etc, including the You in the post, who has just made appearance.
I don't "endorse" or "affirm" any of the utterances of these you's. I have good reasons for not differentiating the You's from one another in the posts, though their utterances are meant to be different. I care that it may be very difficult to tell the You's apart, at this point: is that a problem for you?
I am reconceptualizing the concept of Totalization by using the You's this way. I think its important. The thematization of pronouns, such as has occurred here at EU, unexpectedly (to me), is exciting to me. (Orla was involved with this; the unfortunate thing he was asking me to do something with pronouns I couldn't do and maybe I'm finding out now why, (too bad though Orla left in a huff.)
By the way, calling what this You is "a castle of obsession" I find accurate and rich with association, but I am avoiding any reference to psychiatric lingo and label, unless I think the You would apply such lingo to its own self, which in this case the You, I believe, would never do.
I also agree with your further more prescriptive statements--this is what I would want someone reading the little saga to think...Also, I like that you use the word "vulnerability" where I would have said "risk". It highlights a connection I am trying to reach between subjectivity and the mathematics of probability.
Anyway, I very much appreciate knowing what comes through because I can't gauge where my intentions are unintentionally obscured by my idiosyncratic and unprofessional way of doing philosophy, cultural studies, or fiction or whatever this is (if anything.)
--Yusef
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