Steve_Bamlett_blog

What quality do you value most in a friend?

Friendship coming like a surprise upon you in order to remind you of its capacity to be present may well feel to us as the contents of a witch’s cauldron feel, stirred by some witch’s huge and magic ladle.

The poem I tried to bring together this morning was based on reflection on being recently, during my older age, obsessed by having a new bestie (best friend) whom I thought would be so forever. We both talked as if this would, for certain, be the case. It ended, this friendship, in two and a half years. Was it then a lie? This is just therapy to exorcise the sense of something that continued to feel broken inside me. Afterwards, I reflected again that friends, and I know I have them and that better still have the gift of a loving husband whom I love, bridge distances, of all kinds but nearly always in their felt proximity. Some modulation of distance into something else touches you in some way and feels near. I try to say how Emily Dickinson in her wise, but definitively weird, way gets it right.

Here is my first thoughts  then:

It used to be easy to think about
Friendship, as a thing that contact bred.
Young hearts open fast,bind quick, soon to shout
To the world, 'I have a friend'. Hearts force fed
On such fantasy dream an endless  story
To fulfil the need of a proximate
Sense of belief in the futurity,
Of a present bonding that felt like fate
Had meant it so to be. 

We like to think you see
That ties that bind us tight to another
Will never fracture, and maybe that's true.
No-one, least of all you,wants to smother
That baby or think it so soon turns blue
From so much pressure that it must live still,
And prove its parents right to surrender
Present life to an end they cannot fulfill
Themselves in their lives. Friendship is tender
Let us admit that we will never see a friendship loyal to eternity.
Infinities are not for me bonded to thee.

Emily Dickinson writes brief poems that bind complexity into very few words. In brief I’d say, that, in this lyric [the one below], Dickinson does not try to define friendship or enumerate its qualities, choosing one from out of them. She can’t do that because friendship is realised for her only in a surprising moment when presence after long or meaningful absence, suddenly  affirms the existence of something you cannot ever know in the abstract. However, the idea of a hand being singed by fire to remind us of this quality of friendship bears a certain pain in it. Friendship coming like a surprise upon you in order to remind you of its capacity to be present may well feel to us as the contents of a witch’s cauldron feel, stirred by some witch’s huge and magic ladle. The idea of ‘fondling’ a living flame moreover not only suggests that friendship is compacted with pain necessary to spark it in the first place but also leaves a visceral remnant of disgust, of the consciousness of being fondled when you were young enough to be ‘fire’, not just  embers grateful for the friend’s return for reasons you don’t fully understand.

A poem like this reminds me that I will never be a poet. Never mind! Dickinson  is and reading her is enough to satisfy anyone.

“Long Years apart – can make no
Breach a second cannot fill –
The absence of the Witch does not
Invalidate the spell –

The embers of a Thousand Years
Uncovered by the Hand
That fondled them when they were Fire
Will stir and understand –“

Emily Dickinson, lyric 1383.

All my love

Steven xxxxxxx