Has your idea of what makes a good friend changed as you’ve gotten older?
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In the order of what endures, which is renewal, friendship is the oldest, briefest of things
This question keeps playing on my mind and I search what others say: they often riff on the nature of ‘old friends’, imagining that impossible fantasy of a person who endures the same in all essentials of friendship and being, is ‘there’ for you, claiming, as you think of it, they are as unchanged and unchanging as your needs and values are at base. It is comforting too to think these do not change whatever the inconsistencies in your reflected career as a person and in your current status in your own and others’ eyes.
Of these poems Freya Manfred’s is lovely but is so because it speaks of the concept of ‘old friends’ as only adequate in its validity as brief catches of poetry, as articulations of passing feeling without the fallacy of sentimentality which tries to realise ‘old friends’ in abstractly embodied ways, the very definition of sentiment not feeling. In Manfred’s poem, the old friend is a construct of her expectations out of the realms of demands upon any one frail human, even herself, and really defining her desire for recognition as a significant valid being, and what else can poetry be than just that:
Old Friends By Freya Manfred
Old friends are a steady spring rain,
or late summer sunshine edging into fall,
or frosted leaves along a snowy path—
a voice for all seasons saying, I know you.
The older I grow, the more I fear I'll lose my old friends,
as if too many years have scrolled by
since the day we sprang forth, seeking each other.
Old friend, I knew you before we met.
I saw you at the window of my soul—
I heard you in the steady millstone of my heart
grinding grain for our daily bread.
You are sedimentary, rock-solid cousin earth,
where I stand firmly, astonished by your grace and truth.
And gratitude comes to me and says:
"Tell me anything and I will listen.
Ask me anything, and I will answer you."
Copyright Credit: Poem copyright ©2018 by Freya Manfred, "Old Friends," from Loon In Late November Water, (Red Dragonfly Press, 2018). Poem reprinted by permission of Freya Manfred and the publisher.
It is lovely to feel that I am ‘known’ as if time made no changes. In that state, we are still left with a fear of loss that is evidenced by changes that have already happened I think, when each ‘old friend’ is hardened into the rock, its sedimentary source amomgst others, a kind of solid earth to stand upon but not distinct persons. Those beings that aren’t in time exactly yet appears to allow your questions voice, with promise of answer; but are essentially graped in a moment of epiphany – in ‘steady s[pring rain’ and so on, a moment this is not there for us other tham momentarily and passing.
How different are displays in the belief that ‘old friends’ have a body and live, somewhere else to be visited or come upon in aome contingency of life, can be named and pointed to in the flesh but rarely are. Take Edgar Guest’s celrated ‘Old Friends’, which contrasts two species of femds – the ‘old’ and the ‘new’.
Old Friends by Edgar Guest
I do not say new friends are not considerate and true,
Or that their smiles ain't genuine, but still I'm tellin' you
That when a feller's heart is crushed and achin' with the pain,
And teardrops come a-splashin' down his cheeks like summer rain,
Becoz his grief an' loneliness are more than he can bear,
Somehow it's only old friends, then, that really seem to care.
The friends who've stuck through thick an' thin, who've known you, good an' bad,
Your faults an' virtues, an' have seen the struggles you have had,
When they come to you gentle-like an' take your hand an' say:
'Cheer up! we're with you still,' it counts, for that's the old friends' way.
The new friends may be fond of you for what you are today;
They've only known you rich, perhaps, an' only seen you gay;
You can't tell what's attracted them; your station may appeal;
Perhaps they smile on you because you're doin' something real;
But old friends who have seen you fail, an' also seen you win,
Who've loved you either up or down, stuck to you, thick or thin,
Who knew you as a budding youth, an' watched you start to climb,
Through weal an' woe, still friends of yours an' constant all the time,
When trouble comes an' things go wrong, I don't care what you say,
They are the friends you'll turn to, for you want the old friends' way.
The new friends may be richer, an' more stylish, too, but when
Your heart is achin' an' you think your sun won't shine again,
It's not the riches of new friends you want, it's not their style,
It's not the airs of grandeur then, it's just the old friend's smile,
The old hand that has helped before, stretched out once more to you,
The old words ringin' in your ears, so sweet an', Oh, so true!
The tenderness of folks who know just what your sorrow means,
These are the things on which, somehow, your spirit always leans.
When grief is poundin' at your breast, —the new friends disappear
An' to the old ones tried an' true, you turn for aid an' cheer.
This poem is in the public domain.
It’s the kind of poem people often chose as ‘true’ – celebrating the illusions that make aged reminiscence palatable because sentimental with vaguely defined fuzziness in its capture of ‘tenderness’ (‘old words ringing in your ears for they daren’t go further down in exposure to heart and brain. Of course ‘new friends’ are easy to consider as superficial, sincere but wrapped in their own agendum – the one item of which is ‘me and mine’. Old friends have ‘stuck to you’, and whose smile still haunts their faces in your company, are genuinely there for you in body. It is a comfort for a poetaster who knows he is in stable wealth now but wasn’t always thus, that some things and deep down elements in some others and himself just don’t change. But how abstract these old friends of Guest’s are, whose role is to shore up one’s illusions tbat there is in yourself something constant in its validity, irrespective of one’s temporising for permanent benefit: ‘
But old friends who have seen you fail, an' also seen you win,
Who've loved you either up or down, stuck to you, thick or thin,
Who knew you as a budding youth, an' watched you start to climb,
Through weal an' woe, still friends of yours an' constant all the time,
When trouble comes an' things go wrong, I don't care what you say,
They are the friends you'll turn to, for you want the old friends' way.
If like me you think all this ‘magic thinking’, convenient for a person ‘on the rise’ and keen on staying thus, ‘rich’ in their own estimation but wanting something ‘constant’ in their changing lives and identities, you’ll say this is not really poetry nor feeling with any validity or solidity, at all. Yet solid efferescence exists:
.... a steady spring rain,
or late summer sunshine edging into fall,
or frosted leaves along a snowy path—
I am currently reading John Berger’s authorised biography – more on that when I finish. In a life like his ‘friends’ are and were ‘many’, but relationships to those ‘friend’ changed almost beyond recognition. Berger sought truth in things and made others uncomfortable for that reason – he sought the truth even in his own shallownesses, those evasions of truth we use to get by, although as Tom Overton (his biographer) shows he often chose to forget the shallownesses, accept the burial of evidence that showed him shallow sometimes, and, I think, rarely. But he wrote the greatest poem I know on friendhip, and then wove a beautiful multigenre book around it, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos in 1984.
Here’s the poem:
John Berger - and our faces, my heart, brief as photos
When I open my wallet
to show my papers
pay money
or check the time of a train
I look at your face.
The flower's pollen
is older than the mountains
Aravis is young
as mountains go.
The flower's ovules
will be seeding still
when Aravis then aged
is no more than a hill.
The flower in the heart's
wallet, the force
of what lives us
outliving the mountain.
And our faces, my heart, brief as photos.
There is nothing sentimental or false here but the presumpyion of endurance and aging in to the simulacrum in identity of what one was and what your friends were. Old things tell you their meaning not by stasis but by rolling round in eath’s diurnal course, becomin new again in a surprise to our expectation. It’d only the ‘the force / of what lives us / outliving the mountain’ that has a chance of flowering again, because it does not do in one static identity but in a generic one: thne floer’s ovules are not from the same flower each time they seed nor the same ovules. And though I keep your phot in my wallet – if you read The Seventh Man, you will see he is speaking of the tendency of uneducated migrants of necessity that do this, not to convince themselves things are the same but that they too are known and know you in these brief unexpected captures. No ‘olf friends’ trapped in the aspic of my expectations of them here, but ones that might surprise you with renewal and become your ‘kind friend’ again, perhaps repetitively but that perhaps will never do that at all. It is not the difference between old and new friends but that absence of expectation in which a face flowers and ‘lives us’ together. Nevevertleleess the truth is that we accept that the train whose time we are checking will come and the wallet will be forgotten unused for now: ‘And our faces, my heart, brief as photos‘. Thge briefest of things is surely the most enduring, even though each thing outlasts what makes it, in particular if not in kind, live.
With love
Steven xxxxxx
