Mutual friends stars with two great hordes of mutuality. the first chord is that of how one tells oneself a part form a… to live is to be landscape, a river, to have daughter, and a partner. One is the affair. The river is friend and a parent. There are of course in the living, point of difference. There are friends who are only friends in not being there Gaffer robs the dead. Te takes therefore what the dead give him. What they still have of use for him. What was there’s in his, but only his because they are no more. They share with him as if because the are no more. Thos principle is a one extreme point of mutuality. The point where I can aspects, or you into a me, because I kill you in my own mind, and so fee free to use or misuse your property. You are with me, because you are dead to me. I have then right what you were, or what I can salvage from you: Your death makes you as my friend
This point is though an absolute one. That is one must not stumble from it into the second . To Rob the living, to take what was not given is different. It is to assume one had aright. The world then becomes not about exchange but robbery. I might project my base feels upon you and pretend that you and I are really one and the same things. We are in the thing together, when you are bus alive, busy squirmining around doing your own thing. I might therefore simply assume the mutuality is given, and hope. This assumption in itself breaks the feels, and destroys the partnership. To assume to mutual of a living person is robbery, to take the goods of a person already dead to themselves is an act of odd friendship.
At the other extreme there is the mutuality, the love one has for another because ones entire life is bound up to and through then. Ones life and yours means that come what may, for richer for poor or wicked or good, one sticks within them. It is the closeness of kin the closeness of marriage, the closeness of a life caught up wit. This closeness cuts through sense, it cuts through morality. It is the dominant and yet strangely positive force in ones live. The exchange might appear one way. One gives to he other. But such an exchange only have a power because the other, the gaffers of this world in greedily devouring as they use it their daughters devotion also become strangely gentle and noble. They use a love like fire to power their on lives, as a buttress to what they are, and yet in doing so realize the fact. They look to their daughter in love. They try as they cannot try with any one else to love back. The blind grouping of the naturally selfish onwards love, becomes the themselves of their lives. They will then of course for good or ill trap the buttress. How can they escape when they open up for the other the fractures of redemption.
Beyond all of these runs the river. The river hooks up myriad stories, and arranges encounter upon it between very different people. Is rustles everywhere. It provides the thread linking death with life, friend with enemy, father son and daughter. Far more than that tough, I poses in it perceiving the problem of the mutual. You and I see a river, were see the same thing, and yet we do not see it. That is we see differently (for whatever reason). And yet that difference is nothing in comparison to the river or is rather a part to it. I reflects what it is in us, and an become also shared ( I saw this,…well I saw this…isn’t that odd). The river might pose difference, but ones that will themselves in the sigh o it b open, and possible to hook up.
The river therefore poses a landscape of encounter, and the medium in which the encounter is defined: tactic the axis to share, the water the flow we all share and are for a while a least all a part of. It links the tuff with the robber with the waterman. All together as the water flows on. We might hold onto the fact that you and I perceive differently as a badge of subjectivity, a badge of identity, but the river has a habit of undermining the difference. Mostly w see alike, mostly we are caught in its maze, it dreamy flow. Mostly we share. And f we do not, we could always it only we think of it. The river therefore drowns our subjective identity, I makes us as useful. If gives us a substance.
The river runs across mutuality, therefore or better it animates it. We share in seeing or embodying a change elsewhere a change what is known in the flow, but open in the scenes. For you knows at the start of a novel what ma be already drifting bound the current? What we have already found floating in the river? What pattern of dancing before our eyes as we look into the fire? The changes we are, very volatile and lively, they might dance into many landscape or place.
The times of ours the dimension time, where change is echoing god knows where, a trains (in lieu of preface) hurtling on (and replacing rivers). A times where one ability to share a thing or be already sharing that is changing, challenges any subjective pretence to be that which perceives. One is rather for a greater part of the time caught up in the maze of exchanges and the problems of never holding purely anything as oneself own. The ethic is therefore always in what sense one can share with other, only some of which one can know.
2)Putting out the twemlow.
Her begins another starting point. I might be a landscape a river, and caught up in something beyond me, or else might start wt my particular friends. Bit in this case what exactly am I sharing/ what makes someone my friend? This is a problem for the in offensive man the world women Twemlow to wonder at. If a fiend merely a change encounter. To be someone of status, a man from somewhere is to have some kind of bond with them. Is this then o enter into an exchange or to potentially to do so?
An its that is so what is that exchange about? Is dinner enough? Or does on also need a landscape of shade fancy of mythic power and fantasy wealth? If this last point is the case how one ever stabilize the friendship? All one needs is other behaving the same way, others ho understand the last and rules of fantasy, and the world slips out of control. One is caught in the virtual landscape of the fantastic, the landscape of what might have been or what could be. One looks on or sit in, and thinks oneself to be a great actor, a shaper up of the state in some manner. One enters into the elaborate rules of society.
The society here is meant in its flexible sense. It has two elements. Firstly it provides a set of rules by they for a computer game, a Live action role play or eating that animate a group, by setting out the rules of the fantastic. Within the rules of the group the very fact of sharing, of being pitched between makes the participants feel they can do anything or everything. I opens them onto their own power, their own ability to differ what they are, and be as they are different. The rules therefore pitch minds into the world of hope, he the mirage of possibility.
Secondly society is the stage mange of sharing scenarios. One does not the flowing river therefore, but rather the obverse event, the great occasion where very one and everything is there. The great and the good meet and eat together. There share what they are and what they think they might be. The suspend their conflicts in eating, and become other. They become social and entry and cross relate to one another in their exchange. Great set piece occasions (or merely sitting in front of a screen) become the sating point for the pooling of the fantastic. The mind which starts in a fixed event launches into he fantasy of being somewhere (else). \It knocks into the axis of the fixed pool the being of somewhere, the thinking of somewhere. It makes that axis the reality, and everything else becomes unreal or does not mater by comparison.
As long as that is the rules are observe red. Reality devolves into a series of comities with chair and conveners, and forced sharing off opinion.
However any such set cannot quite set itself in absolute isolation. I needs a nod t other powers. It needs to clued a Twemlow, the relative of a duke, the little inoffensive man. the man whose inclusion proves that ones own fantasy is a part of another great set of fantasies, it is already caught up in a wider society. As long as one has a Twemlow is part of the greater world. He in his inoffensive presence gives grandeur, an gives a beyond that is being ignored (and is certainly no different that this table anyway). We represent at once the limit, the furthest point of the table, the rim in which the other world of other societies loo k upon the banquet and wider ay it
And yet this rim by is very marginal state has its own rules. I is not simply there. it wonders as it is their from outside what is happening. Are the fantasies real/ are these really good friends or nodding acquaintances: Where it asks is the reality in the picture? What makes it at all real? Or is it merely fantasy? The twemlow form looking in poses the question it itself which no one else can ask – is this a game of a collective delusion? What is happening here. The margin, at the margin of the exchange remains a moral point, a point that looks in and wonders about reality, and wonders how these elements might really be pitch new against the other. A point outside, whose only yardstick could be a supposed moral order.
The margin is marginal in using other rules It uses the rules that exist between different groups, and which would force them in their fantastical reality to cross relate to one another. It therefore always looks on this the eye of generality, the eye which might insists any exchange opens itself to others, a and through others. It looks o with the eye of the really collective beyond the this and…
A Novel is no doubt as a symphony, it starts in great chords, and then presents themes. The chords at the beginning of mutual friend are the chord of the river, which sweeps up death and life and creates axis to share in an odd reality; and the chord of society, which works in a collective delusion which then becomes in its sharing as if it were what was real.
Chords to conjure in