My Dinner With Amjad

We met online. We dated. We never slept together, but we spent some beautiful time swirled in S shapes atop clean sheets in Midtown. A few months ago we saw each other again. Dinner. And guess what. I got permission to write about it.

Amjad is very slender, with very fine sweet fingers, and his voice has this silvery tilted quality¹ that I can never recreate when I read his texts aloud in my head. He’s a little awkward and more than a little sarcastic and when I say something he doesn’t like² he does this closed-lipped-sort-of-smile which feels both conciliatory and slightly mocking. He would tell this all differently, of course. That’s not the point. The point is that none of it comes across online. This isn’t either good or bad - it’s cybernetics³ ~

Getting to know a person is a process of fitting their story into your story. Barthes says that narrative (the episode, the adventure) - is the “tribute the lover must pay to the world in order to be reconciled with it.” There is something deeply seductive about this process. Not even the person but the process. Especially when mediated by the internet. 360 x 360 pixels⁴ is not a lot of information but it is certainly more than enough information for inference. Enough to fall into another world, another person’s place and posture. I think we must resist this impulse as much as possible. The moment we begin to fantasize about a person, we are no longer thinking about them. We exit reality. We must be very, very careful not to become infatuated with an image or an indeterminate idea of a person rather than the person themself. This of course may be impossible. Perception is like a hand measuring the depth of a stream; something is always displaced. Furthermore the word “information” comes from the Latin word “forma”: form, shape, pattern. The shutters of the mind habitually click open and shut; their little snaps make images which we inevitably arrange at our fancies⁵. Images are great. We have nothing without images. But if you stumble upon an image you’ve never seen before, no need to rush to click the shutter.

On the other side of the camera is how I present myself to you. A popular refrain is “be yourself”, “be vulnerable”, “be honest”, yayaya. This is inane! First, it’s literally not safe to walk around naked honest guts and butt out to everybody. Second, there is no “real self” to reveal anyways.⁶ The most intoxicating part of talking to a stranger isn’t the part where I look at you and wonder “Could this really be you?”. It’s the part where I look at you looking at me and wonder “Could this really be me?”

It’s true that the fear of being known runs parallel to the fear of being rejected. Rejection begins with one person imagining a better life with someone different, a better-and-longed-for partner who is not their current partner. The difference between a committed and an uncommitted relationship is not whether you have these fantasies or even whether you act on them. The difference is that in a committed relationship, the better-and-longed-for life is the life that you are imagining with your partner. The better-and-longed-for partners are the people whom each of you are currently becoming, whom you have not yet become. The obligation of friendship is therefore twofold. First there is the mutual commitment to see and be seen exactly as you are, with no supposition or fantasy attached. Then there is the imperative to join the friend in seeing themself as they could be.

James Baldwin: “I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, ‘Look.’ I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, ‘Look again,’ which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can’t explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw.”

Friendship is a mutual commitment to seeing, and being seen, and imagining, and being imagined by another. Friendship is neither admiration nor charity. If this is all true, then who should we be friends with? Should we be friends with everyone?

Hmmmm. It’s easy to wax sentimental about friendship, especially in mid-May, but let’s also get real about its limitations. You remember in middle school there were kids who were really cruel, kids who came up with secret words and gestures to ridicule their slower, kind of stinky classmates. Those cruel kids⁷ might have had their own complex psychological issues, but as a bloc, they were actually quite good to each other. They shared ice pops. They carpooled. They jumped on each other’s trampolines. These cruel kids actually were, it turns out, interested in relationships based on mutual kindness and respect. Just not with everybody. Just not with your slightly spergy, slightly sickly little brother. Just maybe not with you.

Again and again in adulthood this phenomenon is repeated. Hot rich well-educated kids grow up and are kind and nice to their hot rich well-educated adult friends. This is fine? I guess? We feel a natural gravitational pull towards those whose tastes, temperaments, and situations are similar to our own. But then maybe we shouldn’t valorize friendship. The homeless, the poor, the disfavored, the condemned - are they your friends? Are these people worthy of your time and attention? Not as a group or as a set of social problems to be solved, but as individuated lives whom you cherish and adore? Have you ever loved a person who was homeless? Are poor people worthy only of being friends with other poors? And if your gaze happens to fall upon them, will you look away in another direction, immediately embarrassed, almost pissed off? Will you look only at your friends?

Do I sound preachy right now? I don’t mean to preach. I’m sorry. I live in a major American city and every day I sing/dance/skip past people who sleep on the street, many of whom look me in the eyes and ask me for money or food or conversation. I often refuse them. I hate that we live in a world where homelessness is normal; I hate that I’ve become a person who is able to ignore homelessness so easily. When I write about universal human problems, I am also writing specifically about my own most intimate failures. Mindy Isser: “When I see the failures of our city, I see the failures of myself.”

Besides class, there are so so [repeat x10] many ways of dividing people into haves v. have-nots. You know this already … race religion nationality appearance clout taste age gender sexual orientation occupation morality color size ability Github stars … and the beat goes on … oy. What I’m trying to say is not that American socioeconomic relations are unfair⁸. What I’m trying to do is understand the purpose and potential of friendship in a world where love and affection from our peers is somewhat universally viewed as a contingent good. We will not all be poor all our lives, and anyways, poverty doesn’t preclude friendship or love, and often wealth doesn’t even do much for the wealthy except make possible the mundanities of a parboiled life. But I think we have all been afraid, at one point or another, of not having friends, or of being rejected by the friends we do have. We have all felt lonely. We have all, at some point or another, felt alone or unloved. I don’t think anyone should be mandated to be anyone else’s friend⁹. Love is not love which is not freely given. But I do wish everybody had a friend. This desire sounds so puerile I’m almost embarrassed to write it. But I do.

Perhaps you’ve seen the movie “My Dinner With Andre”? It’s about two old friends who decide to meet for dinner and end up gabbing about life for an hour and a half. Both of these men feel trapped in their lives, sometimes and all the time, for reasons which are varied and difficult to measure or describe. They feel lonely and excluded and apart from the world even as they participate in it, even on crowded subways, in the forests of Poland, in the Sahara with Tibetan Buddhist monks. Andre is kind of insufferable (he doesn’t even ask how Wally’s doing! He hogs the first 90+ minutes lecturing Wally about the bourgeoisie paper-mache pseudo-philosophical art project he’s made of his life!..!!), and Wally isn’t much better (annoying voice). But it works, somehow it all works, the conversation and the dinner and the movie, and it works slowly, then all at once as the two become immersed and transformed in conversation with each other. The freedom and connection they yearn for is found not in a physical place. It is not found by following their respective tastes. It is not even found in art. It is only found in an emergent posture of attentiveness, respect, and willingness to listen to the person before them.

When I lived in New York I was surrounded by people who not only had immaculate taste but also situated their identities around their taste. Even their friendships seemed like rewards for their good taste in having found and selected one another, proof of acceptance into an inner ring of aesthetic excellence. Amjad was different. I liked him for a variety of reasons - singing eyes, clean fingernails, gentle neck, very speedy Whatsapp response time - but my favorite characteristic about him was and remains his deep respect and attentiveness towards people, regardless of whether they are interesting or smart or cool. If you ever get the chance to walk with him through Midtown at sunset, take the offer and you will feel it. You will feel it when he talks to you and again when he talks about his girlfriend and his parents and [REDACTED CITY]. If you never get the chance to meet him you can watch “My Dinner With Andre” and get the same feeling. The fantasy here is the fantasy that we could all pay very close attention to the world, and meet to talk about what we see, and emerge more lucid, patient, loving, measured people. There could be a world that’s beautiful. It emerges by paying attention to the world.

1. possibly this is orientalism

2. mostly vulgarity

3. the study of systems that are open to energy but closed to information and control

4. dimensions of an instagram profile pic ;)

5. this sentence is a loose quote from Anne Truitt’s diary August 12, 1974

6. Zizek: “If there is a big lesson of all those Big Brother and other reality shows, it’s that even when we are just ourselves in private life we always play being ourselves. And I think this is in a way a good thing… I think most people are monsters secretly.”

7. This paragraph is pretty clumsy, huh? There is something deeply reductive about applying this enormous label - CRUEL - to an entire person, and especially to a CHILD. Cruel/gentle, perpetrator/victim .. these feel like the 21st century versions of just labelling people good/bad. Martin Luther writes that a person can be “simul iustus et peccator,” - “simultaneously justified and a sinner.” Do those of us who extol mercy and forgiveness actually believe it? Does forgiveness extend to the perpetrator too? What happens when we let go of our dualistic stories about perpetrators and victims, of good people vs. bad? My darling! What happens when you let go of having an IMAGE, or A NARRATIVE ?!?!

8. although that’s true, and people should say it !

9. there’s something tankie about this idea, no?