Friendly moods

With gratitude and love to the Mira el Río Baja Crew.

I show up in a sabbatical body, a visitor’s body, an American body with a U.S. passport.

I never got to study abroad as an undergraduate. But I make up for these reverse visits and meditations in middle age.

I am in Madrid.

I arrived at February’s end, ready to welcome 2020’s spring, to live an unlived season in this city—Madrid Central, city of bocadillos de calamares, conquistador city, city of looted treasures, city of comings and goings. My easy-to-spot orange suitcase crams all illusions.

I want to lose myself in the accidental here, in discrepancies, in analytic wilderness, in dillydally. A serendipitous inventory of epiphanies: I like 6:30 in the evening, taking in the Madrid sun’s valediction. The sonorous city’s language—a quick tongue coming at me in slow, satellite transmission, never in real time—salutations, and textures hit me. I’m a wanderer—a pedestrian observer, hopping from an Anglophone linguistic empire to a Hispanophone one.

I’m a tourist, waking up daily to a different city. I’m passing through, but I intuit its mood swings, intensity, quotidian alterations.

Headlines announce the disrupting arrival of the coronavirus: it moves from China to Italy to Spain. Madrid is the new Italy. My only defense against the unfathomable and unforgiving virus liable to attack me at any moment is a two-ounce bottle of Dr. Bronner’s organic peppermint hand sanitizer. It smells like home—and an outbreak. I relocate pell-mell from the studio apartment I rented above a churrería and take refuge in a friend’s place.

The streets are empty. Amidst the anxiety, fear, and worry I see a young woman ring a friend’s buzzer. She yells to her friend on the balcony to come down, that she has flowers for her. Holding a colorful bouquet, she delivers fortitude and brings a good dose of friendship to the front door. How touching, how healing, how cheerful, and . . . how fleeting.

Social distance-trust-distrust organize the pandemic every day. I’m in mental limbo. I can’t read or concentrate. I scroll and graze online. What does a general theory of non-reading—or, rather, of reading differently—under enclosure produce?

Travel has turned into a foe. Everything is urgent. I am in a republic of strangers: everything I know is a continent—and another confinement—away.

I don’t get to see Madrid’s sunset again.

Here means unchartered territory, and I find myself outside my place.

Where does the distressing present excess and its transformations take me? What does one become in mobility, in stagnancy, in suspension?

I chart my thinking points through these abrupt life-changing circumstances because my moving forward, humanly speaking, depended—and relies—on ethical encounters and the building of friendships as armor to shield before the world.

My Madrid research trip became a journey to friendship, a step into a network of belonging, and interpersonal solidarity (cf., Chatzidakis et al., 2020).

Where does human connection—and a caring commitment to strangers—fit not in professional scholarship or our working lives, but in our intellectual growth, explorations, ethical reflections, and accounting of global needs and human wellbeing?

Time collapses. Everything is slow motion yet intensified under mass quarantine, provoking a strong desire to go outside. But what is gained from being—and from opening up—indoors?

In my friend’s home there was fellowship, conviviality, modesty, spontaneity, joint thinking, silence, vulnerability, social care. Conversation—trifling, insignificant, significant—lay behind and invigorated our ordinary conduct of life. Stay-at-home existence was both a reckoning and a peaceful calming of the mind amid the horrific possibilities I avoided thanks to friendship. This microcosm and its micro-stories affect how we relate, connect, and re-connect at the macrocosm—a formidable beginning, as philosopher María Lugones reminds us. A possible world “may be inhabited by just a few people. Some ‘worlds’ are bigger than others,” she posits through her concept of “‘world’-travelling”—or, a collaboration between friends that modifies and transforms that lifeworld and worldviews (p. 10).

The spirit of that—this—time in isolation is dizzying, anxious, terrifying. COVID-19’s steepness cues us that we will also be living with it through long-term analysis. What kinds of creative meaning do formative and enduring friendships create?

Political theorist Patrick Hayden (2015) proposes that our global context’s moment occasions a human association characterized through an active practice of “befriending the world.” This critical stance moves in a threefold manner, molding an interconnected triptych of self-world-other. Hayden centers the world in friendship to stress the earth’s ecological vulnerability and metamorphoses, alongside entrenched structural asymmetries of dehumanization, uneven opportunities, and social power dynamics. These tensions and hierarchies emphasize that the shared world can be remade. Hayden’s triad of “we-ness” acquires more weight under COVID-19’s myriad unknowns, health side effects, and disturbances. “Self-world-other either flourish together or deteriorate together,” he avers (p. 758).

Holding friends dear and dearly holding the world is the essence that also embraces—befriends—the self and self-understanding. You can grow to love and appreciate others. Friendship-cum-turbulent existence becomes “a loving way of being and living,” as Lugones might render it in connection to social activity, knowledge, and change (p. 3).

The capacious subject of friendship is not simple or uniform. Its seeds have a boundless intellectual tradition, preoccupying classical authorities (e.g. Aristotle and Socrates) and the twentieth-century’s most towering philosophers (e.g. Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida). Modern friendship has been hummed along the popular culture music canon (for brevity’s sake, recall The Beatles, Carole King, Clarence Clemmons and Jackson Browne, Dionne Warwick, and Red Hot Chili Peppers), and represented on film and television (for ease of reference, see Beaches, Steel Magnolias, Ghost World, The Golden Girls, Friends, That ’70s Show, and Girlfriends).

Our contemporary era is marked by a friendship praxis that lacks a physical presence and accumulates “friends” on electronic social media. Its fickle scale includes group enmity recognized as “haters” and catty acquaintance with coeval friends and foes known as “frenemies.” Online culture industries help fashion one’s media destiny through friending and defriending—infinitely seeking, clicking, sitting, and waiting for “friendships” to amass or dissipate.

Yet this kind of mass appeal and hollowed-out meaning of friendship predates social networks. Dale Carnegie’s influential self-improvement manual—the international bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)—proffered entrepreneurial lessons on how to be instantly likable and successful. Contacts outdo close friendships. One must “sell” the self and “win” over prominent individuals.

Friendship’s cultivation and commitments—outside family ties and romance—marshal an open line of inquiry, an alternative to stifling society and social conformity. These perilous times of isolation and dread urge us to continuously stop, think, and rethink—a reorienting of the day to day and our standard of living. Intimacy, interactions, emotions, ephemera, observations: They all have a research place in this social formation and transformation, in our flourishing, in these enactments of human togetherness propelling us to take other things to heart and the scholarly table.

When life ceases to be business-as-usual under a global health crisis, what counts as productive knowledge? What is corrected and crossed out? Life-altering realities bring out new arrangements and new “productive” practices that direct our attention to acceptable lapses in “productivity” at a time when distraction, fragmented articulation, stress, the risk of infection, and a dark and uncertain future permeate everyday life.

Knowledge construction takes new understandings—and new forms of catching up with scholarship outside one’s research areas. There is a lightning-fast bibliographic need that puts into question specialized documents from one’s field. One’s critical attention and intellectual capacities are now turned somewhere else, tuned into everything on the web. Reading about—and making sense of—the present is another form of research and work. It is inevitable—and a necessity.

Madrid stripped off my tourist identity, as was the speed of life. I traveled and I did not travel. I had nowhere to go. It was down to kindness, to taking the time to notice friends, neighbors, and actual life, and to simply recognize humanity. My (“tourist”) memories exceeded the vagaries of individual experience.

Novelist Sandra Cisneros has noted that, through her sojourns, she has become aware of her father’s migration. “What it was like, for him, to come across,” she says, “and to feel uncomfortable and to find friends among strangers and to be alone and to be taken into people’s homes” (Tippett, 2020). “You have gratitude, when you’re traveling and you don’t have a lot of money—or even if you do, if someone invites you to come into their home and share a meal. There’s a kindness in that.” More striking than relocating from one country to another is Cisneros’s emotive take on new beginnings and goodwill. The “tourist” event is becoming a housebound traveler—surviving, finding comfort, and safety, no matter how far one journeys. Friendship-making and experiencing a home on the road matter because they are part of the human community that can spontaneously build a home anywhere.

Meaningful friendships are vital to what the world has thrown at us at this moment. If the reckoning before us is how to rebuild—how to be better—in a post-COVID world, then we should celebrate, as well, living life through human bonding, fondness, joy, love, and friendship.