MUSINGS

There are many reasons to destroy society as it stands, but reducing social organization to the atomic structure of interpersonal relationships simply isn't enough; those also must be boiled away.

One never really knows where one stands with friends, don't you find? Maintaining cordial relations is a strain. A wrong word, a thoughtless gesture or a moment of human selfishness can compromise a relationship that took months or years to build. A vivid enmity, on the other hand, is as constant and reliable as the sunrise. When you deal with people overtly committed to destroying you, there's no mistaking where they're coming from. Viciousness is a consistent quality, one which rarely disappoints.

Too, a long-standing hatred has nuance, a richness and texture the bland truce of friendship can never achieve. What is friendship, after all, but a suspension of natural hostility, a temporary absence of distrust? The only things that make a friendship interesting are the subliminated cruelties it conceals, the papered-over hurts, the suppressed resentments-- the unfriendly elements.

One "knows" one's friends, and how tiresome we quickly become to one another. How quickly familiarity breeds contempt. Friends tell you things about themselves, tawdry truths, cold porridge. With an enemy, you are cut off from tedious interpersonal intimacies, safe in both directions. You get only their malevolence, from which you may seek to deduce the shape of the mind beneath. Their dislike and their efforts to hurt you function as psychic lingerie, simultaneously hiding and revealing, hinting, limning, alluring.

One's enemies seldom have difficulty identifying what it is they dislike, and isn't that refreshing? Hatred is more genuine, fundamentally more honest. Don't the things your enemies virulently despise about you ring far truer than the nebulous, patronizing crap your friends claim to like, if and when they bother to say so? Who really "gets" you, those who flatter and indulge you, or those who declare you monstrous and take action from there? Between two people who can't stand each other there can even arise a grudging respect, but at that point the relationship has strayed into perversity and should be terminated. A moment to savor the rewarding nature of this respect is acceptable, but a moment only.

Everything about friendship (or love, dare I say) is tragic in the classical sense. Tragic, because it is hubristic to suppose we can get along, or be endured. Tragic, from the deluded optimism of the outset to the bewildered obsequies concluding it. The only heroism available to a friend is to suffer on a friend's behalf, or to endure outrages a friend perpetrates. Not very stirring, unless you're a masochist. An enemy provides all sorts of opportunities for thrills, and even a hatred conducted in low-level, cold-war ways brings a frisson impossible to disentangle from sexual excitement. What will happen? How far will it go? How crazy will it get? This dynamic is heightened by the inconvenient but inarguable fact one's enemies tend to be vastly more sexually appealing than one's friends. Why this is, only science could explain.

Admit your weariness with navigating the minefield of "friendship." The wasted energy, the misunderstandings, the inevitable betrayals-- what a drag. Only in the fertile, bottomless draught of hatred do ingenuity, creativity and all the nobler parts of our nature find the sustenance they need. Being loved inspires complacency; being hated spurs us to action. How I wish I was surrounded only by those who hated me! What a luxury it would be to inhabit a world peopled entirely by enemies.

Ha! Ha!

Yes, what a delicious luxury.

NEXT TIME: MY THOUGHTS ON PARENTING