I Know Him

Probably because of its unusual facade, one house attracted his attention from a distance, and subsequently the Prince remembered saying to himself, “That’s probably the one.” He approached it, full of curiosity to see if he was right; he felt that if he was, he would for some reason find it particularly disagreeable. The house was large, bleak, three stories high, in no particular architectural style and painted a dirty green... 

“As I was approaching I picked up your house at a hundred paces,” the Prince said.

“How did you manage that?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. This house bears the stamp of your whole family and the whole of the Rogozhin clan, but if you ask me what makes me say that - I can’t explain. It’s nonsense, I know.”

“The Idiot” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1869

********** 

Dear Alex,

Do we know what a friend is? You asked last weekend in wonderment.

Let me play musical chair of words with this question: Does a friend know who we are?

Sure she observes your choice to take public transport, and he shares a meal with you. But how earnestly do they know you, not about you?

To know you - or one - is like knowing hunger: I am aware of its presence, or your being human, but neither of you loiter. Hunger roams from eye to diaphragm, its fullness of character forming shape to be known in hollowness. When you are emptied of your chase, a friend shall know more of you in your loss.

The loss here has nothing to do with something cherished or someone you have held, or wish to hold, before one is gone. To know you in loss refers to the kind of deficit that you have not known before until this loss comes to you not in memory or passing, but in discovery. This pop of loss finds you and stuns you naked out of your abundance in persona. If such loss sounds figurative in language, it awaits our discovery in motion of ravaged souls mostly unknown, unimportant to most of us, until loss befriends us.

Last night I watched the 2007 documentary film, “The Raping of Nanking”, which details the massacre of the then capital city of Nationalist China during the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. We would rather not know of the land and lives as ordinary and sacred as the men who desecrated them. We would rather not know these men who look and move like us.

We would rather not be known by friend or folly of our ordinary capacity for commonplace savagery.

I noticed this evening tarnishing on the alloy grip of my glass earrings. I got mad and cursed lightly at the local artist who had sold them to me in a Thanksgiving bazaar last year. My ears had been infected before from rusted jewelry. I wanted to chuck this pair of earrings fast.

But something stopped me and made me stoop to retrieve some polishing wipes from one of the bottom drawers in my bathroom. Then in crude arcs my fingers on cloth rubbed off the discolored ruin, a loss that let known the luster beneath.

Your friend knows you by your loss and luster.

Yours, Kate