Zombie Me

I get an email from Facebook telling me I have two friends with birthdays on July 3rd.

One will be 57, the other 37.  They come from such completely different periods in my life that thinking about them together makes my head gong like a brass bell.

The last time I saw Mr. 57, Mr. 37 had yet to be born.  Conceived, even.  Maybe his parents hadn’t even met.

I wonder whether Messers 37 and 57 would get along.

I don’t know either of these “friends” particularly well, but now I know they share a birthday.

And for the next little while I will be tormented by questions arising from this.

Facebook is like bringing someone back to life, like in Pet Sematary.  There’s something demonic about the resurrected person.  Something missing.

Friendship is a word like intelligence, love, poetry.  Like them, it is an important word for us, because like them it reflects some deep need in the species: the need to understand, or connect, or create.  But these word/ideas also grow from the desire to categorize: to find essential points of commonality among disparate events and thereby create a category.  Put enough trees together, and you’ll eventually start to feel comfortable with the category of tree.  Then you define tree to explain why you believe all these different entities belong in a single category.  Branches, photosynthesis, bark, leaves, birds like to hang out in them, etc.  What a life we would have if we had to consider every tree its own individual self!  It would be time-consuming.  Better to have the category.  But once we have the category, we argue about it, specifically what gets to go into it.  We like to argue.

Same with intelligence.  Is she “smart”?  “He’s not very smart.”  Psychologists have their measures of intelligence, zen masters theirs, biologists and political activists theirs, dancers theirs.  I suppose even George W. Bush has his.  Sometimes, when we observe that someone is not “smart,” we begin to suspect that there is some other kind of intelligence they may have in spades.  For example, there is analytical intelligence – the capacity to take things apart and understand the relation of part to whole.  But there is also associational intelligence: a talent for seeing the relations among things, seeing patterns and shapes, analogies and metaphors.  Some people seem to be strong in one area, and not so strong in another.  Are they intelligent?  How many other kinds of intelligence are there?  How many kinds are we perhaps not even aware of?  How many before we begin to feel the word itself is not as precise as we thought?  Before we realize the word exists partly to exclude and reject? -- We are at least as interested in the lack of intelligence as we are in its presence.  Perhaps we will evolve to the point where rather than refining the category to explain why such evidently different things are in it, we start to lose our taste for categorizing altogether.  We may become so “intelligent” that “intelligence” is no longer meaningful and every individual moment remains unencumbered by word.

If we can lump prose-poems, lyric, epic, dramatic poetry, satirical poetry, and haiku into a single category called Poetry, then the definition must be very supple indeed – so supple that maybe it is meaningless?  How do you like this poem?  I think it is not a poem at all.  Okay fine, how do you like that poem?  I think it is a poem but not a very good poem.  And your gauge of poemness?  Invariably one gets a lot of blah blah blah in response to this question.  And that is probably as it should be, because history is messy and people just come along and call something a poem, or call something intelligence, and everyone sort of goes along, but they’re not worried about the fate of the category or whether this item will play nicely with all the other members of the set.  They’re just doing their thing, living in their own time.  But maybe then they write a book, and they call it Intro to Poetry.  This is the problem.  This is one reason why it’s so hard to say what something is – because we’ve put so many things into the category that it becomes impossible to put our finger on that essential common feature.

Love – well, it’s hard to know whether to say nothing about this or to say a lot.  I’m going to opt for nothing.  Apply what I’ve said about poetry and intelligence to love, and you’ll get the general idea.

So, we come to the category of friendship.  I value friendship, but I don’t have many friends.  I may not have any at all, really.  So maybe I’m not the right person to have an opinion, but I’m going to go out on a limb anyway and say what I think is the single most important quality of a friend:

You spend time with them. 

I don’t know how much, but some fairly regular time.  In person, not via electronic media.  Which means you have to live in the same place, at the same time. And you probably need to not be so caught up in your vastly over-rated job and your vastly over-rated children that you never hang out with friends.  

Now I know of course that this Facebook thing has brought lots of people together who maybe used to be friends a while back but have fallen out of touch.  And many people will say that they have rediscovered an old friend, and are friends with them now again.  But that’s not really true.  You are in touch with them, yes; and they used to be a friend, maybe; but now they’re just a person you are in touch with who used to be your friend.  That’s what I mean about the Pet Semataryaspect of Facebook: You’ve brought them back from the dead, but it’s not really the same.  Either they’re not the same, or you’re not the same, or you both aren’t (which is not such a big surprise), or you just don’t have the context anymore for being friends.  More important, you live a thousand miles apart.  Most of the things that make friendship possible are only possible in person.

How many times have you connected up on Facebook with someone you remember fondly from the old days, only to find that you run out of things to say after a couple of exchanges and feel this profound sense of disappointment and maybe even a little embarrassment?  How do you hold on to your pleasant little memories now?  More important still: How do you get rid of this person?  It’s happened to me more than once.  They are literally the same person, but put together the fact that you haven’t been in touch for so long with the fact that your relationship has no external social or cultural context, no real reason for being (e.g., a place, a job, a school), and it withers and dies pretty quick.  Oh maybe you hold out for a while, sustained by memories and old stories, but sooner or later – it just feels bad. 

And this is because you are trying to be friends with a zombie.  It feels bad to be friends with a zombie.  It is unrewarding.  And make no mistake (as Obama says), you are both zombies to each other – you are undead.   A zombie does some of the things a real person does, like walk and make noise.  But whatever's human in them is gone.  Same with you.  You have done a Dr. Frankenstein on your past, and you know how that story ended.

I think there shouldn’t be Facebook friends; there should be Facebook zombies.  There should be a button you can press on someone’s page to “zombie” them.  And then they can accept your zombie request.  And you can proceed to have an exquisitely unfulfilling relationship until one of you eats the other.

Friendships are never formed in a vacuum; they are rooted in place and time.  It’s funny how we’ve forgotten that.  When that time and place are gone, the friendship is dead and if you try to bring it back to life, you’d better get used to staggering down ravaged streets to chase down the few remaining humans so you can gnaw on their faces.

Because that’s about as good as it’s going to get.