J. B. Thompson

Friend Titmarsh and the AR go back years — in some respects centuries. Friendship like ours is a great gift. Working to be a good friend is a spiritual journey of a lifetime. In a time of normal mobility, maintaining friendships is a challenge. In a time of lock-down, new challenges emerge, and new appreciations.

How much of our relationships depends on physical contact or at least nearness to others in the living air? Although no longer a cavorter, the Authorial Rabbit remembers days and nights as a dancer when moving together with a partner among other warm bodies was transporting, revitalizing. Soulful.

The connection in dance reached deeper than the civilities of normal interaction. Ancient body centers were stirred, stimulated. Surface identities fell away. Habitual diurnal patterns lost meaning. Chthonic rituals rose from the depths to replace them.

With the virus, we rely on the visual and audio representations of other members of our species, especially if we live alone. Very satisfying to see and hear others in their homes, certainly, exchanging our stories, smiling at each other and wishing each other well. The AR cherishes the online time with his friend Titmarsh, with whom he once roamed the wild streets and fields.

But it is not churlish or ungrateful to say something is missing. Is it the absence of an energy invisible like electricity we exchange in the living presence of others of our species? And other species too. One senses it when we are in contact with our animal friends, dogs, cats, birds, squirrels, raccoons, deer.

Our unsatisfied longing is wistfully and regrettably contained in friendly greetings as we veer away from  strangers when we leave our homes for groceries, medicines or a walk. It is harboured as we view our friends and family from afar.

True, some of us cannot wait for a time when we can be together that way again. We (not the AR or friend Titmarsh) rush to others’ homes, to public places. We crowd beaches. The craving overwhelms reason.

Like romantic love, the mind bows to another evolutionary inheritance, this dance of the collective, the cry for the herd, the pack, a restoration of unity. That it might kill us we do not entirely dismiss in the throws of our passion, as we do not when we make love. ‘There are no facts, only interpretations,’ said Nietzsche. We prefer to interpret our own way. We become philosophers, even as we hear and respect the opinions of the medical experts. We mix the two in our little vessels.

The recluse and the hermit, the isolated elder, come to know absence. Some welcome it as a time of awakened awareness, an opportunity for reflection, of freeing oneself from the habitual. Some feel painfully alone, abandoned.

On a related note, who should emerge during the pandemic but Dr. Randolph Pandolphian, the celebrity self-gratification guru for whom I had done a little editing contract not too long ago. I had thought my relationship with him had gone the way of the dodo. Yet here he was, in digital form, first by email, then by Zoom.

“How’s the book selling?” he asked on Zoom, the screen displaying one of his ghastly smiles, canines stretched long and savage by camera distortion. He appeared healthy, in his way. Still the straggly white–yellow hair, the cadaverous concavities. The glittering eyes. That just climbing out of the coffin look.

He was having trouble with the volume of his voice. I adjusted my controls.

“Fantastically,” I replied.

“It’s the book’s moment.”

“How is that?”

“The Perfect Moment. An opportunity like no other.”

“You aren’t drinking bleach, by any chance?”

“The fine art of hating. Perfect. Perfect Leaders — if they’ve read the manual — will enlist thousands. A reckoning. Think about it! The White House.” He was becoming hysterical. When he said white, I thought of the Preposterous Pump and bleach, whiter than white.

“I beg your pardon?” Sadly, I knew where he was going with this.

“I’m wonder if we should write a sequel.”

“We?”

“I’ll forward you some ideas. Package will be on the doorstep.”

“I’ll use bleach for that.”

Fortunately, I seldom go out now. I’m unlikely to encounter Dr. Randy in the crawling pallid flesh.

I would not call the doctor a friend. Or would I? I read that some people select aggressive haters as their friends, companions, spouses, mob bosses, political leaders, because the selector burns with anger inside but does not have the courage to act on it. The selector “employs” the hater to do the hating, inflict the aggression, for both of them.

No, not the AR’s style. Where there is anger, where there is fear, it is the Authorial Rabbit’s duty to manage them. One must manage one’s own. Not to act upon hate, send hate into the world to cause more anger and fear, regenerating forever; but to be aware of these emotions, understand them, and to transform them.

Often, I write my way through them. I can talk them out with friends. Titmarsh is great listener. Another device is to imagine the ostensible object of my anger as a baby, as a child, helpless and innocent once, hopeful, loving — and to some degree that still. Once loving compassion begins again — even if the object of one’s anger is dangerous and has to be reasonably contained, even defended against, perhaps jailed — the love rolls on, hope returns, and we become the first beneficiaries of this duty to transform.

Ah, yes, no sequel.