FRIENDSHIP, LOVE and LOSS

How easily life loses in a day what many years of toil and pain (and love) have amassed. Petrarch

When we have love, the non-sexual love of friendship
for and with another,
our world is partly shaped by it and them.
We smile and laugh with the other,
we discuss and find peace in agreement
and in discord we, none the less, learn and gain knowledge
and perhaps wisdom from our time with them.

Discoveries early on define whether the friendship will grow or diminish.
I’ve found that petty discord means nothing
in relation to caring, fondness and concern for the other.
It’s easy to ascribe the minor differences to their eccentricity,
to their history and upbringing.
If the love is profound
it’s easy to be accepting and quietly, privately forgiving.
But when one recognises
that one’s own values are being questioned,
attacked, dashed on the assumptions and morality of the other,
that is when friendship dies.

I could not abide friendship with a racist,
with a war monger,
with an ardent believer/follower of a religious cult
or a secret organization,
or with a person who lives on intellectually shifting sands…
my list is as long as my intolerance.

Why intolerant?
Because I see that they participate
in the unfairness and injustice
towards those weaker them themselves,
because they turn a blind eye to participating in change,
because they refuse to help, to mend, to heal our damaged world.

Those who exist within my life, beyond
my intolerance construct the joy of friendship
but upon their passing,
we experience the grief of an unending emptiness.
We recognise so much is lost and sadly,
more than we realised that the beauty of their presence,
their laugh, their observations,
their rich contribution to the discussions, their humour,
their deep vein of morality, of goodness, of quiet bravery
are gone and they are gone but for our memories of them.

Six days ago a dear friend died.
I had known Charter Weeks
since he and I met at film school in London
in the autumn of 1965.
Our friendship was almost immediate
and throughout our friendship,
even while not seeing and often not communicating for years,
we always just picked it up again.

We shared a love of culture, art and photography.
We shared a flat in New York and then a loft,
he and I and an occasional girlfriend.

No this is not Charter but a man and his friends in the Appalachian Mountain chain photographed by Charter in his very frank, straight forward way for his book (see below). Charter, camera in hand, had a disarming way to gain people’s trust.

I spoke to him ten days before writing this.
We had a long conversation in which he told me he was dying,
but, he said, “I have several weeks and am enjoying myself
digitizing past photographs and experimenting with them”.
‘I’m not frightened of death but of the dying’.
We laughed together, my tight lipped laugh
and his hugely generous explosive laugh
mingled somewhere across or probably under the Atlantic.

He was a talented man,
a kind man who began life as a Quaker and ended it as a Buddhist.
His few references to Buddhism were always about
privately finding truths and doing good,
both of which he was capable of.

Charter had the ability to be directly in front of someone with his camera, allowing them to be what they were, as mad, absurd, vulnerable, or aggressive or holy as this preacher.

Receiving the news in the midst of being very busy,
being worried about deadlines, not letting others down,
all dissolved away…
one can’t see a computer screen easily
through tears;
one can’t concentrate though pain,
one can’t engage in the mundane
when on the precipice of emptiness.

One thing that never escaped him was the absurd of our world.

Albert Camus, the French writer and philosopher wrote,
“A friend may well be reckoned a masterpiece of nature.”
Thus was my friend Charter.

---

I wrote of him twice in these essays.
The first time was to talks about,
indeed to admire his book,  
and the second time was to share the discussion we had 
which emerged from our dialogue about his book and picture making.