If only I were snow on these mountains

"My father's advice to me has always been this: never befriend those more ignorant and worse than yourself, but always those more knowledgeable and better," said a friend I love very much, perhaps paying me a compliment. With this he was saying that I was more knowledgeable and better than he was. Moreover, in doing so, with complete humility he was also expressing that he was ready to be nourished more by me in terms of knowledge.

"Then let me start from here," I was about to say. Of course I was not yet sure of what, and how much, he would be able to understand, so I held myself back. But this is the thought that crossed my mind at first, which I wanted to say, and did not: "If I am truly more knowledgeable and better than you, that is, if I am in a position to measure this with certainty, and my father also advised me the same thing, how are we going to get out of this? In that case I too should not go near friendship with you, should I?"

If a person's expectations of his friend are always tied to such an exchange calculation, the resulting relationship surely cannot be called friendship.

The father who recommends this kind of friendship probably does not even realize that he has also recommended to his child to always take, always benefit, always exploit. In fact, by giving his child a tremendous measure of calculation, he thinks he is protecting him, even that he has given him a benefit. Yet in doing so he is not even aware that he has instilled in the child only a narcissistic selfishness.

Why do fathers not think of giving their children not taking but giving, and, in giving, the sense that they will gain anyway? The simplest and most immediate answer to this question is that they themselves do not possess it, that they are not informed of it. Perhaps the most ordinary behavior is for the paternal instinct to direct the child to the address where he can find the easiest, most effortless, least risky benefit. Yet if they only knew, the greater risk lies in this facile approach, the greater danger in this risk-free advice about life.

Is friendship not something possible to the extent that it can surpass all calculations, to the extent that a person can dare to give rather than take? Is friendship not something possible to the extent that it can surpass all calculations, to the extent that a person can dare to give rather than take, or can find giving worth establishing and sustaining this relationship? Is friendship not something possible to the extent that we give what we suppose we own, or can find giving worth establishing and sustaining this relationship? The alternative is merely bargaining and trade.

Admittedly, there are also sociological theories that tie human social existence to exchange. This is a theory put forward as a response to the Durkheimian functionalists, that is, the theorists of the social division of labor, who see our existence within a society as a fulfillment of our debt to that society. Do people, in their social actions, largely think of being useful in order to be of use in the general functioning of a society from which they benefit, and thus of paying their debts to society, the state, the nation, the family?

If it were so, everyone would truly act with the consciousness of worship of paying a debt to others in society, and such a society would also be very easy to govern. In fact, in a place where everyone had this consciousness, there would be no need even to govern society; society would be organized so as to govern itself without any need for pressure. This was the Durkheimian functionalist approach's imagination of society. But it is an imagination which, when such a world does not come about by itself, has to open the doors to an authoritarian conception of the state that sets about collecting by itself the debt it has assigned to everyone. One reason why Republican policies in Turkey followed the path of Durkheimian sociology was this.

Yet although everyone in society is connected to and dependent on one another, not everyone has this consciousness of debt, and social relations take place within a framework in which people look after their own individual or narrow-group interests. The denial of debt, and a situation of bargaining relations in which everyone looks after his own interest and sees the relationship as a trade, is, however much we dislike it, more determining in the functioning of society. A network of relations in which people do not love one another, see one another as rivals, and have adopted snatching things from one another as a way of being: the general summary of society.

Friendship of course also takes place in such an environment as the discovery of a relationship, a meaning, a sincerity that is somewhat more lost, unappreciated, unseen, forfeited, as the fulfillment of a debt. Friendships cannot be sacrificed by being made the subject of bargaining, inward or outward. Friendship is, before everything, founded on giving.

Do those who look for a true friend and cannot find one ever think of being a true friend themselves? In that case many people can take refuge in the excuse that, because they have not found anyone worth being a friend to, to whom they could display true friendship in all its quality, they cannot be a true friend to anyone either. Yet the first way of finding a true friend, of finding someone to be a friend to, passes through the person himself being a good friend. Friendship is not a value you find in others; it is an understanding that begins from yourself, from your own attitudes, and continues.

"If I were snow on these mountains, if I were a rebellious wind, if I were an unowned grave, if I were cinders in this blaze, if I were to weep and be weary": by tying it to conditions like these, what do I myself give to the relationship, before the friendship I hope will be shown to me despite all these conditions?

Of course let us not squander in one stroke the poem of Yusuf Hayaloğlu, which takes on an entirely different meaning in Ahmet Kaya's beautiful music and Müslüm Gürses's extraordinary interpretation. But friendship does not accept the stubbornness of "love me as I am, whatever I become." Friendship changes. True friendship certainly changes; it sets a person off on a long, tiring and tortuous journey to change toward the absolute friend.

The friend to whom I say, "Let me stay here as a grave, let me remain as a rebellious wind, let me not move an inch from my place, but you go on loving me anyway," I will have buried in the grave I lie in, stuck to the wall I am.

Yet with the journey a person sets out on with a friend, he also sets out toward an unknown. On this journey, like Moses, he must be patient with the strange doings of his learned traveling companion and try to understand and comprehend, instead of immediately objecting, judging and discarding with his own horizon, knowledge, prejudices, ideologies, theories, concepts.

Rather than expecting something from your friend, supporting him, trying to understand him and be open to him is part of the manners of friendship.