Postmortem of a Friendship

So, I was thinking about D. a few months back and had, I won’t call it an insight, but a possibility entered my mind. I’ll call it a hypothesis. Basically, I think D. is beside himself. That is to say, as I was mentally reviewing our so far final tête-à-tête, two things struck me: on the one hand, the almost auxiliary nature of anything I actually said in the light of what D. would hear, and, on the other, his extreme overreaction to that alien meaning he insisted my words meant.

It felt, to use a martial arts metaphor, that he was using me as a training dummy rather than a sparring partner. I’m trying to get the words right: Nothing I said had any bearing on what he heard; since what he heard was not coming from me, I think it was coming from his own invention; and so, I wonder if his vitriolic reaction to what he heard was not just a vitriolic reaction to what he was saying to himself, which, if I understood him, was a series of insults calling his character into question.

I don’t see how useful these thoughts are. If the hypothesis is correct, it doesn’t provide anything practicable. I think D. is, in the way I’ve tried to outline, beside himself and, unable to enter into forthright dialogue with himself, can’t talk with anyone else either. He can only see the projection of himself. I think he used me, in some sense, as a mask for the natural instinct one has against the sort of violent mental change of going from a heartfelt faith in God to a complete rejection of God. Instinct is neither true nor false, but the more one can’t face and acknowledge an instinct, the more terrible its judgement.

If my conscience bothers me and I ignore or suppress, I might begin to project that botheration onto others in disproportionate responses: A person, feeling guilty after shouting at his mother, proceeds to shout at a friend for speaking well of mothers in general. A thief fears that all eyes linger. The madman is sure that everyone is plotting against him.

Because he couldn’t express good reasons for his apostasy (not judging whether or not he had them, only that he could not state them clearly apart from what seemed to me a meaningless parroting of memes) he can’t actually face himself. So, he’s angry at himself and shouting to be heard by himself. It is like the noise of his own thoughts are so loud he can’t hear anybody else talking.

Well, I’m either right or wrong, but what good is it to say why he can’t hear/read/understand what I say when I know by experience that he doesn’t? I’ll try to attack an idea, and D. can only hear me attacking him. I’ll say sorry for any personal insult and that I only meant to say why the idea is wrong; he’ll take that “sorry” and turn around and act as if I’ve now recanted my position.

It becomes a cycle of control where he tries to cling to his hurt feelings as proofs against my arguments, and I can’t help but feel that it was his choice. The whole thing started with me asking if he wanted to discuss whether a belief in truth and a belief in atheism can cohere, and instead of saying “No, I don’t want to talk about it,” or explaining how he holds both positions, he basically said, “Ow, that hurt.”

I think it did hurt, and it hurt because he can’t ask those questions without facing himself, and he can’t face himself without facing his own recriminations, and he can’t deal with those recriminations because, for all of his analytical and mathematical genius, he can’t put into words what he actually believes.