The Voices Behind
Portraits accompanying the book ‘Staying With’
Everyone who accompanies stands on the shoulders of others. Behind the quiet listening on the telephone, behind the staying when there is nothing left to say, are people who asked, heard and endured before us — philosophers, doctors, therapists, an engineer, a monk, a family therapist.
These portraits tell of them. Not as lessons, but as scenes: a frog whose eye proved that no one sees the world as it is. A woman who, for fifty years, sewed the movement of the man she loved. A village that celebrated without anyone steering it. Each scene carries a thought without explaining it — and each thought leads back to the one question the book circles: what happens when one person truly stays with another?
In its chapter ‘The Voices Behind’, the book ‘Staying With’ gathers its own selection of such witnesses. The portraits here on the website are their extension: further voices for which there was no room in the book — for the book follows the principle ‘one room, not many rooms’. You may read them singly; together they form a small ancestral gallery of listening.
They are worth reading slowly. One after another. The way one listens to a person.
I am here. I stay with you. It holds.
Nāgārjuna
The Emptiness That Holds
Of this man we know almost nothing.
Second century, southern India.
Little more is certain.
No birthplace, no face, no attested meeting.
Of the man who taught that nothing possesses a fixed core, no fixed core has come down to us.
Only his voice.
The Verses from the Middle.
And they are enough to invite him here.
For Nāgārjuna thought a single thought through to its end.
Nothing exists of itself.
The cup is a cup through the clay, the potter, the tea and the thirst.
Take one of these away, and it is something else.
Everything arises in dependence.
Everything is fabric.
This he calls emptiness.
And by it he does not mean: nothing.
He means: nothing stands alone.
‘What arises in dependence,
that we call emptiness.
And this itself
is the middle way.’
For thinking, Nāgārjuna left behind a tool.
The tetralemma.
To every question there are not two answers, but four.
This.—The other.—Both.—Neither.
And sometimes, he shows, none of the four holds.
Exactly there, the middle opens.
Eighteen hundred years later, something curious happens.
In Munich, two people begin to lay these four positions out in the room.
The one. The other. Both. Neither.
And a fifth, free position besides: none of this—and not even that.
Insa Sparrer and Matthias Varga von Kibéd turn the tetralemma into something people can walk.
People stand on Nāgārjuna’s thought and sense where the way continues.
The oldest voice in this chapter is at the same time its youngest method.
And for the one who listens, emptiness holds out a consolation that no fixed worldview can give.
If nothing exists of itself, then no pain exists of itself either.
It has arisen—out of conditions.
So it can change when the conditions change.
And no one is their diagnosis, their guilt, their night.
This too is fabric.
It holds—perhaps, with Nāgārjuna, this means: it is not the ground that holds.
The fabric holds.
No one hangs by a single thread.
Vasubandhu
The Tongue
Of this man, too, little is certain.
Fourth century, Puruṣapura—today’s Peshawar.
But unlike with Nāgārjuna, here a story has come down to us.
Written down a century and a half after his death.
A legend, then.
And legends may be told, if one calls them by their name.
The legend tells:
Three brothers are born in Puruṣapura, and all three are called Vasubandhu.
All three become monks.
The eldest takes a new name: Asaṅga.
The middle one keeps the name—and becomes the most brilliant scholar of his age.
He writes the Treasury of the Teaching, the Abhidharmakośa.
A work still studied today, sixteen centuries later.
His brother Asaṅga goes another way.
Twelve years of meditation, visions, the great way of the Mahāyāna.
Vasubandhu mocks it.
A system, he says, so heavy and laden that only an elephant can carry it.
Asaṅga grows old.
And he worries about his brother.
Not because he knows too little.
But because he turns his best—that razor-sharp mind, that tongue—against something he does not know.
So Asaṅga feigns illness and calls his brother to him.
Vasubandhu comes.
And listens.
For the first time he truly hears what his brother teaches.
That nothing appears to us as it is.
That all the world we experience is consciousness showing itself.
And that the ground of experience can change.
Vasubandhu recognises two things at once.
The depth of this teaching.
And his own guilt.
I have mocked what I did not know, he says.
With this tongue.
I will cut it out.
And then Asaṅga says the sentence for which this legend stands in this book:
‘Even if you cut out your tongue
a thousand times, you cannot wipe out your guilt.
If you really want to wipe it out,
you must find some other means.’
The means is the tongue itself.
Speak with it, says his brother.
Teach with the same tongue with which you mocked.
And so it happens.
From then on, Vasubandhu writes for the way he had derided.
The Twenty Verses. The Thirty Verses.
Works that really exist—they are what is documented in this legend.
The one who mocked becomes the second founder of his brother’s school.
Perhaps Asaṅga’s answer is the oldest formula for what accompaniment can do.
He does not shame the one who is ashamed.
He takes the guilt seriously—and forbids the self-punishment.
Not to throw the tool away.
To rededicate the tool.
Sixteen hundred years later, a therapist in Arizona will make precisely this principle his art.
And at night, on the telephone, it is often shame that calls.
People who want to punish themselves for what they have said, done, left undone.
Accompaniment then makes Asaṅga’s movement.
The tongue that wounded can console.
It does not have to be cut out.
It has to be given something new to say.
Alfred Korzybski
The Dog Biscuits
Alfred Korzybski is an engineer.
A Polish nobleman, trained in Warsaw, in the thinking of bridges and girders.
Then comes the First World War.
Korzybski serves as an intelligence officer, is wounded, survives.
And carries a question out of the war.
When a bridge collapses, the engineers learn from it.
The next bridge holds.
Why, then, do our civilisations collapse again and again?
Why does humanity not learn?
His answer becomes a life’s work: it lies in language.
We mistake our words for the world.
What he means by that, he shows one day in a lecture.
Mid-sentence, he breaks off.
Excuse me, he murmurs, I just need to eat something.
He takes a packet of biscuits from his bag, wrapped in white paper.
He offers them to the first row.
Some students help themselves.
Nice biscuit, don’t you think?, says Korzybski, and takes a second one himself.
The students chew contentedly.
Then Korzybski tears off the white paper.
Underneath, the original packaging appears.
A large dog’s head.
And the words: Dog Cookies.
The students freeze.
Two of them clap their hands over their mouths and run out.
Yet nothing about the biscuit has changed.
It tasted good—as long as it had no name.
Korzybski turns to the lecture hall:
I have just shown you that people do not eat only food.
They also eat words.
And the taste of words often outdoes the taste of food.
Out of this insight, Korzybski builds his science of language.
Its most famous sentence fits on a beer mat:
‘The map is not the territory.’
Our words about the world are not the world.
They are maps—useful when their structure resembles the terrain.
And dangerous the moment we mistake them for the terrain.
The most dangerous thing of all, says Korzybski, is one tiny word: is.
Joe is a fool.
I am a failure.
No one is what they are called.
Nor what they call themselves.
On the telephone, there are only maps.
The listener never sees the territory—all they hear is how a person draws their world.
And many a caller who says: I am worthless, has been eating a word for years.
Accompaniment then means both things at once.
Reading the other’s map with respect—it is their terrain, until they survey it anew.
And quietly knowing: the person at the other end is greater than any map of them.
Even their own.
Paul Watzlawick
The Hammer
Paul Watzlawick, born 1921 in Villach.
He studies philology and philosophy in Venice.
Then he trains as a therapist in Zurich—with C. G. Jung.
The young man passes through the school of the man who understood the woman who sewed shoes.
Later, his path leads him to California.
Palo Alto, the Mental Research Institute.
To the place where Bateson’s research became family therapy, where Satir had been among the founders.
Watzlawick becomes one of its clearest minds.
From him comes the sentence every telephone counsellor should know:
One cannot not communicate.
Silence, too, is a message.
Even the call in which no one speaks, speaks.
How much of our reality we build ourselves, Watzlawick likes to tell in a little story.
A man wants to hang a picture.
He has the nail, but no hammer.
The neighbour has one.
So the man decides to go over and borrow it.
But on the way, a doubt comes to him.
What if the neighbour doesn’t want to lend me his hammer?
Yesterday he greeted me only in passing.
Perhaps he has something against me.
I’ve never done anything to him.
If someone wanted a tool from me, I’d give it at once.
Why won’t he?
People like that poison your life.
And then he even imagines I depend on him.
Just because he has a hammer.
Now I’ve really had enough.
The man storms over, rings the bell, and before the neighbour can say good day, he shouts at him:
Keep your hammer, you lout!
Watzlawick has shown, in a few lines, how a person creates an entire reality.
Out of nothing.
Out of a passing greeting and his own thoughts.
The neighbour knows nothing of any of it.
The quarrel has taken place entirely in one man’s head.
There is a saying for this, older than his books:
‘If the only tool you have is a hammer,
you see every problem as a nail.’
On the telephone, it is often this man who calls.
Not with the hammer—with the finished story.
He has long since read the passing greeting, already heard the refusal, already fought the quarrel.
And he calls when he himself is already shouting.
Accompaniment then does not mean: talking him out of his story.
It means finding the place where the story arose.
The passing greeting from which all the rest grew.
And quietly asking: What if it could also have been otherwise?
Not: You are wrong.
But: There might be a second story.
Sometimes that is enough for a person to let the hammer sink.
The one he would never have needed.
Heinz von Foerster
The Hot Chocolate
Vienna, around 1918.
A boy grows up among artists and philosophers.
His father is away at war, in captivity.
His mother and her circle of friends raise him.
Nearby lives a friend of the family whom everyone calls simply Uncle Ludwig.
His surname: Wittgenstein.
One day, seven-year-old Heinz sits with him over a hot chocolate.
The uncle asks what he wants to be one day.
A scientist, says the boy.
Then you will have to know a great deal, says the uncle.
But I know a great deal, says the boy.
The philosopher looks at him.
And then he says a sentence the boy will not forget for the rest of his life:
Yes—but one thing you do not know.
How right you are.
The boy is annoyed.
He does not understand the sentence.
Not yet.
At first, Heinz becomes something other than a scientist.
He becomes a magician.
With his cousin Martin, he thinks up ever new tricks.
What fascinates him is the play with the audience’s perception.
How people see what is not there at all.
And do not see what lies before them.
Later, he becomes a scientist after all.
A physicist, then one of the founders of cybernetics.
And at bottom, he works his whole life on the sentence from his childhood.
We know more than we know.
And we do not see that we do not see.
The observer, he teaches, never stands outside.
He always belongs to what he observes.
At the end of his long way, von Foerster distils his whole science into a single sentence.
He calls it the ethical imperative:
‘Act always so as to increase
the number of choices.’
Not: act rightly.
Not: find the solution.
But: enlarge the space.
Perhaps that is the most precise measure of a good conversation.
Not whether an answer stands at the end.
But whether the person at the other end has more choices than before.
Even if it is only one.
And perhaps the uncle’s sentence, too, belongs in the listener’s ear.
Every caller knows more than they know.
There is only one thing they do not know.
How right they are.
Humberto Maturana
What the Frog's Eye Sees
A young biologist from Chile, at MIT, in the late fifties.
Humberto Maturana studies the eye of the frog.
The question seems simple.
How does the eye picture the world?
One expects: light falls in, the retina traces the world, the brain receives the image.
An eye like a camera.
Maturana measures the nerve fibres, fibre by fibre.
And finds something that destroys his question.
The frog does not picture the world.
Its eye does not report what is there.
It reports what counts for the frog.
Something small that moves fast—a fly.
The large, slow cow on the horizon: does not occur in the nervous system at all.
The frog does not see the world.
It sees its world.
And Maturana draws the conclusion that changes his life.
If this holds for the frog, it holds for us too.
No nervous system shows the world as it is.
It brings forth a world—according to its own structure.
From this comes a new word.
Autopoiesis.
Self-creation.
Living beings are systems that ceaselessly bring themselves forth.
Closed in their structure—and yet touchable.
You cannot instruct a living being, says Maturana.
You can only perturb it.
What it makes of the perturbation, it determines itself.
From outside, nothing can be placed within.
At first this sounds lonely.
Everyone in their own world, no one reaching the other.
But Maturana thinks it through to the end, and it turns around.
If I cannot reach the other with truth—then how?
His answer is scandalous for a natural scientist.
‘Love is the only emotion
that widens the domain of the other.
It is the ground of the social.’
Not as a feeling.
As a biological fact.
Love, says Maturana, is letting the other be a legitimate other, beside me.
The only space in which two closed worlds truly touch.
For telephone counselling this is not poetry but a description of the situation.
You cannot talk the caller out of his world.
You cannot place yours within him.
Instruction does not reach him—it rebounds off a closed structure.
Only one thing opens the domain in which he can change.
That he may be valid beside you, as he is.
That is precisely the perturbation no argument can replace.
Perhaps accompaniment is the most practical application of Maturana’s biology.
Not to convince.
To let be.
And to trust that a person who is granted validity moves himself.
George Spencer-Brown
The Train in the Tunnel
England, early sixties.
George Spencer-Brown works as an engineer.
Together with his brother, he designs circuits for the British railway.
The task sounds simple.
Trains entering tunnels have to be counted.
A signal is to know: train in the tunnel—or tunnel empty.
On or off.
Marked or unmarked.
But in the building, something forbidden happens.
The brothers’ circuits use states that, by logic, ought not to exist.
In-between values.
Imaginary states—as impossible as the square root of minus one.
Mathematics says: inadmissible.
The circuits say: we work all the same.
Another man would have hidden the problem.
Spencer-Brown does the opposite.
If reality works and mathematics forbids it, he says, then a mathematics is missing.
So he writes it.
For nine years he works on a slim book: Laws of Form.
It does not begin with a definition.
It begins with a command, two words:
‘Draw a distinction!’
That is the beginning of everything, says Spencer-Brown.
Before every knowing, before every thing, before every world stands a first difference.
A space is divided: inside and outside.
A universe comes into being when a space is distinguished.
And at the end of the book stands the second point.
The mark of distinction and the observer, he writes, are, in the form, identical.
Whoever distinguishes is lodged in every one of their distinctions.
Heinz von Foerster reads the book and writes an enthusiastic review that makes it famous.
And in Munich, decades later, a logician becomes one of the finest connoisseurs of this calculus: Matthias Varga von Kibéd.
The constellation work he develops with Insa Sparrer is, at its core, exactly this.
The art of distinction.
Perhaps every conversation begins this way too.
Before a word is spoken, a distinction is drawn.
A call divides the night into an outside and an inside.
Into the noise of the world—and a space in which someone listens.
Good accompaniment creates a space.
Spencer-Brown is the mathematician of that sentence.
A space comes into being when one distinguishes it.
And the finest thing: the first distinction is drawn by the caller himself.
He has chosen.
C. G. Jung
The Woman Who Sewed Shoes
Carl Gustav Jung is in his mid-twenties.
He is a junior doctor at the Burghölzli, the psychiatric clinic of Zurich.
It is the year 1901.
On one of the women’s wards lives an old patient.
She has been here for decades.
She does not speak.
The diagnosis was made long ago, the case long since filed away.
Incurable.
But the old woman does something.
All day, she makes strange, rhythmic movements with her hands and arms.
Always the same ones.
For decades.
No one takes any notice.
It belongs to the illness, they say.
Jung walks through the ward late in the evening.
He sees the old woman making her puzzling movements.
And he asks himself a question no one else asks:
Why must it be so?
He asks the old head nurse.
Was the patient always like this?
Yes, she says.
But my predecessor told me she used to make shoes.
Jung fetches the yellowed case file.
And indeed, there is a note.
The patient makes cobbler’s movements.
That is how shoemakers back then held the shoe between their knees.
That is how they drew the thread through the leather.
With exactly this movement.
Soon afterwards, the old woman dies.
To the funeral comes her elder brother.
Jung asks him:
Why did your sister fall ill, back then?
The brother tells him.
She had loved a shoemaker.
He did not want to marry her.
When he finally rejected her, something broke in her.
There it was, the riddle.
For fifty years her hands had made the movements of the man she loved.
She sewed his shoes, to the very end.
It was no meaningless disturbance.
It was a love story that no one had asked about.
Jung writes later that this case first showed him that meaning dwells even in psychosis.
From then on, his whole attention belonged to the meaningful connections in the seemingly senseless.
And from it he draws a sentence that carries his work:
‘The patient who comes to us
has a story that is not told,
and which as a rule no one knows of.
It is the patient’s secret,
the rock against which he is shattered.’
The real therapy, says Jung, begins only when this story has been asked for.
Perhaps accompaniment begins with a single assumption.
That every person carries a story no one has yet asked about.
One does not need to be able to interpret it.
One only needs to ask.
And to stay, until it is told.
Virginia Satir
The Phone Call
Virginia Satir is five years old when she settles on what she wants to be.
She wants to become a detective.
A children’s detective who investigates parents.
She does not yet know what she will be looking for.
But she senses: in families much goes on that the eye does not see.
Twenty-six years later she has her own practice in Chicago.
It is the year 1951.
She is treating a young woman.
The diagnosis: schizophrenic.
For six months the two work together.
Things are improving.
Then the telephone rings.
On the line is the young woman’s mother.
She is beside herself.
She threatens to sue.
Satir, she says, has stolen her daughter’s affection.
Everything in this moment invites defence.
To justify oneself.
To protect the therapy.
To ward off the threat.
Satir does none of it.
She listens.
And she hears two messages.
The words threaten.
But the voice pleads.
The words say: I will sue you.
The voice says: I have lost my daughter. Does no one see me?
Satir does not answer the words.
She answers the voice.
She says: Why don’t you come along too.
The mother comes.
And in the consulting room something strange happens.
The daughter, who had made such progress, falls back into her old patterns.
As if nothing had been.
Another therapist would have seen a catastrophe in this.
Satir sees, for the first time, what the five-year-old had wanted to look for.
The invisible.
It is not a sick person sitting before her.
It is a dance.
A structure in which each holds the other—and holds them fast.
She works with both until a new balance forms.
Then she asks: Is there a father?
She invites him in.
And later the son too, the family’s pride.
With each one who joins, the picture becomes more complete.
Out of these sessions something arises that did not exist before.
Family therapy.
Virginia Satir will one day be called its mother.
She herself later says:
‘The family is a microcosm.
By knowing how to heal the family,
I know how to heal the world.’
It all began with a phone call.
And with a person who heard, in a threat, a plea.
Perhaps that is the whole art.
The words say what someone demands.
The voice says what someone needs.
Accompaniment answers the voice.
Peter Levine
The Tiger
It is the year 1969.
Peter Levine is a young researcher in California.
He studies what stress does to the body.
A doctor sends him a patient.
Nancy.
She has suffered for years.
Panic attacks.
Migraines.
Exhaustion.
No one has been able to help her.
Levine begins with a simple relaxation exercise.
And then the opposite of relaxation happens.
Nancy plunges into a panic attack.
Her heart races.
She freezes.
She cannot move.
Levine sits beside her.
He himself is as if paralysed.
He does not know what to do.
He is a researcher, not a therapist.
And into this helplessness an image rises in him.
As if from a dream.
A tiger.
Crouched, ready to spring.
Levine hears himself calling out:
‘A tiger is hunting you, Nancy!
See the tiger!
Run!
Climb the tree!’
And Nancy’s legs begin to run.
Sitting down.
Her legs pump, as if she were running.
Running for her life.
Then a trembling comes.
It moves in waves through her whole body.
For almost an hour.
Levine does nothing.
He stays.
He lets it happen.
As the trembling subsides, Nancy remembers.
She is four years old.
A tonsil operation.
She is pressed down onto the table.
Held fast.
Anaesthetised.
She cannot get away.
Her whole body wants to flee.
And is not allowed to.
Twenty years later, in Levine’s room, the body completes the flight.
It runs to the end of the path that was blocked to it back then.
The panic attacks do not return.
Levine has repaired nothing.
He has explained nothing.
He has opened a way of escape.
And stayed, while a body remembered how to save itself.
Levine writes later:
‘Trauma is not what happens to us.
It is what we hold inside—
in the absence of an empathetic witness.’
Perhaps accompaniment is exactly that.
The witness who is there.
So that a person can bring to an end what they could not bring to an end alone.
Karlfried Graf Dürckheim
The Belly
A German count in Japan, in the years before the war.
Karlfried Graf Dürckheim is a psychologist, a diplomat, a man of the head.
He learns archery.
Not in order to hit.
To understand something for which the West has no word.
The master tells him: you aim with your eyes.
You draw with your arms.
You want to hit.
And that is why you miss.
Dürckheim practises for months.
And slowly grasps what the master is pointing to.
There is a centre in a person, deeper than the head.
The Japanese call it Hara.
The belly.
Not as an organ.
As the place where a person rests, when they stop holding on.
Whoever lives from the centre, says the master, no longer needs to aim.
The arrow releases itself.
It is not I who hit.
It hits.
Dürckheim will never let go of this thought for the rest of his life.
The West, he realises, has lifted the human being upward.
Into the head, into the I, into effort.
We brace ourselves against life.
We want, we plan, we hold on.
And the tighter we hold, the less anything carries us.
Hara is the opposite.
A centre of gravity that does not lie in thinking.
A person with Hara stands like a tree in the wind.
They are not rigid.
And they do not topple.
They yield and remain.
After the war, back in Germany, Dürckheim turns this into a work with people.
Not to heal the illness, he says.
To bring the person back to their centre.
‘The therapist is not the one who heals—
who intervenes with his own skills;
he is a therapist in the original meaning of the word:
a companion on the way.’
And the most important thing happens neither in the head of the one nor in the head of the other.
It happens in the bearing.
How a person sits.
How they breathe.
How they are at home in their own body—or not.
On the telephone, the listener sees no body.
And yet they hear the centre.
Sometimes they hear it in the breath.
The shallow, quick breath of fear.
And sometimes, in the middle of the conversation, the breath grows deeper.
Something settles.
From the head into the centre.
The caller has solved nothing.
But they are standing again.
Perhaps this is one of the quietest tasks of accompaniment.
Not to place the right answer into someone’s head.
But to be there, while a person finds their way back to their centre.
To the place where they no longer aim.
And breathe again.
Harrison Owen
The Breathing Village
Harrison Owen has spent a year organising a conference.
Two hundred and fifty participants.
Programmes, speakers, schedules.
A year of work.
The conference is a success.
And then he reads the feedback.
The participants write about what gave them the most.
It is the coffee breaks.
Not the talks.
Not the programme.
The breaks in between.
Another man would have been offended.
Owen grows thoughtful.
He asks himself a question:
What if a whole conference were as alive as a coffee break?
And as he thinks about it, a memory comes to him.
Balamah.
A small village in the interior of Liberia.
Owen was there as a young man, in the late sixties, as a photojournalist.
A guest of the chief.
He was allowed to witness something that happens only once every seven years.
The boys of the village become men.
For four days.
Five hundred people.
Rituals, speeches, drums, dance.
Everything interlocks.
Nothing falls into disorder.
And Owen looks in vain for what, in his world, is always there.
A planning committee.
There is none.
No one steers.
No one coordinates.
The celebration moves from the edge of the village to the centre.
And back again.
It swells and ebbs.
Again and again.
Owen writes later:
‘It was as if the village were breathing.
And just as breathing needs no planning committee,
neither did Balamah.’
Out of this memory comes Open Space.
Conferences without an agenda.
People sit in a circle.
For a circle has no top and no bottom, no front and no back.
Who ever heard of a square of friends?
What wants to be discussed, people bring themselves.
Owen only opens the space.
And trusts.
Millions of people in more than a hundred countries have since worked in such spaces.
The space holds.
Perhaps this holds even in the smallest thing.
In the conversation between two people.
The accompanist need not steer the conversation.
He need have no plan.
He opens a space.
And the life within it finds its own rhythm.
It breathes.
Even without us.
Precisely then.
Gregory Bateson
The Crab
Gregory Bateson stands before a class of young artists.
San Francisco, an art school.
He is an anthropologist, a biologist, a wanderer between the sciences.
The young people before him are not scientists.
A stroke of luck, he will say later.
For their gaze is an aesthetic one.
On the table lie two paper bags.
From one, Bateson takes a crab.
He lays it before the class.
Then he sets his task:
Convince me that this thing is the remains of a living being.
The students look.
They hesitate.
Then the first observation: it is symmetrical.
The right side matches the left.
Then the second: but one claw is larger than the other.
So not symmetrical after all.
The class falters.
And then someone says the sentence Bateson had been waiting for, without knowing it:
Yes—but both claws are made of the same parts.
Bateson is delighted.
What a beautiful, noble sentence, he writes later.
For the speaker has, quite casually, thrown magnitude into the wastebasket.
It is not size that counts.
The relations count.
The relationships first, then the things.
And your own hand, says Bateson, is built the very same way.
The same parts, different proportions.
The crab and you—kin in the pattern.
From this comes the question that carries Bateson’s whole work:
‘What pattern connects the crab
to the lobster and the orchid
to the primrose and all the four of them to me?
And me to you?’
To be aesthetic, says Bateson, means: to be responsive to the pattern which connects.
Perhaps there are two ways of looking at a person.
One asks: what is broken?
The other asks: what connects?
The first question turns the other into a case.
The second turns them into a relative.
Accompaniment begins with the second question.
Even with the strangest caller, even at three in the morning:
And me to you?
Charles Sanders Peirce
The Friend's Name
Bertrand Russell called him the greatest thinker America ever produced.
Charles Sanders Peirce: logician, founder of pragmatism, father of the theory of signs.
A mind of the century.
And a failed life.
Peirce loses his university post and never gains another.
The academic world closes its doors.
With his wife Juliette he lives on a country estate near Milford, Pennsylvania, which they name Arisbe.
It becomes a trap of poverty.
No income, cold winters, debts.
And he writes.
More than a hundred thousand pages will be found after his death.
The greatest logician in America, writing against hunger.
But one friend remains.
William James.
Famous for a philosophy that Peirce founded.
James does not conceal it—he says so publicly, in his books: the origin lies with Peirce.
In 1897 he dedicates to him his book ‘The Will to Believe’.
Twice he arranges paid lectures for him at Harvard.
And then, from 1907, James does something that is no grand gesture.
Every year he writes letters to his friends in Boston.
Every year he asks them for money for Peirce.
A quiet fund, renewed year after year.
Accompaniment in instalments.
In 1910 William James dies.
And now the remarkable thing happens: the fund does not die with him.
The friends carry it on.
The accompaniment has outlived its founder.
Peirce gives thanks in his own way.
He names James’s eldest son as his heir.
And in his late writings a new middle name appears.
Santiago.
Spanish for Saint James.
Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce.
James’s widow already told it so: this was his thanks—he had taken the friend’s name into his own.
Whether it was so no one knows for certain—the name appears earlier, and the scholars dispute it to this day.
But that everyone who knew the two believed it at once tells enough about this friendship.
The same Peirce wrote, in the midst of the hunger years, an essay on love.
The world does not grow through severity, it says.
It grows through a love that tends what is not yet lovable:
‘Love, recognising germs of loveliness
in the hateful,
gradually warms it into life,
and makes it lovely.’
All the other voices of this chapter give accompaniment.
This one receives it.
Perhaps that is exactly why it belongs here.
For whoever accompanies should know what receiving looks like.
It is seldom a grand gesture.
Most often it is a round-robin letter, every year again.
Faithfulness in instalments.
And whoever has once been held like that carries the friend’s name onward.
Somewhere.