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Gone But Not Forgotten. The Vulnerable Concrete Social Group.

“…the time has come for us to part,” wrote Che Guevara in his farewell letter of April 1, 1965 to Fidel Castro. This marked the formal end of their relationship. A separation, the parting of the ways, is a moment with which we are all familiar. There has been a sharing of a social space and of a rolling out of actions. And now it is over. That does not mean the joint project is necessarily ended, others may still be there, but the withdrawal of a person has to be treated as significant. The formal concrete social pattern that had existed is replaced by another–the project at the least enters a new phase.

This kind of split (withdrawal, exit, expulsion, loss by waywardness or wandering off) tags one of the elements of the social situation we are describing. There is a series of concrete (real) groups (of local interactions and social situations) whose participants can vary from one time to another. That is our start.

Another setting and situation that I came upon in my travels: A six year old boy named Felix lives with his parents and his newly born sister in a row house in Philadelphia. The year is 1931, the Great Depression is well begun and continuing. A neighbor, an Army veteran of World War I disabled in a poison gas attack, lacks the funds to keep his family together. They disperse. Their 16 year old daughter, Florence, still a student at the local public high school, comes to Felix’s family as what we would today call an au pair (a temporary and equal member of a family who shares in housekeeping and child care but not as a servant. She is on par with everyone else.) She would stay with them over her two remaining years of school.

The story comes from Felix, a childhood recollection, limited in detail. There is no other testimony. But as far a Felix knew it was a pleasant and useful interlude for all. Florence graduated on schedule and a short time later married a young fellow named Bill, a street car motorman. They adopted a daughter and continued onward like everyone else.

Of course, young Felix fell in love with Florence–expressed and denied in shy refusal. She was so impossibly beautiful. From the moment she came through the front door into the living room, damp from the cold autumn rain, a close fitting knitted hat, light reddish brown curls peeping out from under, a warm confident smile, a quiet greeting.

A childish love. She was a big sister–made him special sandwiches, taught him to tie his shoe laces (something his parents inexplicably refused to do). She responded to his moods. Paid attention. Nothing much else. Only later did he realize how important she had been to him.

Years passed. Back from the Army Felix asked his father about Florence. Whatever happened to her? Oh, came the answer, she became an alcoholic, depressed and despondent, and died.

One leaves and there remains an empty place that can never be filled.

The sociology of the models, of the consensus, of the laws, of the culture, that explains so much, can not explain this concreteness that is no longer there. Underneath the concepts and language is a bio-social reality. The lost, disappeared, departed–gone fishing, gone drinking, gone to the new world or to the old world or to the no world–and those remaining behind know and the group order changes. This is a fundamental concrete fact that is starkly there.

The leaving and the arriving. The going and the coming. Exit and enter. At the far end of this concept is death and birth. Taking us altogether as a mass statistic we have demographics, the counting of the people. All those piled up numbers are us, or were us, in our real lives.

The experience is always whole, undivided. Talking about it, evaluating, we abstract elements. In this case we split the social atom into two parts: the socio-cultural and the bio-social. In other contexts they are described as the social versus the individual–the socio-cultural overlay operating through the language perceptions that set the action patterns over the living energetic. Freud called it the reality versus the pleasure principals–the conceptual appreciation of the organized settings butted against the unavoidable, and not always easily disciplined, energetic wish

The disappeared-other can have a group consequence. The composition of the group changes–from early infancy we learn to adjust. But when the other vanishes, even for a short period, our group becomes something else. This something is at another level of group experience and order–our social pattern emerging from our immediate and, in origin, inarticulate energetic. (If you like call it life force.)

I have to appeal to your own recollection of the experience. Take the formation of the social group in school called the class. The instructor and the students gather at a fixed time to share a conceptualized subject and develop the skill to use it as a tool. Unless the group is very large, members quickly perceive, identify and evaluate each other–osmotically, without necessary awareness. It is a crude knowledge but as we continue into the semester it becomes more precise, and for each member more internally ordered–like some and dislike others and so on. A spatial order develops–we tend to form a seating pattern. We become more comfortable in our togetherness. A stranger enters and we become alert, oriented toward this intrusion, until some explanation gives us a clue, a placing this new against our established way.

The group well formed and launched, we have the situation of the member who is absent. And now the question for your consideration: Isn’t there an awareness among the others? A concern? Where is our companion, even the quiet one in the back of the room who never talks? Suppose you are the one who is absent–slightly ill, hung-over, over-slept, disgruntled, rebellious. Isn’t the total configuration of the group, the experience of the wholeness of which you were a part, a similar kind of loss? The call of the known group like the call of the wild.

Of course in the reality we known conceptually that absences are to be expected, that life is full of these unexplained hiatuses. These comings and goings. We can discount them, any residual separation anxiety rationalized. And in addition we have in culture and in the received social organization, rituals and explanations that fill in for us, carry us through. The graduation ceremony, the welcoming of the visitor or the newcomer, the forms of greeting and farewell. The funeral.

^^^^^

We discuss this concreteness in a virtual medium. Over time and space we form a sort of group within which we are all present for ourselves and absent for all the others. But when I say “It will be so long until we meet again” in some obstinate way I mean it.
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Gone But Not Forgotten. The Vulnerable Concrete Social Group.

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