October 9, 1966 • April 2, 2010
The day I met James Hatton I had no idea that it would be a life-changing event. I traveled to visit him at his home, a 13 hour drive for me, not knowing what to expect, but with the comforting feeling that after hundreds of hours of on line chatting, I had found a kindred spirit – someone who understood me without me having to explain, someone who shared many of my passions, and someone who had a lot to teach me about how to live them, not just dream them.
More than a dozen years later, the fulfillment of every one of those expectations still graces me every day. In James I not only found a friend in every since of that word as I understand it, but I found something more. While admittedly an enigma (wrapped in a mystery, clothed in a riddle), I came to know and love a man of such great complexity that just to talk to him inspired me to rethink long held beliefs and convictions about all that I thought I knew. His way of viewing the world, and his place in it, was never to accept anything as a “given,” but was to challenge every assumption as a ponderable to be tested, retested, tried for fit, and then worn with the skin tight fit of the shiny rubber he held so dear, or discarded like an old shoe.
A life cut too short is always a tragedy, especially one that was bursting with creative energy that was so prolific that it could never be fully realized. James had a new and better way of doing, well, everything, and nothing demonstrated that more vividly that teaching himself how to become one of the premium rubber makers in the world, and taking a fledgling company he founded, Devil Dog Rubber, to the cutting edge. And, I know from hours of discussion with him, that he had just begun to revolutionize the whole approach to fetish gear, liberating it from the limited notion of sexualized garb to the stature of a method of expression of deeper aspects of personality.
I do not want to suggest that he was not competitive, egocentric, and quite simply wanted to be the best at everything he tackled. He was, and that was his nature, and his curse. Perhaps that is why, in the end, he lost the passion that had sustained him, and sought to find new ways to stimulate the brilliant mind that refused to recognize limits, and would never take “no” for an answer but rather viewed it as a gauntlet thrown in his path.
Ultimately, the eagle soared too high. Perhaps he saw something on his flight that drew him upward instead of back down to this world.
I believe this to be the case, based upon the endless hours of interaction he and I had over the years. Our understanding of each other was intuitive, and most often never even expressed. We could give each other the most profound companionship without speaking a word for hours, just listening to each other think. When life’s challenges confounded me to the point of surrender, or wore me down to exhaustion, James was always there to make me rethink my predicament.
Andrew Sullivan wrote in Love Undetectable that
“The wish to be friends can come quickly,” as Aristotle nicely puts it, “but friendship cannot.” In its pure form of friendship, pleasantness is present but incidental; it flows from the virtue of the relationship and is not the reason for the relationship in the first place. And usefulness as a motive and as a basis for connection is abandoned. Someone is not a true friend because it is useful for him; he is a friend in order that he might be useful for someone else.
This view strikes a chord in me. I only hope that the benefits I offered to James as confident and counselor were even half the measure of what I received in return.
Sullivan also notes that
[i]f friendship rarely articulates itself when it is in full flood, it is often only given its due when it is over, especially if its end is sudden or caused by death. Suddenly, it seems we have lost something so valuable and profound that we have to make up for its previous neglect and acknowledge it in ways that would have seemed inappropriate before. *** It is as if death and friendship enjoy a particularly close relationship, as if it is only when pressed to the extremes of experience that this least extreme of relationships finds its voice, or when we are forced to consider what really matters, that we begin to consider what friendship is.
I do not have such a consideration ahead of me. I already know. I knew it when James was in this world. I know it now even more that he has left it. While I will miss him every day, he will always be with me as my inner tribal council, guiding me, sometimes not so gently, to a better course, or to at least question the one I find myself upon. As much as my selfishness will never let me abandon the wish that I could hear his voice or see his face again, I also know that I must take solace in knowing that he has left us in the manner of his choosing, on his terms, dreaming as only dreamers do, even if he did not necessarily pick the time or place.
James – fly high, my beloved friend. And from those heights, you will always be with me.
Robert Arceneaux