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Dearest Warrick, my son - Tomorrow will be your twenty-sixth birthday. It's been three mute months and nine days since your consciousness - that calm, inquiring, witty, and loving realm you occupied so potently; that shy, sharp depth and awareness which so amazed everyone who knew you - released you from the present, from the "Is What Is" of your poem : ". . . just Is What Is and Why? it is. What Was supplied the tool." Our grief. . . our missing you. . . the numbness. . . the immutable Why? The tragedy of your fair, unfolding passage, your adventure so abruptly overwhelmed, dimmed. "But I'll not linger there. I will but briefly stare at all that's done and all that's gone and I'll not even care. For I'll be here and always here, and never, never there." Then where are you now? We think of you constantly, and are groping with sadness. Our life is now a sphere in which we still feel and think. . . but have you forgotten. . . ? Thus, my writing to you, Warrick, is testament to an anguished illusion: You are not here. So, in my anguish, I try to remember, to retrieve all I can of you - of your growth, your character, your experiences, your thoughts and feelings; not so much for myself as somehow, irrationally for you - as I feel so poignantly that you, yourself, are now helpless to do it. Melancholy memories and anticipations sift through my days and nights, and then you are here - not in the hollow views and spaces of my daily encounters, of course, but surely in my mind. . . and in the time-warp of my existential experiences. And, although I know that your mind, your body, were apart from mine; and, although all reality tells me we are now irrevocably separated, nevertheless, you always were, and are now, nearly tangibly within me. You always, it seems - even from the most nascent times of my own childhood - have been a part of my self - of my inner universe; and I have a great, resonant feeling of our personal, living bond. Yet, again, as reality crushes in on me, this all is now seemingly severed, vacated. And, moment by moment, the hardest to endure is having new thoughts and dreams to tell you, still knowing that you are beyond my reach. And I feel the hurt in a phrase of music, a simple discovery, an encounter, an observation, all while expecting and wanting to share these pleasures with you . . . thinking of what this thing or that occurrence might have meant to you - of how you would, in your strange and wonderful insight, comprehend it, enjoy it, reshape it - or perhaps wittily disdain it. . . Furthermore, in trying to construct a reality I can understand, I also live with a perverse imagination . . . your ordeal. . . morbid conjectures. . . visions. Episodes blend from one to another, dream scenarios recall themselves; and, in consequent memory, I might even accept some of these - my own fabrications - as if they were actually true, real, experienced knowledge about you and your destiny: I can see the lake and water of your own last visions, for example, although I know these are only vivid images I, myself, invented. The thoughts and scenes thus pretend as real memories, compounding upon themselves; and I keep searching for your reality in a mental world which, I periodically must realize, is mostly my own grieving fantasy. . . . It all transpired in a fraction of an eternity: Your life; the brief moment; an exalted being; then a transfigured state. Eternity: past, present, future. How many eternities are there? All of this seems to me a grand framework of thought which you might have had, my son - even at the last - and typical of profound things you wrote: "What must thought be if it only exists in the present? The present is an infinitesimal length of time." So, as I know that my present, most despairing thoughts and images of you surge only from the most abrupt, recent frame of your existence, do such sensings merely reflect a natural, aching need of you? And, what am I really trying to see beyond this unfathomable curtain? In my mind, or however else, I guess I am trying to reconstruct you - your destiny, and, I must do it in a more profound, eloquent image, as all of us who love you need to manifest and sustain you in whatever ways we can - not you as a mere physical body; not as a passing person we loved so deeply; not as an aching void - but you in your wonderful understanding, your persisting state, your beautiful sense. We must keep you alive - as you must have sensed as you wrote your poetry - as a freshly integrated spirit in a universe you loved and challenged. *********** Such is my anguished mourning; and in this kind of groping, we are assembling your works: Your youthful, wry vignettes, your poetry, your serious treatises. Your music. Even the brief notes you wrote to yourself on crumpled, now precious scraps of paper. . . all of the records of your thoughts and experiences we can find, including your sayings from childhood. But, half-dreaming through such memories. . . can such an involvement yield understanding? Can understanding soften the grief? Well, retrieving - reconstructing - your rich and perceptive personality by reliving your most eloquently expressed sensibilities in memories, in your music, in decyphering your writings, smiling over your wit - all of this mutes the tragedy which still grips me. I thus painfully fulfill my need to be with you; and, there is also the hidden faith within me that maybe such obsessive thoughts and perusals will help to satisfy an arching urgency to reinsert your marvelous order into that great cosmic flow which so gripped you in your own contemplations. . . Thus, what meanings do these remnants communicate to me? They reveal a soul few ever fathomed fully but many sensed vividly: While your poetry hints at a youthful angst, it reveals the profound questionings and beautiful answers to life you were finding within your own wit and sensitive nature. There are your tilts at vital questions: time and relativity; chaos; logic; rhythm; harmony; pseudoscience; the contradictions of will and fate; zero states; the vagaries of feelings and purpose; the symbolism of light and darkness. And, finally - ultimately, in my view - there is your music, your inventive forms, creative powers, inspiration, compelling scope and command. . . much of your unfulfilled potential. . . bound in the few, marvelous, tentative works you left us. *********** So, it is true that, in my grieving reverie, on planes not quite rational, sense is evolving - and the pain lessens as the focus broadens: In this vein, we have intimate family memories I want to add to the diary: All of these, I think, are a part of an obscure picture which promises some kind of wisdom about you, your destiny; all of what follows I hope will help in reconstructing your image, your reality, in a true and profound form. . . * * * In your childhood, your mother and I, in our "parental wisdom", of course felt we were subtly teaching you - guiding you in life, science, art, music. But, as you grew, as we tried to let go, we watched your strides toward maturity, your innovative independence, your depth and clarity. Now, recalling such realizations, you, your existence, blend from our recent, infinite moment of tragedy into a more beautiful, pervasive time, space and meaning. * * * There are many of us now who are thankful that we had time to realize you as an amazing, creative, beautifully personable and loving being, moving expansively on your own. We are also now fully aware of your marvelous, introspective, philosophical depth: Do you remember when you were young, when your Mom or I would lie beside you and Juliet at bedtime, in your darkened rooms? We would philosophize, think, invent, wonder. Even then, and increasingly in your growing maturity, you were enthralled, entranced by infinity and God; justice and truth; form and time; physical and mathematical laws. By flight; image; illusion (your childhood airplane designs - your stereoptic collages - your magic shows!). And you were always seeking to uncover some of the great mysteries of galaxies and thought through your own kind of imaginative theorizing, through your own incisive strategy - all checked invariably, of course, within your special, unique, framework of lucid, rational testing: "If God made everything in the world, who made God?" (You asked this at age 4.) *********** So, we now see your mind in the broad, rich palette we always knew but could never fully fathom - could only glimpse before: your wonderment; your searching awe; your beautiful consciousness. And I see especially, with great satisfaction, that salient, vital part of all this: your noble evocation, Warrick, of fresh dominions of the mind and cosmic energy; your historically constant, passionate attempts, from childhood on, to conceive worlds and answers which lie beyond the normal touch of human wisdom, outside the pathetically limited span of a single human life. *********** You left us clues: just last year: "For every time we try to ask what started this collosal task of life we find the question vast: what feature of our lifeless past has ended lifelessness at last?" or, "If the structure of my brain results from the structure of the Universe, then the Universe has a soul." or, "If the universe is infinitely complex, then every particle has infinite component parts." *********** Therefore, all of us who have experienced these fragments from your life have been in awe of your lifelong, serious, penetrating vision, Warrick. You wrote beautifully, prophetically. Your expressions now touch us with great pertinency, especially in reference to our present, tragic confrontation, through your fate, with the ultimate, monolithic Meaning. You had a profound realization of the unity of Nature and Mind. Of the transcendental state of Life and Universe. So, although I did not wish to meander mystically (at which I know you would smile. . . in fact, I did not at all intend to follow the deep and perplexing path I seem to have taken), as we search through your works, the memories and images they evoke vividly compose an elusive but profound wisdom which you embodied. Indeed, I need to write this confirmation, for myself - for my own assimilation - of your great prescience of a Cosmic Continuity, of an Ultimate Cohesiveness. In short, I want to confirm that persistent, passionate ideal of inquiry into Truth which you were exploring, and which I know to be most innately you: "a fleeting moment of insight, a comprehension, a delight, outlasts a season of despair, immortally sustains a care. The universe is never bare." *********** Besides all of this, there are also my own private memories of our most recent times together which I want to transcribe before they fade: "Like an ocean with waves that rumble and roar may never lie beyond its shore, we see What Is, not what's in store." I know that the same deepening knowledge about you which I have experienced engages others too: many, who love you; many who often wander within similar memory reconstructions of your personality, your intellect and wit, your love. As Lolo wrote to you: "My heart feels its life with Warrick, My Brother who had a secret world with all things and every person His secret life within his own life He was my life's secret. . ." or Juliet: "You are a mysterious spring running crystal deep below the strata. . . We knew things together that no one else knew. . . Now I am alone with my childhood. . ." Thus, although our "here" and "now", our "present" life, our living vision, is limited by its own focus . . . and, although it is difficult to view the secrets of the infinite from the transience of the temporal. . . nevertheless, your sense, your being, is accruing with untold ramifications. Your vital thoughts and contemplations have - as you predicted - "sown fields of tomorrow". So, it is our great sadness, Warrick, that you are not here, as you might have been, to follow the marvelous harmonic evolution, this spreading wave of your sense. Your character and form-giving command, which you habitually, shyly (we sometimes thought slyly ) withheld from our full view, now seem so released to gather force. *********** So, what are you now, my son? Far from being a "zero state", you are, at minimum, within the energies of the rest of us, in our thoughts and comprehensions of you. And, by extension, you are in our understanding of many promises of life. As Jackie wrote: "Our 'Season of Despair' seems to go on and on. But you have changed us all deeply, permanently. Your being here and your leaving are two of the most significant parts of our lives. Through you we've all grown. We've loved each other openly." *********** But I know that you are also more (and who knows but this state is greater than life, itself? greater than your physical life with us for which we weep?); because you are safe now within the larger scale of the life of the Universe, of memory, of human - but also immortal -cosmic actions and reactions. You are, as you said you would be, "forever affecting What Will Be". *********** All of this has brought me, personally, to a more convincing concept of Life and Eternity than I yet fully understand. From Francie, on a card she brought from Peru: "Nada hay sin voz, todo habla para quien sabe escuchar . . . There is nothing without a voice. Everything speaks to those who know how to listen." "Then he descended into his memory. . ." What occurs to me? That the Sense of the universe clearly transcends the human condition, life - life, which, in cosmic terms, is framed in an infinitesimally short point of time, but also in an infinitely unbounded consciousness. That in "life" or "death" perhaps we all are the Cosmos : pervasive subunits, perpetual and infinite, as it is. We meet ourselves in each other, and in Nature. This profound sense and my feelings about you are, of course, intertwined. *********** So, what do you see now, Warrick, from your transfigured state? from your cosmic position? Your life and immortality are a wonderful symmetry. . . a beautiful synergism. Was it your marvelous Intuition - your Cosmic Self - at work as you wrote: "--and where I'll go, someday I'll know. I'll stop enroute and view the show For time will take me there to see What came to pass; what was to be. And looking back I'll say to me: 'This was to be my destiny'. "But I'll not linger there. I will but briefly stare at all that's done and all that's gone and I'll not even care. For I'll be here and always here, and never, never there." Where are you now, my son? *********** As I finish this, the radio is playing the same Albinoni "Adagio for Strings and Organ" you gave Juliet several years ago. And, when Mom, Francie, Juliet and Kevin were on Mt. Meeker with your ashes, I sat in the car below, watching, listening to a performance of Berlioz' "Requiem". It was overwhelming, because Berlioz was one of your favorite composers. You live for me in the great, etherial energies we both loved. * * * October 8, 1988 Warrick - Today is your birthday. Mom and I cleaned out the "storage room", that outside room here in Tesuque, and put things in a rented storage stall. We're going to make another studio for me there, where I'll have music equipment and can work in more privacy. We'll put in a skylight, a new door to the small, inner court, and make the present door into a window. Maybe I'll set it up for painting, too. Juliet and Annie and your Aunt Margaret called, remembering your birthday. Margaret had written a beautiful poem about you, playing your violin in their patio many years ago, which she read to Amy. They both cried. Mom called Lolo. Ama was ill. I hope she is better soon. Lolo is doing very well with her college studies, and her tea shirt business may get a start at some fairs she is going to. Travis was out there in San Franscico for a week or so in August, which helped. You'd have been a highlight in the year for Lolo and Ama, as they were expecting you. We had your car repainted. Travis drove it to California and then out to Juliet and Kevin, in Buffalo. I spent part of this evening going over yesterday's letter to you. I knew I had not written what I had intended yesterday morning when, as usual, I had awakened thinking about you. I wanted then first merely to record all of my most recent memories of you. Then to reflect a bit on some things I've come across that I planned to tell you. And finally to try to express some realizations I've had about the exuberant confidence and direction you had discovered in the last year or so. I want to continue this to try to cover those things. *********** October 9, 1988 Warrick - I spent much of the day rearranging the October 7th entry. I want it to be clear and readable. Amy says she always cherished the comments of several different adult friends when you were still tiny that you "must be a very ancient soul"; and of Grammy, who said she particularly enjoyed talking with you. Grammy was always amazed at your insight and refreshing wit: "What if a giant found out how God was made and he wasn't supposed to tell, and he told - would God kill him?" "I want to die because when I get to Heaven I want to ask God how he made everything." "Juliet, know what I wish I was? I wish I was God, or the Easter Bunny, or Santa Claus." March, 1967, age 4 November 22, 1988 Warrick - They have been rerunning a lot of memorial programs on the death of President Kennedy, 25 years ago today. Can't quite tie this in with you: You were only a year old at the time, and we lived in Canada; so why does it reverberate so on your image? Maybe the magnitude of the shock, which touched the whole nation, the world, is comparable to our private grief over you. And people saw so much youthful promise, such energy and idealism in John Kennedy; the things he wrote; the things he said; but he didn't have time to fulfill much of it. That allusion is obvious concerning you. Another thing that makes me think of you in all of this is a quote by Kennedy from the Greeks, which I had come across in a magazine at Juliet and Kevin's in Buffalo last April, and had saved to give to you - but lost. It went something like, "the Greek ideal of happiness: To exercise of all one's creative faculties in the general pursuit of excellence.". That allusion is also obvious. *********** Christmas Day 1988 Warrick - Today is special, of course. We are all thinking of you. Lolo and Ama, and Nancy and Laura have been here for a few days, and I'm going to the airport in Albuquerque this afternoon to pick up Juliet, Kevin and Kyla and Thea. I've been working on "the long birthday letter", and that involvement makes you more abstract, less immediate and emotional in my mind. (I want to finish it today, because Juliet, and probably Lolo, will want to help me organize your materials when they are here.) But as I leave the letter, I am confronted with the starkness of reality. I find myself thinking so many things. . . *********** I want to try to tell you some things of what your absence means to me, personally. I hope this doesn't reflect too much self-pitying grief; but I can't help feeling a deep void in those regions of my own awareness, wherein - I am coming to understand - you were an inborn part of me. You filled some vital spaces in my being. I guess it has much to do with self-concept, with what we are in our deepest being. For one very basic thing, you were my only son - my masculine balance. As you know, my Dad died when I was twelve; and by that time, my brothers, all older than I, had left home for college. I've never stopped to analyze this, but have always had a great, hidden sense that you - coming into my life much later, and into a family (our own, later family) which turned out otherwise to be all female - were some kind of special, unique potential - special for me. You didn't offer any more inherent promise than your sisters, of course, but a different affinity for me, particularly: a different support, rather than contrast, to my natural gender attitudes. I am sure your mother felt that kind of special affinity to your sisters, as well as a complimentary, contrasting fulfillment in you - as I do in them. But that only emphasizes potentially beautiful differences. Your absence becomes especially painful to me at a time like today, when I feel - dare I say it? -surrounded by women and feminine conceits to which I am not at all attuned; engulfed in an ilk of thinking which is not very understanding of, nor sympathetic to, my admittedly more harsh, expedient approaches to life. . . I need you, selfishly I guess, to reinforce my basic self-image. In our family life, I was in a position, I think - and Amy supported me greatly in this - to hold my own, to convey much of my personality ( not just a "masculine" sense, although that's part of it) to Jackie, Francie, Lolo and Juliet. But in some, natural way, you were my "secret ally". . . .Perhaps so secret that you didn't even realize it; but every parent tries surreptitiously to subvert each child with some transference: some personal vision. I think all of you - Jackie, Francie, Lolo, Juliet and you - caught somehow in life a great sense of self-reliance; an imperative to be true to yourselves coupled with an ability of introspection; a basic awe and optimism; a deep, creative urge; and an overriding concern with the world outside the self. (I cannot claim credit for all of this, except it certainly reflects my strongest concerns; and it came in no less degree from Amy, too.) Maybe the message about life wasn't any different for you; it was just coming back to me differently, with a different kind of promise. *********** Gender aside, it's within my creative life where I most need support, and most miss your presence; and I think Amy does, too. Each child fills a special niche. Each pursues a fulfilling direction, and augments our lives: Jackie and Francie in their amazing, creative acumen, mainly directed toward business now, but also toward life in general; and in their sensitive attempts to mold values into the lives of their children. Lolo in her beautiful, imaginative and poetic construction of living patterns and environments for herself and Ama; and in her mature efforts toward personal growth. Juliet's firm grasp of art, aesthetics and expressiveness; and of art-mixed-with-life; her understanding of our fundamental attitudes; plus her intense "tuning-in" to Kyla and Thea - their psychological and philosophical development. All of these are vital, living systems operating within our children which feed our consciousness and will continue to support our lives. But, especially in my creative life - in music, in particular - I am facing a future, topsy-turvy, wherein I still must fulfill - without you - whatever I can of a potential which I have always felt I owed to life. I was pouring much into you, and knew you were also helping me in that, as well as in other realms of philosophy and science. I knew you would carry the quest far beyond me, in fact. You were young. I know that you needed to take time to organize your life in many dimensions: to decide on Peace Corps or further studies in music; to earn a living; perhaps to marry; to have children. Perhaps to write; or even to study optics, sculpture or painting. But our interrelationship with music, especially, had something to do with a supportive, creative competition between us. I always wanted to project you much beyond myself . . . And that's what I miss the most. |
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