Ruminations on death.
The message reads, "He was your teacher, you were a good student. Your note came just as the call to prayer echoed out over Kerala. I'll say a prayer to the waters from our houseboat." That's a perfect scene to me just now. The sunset, gold and awash in subtropic warmth. It's the kind of prayer Joseph would have completely appreciated. I've been to waters like that with him. Seen that kind of summery gold at dusk, coming from both sky and water, marveled with him, as lens-men do, at the majesty of magic hour.
It's all such fancy, to be able to share these confidences thus. Age old urgings for the gods to ply their beauty and wisdom in amongst the small and interminable strugglings of man and his stumblings about on the saber's edge until it flays him. It is the old way, ancient, for a brother in arms to be pious for another brother when a Godfather has been lost, and this has been so well served by the shooting of epistolary electrons around the globe tonight. I wrote to RTO earlier "You once sent a note to India about Charlie. Now it's my turn. Joseph sings with Siva..." All the power of that pronouncement, all the finality sent off to the great land of wildest mortality, that great reckoning that would affect a blood brother of mine to kneel down before the still sunset waters as though for an Imam, the call for Gangic rights, the piety toward The End, all went out from the little piece of glowing plastic in my hands. I texted such prophetic news, fancy that. And I had been so impressed to be floored by the news of Charlie's OD seven years ago in what at the time seemed like the ultimate in instant postcards: an email. How awkward it was to cry in the glare and un-private setting of an Udaipur email shop. The Israeli next to me was buxom and young and worldly and probably knew a lot more about death for our comparative years. Her small smile helped a lot. And the next day I was able to tell Joseph about it, on a marvelous pillow filled veranda overlooking the sunset waters and their magic. We ate and drank and shared stories about the crazy ones and how much they bring to our lives. Joseph was there with us, laughing and hearty and full of as much life as that entire mad continent.
Yesterday I watched the sun go down from my perch above Los Angeles. It was the same gold as in India, always all that gold. I thought, "That's the first sunset in 65 years to go down without Joseph here to enjoy it." And enjoy it he would have. He would have liked that chilly fireball in the glass of wintery downtown and especially our vantage on it. He would have laughed and said, "You sure got it right." And I have, because I've been a good student. It's exactly what he taught us to be, and we're not such fools as not to listen. It's some fine technology he left us; the ability to look and laugh, and own it all by making it yours.
