A Biscuit In The Sun

A letter to the mother of a dear friend, recently deceased

Posted on July 20, 2023

Thanks for your comments on my post. Writers are enjoined to avoid writing in too personal a sense lest the reader find themselves tangled in the half-explained details that accumulate in such places. My experiences after ____ transformed were so intensely personal…so inexplicable…that even today I can only begin to approach the subject in the terms you read yesterday: those the Buddha taught me, and those of sufficient power to express an idea in a sentence or maybe two…certainly no longer than a single breath. Everything else –Hemingway’s iceberg– is mine to puzzle over

For all the allusions inherent in a reference like ‘his footfalls among mine,’ I mean the words primarily in a metaphorical sense. When I refer to his example, I reconnect with him on my Way. It is my belief he is on his Way too, inscrutable though it may be. His steadfast and righteous mien transformed with him, in much the same way as the tales of the sages became legend then scripture: a concretion of the ephemeral.

It’s hard to be a moral man: to shun the equivocations and temptations of modern life. As a child I knew that if I meant to be wise I had first to be holy. The latter is the Way to the former, and the latter is simply to be a moral man without equivocation…without giving in to temptations you know are harmful to yourself or someone else. Whether you arrive at that point via the Gospel or the Dhamma or by innate grace is of no moment: a meaningless distinction. It’s hard to be a moral man because all around you you see the fruits of equivocation…of the reflexive putting of self before others. It’s not that the lives of these individuals are enviable (who envies the wealthy thief?), rather that the unwillingness to join them in their gleaming depredations leaves the moral man alone more often than not. I have no question ____ would’ve joined me –would have to have joined me– in the cold on the front porch of the (metaphorical) whorehouse while others we knew went inside. Moreover I’d have enjoyed every moment of teeth-chattering conversation.

I know and love a lot of people who share my interests but not a lot of people who share my morality. A man as beautiful as ____ found himself constantly barraged with opportunities to equivocate yet it was he who confided in me his need for one woman’s love, not tales of heartless conquest or crass opportunism. Presented with every opportunity to be bad I saw him be good again and again. At this point in my life I’d already left the church because of all the hypocrisy I saw in my small town (Williamsburg, VA) the six days we weren’t at worship: the lack of commitment to living as Jesus instructed…the wife-beaters and racists who hid behind the Bible I loved and knew. My bar was set quite high. It’s why just a couple of years later the fraternity was so important to me: they did what they said they would do. A locus of heedless debauchery yes, but to me a group that invented and organized ways to live out the moral underpinnings of the organization. Here too I saw ____ engage with his obligations –both immediate and eternal– with mindful goodness.

The sages were right. Attachment is suffering. Cultivation of the ability to self-abnegate –to un-create problems by stemming our moral entanglement with them– is to create a tool that grows sharper with use. We live in a world that feels entitled to say yes to every experience, but without the ability to appropriately decline no balance is struck…no wisdom can accrue. ____ did what he said he would do. He didn’t do things he knew he shouldn’t. Nobody is perfect in every moment, but what I saw in him is what I know in me: a clear idea of self-perfection and the moral tools to achieve it. If he were here today we’d still be laughing on the whorehouse stoop. There’s a part of a song that makes me think of ____, a folk tune by Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer called ‘When I Go’:

…and when the sun comes trumpets from his red house in the East
he will find the standing stone where long I chanted my release
He will send his morning messenger to strike the hammer blow
and I will crumble down uncountable in showers of crimson rubies when I go.

Dave himself passed away suddenly in 2002, of a heart attack after a morning run. I listened to his friend Brian Bowers play autoharp and sing one night and he told the story and connected it to this lyric. I can’t listen to this song without crying for a dozen different reasons, but our boy is one of them. To cry itself illuminates an attachment, but I’m a Southern boy: sentimental by birth. I’ll drink a shot on Valentine’s Day and hoo-haw with everybody on Facebook, but the part of ____ I carry with me is the utterly unsentimental, factual knowledge that I’m not alone in feeling the way I do. It’s his example to which I refer: one which never fails to answer. I just wish I his knack for making money had rubbed off on me too.

I haven’t so much tried to find words as let words come tonight so excuse me if I’m obscure or left anything half-illuminated. Like I said, I don’t talk about ____ much because the part of him I loved most is notably absent from so many people we knew. Many of these are fine people in their own right, but not in the way that matters most to me. I can say these things to you because you made him and watched him become who he was. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know in your heart. Armed with so unassailable a foreknowledge, I’m certain you’re fully equipped to encompass any perspective I can muster.

I’m going to get back to my other overnight writing (fiction mostly) before I have to start making breakfasts and lunches and rousing sleepy-headed bairns. Thanks again for appreciating my original comments, and for supplying the world with so magnificent a man.