Letter to a Grieving
Friend
I
am sorry for your pain and your student's pain. I know only that we are
all starlight. We came from stars, maybe even twice, and we
ultimately will go to stars again. I do not know what human life has to
do with this, except it is some small permutation in the cycles. It is
lovely sometimes (and always in the abstract), but it is brief. We see
mayflies out for their Day of life; what we don’t realize is that our
own Day is as short, or shorter, in the larger flow. One mourns lost
potential, lost experiences, and lost pleasures--but one must measure
them against the present pains which bring about this shift in the
patterns of particles. We are aware of—have consciousness--in
this pattern of the moment. We have absolutely no idea if such similar
consciousness continues, or is made anew, in other patterns. Stars may
have magnificent intellects, and moonbeams may laugh unheard. We just
don’t know, and will never know. Life is only one configuration of
particles--it is the one we know--but by no means all. Do trees write
symphonies? Do rocks ponder? I don’t know, but I don’t know
why not, in their ways. I do not think human religions have more
than barely grasped what might be--they are very old and simple, and
meant for the masses who cannot think very well. But they all share one
truth--that the story is not entirely told by just the span of our
lives. Death may be a dreamless sleep in human terms--but human
terms are ended at death, and some other terms function. We know not
what.
Mourn your own loss, and even what you can imagine what might have been
in the life of your student, had he lived. But that is really not what
matters: his particles are in transition to something else--smoke,
humus, fragments, whatever, but simply continuing the same voyage they
began with the Initial Singularity some 15-20 billion years ago. We are
all that old. We have been here since the beginning, in one form or
another, and we will be here till the End. We have nowhere else to go.
This is our little universe.
Much love to you, and what sustaining energy I can send. ---Howard
from
THE BOOK OF FRAGMENTS
As one of the few anciens who can still remember the distant
rumble of Giap's guns at DienBienPhu some sixty miles away, the wind
fresh from the east, carrying a sound that was not thunder, I remember
also the lean figure on the trail before me --cousin, botanist, snoop,
and mystic--
Benjamin Coe. I followed him in the early months of 1954 because
anything was better than the boredom of serving on the USS Essex as it
cruised the China Sea. He effected my escape from the Essex disguised as
a routine transfer, and brought me to Bangkok, where we idled together
at a fine hotel with more to eat and drink than I was accustomed to. He
talked to French planters, Meo tribesmen, strange diplomats,
missionaries, Buddhist monks, and herbalists. I have no idea what they
talked about, since it was always in a language other than English. But
one day he said it was time to go. We flew to a small field somewhere
north of Chang Mai, as I have reckoned, and settled in a tin
roofed shed for a few days. My new Palm Beach suit was replaced by
fatigues and already rotting combat boots. I was assigned a simple but
important task: carry the notebooks, the three bottles of Scotch wrapped
carefully in green underwear, and the little Mannlicher with a hundred
rounds of ammunition. Locals carried the rest, and Benjamin kept his
hands free to examine blossoms properly.
The little brown men who carried more than we did were from Laos. Each
had a big, fine blade for cutting trails or taking heads, and I coveted
one. But Benjamin advised against it, as I would be tempted to explore
and get lost, and that I should leave the cutting to those whose karma
had prepared them for it. My work, he said, was to tend to the delicacy
of the Mannlicher's trigger, to guard our precious Scotch, and to
meditate on the frightening differences between observation and
understanding.
As we waited by our shed for whatever it was we waited for, Ben took me
each morning down the road a mile or so for a visit and a cup of tea
with a small Negrito man whom we always found seated beneath a great
tree. He was introduced to me as Louis Aragon of the Andaman Islands and
possessor of the only graduate degree in mathematics awarded to a native
of those islands. Louis was about four and a half feet tall, very dark,
and always seemed immensely amused by the world. He spoke English with
an Indian accent, and he and Ben gossiped about the war to the north and
what various people were doing, what had been seen in the forests of
late, and what went on beyond the Mekong, both east and west. I sipped
the tea carefully, and listened. When I asked, Louis told me he no
longer did mathematics, and preferred to observe clouds and trees and
the footsteps of men, as these were more beautifully complex than any
equations.
