A Letter to My Brother

16 January 1997

Dear Scott,

This letter is in response to some of your recent comments via e-mail. I decided to mail this to you because a) everything has more impact on paper than on a computer screen, and b) it is so much more fun to get an actual letter than an e-mail message. Also, I am sending a few recent poems of mine. There are others I've made recently, but I did not have room for all of them in this one letter. I'll send the others with my next mailing, which will include the Love discussions and comments on your recent poems and stories.

I have already said something about your not feeling inspired to do or "be" anything in particular. I noted that this was very common and that there was still plenty of time for something to work out.

I also accepted the idea that there was something different about me compared to you and others our age. I would like to discuss this for a bit:

Alone among my peers (not to mention my juniors and elders), I have been blessed (if that is the right word) with a seemingly instinctive spiritual vitality, the strength of which has allowed me to organize and harmonize my life into a kind of unity. This process I imagine as being akin to the gravitational power of the sun which fixes and guides the orbits of the planets. I often have doubts about a great many things, but I never have doubts when it comes to my decisions. I have always done what I perceived to be absolutely necessary. I recognize a certain weight on the opposite arm of the balance, but I have no doubt where the greater weight for me must lie; and so in a very real sense I have always known what I've wanted to do.

Certain things about existence, about human life, about my life, that I have perceived have struck me as being so vital and so important that there has been no question in my mind but that I must consecrate my life to their exploration and elucidation. I am so inspired in this task because I believe that upon such questions and realities the entire weight of my life rests: all my hopes and fears; all my joys and loves; all my hopes for a good and meaningful life. In short, I am possessed of the intense conviction that the salvation of my soul is at stake, and that, above all, it is my duty to seek and attain that salvation as well as attempt to share my Good News with others, who, as souls, are merely variations on myself, just as we all are variations on life, or matter, or energy, or God, which is, I sometimes imagine, the source of variation and also the fact of variation itself. In any case, I am bound to myself and to my fellow creatures, and therefore I am bound to seek what is best for all of us, though I proceed by uncovering what is best for me and then striving to share it with the world, which may then, as it likes, freely take or leave what I have found.

So this is one thing that sets me apart, the greatest thing perhaps: as a person who sees a madman rushing toward him with a knife is filled with a horror of ultimate significance, so I am thrilled and inspired by the sights I have seen. This analogy sounds extreme, but I do believe the difference between the two experiences is only one of degree; in the same way that stress, for instance, is a more subtle and temporally extended version of the intense and short-lived "flight response." It is true that I rarely feel as if a madman is rushing at me: but I almost always feel one might be hiding round the corner.

Now, however, we must ask why this is the case. Why do I see madmen with knives while so many of my contemporaries see wages and car payments, sports and jobs? Why is everyone else looking for a "career" OUT THERE while I have found my sole career here, within myself? Why do I fret and weep over the little I have done, while they, having done nothing, spend their days, one after the other, as if there were no limit, in mindless, busy oblivion?

The answer is a gift. (assuming it's a gift; it could also, in some respects, be a curse) This gift may be divided into several interrelated and necessary parts:

The first part of my gift is the instinctive spirituality I earlier spoke of. A preternatural sensitivity to the natural world, to great ideas, to my own feelings, and to the feelings of others from my earliest years have made the world around me turn oftentimes electric. To this day I distinctly recall the intense love and awe I experienced as a child with respect to nature and to animals. I poured out my heart into these things, into rocks, rains, winds and snowy woods; into deer, foxes, snakes, tadpoles, and pigeons. There was in me a beauty, I believe, that responded, that was enhanced and given vessels to inhabit, by the beauty of the natural world. But the quality of my beauty, which, I had hoped, all men possessed to some extent, and which, under the right circumstances, could still be encouraged and enhanced by their exposure to the corresponding beauties of nature, I sadly now consider a gift granted more uniquely unto me than something all humans equally possess. Placed within the exact same outer circumstances as myself, I doubt many would become as I.

What is the source and nature of this beauty? A child walks home in the rain from school. He enters his house, stares out the window at the silent clouds above his town, the shifting veils of rain descending through the air. Lightning flashes through the sky, and he is struck down to the marrow by the crash and peal of thunder. The rain comes down in torrents, and he stares and stares and stares. Soon the front door opens; his father comes home from work. He smiles. He has a box. In the box there is a salamander, all black and dun, five inches long, moist and moving, pressing round the box's walls and glistening in the doorway's light. "I found him crawling in the gutter," the father says. Lightning thrills of flashes burn within the child. He lifts the creature: it is so soft, like melting rubber; he feels the little bones beneath the delicate striped skin; he registers resistance in the wet, cool, tiny belly as he squeezes, so gently, with thumb and finger. And he knows inside the creature bones and organs, stomach, senses, intelligence, experience and will, pulse and squirm with life, though hidden, all in darkness, from his eye, which, with his fingers, plumbs the truth from just a surface. And the child demands the salamander be taken to the pond nearby; for he loves it, knowing, with an instinct not so different than that of the creature's, where it belongs and has its home: not on concrete; not beneath the wheels of cars; not in boxes; not in humans' homes: but in the cool and darkling waters, in the shifting green and blackness, in the unbrackish muddy loamness, of a still and silent pond. And so they take him home.

Now, if you dare to ask this child to rationally defend his feelings, what will he say? Nothing, I suspect. Or, perhaps, he'll stare at you, as if you're just barely there, and say, "Coming home I tasted the rain on my tongue; at home I saw the sky and heard the thunder burn; my father--I love him--came home from work, and in a box there moved a salamander; I held the salamander in my hand; I let him wriggle in my fingers; I looked into his eyes: he was lost: I took him home. Now he lives within the pond." For him, this is enough.

By this example I have tried to communicate through language the strange, magical power that such beautiful things as rain, lightning, fathers, salamanders, and bodies of water can inspire in human beings; a power which fills the soul with energy and runs through the body like music. And please note the child's assumption, never questioned, that the salamander is a fellow person and has a "home," a certain place, where it, like every other living thing, specially belongs. The child loves the salamander for its beauty, for its strange, inexplicable vitality; he feels compassion for it; he identifies with it, for he feels the same vitality within himself; and so he seeks to help it live the life that it was made to live. He wants to see it be exactly what it is--and how this gives him joy!

Now, there is no question that salamanders in boxes leave most of us, children or not, more or less untouched. And no doubt this is little different than the experience salamanders have of us. So why, we must ask, are so many people so untouched? Is it because a salamander is just a salamander? Or is it because most people are just salamanders too?

We are faced with a dilemma. If it is meaningless to inveigh against salamanders for not being inspired by humans in boxes, is it then fair for us to inveigh against humans who fail to be inspired by salamanders (or other humans for that matter) in boxes as well?

First of all, we must ask, are compassion or wonder, for instance--the body and soul of the aforementioned inspiration--meaningless or non-existent if they are not manifested in a salamander? The answer to this is obviously no. To the contrary, we must say these things exist, even if they do not exist in salamanders, because, of course, they exist to some degree in human beings, for whom such things are natural and proper. Similarly, we must not say that, just because a certain INTENSITY of compassion or wonder is not manifested in most human beings, it must be non-existent or meaningless or unnatural or improper: for different human beings are made differently, both by their individual natures and by their past experiences. Perhaps there are unnatural and improper feelings, but these cannot be identified merely by a quantitative evaluation of how many, or how few, people feel that way.

So given the fact that there are natural differences between humans and humans, just as there are natural differences between humans and salamanders, does it then follow that each of us is merely born or made a certain way and that if we are born salamanders, so to speak, we are born salamanders and that is that? In my speaking out to people, then, will I merely be preaching to salamanders who, lovely though they are in their own way, are beyond what I might dare to call the higher experience of being human? The question, then, becomes, do salamanders ever turn into humans?

Sadly, my answer is not remotely as interesting as my question. And the answer is: perhaps they do--unfortunately I don't know. However, as I mentioned above, I am not nearly as optimistic as I used to be. In my early twenties I believed the road to the "higher experience" could be revealed to all human beings if only a match were struck near enough to the kindling lying, disused, inside them. The best match I could imagine was art, though it was an art that was infused with much of the sound and fury and sentiment of religion. This was primarily because the achievement of this higher state, of this richer and fuller humanity, was directly equated by me with the concept of salvation.

I suppose I must admit my view of these things has not changed much since then; aside, that is, from an ever-deepening insight into the gravity and difficulty of the task. Today, people seem more like heaps of wet wood to me than dry and thirsty branches. Yet I find I can only do what I had originally proposed to myself to do. I must still carry on. What else can I do?

In recent years I have become more and more aware of two facts:

1) Some people may well be born damp, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it; in which case, what can you do but put them back in their pond and wish them the best?

2) Even those born relatively dry will, almost inevitably, be dampened by their environment, which gives them soft skins, little legs, beady eyes, and tails.

I fervently hope, however, that dampness is relative, that less dampness is better than more dampness, and that, therefore, what I do and say may help people become less damp, even if they never lose their tails, walk on two legs, or love their old, four-legged comrades who come to them, lost and all forlorn, in boxes. I suppose this must be a matter of faith with me.

Hm. I wonder: does this put your "I just want to swim" comment in a new light?

But please do not misunderstand what I am saying! Comparing some humans to animals while referring to other humans as "humans" is obviously not something one should do in mixed company. But just as Nietzsche admitted he was a decadent, so I freely admit that, far too much of the time, I too am a salamander. Thus salamanderism, with the exception of some very much to be pitied individuals, is not a permanent state but rather something which most of us have the ability to rise above, at least a little, every now and then.

Nevertheless, I think I was born exceptionally dry. This natural dryness has, so far at least, enabled me to fend off the cold and damp of the world, though I cannot claim to possess the same unthinking, spontaneous flammability as my younger self. I was also blessed with two important environmental benefits: first, I had parents who indulged my interest in animals and nature, and who allowed and helped me to acquire books and pets and to visit zoos and parks; secondly, my two childhood homes (in San Diego and, most importantly, Rapid City) were very close to places where I could be outdoors in relatively wilderness-like areas. Who knows: perhaps if, in Rapid, we had lived a few blocks in a different direction, today I would be practicing law and these words would not exist? This environmental blessing, then, is the second part of my gift.

Aside from a rich, instinctive spirituality and a consistently supportive and stimulating environment, I also have been blessed with great intelligence and drive. (this is the third part of my gift) This has been very important for me because my intelligence has enabled me to see new reasons for, and find new sources of, wonder and compassion and meaning, while my drive has made it certain that I will not stop till I find them all and drink them dry. Although I still possess elements of that natural, unthinking spirituality (which I absolutely need to have, for what good is fuel without a fire?), because the slings and arrows of modern life tend to dampen the exuberance and vitality of the childish spirit (one really must read Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" ode for an overview of this process, as well as for a vision of what is lost and what can still be gained), and because age brings changes in the minds of men, the insights I have gleaned from thought and study have been absolutely essential to keeping the fire alive, though, admittedly, altered in some respects from what it was when, as a child, "every common sight/ To me did seem/ Apparelled in celestial light." Were I only of mediocre intelligence, perhaps my spirit would have died of malnutrition; or if I lacked my drive (which, I suspect, is nothing more than the ineradicable thirst of my spirit for sustenance), it is possible my spirit would have become stagnant from inaction.

But it is not JUST intelligence that I possess: for many people possess extraordinary intelligence, far greater than mine in many cases, but are, spiritually speaking, dry as a bone. Intelligence in and of itself, then, as commonly understood at least, is not enough. What is also needed are other aspects or kinds of intelligence in addition to the first. One of these other important types of intelligence I shall call "insight." Insight is the power of seeing the significance of things; of seeing--of making--problems. For instance, intelligence allows one to be competent in the handling of numbers (e.g. calculus, accounting); insight allows one, intellectually, to recognize and consider the mystery of number itself; it allows us not only to solve common, even if complicated, problems, but also helps us FIND problems that are not at all obvious to the more literal- and surface-minded. The more common kind of intelligence can then be used to explore and elucidate the insight.

Another, very special, kind of insight or intelligence is imagination. Imagination is the ability to sense or comprehend the significance or nature of seemingly distant or abstract things: for instance, what is said about the size and age of the universe or the experience of suffering or fear in others. Having your breath be taken away at the thought there might be life on other worlds requires imagination. Realizing--really realizing--that one day you will die also requires imagination. So does the most valuable forms of compassion--for we feel with and for others in so far as we are able to make the imaginative leap between them and ourselves, and thereby dissolve, if only partially or temporarily, the (in many respects false) consciousness of difference between us. Seeing ourselves in others; seeing ourselves on the verge (and actually over the edge) of our inevitable death; seeing the stars and knowing they are thousands of suns that, nevertheless, are just drops in a near infinite bucket, all require imagination. And it is imagination that is the primary human faculty for the experience of wonder and awe. But when you have imagination, insight, and intelligence all working together--look out! This is the best "kind" or form of intelligence of all. (or so I would argue. Also, I should point out that these terms for the "types of intelligence" are useful in only a general way: the reality of human beings' intelligences is of course an organic, single unity and we cannot really cut them into chunks and pretend that we're not just using language to describes aspects or properties of the one, single, whole thing in question)

Let me apply intelligence, insight, and imagination to the question of our foreknowledge of death:

Intelligence recognizes that everyone dies and realizes, intellectually and abstractly as it were, that it itself will die as well. Perhaps it then goes about trying to figure out ways to prolong life and fight disease.

Insight, on the other hand, does not accept death as just a brute fact but also sees it as a more philosophical problem: why do we die? does anything happen to us "after death?" what IS life, anyway? Where did everything come from?

Imagination, finally, says, shocked, "My God--I'm going to die!", weeps over images of suffering it receives and enhances from the world, and perhaps helps form or inspire a religion or philosophy or work of art in response to visions both of the Great Possibilities (e.g. God, love, eternal life, happiness) and of the great horrors. (e.g. Meaninglessness, genocide, death, sorrow)

So my intelligence, whether we call it that or imagination or insight, or all three, is a gift, which, nonetheless, I have worked hard to develop, and that feeds with fuel the spiritual fire, the nature and intensity of which is also a gift, that burns within me.

I, however, do not take great pride in this. Pride, in the sense of feeling you have something very valuable that you yourself have earned, is not appropriate to my situation. This is because the closer I look at the circumstances of my life and the source and nature of my spiritual self, the more I realize that none of it was in any real way my doing. I feel, rather, blessed; by Fate or God or Chance I cannot say, though the ultimate source of, the ultimate power inspiring, the universe, whatever it is (unimaginable though it is), I cannot help but call God.

On the negative side, however, it must be realized I have put all my eggs in one basket. If the spark dies within me, the resultant alteration in circumstances will prove a terrible shock. Others, who have perhaps lived more modestly, might be able to accept such changes more easily than I, who, by this time, have come to believe that the spark is my salvation and that losing it would mean a living death.

It is also possible that my spark, even as it is, is not enough and that, as I grow older, it will seem less and less meaningful, provide less and less reassurance, and begin to feel hollow before the approach of oblivious death whose footsteps will sound ever louder in the ears of both mind and soul. Perhaps a less fiery spirit in the long run is better. I suppose we will just have to wait and see.

So I hope you can see why I am so little concerned about careers or about what I am going to "be" in a professional sense. The terrifying truth is that, whatever we are going to be, we must be it right now, in the present, whether that present is in childhood, middle age, or the final years. The great horror, perhaps, is that NOW is all there is and all there will ever be. I intend to make my nows as living and meaningful as possible; for what, in the end, we really are is in one sense no more than the sum of our nows. Were your nows good; were they joyous; were they filled with wonder and laughter and delight? or were they filled with weariness, with sadness, with the empty, never-ending errata of everyday life? In the grave Now ends. Maybe then it no longer matters. But for us, who are alive RIGHT NOW, we cannot help but feel that what is to come, that what IS, and what its qualities are really do matter. For me, it matters so much that I have more concern for what I take to be my eternal soul (for when I die all that I have been and done will be eternally unchanging and fixed) than most of the so-called religious do for theirs. Perhaps the desires resulting from these realizations are destructive; perhaps they are not conducive to happiness. But I cannot imagine handing my life over to ignorance, apathy, and simple pleasures. I have neither the desire nor the modesty to do so. Rather I desire to fill my life as full of fire as I can, even if, for what little fire I win, years of suffering and despair must be paid as remuneration. And I'm afraid I cannot council complacency in others. If they must live in such a way, I will not stop them; I will let them pass along their way (though sometimes I imagine myself stopping them and screaming to them the truth) and find their grave in their own fashion. To each his own. But if they ask me to speak with an open heart, what can I do but tell what I see?

Speaking to one such as yourself, however, I will not be silent! I will rather enjoin you to search and think and feel and try to fire the kindling of your soul with light, to "eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart," to "always be clothed in white, and always anoint your head with oil." (these phrases, by the way, are from Ecclesiastes 9:7-10: it is hard for me to read this passage without weeping; the first time I read it I cried many tears; it is perhaps my favorite passage in all the literature of the world) Listen: "always anoint your head with oil!" But the word in Hebrew for "anointed" is Messiah. Anoint yourself the Messiah and save, redeem yourself! But not as an atom! No, even the Christians, who give so much to God, still believe that they are atoms, for though God is responsible for their goodness he is not responsible for their evil, and so they suppose there is something in them that is untouched by all things but themselves. But they are not atoms; they are not little gods: all comes from God; all is the manifestation of God, the Incarnation of God. What gifts and powers we have to save ourselves, in so far as this is possible, only come from God, who takes and gives for no human reason and neither punishes nor rewards. So if we are so gifted we can claim no honors; we can only claim we are among the fortunate and the blessed and shrug our shoulders in incomprehension when we dare to wonder why.

The energy of creation rolls through all things, continues creating and expanding and elaborating; the story is not over; and who knows but that you or I or many others are not destined for great things? for the salvation of our lives? for doing something to help our fellow beings under the sun? for creating something beautiful that lasts into the future and helps save someone else a thousand years from now? It is hard to bear such idealism; such hope: reality, the reality of human beings, of oneself, of the world, rakes and beats the great and eternal hopes and visions of men, which "at length [are perceived to] die away,/ And fade into the light of common day." The Enemy is strong. He makes all great longings look childish, inconsequential. He says, "get thee to a university; find thou a profession that pays well; then seize it, become it: it will then be all you are. What else do you need besides a respectable answer for when people ask, 'what do you do?'" But what can WE do, we who have smashed through the thin, pasty shells of society's banality and seen the inner glory--or at least the POSSIBILITY and HOPE of inner glory!--except be loyal to the light and struggle against the dark which, as long as there is light, as long as there is anything, will still be there no matter what we do? Yes, the battle is long; yes, the battle is hard; and yes, the battle, perhaps, is even hopeless: and yet it must be fought. If you lower your head after you've learned this much, and scan the ground for sustenance, you will find there are no longer real alternatives; that your former earth is bare: you have awoken into life.

These are brash, angry, frightened, hungry, hopeful words. "In the light of common day" they can only seem the product of folly. But it is the light of the UNCOMMON day by which we must view our lives if we are not to pass through them in a haze and never really know what it can mean to be a human being. The world gives us so many shows; so many surfaces; so many things (money, games, little projects, narrow aspirations, distractions to no end) that all too often serve to drain the hours away and make us forget the fact that we are mortal. What is the greatest wonder? It is that every day men go about their business as if they were immortal, even though, "in the grave, where [they] are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom."

As I say in one of my own poems:

O Brother, O Sister: gather Treasure on Earth:
It is here you must earn and must spend!
Be neither a miser nor a despiser: the end is the end is the end.

Do not fail to share, cultivate, and set free the beauty in yourself; do not despise the beauty in others or in the world: death comes. For one who hears, for one who knows, these words are the trumpet that announces the Apocalypse.

And it is not true, as Tennyson said, that eternal death means the death of love in life. My belief is precisely opposite. It is because we die, because what we love--through instinct, natural need, and capacity; NOT through intellectual affirmations or denials!--will die, that, knowing this, we in fact love all the more. We love them even more because we know that all things pass back into the earth, and thence again into the void. The flower is more beautiful because of its imminent destruction; just as are our friends and family: for we can never truly know how beautiful something is, how much we love it, need it, and long for it, unless it is taken from us, and placed forever beyond our reach. And if the reality of death be a terrible sorrow, we still may justly feel a bitter-sweet gratitude for the threat, which tears away the shadows of our delusions and reveals the truths of life.

But as for you, who have, so far at least, neither a great secular nor a great spiritual aspiration to guide the course of your life, what would I recommend you do? I actually can recommend nothing you are not already aware of. You must read, think, talk, listen, imagine, learn. You must open both mind and heart to as many, and as various, people and things as possible. Surround yourself with sparks. Give yourself time. And maybe, someday, one of those sparks will land upon the fuel that lies within you, and flames will fill your soul. In the meantime, continue teaching; keep talking and listening to me, your family, and your friends; keep reading; keep writing; get outdoors more; see the world; and keep swimming. Be patient and learn to love the life that is yours. Do not fret over careers or jobs or money. Struggle hard; yet be at peace. Perhaps this is your destiny; perhaps this is the destiny of us all: to seek, to hope, to struggle, to love, to rise, to fall. If so, so be it: amor fati.

How I love you: you, who were fated to be my brother.

Love,

Lee