Posted by karen w powell on November 20, 2002 at 11:11:21 from 68.69.68.33 ny-chicagostreet4c-33.buf.adelphia.net :
Hi hon. It's appropriate that it's now Nov. 20th, instead of the 18th. I managed to delete my original as I waited to get the spelling of "soar" from Rachael. Many times I heard poignant expletives from your study when yet another wrong botton was touched in your eagerness to get your thoughts "on paper." Just in the last week I've run into 2 people who had stories to share of your presence in their lives. One guy, wife of a student who use to drop papers off, late, at the house. He's reading Design of Discord and is amazed. Another friend picked up Manny's book from Rust Belt and found a post card you'd written to Manny and not sent - he put it in the mail. The legend goes on!! "If we are to set a Purpose, it is this: to transubstantiate matter and to turn it into spirit" "I have one longing only: to grasp what is hidden behind appearances, to ferret out that mystery which brings me to birth and then kills me, to discover if behind the visible and unceasing stream of the world an invisible and immutable presence is hiding." ". . . I choose the ascending path." "Learn to obey. Only he who obeys a rhythm superior to his own is free." -"THE ULTIMATE most holy form of theory is action. "Impose order, the order of your brain, on the flowing anarchy of the world. Incise your plan of battle clearly on the face of the abyss" (there are tears as I feel you saying and living these words in this moment) From the last chapter SILENCE: "Where do we come from? Where are we going? What is the meaning of this life? That is what every heart is shouting, what every head is asking as it beats on chaos. . . . Then all at once the rhythm of the earth becomes a vertigo, time disappears, the moment whirls, becomes eternity, and every point in space-insect or star of idea-turns into dance. . . . There he merges with the Abyss and nestles within it like the seed of man in the womb of woman." The picture of you and I taken in the back yard of Jewett in March for "Business First" as we bagan our project to relocate to more managable space recalls for me our sitting together with your wondrous trees pursuing the "silence" Kazantzakis speaks of. . . . always, until that last step, your struggle, your search for that balance between "battle" and "becoming One." How blessed I am to have been loved by you and to have experienced loving you. your wife, karen
As we're living out these Bush days, so many people that I run into at demonstrations (Connie in Lafayettee Park in DC!) have missed your voice. I miss the voice and the physical presence behind it! Your battered, well-marked copy of Kazantzakis's The Saviors of God were your words to me as a re-read it last week. I hear your voice in these "NB's" - Note Well - of Kazantzakis
My God is not Almighty. He struggles, for he is in peril every moment; he trembles and stumbles in every living thing, and he cries out. He is defeated incessantly, but he rises again, full of blood and earth, to throw himself into battle once more. . . . My God struggles on without certainty. . . . Within the province of our ephemeral flesh all of God is imperiled. He cannot be saved unless we save him with our own struggles; nor can we be saved unless he is saved. . . . It is not God who will save us - it is we who will save God, by battling, by creating, and by transmuting matter into spirit. [ed's !!!}