Andrew talked to me again tonight. I shared with him an
article that I thought to be of marginal importance when I first found it. It
seemed to be merely one of many fairly superficial websites that one could find
on the internet pertaining to spiritualism and “Spirituality”. The writer
attested that there were three different people who comprised a sage: The
philosopher, the wise man, and the mystic.
Andrew and I were thinking the same thing at once. Andrew
was the philosopher. Kresten was the wise man. I was the mystic. Andrew
synthesized concepts into a cohesive whole and spoke with authority on
intellectual matters. Kresten had authority over the world of matter. He had
life experience. He was an adventurous rogue who took frequent breaks to pause
and to breathe in Life and breathe out his regret for its passing. And I was
the mystic. I drew my authority from the Tao. I drew my authority from the fact
that no moment like this has ever existed before in memory, yet this moment has
been around since the dawn of time, if such a thing exists. Together, we made
one collective Sage.
I posted the link to Kresten’s Wall on facebook. Andrew
commented on it, corroborating my finding, yet with enough detachment to make
it appear as though he had in fact stumbled upon it by accident on Kresten’s
Wall. The one detail that would have suggested our mutual conspiracy in this
was the word “Kresten” at the beginning of Andrew’s comment, suggesting
sincerity.
One of the things that I remembered Kresten saying shortly
after I first met him he had said when we walked down to Abraxas High School in
his sophomore year of high school and my freshman year of college. It was one
of Kresten’s many brooding, melancholy defeatist convictions that still are apt
to possess him from time to time, and I was as ardent then in my enflamed
attempts to dispel it as I would be today. There was no question of the
absurdity of his defeatism.
What he had said was to the effect of this: “It is sad to
think that some people are better in my life as memories than as friends.”
Calling upon the authority of the gods and of all of my
teachers from High School (for the two parties were apparently the same), I
impressed upon Kresten the absurdity of that conviction. We walked back up the
street to our homes, and I kindled in his mind an exuberance that illumined his
adventurousness. He was prepared to venture into romantic relationships, et al,
again, with renewed vigour. My girlfriend at the time, not yet my ex, found it
inspiring.
I recalled this to Andrew in the midst of puzzling over why
Dana had ceased to speak with me. The memories of her had been a painting to
rival any physical painting for the totality of the four-year interim between
my sightings with her. Yet no memory could be a substitute for the Person, and
I saw that fact looking me in the eye when I ran into her at Jalapeno’s. She
had not changed from the substantial Dana that I had met at the foot of the
Bernardo Heights staircase in my seventh grade year. The ardous trials of
living in Afghanistan had been like boulders upon which the moss could grow,
and that moss was an extension of the same life force that Dana was: A tree of
fortitude exploding periodically in a flame of ardour.
And no memory could be substituted for that. Not even the
glorious emerald painting that had given me pause as I recalled it to John the
Hitchhiker. Not even the memory of the silence at Graziano’s at night-time
which had stopped my breath could amount to the Thou of seeing Dana in person.
Andrew was quick to disagree with me, yet he never once said
that I was wrong. Rather, he assured me that Kresten had been right all of
those years ago. The function of friendship was to produce memories. Those
memories would endure beyond death. Although interacting with another person is
nice, the memory is what matters when that person is no longer in one’s life.
And I was reminded in his use of that peculiarity the same
strange conviction that Alexandra had had: That people are not “in your life”,
simply because one does not talk with them.
I thought of how preposterous that was. It was always
strange to me. I was born from a human race with which I am entirely
continuous. Every individual I interact with, be it socially or simply by
saying hello in the streets, is affected by my actions, and those actions
reverberate throughout all of Humanity, if not the Cosmos. Everyone has this
authority, for the Cosmos is comprised of these Units. Yet such intellectual
convictions were merely at the hind of my mind. What I kept in mind was
emotional. What I kept in mind was that every individual I had ever known
carried a part of me. That individual’s life did not END when I ceased to speak
with that person; it continued. My memories belonged merely to my egoic
conception of myself; the interactions with the world in actuality were mostly
unconscious. Why would I use facebook? Was it because I wanted to keep people
“in my life”? No. It was because they always were in my Life, be it with
or without my consent, and if they felt an indebtedness to their common mankind
that necessitated their involvement in the wretched website, then I should
adopt that indebtedness as well, however uncomfortable it may be.
But even that had not crossed my mind. What had occurred to
me was that this same common sense that Andrew had tried to impress upon me,
which Kresten had etched into my memory, was exactly what Dana, and Dylan, and
Alexandra, and Doctor Englund, and everyone with whom I had ever really Met had
seemed driven to debunk. It was perhaps what Vanessa had sought to dispel when
she offered me a bit of her chips as the group of Pre-Calculus students from my
first summer school class sat about on a couch in the now extinct Hot Java
Café. It was that isolation was bullshit, plainly and simply, and that
involvement in a common Life was essential not only to happiness but to sanity.
It is a fallacy to think that one is not in the Lives of everyone else on the
planet. Why else would one be alive? What motive could there be, if I may voice
an ideal, for altruism? Why did Dana go to Afghanistan? To teach children whom
she had never met. They had been in her Life since before she had met them. She
knew this, even if by memory. And so Andrew claimed to have won the argument
with that point, though he did not say that he had won, for there was too much
pity in mind towards me. And I had been in her Life throughout that entire
Life, as were those children, and as are all children in everyone’s Life at all
times, til Death do we part.
But all of this was merely loaded into my words like
grapeshell that exploded only after I shot this question at Andrew: “Is it not
a matter of common sense that every other individual on the planet is In one’s Life?”
