Tear in My Fabric of Reality

On a Reddit forum, the majority of the comments are calling him an absolute MONSTER. Because if you imagine something awful, and then make it brutally far worse, you’re still probably not yet in the ballpark of the crime he’s accused of.

I’m choosing to use this newsletter to begin to crawl through the delusion that my grasping after “sense” will be effective; I already know sense will fail me utterly, sadistically. But maybe writing about this tear in my fabric of reality will teach me something — maybe how to let go of my need to make sense of things. It’s that need for some kind of control on top of the shock and grief that’s torturing me right now.

The MONSTER internet people are discussing was my closest friend in graduate school for about seven years. But that phrase is vacuous relative to how I remember those days.

When I arrived in graduate school I had been a hard worker my entire life, school-wise, and maybe if I flatter myself some more, as a track and distance runner; I knew what working hard with discipline requires.

And so in year one of my PhD program, I didn’t expect to all-of-a-sudden go easy on the studies. But what happened instead was that I met X, whose name I’m withholding because it’s far beyond the point of why I’m writing this.

I met X because Fate slaps reality one way or another — and it chose to sit us in close proximity on a wooden bench at an outdoor patio of a bar at one of the early graduate school get-to-know-each-other functions. There were maybe twenty-five of us in that initial first-year cohort at this gig.

I’m sharing this because not long after those initial social meetings, X would more or less disappear from all public gatherings— nobody, except a handful of us, even knew he existed. He just basically did his own thing to a severe degree. And it just so happens that one of the things he did a staggering amount of the time was to hang out with me — and on occasion — another good buddy.

My memory is fuzzy since this is now decades ago, but it took me about the length of that first semester to realize that I might have won some kind of cosmic lottery. As I got to know X more intimately, it became clear he was an intellectual savant. I knew a lot of smart folks, but none that were so obviously savant-ish.

But savant-ish people can be extremely difficult and dickish and just not that pleasant. So the strangest aspect about X was that he was — and I don’t exaggerate — the most kind and present and gracious listener — I had ever met. I had become friends with an intellectual prodigy who made hanging out with him a balm for the heart, mind, and spirit. For endless, countless, beautiful exquisite hours on end.

I know memory can be a Faustian devil, but I’m really not exaggerating. For whatever obscene reason, after fulfilling my scholarly duties, whenever at all possible, I ended up spending the majority of my hours in conversation with X; think here of staying up until 3 in the morning-type-stuff but at the graduate-school level.

I don’t recall X drinking anything but water, ever, during these sessions — they were never sloppy or just shooting the shit.

What they were were always deep in the way that convinced me early on that I preferred devoting as much time to be with X as remained rational enough instead of preparing papers for conferences so that I might one day land an academic job — even though I ended up getting one, thanks again to Fate and her wicked charms.

To my younger self, when Aristotle wants to hang out with you, it don’t matter none what you thought you were about to do was important; you hang out with Artistotle and learn.

X’s astonishing presence was made especially endearing because he was stupidly funny, too, and we’d discuss animated cartoons about a flying pack of fries and a talking meatball and why it’s not true if it’s not from New Jersey.

Damn it all to fucking hell! It’s becoming clear to me as I write whatever this is that little of what I’m saying is believable, or that I’ve warped reality too much out of allegiance or sentimentality or some kind of perverse nostalgia.

But the way I remember all the thousands of hours we spent together was that I was in the presence of an intellectual genius who was surreally kind and gracious, and an absolute comedian in the best sense of the word. Some of the shit he would write and say was just absolutely bonkers and goddamn funny as a drunk duck waddling its way across the street.

At some point, X became obsessed with tennis, and I was guinea pig enough to follow him into that obsession. And so we would meet up at a local court, hit the ball around, and then talk for hours endlessly afterward. He never, ever, made it seem like he had something better to do, or that time was up. It always felt like I was the only person who mattered and that he would enjoy being in my company forever. It was I who, out of my own human limitations with some functional adherence to schedules and sleeping routines, would say okay, that’s enough for today.

One semester, X became depressed and couldn’t teach his classes. So I wrangled a way to teach them for him so he could keep his academic standing.

Sometimes trying to reach him became impossible and he wouldn’t reply to basic messages. Any of us who had any connection with him adapted quite easily — it’s hard to get angry with someone who is a kind of mystic —and yet again, I don’t exaggerate my experience of him, though I admit that this kind of reverence appears highly suspicious.

But because we talked endlessly about cinema and religion and philosophy and spirituality, those conversations gave me a platform to better understand some of the shit he did that was so out of this world that only a mystic could reasonably have done them.

Like, for example, taking a trip to Paris and walking the streets for 30 miles a day for days on end and sleeping on park benches at night to better feel connected to everyone and everything instead of the sequestering “limits” of hotel walls.

First, friends are few, and should be, because the intimacy of the bond is expensive and needs investment; and second, we experience love at its most profound in friendships. So we should make friends selectively, tend to those relationships well and lovingly, and hold our friends and ourselves accountable to the magnitude of the gift. I need to reach out to the friends I truly love, not merely because I like them--love is not a more intense expression of like; they are different categories of thing rather than degrees of a thing--but because I trust them to push me to the limits of my being; to challenge my lazier emotional and intellectual habits and ask more of me; and because I admire them as virtuous persons whom I can reciprocally challenge. And that means a small circle. And some reacquaintance.

~ excerpt from an email from X

Some of the stories and emails I have from him are staggeringly beautiful and inspiring, but I don’t think they’re the point either. I’m not trying to make him appear holier than life itself, even though he did occasionally feel that way to me— like, is being this “spiritual” and obscenely kind and compassionate and smart about everything even a thing? What’s possible became more possible whenever I spent time with X.

He had pet rabbits that he absolutely fawned over and loved and loved protecting because they were so unbearably vulnerable. He nicknamed my beloved four-legged child’s little white fur patch on his breastbone “the Roger” after Roger Sterling’s character on Mad Men and bunk’s silky smooth hairs behind his ears “the stupid.”

I could fill this with probably two hundred pages of additional examples and stories but the fundamental point is he was the most inspiringly kind and beautiful spirit I had ever met. I just can’t think of a single instance where he was anything but gracious in our interactions. That’s probably why whenever he didn’t reply to this or that message and I didn’t see him for weeks or sometimes even months in later years the option of being angry at him didn’t really present itself — why would I be angry at someone so bewilderingly kind/compassionate/gentle/funny/wise/gracious/humble?

But now he’s on trial for having committed the unthinkable.

As my mind tries to accept this new reality of whatever it is that happened, it reaches a breaking point of some kind of too-much-ness, that’s analogous to the Ivan Karamazov sections in Dosoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Which like most of Dostoevysky’s work is about the ways human beings close their hearts to protect themselves from the bitterness of the world. And how others continue to try to keep their hearts open, despite all the evidence.

So I don’t know what to do now, really. I’ve only begun to process this rip in the fabric of my reality.

I don’t believe in Evil, having read too much Nietzsche. As a Zen practitioner, the concept of sin and redemption doesn’t do much for me either. I reckon the teachings of I-don’t-know-mind ought to kick in and be of some use, here, maybe.

Because not only don’t I know all the facts, even if I did know them, the tragedy will remain.

In the middle of that which is beyond sense, my own proclivities toward the rational are useless. I’m now being asked to surrender in the most profound way imaginable.

May whatever all this is help me, help us, and help my beloved friend.