week 3-1: 2 Samuel 18:33 (atmosphere)

my son, my son

You can, with your little hands, drag me into your grave -you have the right — I myself who am joined with you, I let myself go — but if you wish, the two of us, let us make… an alliance -a hymen, magnifcent – and the life left in me I will use to…- so not mother then?ceremony – coffin – etc.there we saw (the father) the whole material side – which lets us tell ourselves at need – ah! well yes! it is all there – no fear for me thinking of something else (the reformation of his spirit, which is eternal – can wait (granted but eternity through my life)_____father -shape his spirit (he absent, alas! as we would have shaped him better present but sometimes when it all seems to be going too well – as an ideal – cry out – in the mother’s tone, she who has become attentive – This is not enoughI want him, him – and not me – 

my dad first introduced me to eric whitacre on the westernmost tip of portugal, in april of 2004, more or less 5 weeks before the cabrillo college chorus sang ‘i thank you god for most this amazing day’ at my sister’s funeral.

hold onto that moment then – before but foreboding. i sat on the edge of the cliff in the sun and the wind and listened. for days before i’d been stricken with most horrible plummeting feelings of wrong/wrong/all wrong, stuck/angry/lashing out at him (on holiday) until i got the email (in the whitewashed shop) that kelsey was in the hospital and as i rushed heavily through the town to find him to tell him, i fit again (though cobblestoned) – it wasn’t me i felt but her. i felt better knowing why i’d felt so bad. and dad -he tried to get a flight back to london that day, or the next, but couldn’t. so we drove to sagres instead. to the cliffs. each town in and out, fumbling with quarters for phone booths – how much has mobile technology changed since even then – the time difference, time lapse. somehow we came to a little cove. it was still the off-season. we were out of time, but i felt at home there. the algarve is roughly the same latitude as santa cruz, and there was something about the air there – and the ocean, though atlantic, pacific. so i was pacified, momentarily. suspended on the brink of the big sink (or swim).

and you his sister, you who one day – (this gulf open since his death and which will follow us to ours – when we have gone down your mother and I) must one day reunite all three of us in your thought, your memory_____- just as in a single tombyou who, in due time, will come upon this tomb, not made for you -PrSun down and windgold gone, and wind of nothingness blowing (this, the modern void)?