01 VI 2002 - 00:46 - verba19

Whee, it's a new month.

Oh look! It's another Alchera project. Lucky thirteen, I suppose... (although it's certainly not my thirteenth, no.) If you want to find out what's happening in my life, try this, although I assure you, it's not worth your time.

Onward and upward.

Weekly Challenge No. 13

Project Begins: Tuesday, May 28, 2002
Project Ends: Tuesday, June 04, 2002

PROJECT DETAILS

I know this is going to sound really depressing, but please bear with me.

Write your own eulogy (as in funeral eulogy).

Now, here's the point behind this. In the age of sex, sex, sex, and more sex, we tend to lose sight of who we are on the inside and focus more on what we give with appearance. While looking good is a lot of fun (otherwise my credit cards wouldn't be so happy), who you are as a person is much more important. I want you to sit down and make yourself say nice things about the person you are, the person you were, and the person you plan to be. Being a beautiful person is more than a pretty face, a great ass, and gorgeous eyes.

god knows where -- st. ignatius church, or grace cathedral, or muir woods?

This memorial service is supposed to be about Jay, but if he were here, you must know that we would soon be dragged through a dizzying array of non sequiturs. With that in mind, I find it difficult to believe that I was the only one who was willing to speak today. We were, of course, accused of secretly wanting to marry each other almost from the first time we met; that still doesn't change the number of times he laughed at the way I stumble over my words.

A eulogy is not the place to dwell on a person's faults; it is, however, for memories, and were he writing this himself, he would be dwelling on his faults, convinced that to do anything else, to say anything too good, would be dishonest and arrogant. Curiously, this arrogance was one of his greatest faults. If he liked you, his barbs were in jest, but if he didn't like you, you knew it, and he became reserved, monosyllabic, vicious. His jokes and retorts were often off-color. He was impatient and demanding. In search of balance, he would overweight his worst aspects; in his depression, he would feel guilty that he didn't feel better, but this didn't stop him from managing, awkwardly, to destroy everyone else's mood.

Despite his faults, he was a good man. He tried to raise his children well; he wanted dearly to make the world around him a better place; he realized that he was imperfect. He would often lament how he was too much of a pushover, but in truth, he didn't mind doing whatever he had promised, as long as he was asked politely. He was notoriously bad at finishing the tasks he set for himself, but somehow, this didn't matter.

He found fulfillment in his work (first in the Foreign Service and then as a teacher) and in his devotion to his partner. He took delight in making incredibly elliptical references to mythology and other readings, and he was possessed of an intensity of motion and speech which a mutual friend of ours often said must stem from repressed anger. He had an interest in things which other people found quaint -- he believed firmly in the pleasure of opening a letter that had been sent through the mail and never stopped wanting to learn more languages, and if they were obscure and ancient, that was best. His entire life was about finding the right words, and the right shades of meanings; perhaps the paradigm his life is most easily shoved into is that of the search...

He had a knack also for stating the obvious, and it's in this spirit that the split between his private and public selves should be mentioned. Jay was terribly difficult to live with at times, but at the same time, intimacy was worth seeking, for his ability to be quiet and listen when he sensed a matter was important and for many other things having nothing to do with his clumsy attempts at comfort; his public face was polite and accomodating, but distant.

Trying to keep my voice level and the words coming out probably isn't so good for my throat, and he'd be telling me to get it over with already if I'm so clearly suffering through it. I'd like to leave you with three fragments of poetry that he loved. The first is by Yeats, for his view of aging:

The Coming Of Wisdom With Time

Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.

The second is excerpted and translated from a longer Irish poem, "Carnival," by Nuala N� Dhomhnaill, for his love of the British Isles and for his devotions:

11

When I left you
at the quay tonight
an enormous trench opened
in my core
so profound
it would not be filled
even if you were to pour
from one utensil
the streams of the Mull of Kintyre
and the Irish Sea and the English Channel.

The last is the longest, by Eliot, composed of two sections excerpted from East Coker and is for his philosophy:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing...

�...Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate -- but there is no competition --
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.