Yesterday was full of messages ... Someone wondered about "the value of it all" ... another about Kafka ... I found myself wanting to write a letter to my friend, Corbett. I wanted to tell him about my recent impulse to do some Biblical translations, particularly the words of King David's primary heir, son of his lover whom he stole from Uriah the Hittite by arranging Uriah's death on the battlefield. I wasn't drawn to this son's lusty poetry of Songs or even to his Proverbial one-liners, though I am moved to listen to such recommendations, as: Don't rejoice in the fall of your enemy and chill on letting your heart dance with joy when s/he stumbles. No, I wanted to tell Corbett that I am more and more drawn to Soloman's Ecclesiastes, as it is called in Greek/English or The Congregant (Kohelles) as it appears in its apparently original language. King Soloman's riff on "Nothing of nothingnesses ... all is nothing."
Corbett and I met on line maybe 15 years ago when professional chat rooms were proliferating online. This discussion group was multinational and centered on the writings of a physician turned psychoanalyst by the name of Bion -- long dead. Corbett had been an engineer and, like many, had turned to managing other engineers. Bion had (I suppose in WWI) briefly been in need of treating lots of people damaged on those bloody battlefields of relatively modern warfare ... not the somewhat more savage wars of four millenia past but the horribly bloody conflicts of last Century's second decade. ... Bion found that he could not treat these people singly and began treating them in groups. Corbett had to deal with engineers not getting along at corporations like Xerox in the early days of the telecommunication bubble ... of cyber-doo-dads and the early internets. So, drawn by a need to develop group skills, Corbett ended up discussing such matters with a multinational crew of folk who had mostly attended a So. American conference about Bion in 1997.
In any case ... a friendship grew between us. Corbett came to lunch, once and then returned for a week with his teenage son to visit M and I. I heard someone recently say that cyber-friendships are thin ... not real. Oh! And the fact that Corbett and I lived across the N. American continent from each other did make talks at the coffee shop or walks around some Ringstrasse in this or that city unlikely. Still, I think Corbett and I developed a capacity to listen to each other and to feel "listened to" by the other. (I keep going back in my mind to Montaigne's writings that arose after he could no longer talk to his friend and collocutor, Etienne de la Boitie.)
Maybe it was during this time of year, a couple of years back, that we had our last phone conversations ... maybe a month of them ... daily. Corbett was in a place where he could die quietly and with enough dignity and narcotic painkillers to cut through the pains of his osteo-sarcomas. His now-grown kids and ex-wives would visit him a lot and friends -- I include myself -- would serve their/our roles, too.
As I write these words on a rare morning of the Fourth Quarter when I "slept in till after 5 AM," my mind skips about to all those who are now MIA in Life ... gone from my life ... ghosts skipping with me ... frolicking about amongst my memories. Now I want to tell them all about an errant wish to translate the words of Kohelles ... of the Congregant ... of Ecclesiastes ... that appeared in a dream just about 50 years after JFK was shot down.
Maybe I'll try "sleeping-in" tomorrow, as well.
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