March 10th, 1976 at 2:45 pm
by Rastaban (1976)
Yesterday I felt generally worse than the day before, generally felt extremely uncomfortable in my stomach and my head, very uncomfortable and tired. I think I was more resigned to his death and able to accept it, to allow it, except for the funeral.
Boyd would probably not have appreciated the funeral, though he would have the concern of people—all the friends who came, the relatives and friends there to help his parents.
The funeral was not for Boyd but for the people there.
The funeral was for the preacher, to advertize Christianity.
It was for the funeral home and the ritualistic, to make a pageant of it.
It was for the rest of us, and especially for Boyd's parents—to see the coffin containing his body lowered deep into the earth, and covered with shovel after shovel of heavy dirt. This meant it was true, he was dead, and now he was buried. It could not really be understood until it was seen.
The wind blew hard during the grave-site service—blew viciously at the tarpolin and at the flowers stood around the coffin, knocking some off, some over. Glory to the wind, for trying to express the anger and viciousness I felt. Back at the funeral home during the chapel service earlier I had wanted everything torn and knocked apart—all the flowers there be tumbled over, as if by hurricane. But the wind could not get inside the chapel.
And so they buried Boyd, and placed the flowers over the open dirt. I picked up a flower and tossed it on, to buck the neatness of the placed flowers—the only way I could state my protest.
I hated the neatness and order of the whole thing. I wanted chaos and confusion—because what I felt was chaos and confusion. I felt anarchy and disruption and viciousness against the neatness of it all.
They made his dying all neat and tidy and orderly: they perverted what really happened: they denied what I felt, and what more than anyone his parents felt; what, I think, all felt at least a little of.
It was a thing of destruction and violence, chaotic and confusing and bitter.
How I wanted to protest: Don't you know what you're doing? Don't you realize? Don't you realize who you're burying? What are you doing? What are you doing?
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March 8th, 1976 at 10:15 pm
by Rastaban (1976, Journal)
I guess I am too intellectual about it to cry. I approach life with my head and not with my eyes and ears and mouth.
People who believe in God cry so much more easily.
Boyd’s parents have cried more than I have in my entire life.
Perhaps it is because of the contacts, maybe they have ruined my eyes for crying.
God I wish I could cry.
I simply can not lose control of myself—I never lose it any more. I drain it all out of me by thinking instead.
I wish I could cry and not think.
Anyway it would be better for my eyes.
Several times I was about to lose myself and my face into tears—and then I was aware of it and thought, ‘I am about to cry.’ But that would destroy it, and there wouldn’t be anything but a little wetness on my eyes, that my contacts quickly soaked.
I want to cry and not be aware.
Will ever again I do something unaware?
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March 8th, 1976 at 9:05 pm
by Rastaban (1976, Journal)
He had been on a geology field trip from early Saturday morning.
They went back to the University; Boyd drove his Falcon on toward home.
He knew his mother was to get out of the hospital that evening. He had seen her two weeks before in intensive care.
She had almost died, from a bloodclot that was at the door of her heart.
So he was coming home to see her, since she would be out; since the field trip would bring him so close.
He was probably whistling and singing as he drove, as he always did. So Mrs. Curry has said, and I agree.
But apparently he fell asleep. From the left lane his car went off the road, over grass two hundred, three hundred feet. And then the pillar of the bridge crossing the interstate.
He must have been killed on impact. But then the car exploded into flames, and he was burned beyond recognition.
They will not let his parents see him, because of the burning. It is not clear how much of their body there is to see.
But he is dead, and that is the story that counts.
It is insane, the way I seem to have been isolated from the tragedy of what this is. Why aren’t I torn to shreds over what has happened? Why can’t I cry tears?
Why was I able to go to college today. I debated god and infinity and the universe. What good is the damn universe if Boyd is dead?
What good is the universe anyway?
Once, Boyd was alive, and that is the most significant thing in my life. I am saved, because I understand. I drank of the cup and ate of the bread of Boyd’s life. He is more important to me than God or Jesus.
I denied God today—publicly. If he exists, it is war between us. If he does not (and I know he does not), it is war between me and men as the group.
It will be the new religion of free and careless life, without mindness and consciousness to the damnation of the group. Anarchy to the group!
But for Boyd it was easy. For me it will be a million revolutions within myself.
But I will be saved.
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March 8th, 1976 at 1:15 pm
by Rastaban (1976, Journal)
What would Boyd have felt, what would he say? What did he think now?
Suddenly I want to know him all at once, now that I can’t know him at all.
I hardly knew him—I really honestly hardly knew him, though I know him more than I know anyone.
The more I knew, the more there was to know.
Without us knowing it, he was my teacher for many things.
Everyone who knew him knew he was different.
He knew the world, like a man might know a woman.
He was the most mentally curious and alive person I ever knew, or likely will know. And he did things. He did things all the time.
The truth is I need to talk to him desperately. He was the one I talked to when I needed to understand something.
Being his friend was like having 4 or 5 extra senses at work for you continually, bringing in for you new access to the world.
Without him, I am bereft of creativity and new sight. And my blood is rushed to my head.
And I shiver, it is so cold.
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March 7th, 1976 at 5:30 pm
by Rastaban (1976, Journal)
The last letter he wrote to me, except for the picture through the mail: November, 1975.
these days are not my days. oh oh oh to only half way home be, happyiness is fickle it keeps coming back, but will not come when needed. the sun is bright on the land, bright on the puddles, like reality scattered on the asphalt. noone looks down from the sky; even a baby now upsets me, with its searching stare, so different from the standard flat stare. i am i am iam not a fighter, i have never made a fist. i hate reality when it stains the floor like it does in our dumbstruck cities. the baby cries for the morrow, it cries for discovery, it cries for……………… kindness, mindlessness (are they synomyns?) not now not now nto now not now not now am i ami ami ami funny that the english puzzle is solved by french friendship. i am singing out the day, singing out my life, so come and go, come and go, c come and go what can slice the emptyness of life? i want to come and go with her, with hre, it is a strange baby that never cries, even when the wind is blowing hard. people are crazy, people are beautiful, i guess that is the way it was meant to be. i only wish that the outside would revel the in side. all hope is pass. my passion is my pain, what could make me this far??? is it easier to take it this way? i dont know i dont knoe, cities are the fingerprints of man on the medows, now man wants to live on the sea, only a baref ot boy can wash his hands of the land, is the sea a better place to be? can we avoid leaving our fingerprints on the sea? ah for a big old friendly girl …… consider this what can warm a winter frost? iam out of gin, people say my grin is crooked, my halo has been repossed. i guess it's time i moved on.Let's go 'round one more Time,
boyd curry
Did we ever go 'round one more time?
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March 7th, 1976 at 4:30 pm
by Rastaban (1976, Journal)
So Boyd is dead. It is impossible to believe it, yet it must be true. Everybody is resigned to that now: he will not come whistling through the doorway with his profound sense of life in his mouth and hands again. He is not here to tell me what is most unitary and striking about funerals.
Because he is dead.
I can’t believe it. Yet he’s dead. He was so profound, and so alive in how he acted and how he thought. Of all I knew, he was the unique one in the world.
It can’t be so.
It’s as if Jesus who the disciples knew had been killed in an accident. In an accident, before he could be crucified a martyr. It’s beyond what I can believe and realize.
But it is so and I know it is so. Yesterday it was as if a third of me were gone.
As if I were suddenly more alone in the world.
As if an intellectual vacuum had formed in the world. A vacuum in my world. Intellectual and emotional.
Instant atheism.
He was important. He was important in the world. Boyd was important. That’s all I could think after I began to think again, after the telephone call.
He was important to the world and he was important to me; and it did not seem possible that he could die.
I did not believe it, because it was not believable.
I shook. I was cold and I was shaking and I couldn’t help it. All the blood was to my head, to try to comprehend, and my body was shaking of cold.
It could not be explained how Boyd could not be alive.
But now it is true, it must be true. He has not showed up to prove it not. It’s obvious that it’s beyond him.
It’s simply not possible to understand.
It’s almost possible that his body could be dead. But his mind and his knowledge of life—how can it be? It must be just a part of his body, that dies when the body dies.
It is as if I have come against a wall I can’t fight. That is meaningless and irrational and denies me. And denies Boyd and what he was.
Apparently he was other than what he was.
Instant atheism, to realize that god is meaningless and irrational.
Only if there is no god can death be acceptable; only if life is for itself and nothing else.
Boyd was alive, and that is the important thing in the world. Boyd was alive and that is everything. To once be alive is everything.
His mind was a part of his body, else it could not have been alive.
His body was a part of the world and life, else it was nothing and part of nothing.
Yet he was important, for more than just this. He was a Jesus who could have helped reclaim us.
I know it sounds trite, or theatric. I know it sounds poetic rather than true.
To me, though, he was always a Jesus. One of the few really alive and unique people in the world, who made me, in my own self-honorable and integral way, a disciple of his simply by being his friend and by knowing him.
A Jesus crucified at the hands of what is worst and most profane in the accident of our modern man-world today. We have made everything random and accident. So there is no better way for a modern Jesus to die than by tragic and violent accident.
To me, Boyd’s death is a bitter thing. I can’t explain my hate yesterday at interstates and cars.
It is war, then, I could only say to myself. Boyd is dead; it is war, then.
I can not accept the making of his life meaningless.
I want to put my fist through glass.
I want to write the most vicious things I can.
But I am too numb to dare.
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