So Roberta cut me off over our fight about Fahrenheit 9/11. Finally, after 18 years I’m on the outside. Sad and bruised by it, but I suppose if it had to happen (did it?) this was the most worthy matter to split over. Was I addling an old lady? I suppose. Although I also thought to so engage was not to allow that distance, where piety is a falling off. The element of grinning pliant hypocrisy finally here made way for my real opinions, which, if they could not be tolerated by her, at least were acknowledged for their truth.
I’m sad for selfish reasons, largely. Now there is really no one out there with some at least tangential connection to the vital tradition I long to take up and further, who continues to root for me. Her support was always genuine, always curious to me, and I always had a heady feeling of luck, or of my luck about to run out I suppose. Now it has. Now luck, or the blessing, or being “one of the elect” will play no part.
Brando died. Roberta has probably gone into deep mourning, if not shock. I instinctively knew this, but made light of it, would not give it the gravitas I did when Kazan died. My anger. Bad timing for all this, but too late. There is no place for apologies in this world of things.
In a culture of human beings, ours, where the struggle for recognition lodges in every soul, Brando was above recognition, seemingly struggling with whatever lies beyond, or results from it. Seen this way, he was the cultural tent pole that made sense of it for everyone else, but for himself only senselessness.
If this with Roberta has been the last of the surely inadvertent zen lessons, this last is about the break with the urge to recognition. – July 4, 2004. Middletown Springs VT