• Bluelight
    Shrine




    A memorial
    to Bluelighters
    who have passed away

Where Wolf? - May his memory ever be for a blessing

Thinking tonight of Reuben, his family and his partner. I got to see a picture and so now that face swims into my mind--so alive and relaxed in the photo. So much sadness was left in your wake, Reuben, but that is because you gave so much happiness to those you loved. <3
 
O Song

O man of sorrows, I missed you
as you passed me in the street last night.
The wind funnelled between buildings,
blew grit into my eyes, fine sand
miles from the sea. I am so sorry.

I stopped to blink, and saw a bloom
of damson on your linen shirt,
a swarm of scarabs on your brow,
a staggered gait, as if your boots
were not a fit. I knew then it was you,

and watched you turn to look at me,
to brush your hand across my head,
a palm still wet with rain or blood.
You said some words I didn’t catch,
left me lost and shot with longing.

Michael Symmons Roberts, Drysalter (London: Cape Poetry, 2013), p. 95
 
Seeking Where? said:
The toxicology report was sad to read - unfortunately, it showed that Reuben had taken heroin again after almost two months of abstaining from all opiates. His death was from an accidental overdose, probably because his system was no longer able to cope with the quantity he had taken before.

As he wrote here on Bluelight - heroin seems to give a great deal, but it takes back with interest. The price this time was his life.

Those who loved him are paying also, with pain and sorrow.
Click to expand...

A smart and witty fellow. <3 Reuben <3
 
I now know that the quote above was from Trainspotting - but I only realised how much Reuben quoted from novels, songs, and so on in retrospect, as with so many things I am continuing to learn. He was my amour fou, and remains a blessing to me. Tonight his family in America have gathered to remember him. As I cannot be there, I am here on Bluelight, the community that gave him support and acceptance when he so badly needed it. I share the following with anyone who cares to read it, as Burnside explains better than anyone what love, true love, is.

From John Burnside’s Waking Up in Toytown (London: Vintage Books, 2011), pp. 214-216

For Reuben, Tamid Ahuv -

The vagaries of amour fou. How certain pieces of music, from a chart song to a Britten quartet, can restore me now to the condition of terrible joy that I thought I had put behind me forever. How, for years afterwards, I enjoyed the lingering sense that nothing really mattered, because the real drama had been played out: a walk on a beach in the early morning; a conversation in a car with the radio playing, a moment when everything stopped and Ketty Lester started singing ‘Love Letters’; all that corny stuff that isn’t corny at all when it’s happening, because it’s the everyday wabi of falling in love, which is never a good idea, though it cannot be avoided. No se puede vivir sin amor, and all that. It’s a bad idea, falling in love, but it’s a sin to jump out of the way when you see it coming. Bad karma. Somebody possessed of good luck and preternatural skill and judgement can find a way to live alone, I mean truly alone, someone armed with a vocation, a lifetime discipline can do it too, but that doesn’t mean he has escaped the cycle. Not until the last cut. Not until the very last breath.

Still, that said, the truth remains: it’s never a good idea to fall in love. Falling in love reveals things about ourselves we’d much prefer not to know. Falling in love is an abandonment of order. All that madman, poet and lover stuff you hear about is wrong because, no matter how odd or perverse his actions might seem, the madman is striving towards order with whatever raw materials he has at his disposal, like somebody trying to make a cake out of sand, rose petals, and a scale model of the Tower of London. The visible product may be a disaster, but his intention was honourable, and if somebody had let him have some flour and eggs and butter, he would have used those. But they weren’t available – surely we can see that by now, after all the theorizing and late-night chit-chat on the subject? Surely we can see that madness is a symptom of a wider disorder, a general deprivation? Apophenia is usually talked about in a context of excess sensitivity, which would make the apophenic symptomatic of some wider malaise, just as the loss of an indicator species like a filmy fern or long-eared bat serves as an early warning that the wider environment is being degraded. The mad are symptomatic of societal failure, not random episodes of perversity or bad luck and, most often, what they want is order. Much the same goes for the poet – but falling in love, falling in love, is abandonment, falling in love is a total and unquestioning assent to the inevitable, wherever it might take us. For years, I made myself believe that falling in love was an imaginative act, an investment in some chosen object. But that wasn’t love – that was just making movies in your head, in order to avoid a more random and dangerous event. An event that is, in essence, as destructive and as eventually regenerative as any natural disaster.

I had thought that I would never feel the same way about anyone as I did about Adele – and it was true, I never did. Nothing I felt about Esmé changed or diminished my memory of Adele. The true romantic may well believe in that old cliché, the single lifelong, definitive love, but that isn’t how amour fou works. With amour fou, we go on loving the first true love in everything the real world throws at us: happiness, pain, banality, desire, lust, temptation, forgetting. That first afternoon, as we drove back from Morecambe, I knew that I was about to get lost – but I also knew that I was about to be lost in the same territory where I had once been lost with Adele, as illogical as it may sound, being with Esmé wasn’t a way of leaving Adele behind, it was a perverse, possibly twisted – and certainly unfair – way of finding her again. All I knew then was that I wanted to be lost again – for who couldn’t love being lost? Who couldn’t love reaching out for something that is slipping away even as his fingertips graze the impossible surface? Who wants to keep anything forever? Who would willingly accept the sheer tedium of the imperishable?

Who wants to be safe? What wants to be sane? Who wants to be normal?
 
Tonight is Where Wolf? 's Memorial in the US. In honour of that, I reproduce a post from 25-07-2011 22:37
So...it's one of those nights, and I'm back on this thread. First off, I've been reading the posts above, and I feel empathy for everyone in this thread. I've struggled with thoughts of suicide since I was in my late teens, with one serious attempt - now I'm 36, and in a mess, professionally, financially (which keeps me in a job I hate), and with benzo addiction. My tolerance reached the point where I started throwing in some seroquel to get to sleep, and modafinil or MPA to get moving in the morning - it's impossible to imagine living drug-free, and I feel I've fucked up so many opportunities that sometimes I can't forgive myself. A few weeks back, I had a dark experience with Methoxetamine and 4-meo-pcp that had me calculating LD50s and whether my 'scripts, combined, would do the job...but I was partly raised by a grandmother who killed herself, and even though she was 83, it's haunted and damaged me to the point that I know, while I have living relatives, I just don't have the option. Too many friends as well who'd lose months to grieving...and one who's told me she's not sure she could carry on herself if I don't. I score off the charts for major depressive disorder, generalised anxiety and have been an addict/alkie since I was 15...brief flashes of happiness in relationships that turned to shit, and now I wonder if I'm coming close to a point of no return...

I know that I may still be suffering PAWS, as well (three months clean), and my neurotransmitters just can't experience pleasure for very long. I don't know if I can do my job, pay my debts, deal with everything I have to deal with. But...fuck it. I'm going to try. I don't know if I can forgive the past, or face the future: but I won't do to others what my grandma did to me, leaving me wondering for 14 years about her last moments, about whether I could have done something to stop her if I hadn't been too busy with girlfriends and partying. I'm typing this at what used to be her desk, one of the few things she managed to get out of Romania during WWII - we're Jewish, and the Nazi puppet government was sweeping the area, her folks bribed the right people, they got out. I remind myself every day that whether you're an atheist or psychedelic mystic, a true believer in an organised religion or none of the above, on some level, don't we all sense, at least sometimes, that all things are connected, all is one? Maybe that's just down to raw physics: there are other ways of looking at it.

But if we give in to the urge to self-destruct, I do believe it's a loss that effects - and affects - everything. I haven't had 'a good day' this whole year, haven't felt pleasure or a sense of peace for so long that I don't remember what they're like: but still, even if for no reason that I can name, I know I must remain alive as long as I can. I had to write that, tonight, in a public forum, because I'm trapped in a job/apartment/life I hate...but fuck it. No. I'm not giving up. I don't really know why: but whatever pain may come, I won't be my grandmother (of blessed memory, as we say in Hebrew), because the damage done to the fabric of the universe that each and everyone of us contributes to was too great. Because when there's still breath, there's still hope: even if only as an abstract idea, and because there are places, such as this, where strangers can share our howls of pain.

Forgive the long and rambling posts: and, all of you, keep breathing. Things get better: things get worse, but let's not cross over to the void or whatever else subsists beyond this consciousness until we have to. After all, even the coldest of empiricists has to accept that alocal causality is a real possibility - and we do not know what might be torn apart by our own self-destruction.

So fuck it - keep breathing, even and especially when it hurts most. There is every reason, there is none, and that same alocal causin' might bring riches of happiness and hope that none of us can imagine. We are human beings, low and high, strong and weak, pointless and purposeful. Embrace the contradictions, blow a raspberry at the void, and gentile or Jew, raise a glass of something if you're drinking, and even - most of all, if it feels like a lie - toast 'L'Chaim'. 'To Life', because it hurts and hates and loves and gives and takes, and there's no way of knowing if the nothingness that lies beyond is nothingness at all, better, worse, or unimaginable. Let's make suicide our enemy and hold the line. There's reality beyond the pain, and pain beyond reality. Let's live with them both.

So goes this bird-brain's verdict on the universe and staying in it. Fuck it. Why not? David Foster Wallace should have listened to his own words: 'no single moment is in and of itself unendurable.' And anyone who has the nerve to post in this thread, to admit their own pain, is a whole lot stronger and more worthwhile than we think at our worst moments.

'Don't let them have their way/don't let them have their way/you're beautiful and so blase/so please don't let them have their way/don't fall back into the decay/there is no law we must obey/so please don't let them have their way/don't give in to yesterday/don't fall back into the decay/We can build a new tomorrow...today' - Placebo.

One foot in front of the other. Let's all keep breathing and dance until the music stops. Most of all when it hurts most.
Last edited by Where Wolf?; 25-07-2011 at 22:49.
 
It hurts most now, my love - and I am still breathing, though I can't dance until the music stops. It stopped when you left me, left us; it is cold and alone here without you. Spoke to your mom and everyone is sharing stories of you: I am here, lonely (which is different than alone, you knew that, more than anyone) and the longing is almost impossible to bear. I can't go on, but I WILL go on, as Emily Berry said - for the sake of those who love you, who will always love you, and who will always remember. God bless and keep you, bound into the bond of eternal life. I will join you; we all will. You are not alone.
 
Reuben was such a powerful writer.

I will keep breathing and dancing, friend that I never knew, friend that has now brought me the friendship of your loved ones. You had a powerful voice and those that loved you are keeping it alive. To keep breathing and dancing, especially when it hurts the most--these are words I needed to hear tonight. Thank you, Seeking_Where, thank you Where_Wolf.
 
My memory is a pomegranate. Shall I open it over you and let it scatter, seed by seed: red pearls befitting a farewell that asks nothing of me except forgetfulness?

Forgetfulness is the training of the imagination to respect reality by letting language rise above it. It is homegrown hope holding an incomplete image of tomorrow.

Tomorrow is now here before us, my friend, disrobed of Time, thrown in a ditch, waiting for a metaphysical fig leaf to cover the private parts of the one passing.

Passing from the night of light to the light of night.

Night descends upon us and we must tend to the concerns of those who left us for their own private night, forgetting or recalling a portion of the long farewell.

Farewell is the silence separating sound from echo. Sound is broken and echo is preserved by attentive valleys and caves – the world’s ears – listening closely as it reverberates into the echo of an echo.

The echo is the traveler’s pleas to the transient, a bird tracking another bird, the end insisting on prolonging the tale. The echo is the carving of a name in the air.

- From Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence, trans. Sinan Antoon (Brooklyn NY: Archipelago Books, 2011), pp. 157ff)
 
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I have copied that phrase, " Forgetfulness is the training of the imagination to respect reality by letting language rise above it." so that I can think about that for a while. I know how much you are hurting and i am so sorry.<3

"passing from the night of light to the light of night..."

((((<3))))
 
Where? Wolf Forever

Reuben it is almost a year and the shock has been slowly wearing off. Guilt is there - how did we lose you, how? But mostly desolation, bewilderment and sometimes
outrage - living in the world without you? Preposterous.

Not to have you making tacos, ordering pizza, opening red wine, seeing your brilliant novel published, and your second, sounding off about something, laughing your high hilarity laugh - I can't manage it. I can't think it.

Nothing here but such sadness - like the sky. Infinite. Stretching everywhere. No words for it. Love is such a little word. But that's all there is. I love you more than life, more than I even let myself know.

Don't even want to end this. Your alter ego character says in your second novel when his mother says to him 'You always matter' that it's true - he'll always matter at least, as long as she's around'. You will. Always. Matter. As long as I'm around. It is, was, and always will be a privilege to be your mother.
 
I understand so viscerally all the ways your son is missed, in all the little ways that in his absence are so unfathomably huge, and how a birthday, always a celebratory day for a mother, becomes a very cruel set of numbers. I send you all my thoughts and empathy.<3

I will merge this into the shrine that was created for Reuben so that you will be able to find it whenever you feel like it.
 
Today Reuben would have turned forty. He was a brilliant writer, a passionate thinker, a devoted son and brother, lover and friend. He had so much left to give, so much still to live and write--3 books in the making and who knows how many more still in his head? Forty is such a turning point for people in their minds--a resetting and reappraisal-- and yet, but for an accident and a disastrous choice, Reuben leaves all who loved him with a devastating silence.

Reuben I hope that the God you believed in enfolded you gently. I know that you exist in peace. Shalom. Tonight I hold you in my thoughts but it is your family and loved ones that I hold in my heart. <3
 
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