Wednesday, February 11, 2004
One of my best friends died monday. I'm a little yclempt.
We'd never met in person - I don't have a passport, and Bri was
a secretive reclusive type. But we chatted for hours, each of us
with our own bleak despair and loneliness, but reaching out to give the other a hand up. He'd been expressing concern that i'm going to be offline for a few weeks in a few weeks; he knew his time was short. We didn't formally say good-bye, and I didn't save that last chat session, but I think we were ok. Don't know yet if any of his writing will be saved. He undervalued his writing, because his lover of 60 years, who had died a year ago, was the writer of the family, but Bri was a poet and a keeper of folk tradition. He was a retired butler, from a world of country houses and villages where everyone is related to everyone, a world that I'd only known through novels. I loved him, and I'm gonna miss him, and I mourn the loss of the world he lived in. I need to go cry, and then get on with my life. He came from a world where death was part of the natural order of things. I don't. I want to upload a backup before this bag of meat breaks down. I want to be able to keep blogging and reading, 100 years from now. And to cherish Brian.
way too many poems about death, but not the housman i was looking for
more housman
Brian liked housman - they were poets, british, and warriors.
Bri had some dark secret that haunted him, from his war years.
Something about almost starting WWIII. I know he went on one last mission last year. Something about looking for a plane that had gone down. I think he found what he was looking for. I don't expect to ever hear the real story.
Oh! I didn't realize shropshire (sp) was where it is - that's bri's general area.
I've been there, ages ago, at the youth hostel in shrewsbury.
A shropshire lad is housman's best-known work. Housman was gay.
I first got to know brian as a character in stories his lover wrote about when they were boys together. He was a gentleman's gentleman, in every sense of the word. The poem i was looking for was about a soldier who falls in love at first sight with the enemy soldier who jumps in his foxhole as he "fell upon my sword and died." But no google hits, i'm remembering it wrong.
update: usually i write in a vacuum, not expecting anyone to read any of this.
but i got a chance to share this with bri's family and friends, and it was well-received. and a book he wrote survives - one copy, and i'm worried about that one copy, but it's more than i hoped for.
We'd never met in person - I don't have a passport, and Bri was
a secretive reclusive type. But we chatted for hours, each of us
with our own bleak despair and loneliness, but reaching out to give the other a hand up. He'd been expressing concern that i'm going to be offline for a few weeks in a few weeks; he knew his time was short. We didn't formally say good-bye, and I didn't save that last chat session, but I think we were ok. Don't know yet if any of his writing will be saved. He undervalued his writing, because his lover of 60 years, who had died a year ago, was the writer of the family, but Bri was a poet and a keeper of folk tradition. He was a retired butler, from a world of country houses and villages where everyone is related to everyone, a world that I'd only known through novels. I loved him, and I'm gonna miss him, and I mourn the loss of the world he lived in. I need to go cry, and then get on with my life. He came from a world where death was part of the natural order of things. I don't. I want to upload a backup before this bag of meat breaks down. I want to be able to keep blogging and reading, 100 years from now. And to cherish Brian.
way too many poems about death, but not the housman i was looking for
more housman
Brian liked housman - they were poets, british, and warriors.
Bri had some dark secret that haunted him, from his war years.
Something about almost starting WWIII. I know he went on one last mission last year. Something about looking for a plane that had gone down. I think he found what he was looking for. I don't expect to ever hear the real story.
Oh! I didn't realize shropshire (sp) was where it is - that's bri's general area.
I've been there, ages ago, at the youth hostel in shrewsbury.
A shropshire lad is housman's best-known work. Housman was gay.
I first got to know brian as a character in stories his lover wrote about when they were boys together. He was a gentleman's gentleman, in every sense of the word. The poem i was looking for was about a soldier who falls in love at first sight with the enemy soldier who jumps in his foxhole as he "fell upon my sword and died." But no google hits, i'm remembering it wrong.
update: usually i write in a vacuum, not expecting anyone to read any of this.
but i got a chance to share this with bri's family and friends, and it was well-received. and a book he wrote survives - one copy, and i'm worried about that one copy, but it's more than i hoped for.
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