In a very real sense, it also had to do with Q, or rather the source of Q, now referred to in the newspaper articles as U.Q., which is Ur-Quelle in German: Original Source. Behind Q lay the Ur-Quelle, and this is what led Timothy Archer to London and several months in a hotel with his mistress, ostensibly his business agent and general secretary.
No one had ever expected the documents behind Q to reappear in the world; no one had known that U.Q. existed. Since I am not a Christian-and never will be, after the deaths of the people I loved-I am not now and was not then particularly interested, but I suppose it is theologically important, especially so inasmuch as the date assigned to U.Q. is two hundred years before the time of Jesus.
5
WHAT I REMEMBER most, in the first newspaper articles to come out, the first intimation we had, anybody beyond the translators had, that this was an even more important find than the Qumran scrolls, was (the articles said) a particular Hebrew noun. They spell it two different ways; sometimes it showed up as anochi and sometimes anochi.
The word shows up in Exodus, chapter twenty, verse two. This is a terribly moving and important section of the Torah, for here God Himself speaks, and he says:
"I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. "
The first Hebrew word is anochi or anochi and it means "I"-as in "I am the Lord thy God." Jeff showed me what the official Jewish commentary is on this part of the Torah: "The God adored by Judaism is not an impersonal Force, an It, whether spoken of as 'Nature' or 'World- Reason.' The God of Israel is the Source not only of power and life, but of consciousness, personality, moral purpose and ethical action."
Even for me, a non-Christian-or I should say a non-Jew, I guess-this shakes me; I am touched and changed; I am not the same. What is expressed here, Jeff explained to me, is, in this single word, one letter of the English alphabet, the unique self-consciousness of God:
"As man towers above all the other creatures by his will and selfconscious action,
so God 'rules over all as the one completely selfconscious Mind and Will.
In both the visible and the invisible realms, He manifests Himself as the absolutely
free personality, moral and spiritual, who allots to everything its existence, form
and purpose."'
That was written by Samuel M. Cohon, quoting Kaufmann Kohler. Another Jewish writer, Hermann Cohen, wrote:
"God answered him thus: 'I am that which I am. So shalt thou say to the children of Israeclass="underline"
"I am" has sent me to you.' There is probably no greater miracle in the history of the spirit
than that revealed in this verse. For here, a primeval language which is as yet without any philosophy,
emerges and haltingly pronounces the most profound word of all philosophy. The name of God is' I am that
which I am.' This signifies that God is Being, that God is the I, which denotes the Existing One."
And this is what turned up at the wadi in Israel, dating from 200 B.C.E., the wadi not far from Qumran;this word lay at the heart of the Zadokite Documents, and every Hebrew scholar knows this word, and every Christian and Jew should know it, but there at that wadi the word anokhi was used in a different way, a way no living person had ever seen it employed before. And so Tim and Kirsten stayed in London twice as long as they had intended to stay, because the very core of something had been located, the core in fact, of the Decalogue, as if the Lord had left tracings in his own autograph, which is to say, his own hand.
While these discoveries took place-in the translating stage-Jeff wandered around the U.C. Berkeley campus learning about the Thirty Years War and Wallenstein, who had cut himself off progressively from reality during the worst war, perhaps, of all wars, except for the total wars of this century; I am not going to say that I have ascertained which particular drive killed my husband, which thrust from the mix got to him, but one did or they all did in chorus-he is dead and I wasn't even there at the time, nor did I expect it. My expectation came initially when I learned that Kirsten and Tim had gotten involved in an invisible affair. I said what I had to say then; I took my best shot-I visited the bishop at Grace Cathedral and found myself outargued with little effort on his part: little effort and professional skill. It was an easy verbal victory for Tim Archer. So much for that.
If you intend to kill yourself you don't require a reason, in the usual sense of the term; just as, to the contrary, when you intend to stay alive, no verbal, articulated, formal reason is necessary, one you can seize on if the issue comes up. Jeff had been left out. I could see that his interest in the Thirty Years War really had, to do with Kirsten; his mind, or some portion of it, had noted her Scandinavian origin, and another part of his mind had perceived and recorded the fact that the Swedish army was the victor and heroic power of that war; his emotional pursuits and his intellectual pursuits wove together, which was, for a time, to his advantage, and then when
Kirsten flew to England he found himself wrecked by his own cleverness. Now he had to confront the fact that he didn't really give a good goddamn about Tilly and Wallenstein and the Holy Roman Empire; he was in love with a woman his mother's age who was sleeping with his father-and doing that eight thousand miles away, and above and beyond everything else the two of them, to his exclusion, participated in one of the most exhilarating archeological theology discoveries in history, on a day-to-day basis as the translations became available, as the documents got patched and pasted together and the words emerged, one by one, and again and again the Hebrew word anokhi manifested itself, in unusual contexts, baffling contexts: new contexts. The documents spoke as if anokhi were present at the wadi. It or he was referred to as here, not there, now, not then. Anokhi was not something the Zadokites thought about or knew about; it was something they possessed.
It is very hard to read your library books and listen to a Donovan record, no matter how good, when a discovery of that magnitude is going on in another part of the world, and if your father and his mistress, both of whom you love and at the same time furiously hate, are involved in that unfolding discovery-what drove me frantic was Jeff playing and replaying Paul McCartney's first solo album; he liked "Teddy Boy" in particular. When he left me to go live alone in the hotel room-the room where he shot himself-he took the album with him, although he had, it turned out, nothing to play it on. He wrote me a number of times, telling me that he was still active in antiwar happenings. Probably he was. I think, though, by and large he just sat alone in the hotel room trying to figure out how he felt about his father and, even more important, how he felt about Kirsten. So that would be 1971, since the McCartney album came out in 1970. But see, that left me alone, too, in our house. I got the house; Jeff died. I told you not to live alone but I am speaking, really, to myself. You can do any goddamn thing you want but I am never going to live alone again. I'll take in street people before I let that happen to me, that isolation.
Just don't play any Beatles albums around me. That's the main thing I ask. I can take Joplin, because I still think it's funny that Tim thought Joplin was alive and black instead of dead and white, but I do not want to hear the Beatles because they are linked to too much pain in me, inside me, in my life, in what happened.
I am not quite rational myself when it comes down to it, to, specifically, my husband's suicide. I hear in my mind a melange of John and Paul and George-with Ringo thumping away in the rear somewhere-with fragments of tunes and their words, critical terms pertaining to souls suffering a great deal, although not in a way I can pin down except, of course, for my husband's death and then Kirsten's death, and finally, Tim Archer's death—but I suppose that is enough. Now, with John Lennon shot, everyone is pierced as I have been, so I can fucking well stop feeling sorry for myself and join the rest of the world, no better off than they are, no worse off either.