Often, when I look back to Jeff's suicide, I discover that I rearrange dates and events in sequences more syntonic to my mind; that is, I edit. I condense, cut bits out, do a fast number myself so that-for example-I no longer recall viewing Jeff's body and identifying it. I have managed to forget the name of the hotel where he stayed. I don't know how long he stayed there. As near as I can make out, he didn't hang around the house very long after Tim and Kirsten flew to London; one early letter came from them, typed: signed by both of them but almost certainly written by Kirsten. Possibly Tim dictated it. The first hint of the magnitude of the find showed up in that letter. I didn't recognize what the news implied but Jeff did. So, perhaps, he left right after that.
What surprised me the most was to grasp, all at once, that Jeff had wanted to go into the priesthood, but what point was there, in view of his father's role? But this left a vacuum. Jeff did not want to do anything else either. He could not become a priest; he did not care about any other profession. So he remained what we in Berkeley called a "professional student"; he never stopped going to Cal. Maybe he left and came back. Our marriage hadn't been working for some time; I have blank spots back to 1968, perhaps a full year missing in all. Jeff had emotional problems that I later repressed any knowledge of. We both repressed it. There is always free psychotherapy in the Bay Area and we took advantage of it.
I don't think Jeff could be called-could have been called-mentally ill; he simply wasn't terribly happy. Sometimes it is not a drive to die but a failure of a subtle kind, a failing of the sense of joy. He fell out of life by degrees. When he came across someone he genuinely wanted she became his father's mistress, whereupon they both flew to England, leaving him to study a war he didn't care about, leaving him stranded back where he had started from. He started out not caring; he wound up not caring. One of the doctors did say he believed that Jeff started taking LSD during that period after he left me and before he shot himself. That is only a theory. However, unlike the homosexual theory, it may have been true.
Thousands of young people kill themselves in America each year, but it remains the custom, by and large, to list their deaths as accidental. This is to spare the family the shame attached to suicide. There is, indeed, something shameful about a young man or woman, maybe an adolescent, wanting to die and achieving that goal, dead before in a certain sense they ever lived, ever were born. Wives get beaten by their husbands; cops kill blacks and Latinos; old people rummage in garbage cans or eat dog food-shame rules, calling the shots. Suicide is only one shameful event out of a plethora. There are black teenagers who will never get a job as long as they live, not because they are lazy but because there are no jobs- because, too, these ghetto kids possess no skills they can sell. Children run away, find the strip in New York or Hollywood; they become prostitutes and wind up with their bodies hacked apart. If the impulse to slay the Spartan runners reporting the battle results, the outcome at Thermopylae, rises in you, by all means slay them. I am those runners and I report what you do not want, most likely, to hear. Personally, I report only three deaths, but three more than were necessary. This is the day John Lennon died; you wish to slay those who report that, too? As Sri Krishna says when he assumes his true form, his universal form, that of time:
"All these hosts must die; strike, stay your hand-no matter.
Seem to slay. By me these men are slain already."
It is an awful sight. Arjuna has seen what he cannot believe exists.
"Licking with your burning tongues,
Devouring all the worlds,
You probe the heights of heaven
With intolerable beams, O Vishnu."
What Arjuna sees was once his friend and charioteer. A man like himself. That was only an aspect, a kindly disguise. Sri Krishna wished to spare him, to hide the truth. Arjuna asked to see Sri Krishna's true form and he got to see it. He will not now be as he was. The spectacle has changed him, changed him forever. This is the true forbidden fruit, this kind of knowledge. Sri Krishna waited a long time before he showed Arjuna his actual shape. He wanted to spare him. The true shape, that of the universal destroyer, emerged at last.
I would not want to make you unhappy by detailing pain, but there is a crucial sort of difference between pain and the narration of pain. I am telling you what happened. If there is vicarious pain in knowing, there is actual peril in not knowing. In aversion lies a colossal risk.
When Kirsten and the bishop had returned to the Bay Area-not permanently but, rather, to deal with Jeff's death and the problems raised by it-I could upon seeing them again notice a change in both of them. Kirsten looked worn and wretched, and this did not seem to me to emanate from the shock of Jeff's death alone. Obviously she was in ill health in purely physical terms. On the other hand, Bishop Archer seemed even more animated than when I had last seen him. He took complete charge of the situation regarding Jeff; he selected the burial spot, the kind of gravestone; he delivered the eulogy and all other rites, wearing full robes, and he paid for everything. The inscription on the gravestone came as a result of his inspiration. He chose a phrase which I found quite acceptable; it is the motto or basic statement of the school of Heraclitus: NO SINGLE THING ABIDES; BUT ALL THINGS Flow. I had been taught in philosophy class that Heraclitus himself invented that, but Tim explained that this summation came after Heraclitus, by those of his school who followed him. They believed that only flux, which is to say change, is real. They may have been right.
The three of us joined together after the graveside service; we returned to the Tenderloin apartment and tried to make ourselves comfortable. It took a while for any of us to say anything.
Tim talked about Satan, for some reason. Tim had a new theory about Satan's rise and fall that he apparently wanted to try out on us, since we-Kirsten and I-were the closest people at hand. I presumed at the time that Tim intended to include his theory in the book he had begun working on.
"I see the legend of Satan in a new way. Satan desired to know God as fully as possible. The fullest knowledge would come if he became God, was himself God. He strove for this and achieved it, knowing that the punishment would be permanent exile from God. But he did it anyhow, because the memory of knowing God, really knowing him as no one else ever had or would, justified to him his eternal punishment. Now, who would you say truly loved God out of everyone who ever existed? Satan willingly accepted eternal punishment and exile just to know God-by becoming God-for an instant. Further, it occurs to me, Satan truly knew God, but perhaps God did not know or understand Satan; had He understood him, He would not have punished him. That is why it is said that Satan rebelled-which means Satan was outside of God's control, outside God's domain, as if in another universe. But Satan did I think welcome his punishment, for it was his proof to himself that he knew and loved God. Otherwise he might have done what he did for the reward ... had there been a reward. 'Better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven' is an issue, here, but not the true one: which is the ultimate goal and search to know and be: fully and really to know God, in comparison to which all else is really very little."
"Prometheus," Kirsten said absently. She sat smoking and gazing.
Tim said, "Prometheus means 'Forethinker.' He was involved in the creating of man. He was also the supreme trickster among the gods. Pandora was sent down to Earth by Zeus as a punishment to Prometheus for stealing fire and bringing it to man. In addition, Pandora punished the whole human race. Epimetheus married her, he was Hindsight. Prometheus warned him not to marry Pandora, since Prometheus could foresee the consequences. This same kind of absolute foreknowledge is or was considered by the Zoroastrians to be an attribute of God, the Wise Mind."