In the days after my father's passing my thoughts turned to John F. Kennedy, for an example to provide some comfort and kinship. I remembered the times back in college in Amherst when I'd go to the music library and put the records of his speeches on the turntable, his voice calling to us still, a winter light or darkness outside, quiet. It was of course a great privilege to go to school there, and one always wonders if one does well with opportunities, those given by your father and his example.

My Dad, raised as a studious professional, botany professor, with an awareness toward Eastern scripture, was sympathetic to my interest in one JFK speech that stayed with me, the one Kennedy himself made on a visit to Amherst, about poetry informing power. My Dad understood the importance of the human soul, along with transcendental poetry's sensibilities, being present in modern science, lest it become too cold, too rational, too materialistic, shut off from human experience.

Like Kennedy's old man did for him, my dad, and my mom of course!, did so much for me, nudging me toward a good life, an opportunity to be useful to society.

Maybe I remember listening to those records as a time of having a purpose, a clear purpose to help humanity, before setting out into the confusion, the attempt at adult life. As I instinctively took toward trying to be a writer (by writing, whatever came, in notebooks), it was good to remember Kennedy, his speeches laying out intelligence, policy, direction, leadership.

Well, a writer quickly gets lost, being out on his own. Outside of my job, a not very glorious one, I felt the continued sense of being an outsider that had perhaps drawn me away from being an academic type. I felt like a stranger, I felt like an outsider, I felt like a deviant, even. What can I say; that's how you feel sometimes when you fall out of the life of what you are supposed to do.

Twain poetically brings this sense--I suspect he had it too, could apply it to all his own strange choices--as he sends Huck and Jim down the river, particularly that part where they get separated in the current. (Blogged about somewhere below, January, 2010, "A Moment from Chapter Fifteen, Huckleberry Finn.") They call to each other, but it's dark out, foggy... Huck wakes, and by miracle finds Jim there nearby, sleeping on the raft. Huck plays a trick on Jim, telling him it must have all been a dream. And Jim, looking at the raft, covered with litter, reacts. I was most heartbroke, he says, in dialect, thinking you were lost, terribly sad, and all you can think about is playing a trick on old Jim. And then, predisposed to understanding, Huck awakens to Jim's full humanity.

The writer has this sense of being lost, seeking to make sense out of the strangeness of the world, society, day to day reality. To my taste, great books have that experience, that of the outsider. Which is maybe why writers can end up as, in one form or another, ex-pats. Kundera does it well in The Joke. To Kill a Mockingbird as well brings us a story of outsiders on the verge of understanding things worth understanding, like the benevolence of Boo Radley.

And Kennedy, he must have known the sensation too. The Bay of Pigs experience, the CIA setting him up to act, the Joint Chiefs eager for action, was a learning experience for him. As was the Cuban Missile Crisis, the military living up to the prophecy of Eisenhower's, pushing the madness of the unthinkable. Kennedy woke up. Correspondence with Krushchev behind the saber rattling stance, his speeches, at American University, at Amherst, asking us to question ourselves, our attitudes toward our power, our military might, our modern technology.

One can, as I well know, feel ashamed about himself, for where and what he is in life. Kennedy, of course, had self-confidence. But he must have felt a room full of military brass pressure, LeMay telling him he was about to be another appeasing Chamberlain, pushing shame on the man who was President, Commander in Chief.

When you are an outsider, you see things differently. Kennedy awoke to the theater of the generals pushing total war, actors divorced from human reality. He awoke to his own folly as a practitioner of war, able to define it.

Foundering and floundering, one hopes he too has found some sense of awakening, of bringing humanity back to some basic values of kindness and compassion.

My Dad saw my book as a kid who becomes, through his thoughtful sensibility, something of an accidental Theosophist, one sensitive to 'the meaning of life,' open to Buddhist thought and Christian sense and that sort of a thing. And that sustains me.


As I should, or might well, know, you're not going to get very far just sitting around feeling bad about yourself. I am human, one says, I say, maybe particularly prone to error. But maybe that lets you see the foreign object in your own eye first. What we do in the world, as with associating with publicans and sinners, is sorrowful, sorrowful and unsatisfying as the Buddha saw his own life prior to his own awakening.



As a postscript to the above, perhaps not so connected, the thought occurs what if he had lived and had his chance to be a writer, recalling the brink, other matters of government, the possibility of peace and environmental concern.