Brad Magnarella
9/7/15
Todd gave me the news tonight over the phone, which I think you would have appreciated. Numb, I walked to my bookshelf and pulled a copy of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces, a book I’d borrowed from you years before. You’d made some notations in there, and I thought by reading through them, I might feel something of you.
A folded-over piece of paper fell out, covered in your writing. Near the top you’d written “Shaolin monk.” Beneath it, “Take it to its ridiculous extreme” – a quote you attributed to me. And beneath that, “Self actualize,” to which you’d pegged your own name. I can only guess that was written after a summer visit when we were sitting in a Cuban restaurant on 34th Street, brainstorming ways I might escape a woman who had developed an infatuation. You wanted me to tell her I’d become a Shaolin monk and then introduce you as my mentor; we crafted all sorts of preposterous scenarios around that.
But even in the fog of absurdity, the shining archetype of the self-actualized persona – in this case the Shaolin monk – stayed with you, apparently. As it often did. Your heroes were either pure and uncompromising or hopelessly flawed, the paradox never seeming to bother you. "It’s where art comes from," I can hear you saying, defiance edging the words.
I read some more of what you’d jotted down and underlined, and I thought back through the evolution of our friendship, and those evenings on your back patio where laughter rippled in the skies, and about arguments we had, and revelations that burned through us both. When I complained about the bureaucracy at my job, you told me to read Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and when I lost in love, you gave me your copy of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, both proving redemptive. The stuff of our bookshelves tend, over time, to mirror who we’ve become, and as I returned the borrowed Joseph Campbell book to its slot, I saw you everywhere.
Bill, my brother, my mentor/hero, my friend. Goodbye, and thank you.
Brad