Dear Goose,
It’s two years now. I’m on drugs with Mom and Jacob, but you probably know that. I miss you every day, but you know that for sure. I went to a psychic today. He asked me if I wanted to speak to you. And I said, I don’t know, and so he gave me instead a paraphrase. He said that you’re in a good place and working hard on all the things that were, that are, important to you; that you’re stubborn. Thinking about this now reminds me of that episode from The X-Files—did you know I’m finally watching it after all these years? And I might believe in aliens now? Or demons? Thetans? Synechism, at least, I mean I’m writing to you across all continuity; did you ever read that crazy Peirce essay? “When the carnal consciousness passes away in death, we shall at once perceive that we have had all along a lively spiritual consciousness which we have been confusing with something different”—that episode “Beyond the Sea” when that serial killer is channeling Scully’s dad, and she skips the execution and her dad’s final message. Because she knows she knows what her dad would say, no medium needed. Ahab and Starbuck, they call each other; Magoo, we called you, Gooseberry, Goose. Remember when you said Pierre was about Dad? “Pierre is young; heaven gave him the divinest, freshest form of a man; put light into his eye, and fire into his blood, and brawn into his arm, and a joyous, jubilant, overflowing, up-bubbling, universal life in him everywhere. Now look around in that most miserable room, and at that most miserable of all the pursuits of a man, and say if here be the place, and this be the trade, that God intended him for. A rickety chair, two hollow barrels, a plank, paper, pens, and infernally black ink, four leprous dingy white walls, no carpet, a cup of water, and a dry biscuit or two. Oh, I hear the leap of the Texan Camanche, as at this moment he goes crashing like a wild deer through the green underbrush; I hear his glorious whoop of savage and untamable health; and then I look in at Pierre. If physical, practical unreason make the savage, which is he? Civilization, Philosophy, Ideal Virtue! behold your victim!” I’m reading around in Miller and Edwards and Hawthorne and Melville and various Jameses. (To become Dad? To become you?) I’m watching the fucking X-Files and going to psychics! I want to talk to you about this! I’m talking to you about this now! I’m going to UFO conferences and when I close my eyes right now lizardmen are preying on my louche and I’m saying that Orthodox Franny and Zooey prayer to ward them off. God, I want to laugh about this with you! I’m laughing, we’re laughing. We would figure out a religion we could believe in, we will. You’re making me so happy right now—joyful—grateful—my heart feels so big I want to scream and sing. Imagine if that happened at Quaker meeting! Or at Commie Jew summer camp! It could go at least two ways, they could drive us out or, Christ, join in. We’re terrible singers. Anyway they haven’t crucified us yet.
Your brother,
Sam