This is why they tell you not to rejoice in anyone's death. I'd been fairly cackling about the demise of that Senate Orc and reveling in the irony of it happening July 4th. And today, the pendulum swung back. I found out that Alfred Arteaga, who'd been my prof at UC Berkeley, un colega poeta and a good friend, died the same day.
My friend Henry said, "we're at that age, this will be happening more often from now on." I don't want to be narcissistic and think that the deaths of those close to me are more important than the deaths of other people's loved ones. But because so many of my friends are artists, activists, teachers, thinkers, luchadores, it always feels like when these lights go out, darkness ripples out, at a time when we need all the good people for the beautiful struggle.
I first met Alfred when I took a Bakhtin seminar he taught my first year of grad school. The fact that he was a theory head, a practicing poet, a small-c Chicano who despised ethnic orthodoxies and a Shakespeare scholar quickly made him one of my models for how to reconcile my academic, cultural and political interests. Long after the seminar ended, we developed a relationship that based on poetry, on rock'n'roll and deeply connected to the importance of language, justice and beauty.
The friendship deepened epistolarily the year I was in the DR on a Fulbright. Remember letter-writing? We even created a project out of it, which we called Cartas. We both were writing poetry in Spanish at the time, and began writing poems sequentially, glossing back and forth, one in response to the other. I won't reproduce those here: they were made with tongues thinking between languages, a state like intoxication or delirium. But that give-and-take was a turning point in helping me form an adult identity as a writer. I felt more sure of my voice and my writing muscle after that.
We'd fallen out of touch when I found out in 1999 he'd had a massive heart attack and was in a coma. He was 49. It took him almost a year to recover, a year he described to me later as a rebirth. He had to learn the simplest things again: speaking, walking, moving, swallowing. His memories short-circuited and many became, he said, like snapshots in a box -- the colors and sensations saturated, but little emotional context.
We floated in and out of each other's lives in the years that followed, with letters, emails, phone calls, vague promises to rendez-vous in Paris, NY or Cali. A couple of years ago, I got a message that he'd had another heart attack, and that instead of going on the heart transplant list, he was seeking experimental stem cell treatment in Mexico. He had to pay cash, and was raising money. I was broke and therefore too embarrassed to respond. Messages in a bottle I've floated to him since went unanswered. News would drift via mutual peeps -- he was doing better, not so well, he was dating a friend of a friend.
And now I wonder, should I have tried harder to stay more present? How many other people far away have I neglected, because I feel overwhelmed, because they don't own a cell phone, because calculating time zones seems too much of a bother, because it's hard enough to sustain in-the-flesh relations with people mere blocks away?
Here is a link to Alfred's blog, with his poetry, lit crit, lots of pictures and a song or two. QEPD y nos veremos del otro lado, compa.
[pix of Alfred and his "Corrido Blanco" in Berkeley's Poet's Way via Lorna Dee Cervantes' Facebook page and blog]
I too was a former student of his and just recently learned of his death. He had so much to teach and we had even more to learn. The only word that comes to mind is... grateful. How grateful I am to have come across this unique soul.
Posted by: z | January 23, 2010 at 04:26 AM