A Last Letter to Theo

"Then go write a letter to my grey-haired mother,
An' tell her the cowboy that she loved has gone.
But please not one word of the man who had killed me.
Don't mention his name and his name will pass on."

Dear Theo,
I doubt we have very much in common except for what freemasonry calls the brotherhood of men. Reuters reported what your killer pronounced in court today. I have an 8X10 of that photo above on the wall next to the bed. A man needs an edge, and right now mine is well-honed. I wake up to look at that photo to remember that--like the Man in Black--we should all be indignant, pissed off, and angry to death at the injustice of the day. It's not a brand new emotion.

"There is nothing new under the sun," the Preacher said, "Vanity of Vanities." In the Hebrew tradition and downtown Smithfield, North Carolina, we call that 'Wisdom.'
Wisdom that one spends a lifetime reconciling and wrestling. Today, Theo, I don't feel significantly reconciled to the world. But that is not my job. It's been done.

My native orneriness would assume that being Dutch, you were some type of old-school, lowland, unreconstituted Atheist. That, baby, is why they call it Wisdom: if we could puzzle out the paradoxes, you would still be doing what you do. An unfortunate comparison in the press put you in the same sentence with 'big-boned'American documentary filmmaker. Were you still doing what you do (in some anabaptist, Rieperbahn, hash smoking cliche), I would be bitching about it.

I write today, Theo, to point out a line of language. Deconstruct it; fashion of it an ontology, slip inside the eternal groove between sound and sense. Don't mention his name and his name will pass on. Johnny and I and every xenophobic, American shorthair who knows his ass from his elbow, stand shoulder to shoulder for a chorus of "The Streets of Laredo" facing that courtroom with one finger on each hand up.

In the beginning was the Word, and in the end the word on a page is the only Balm of Gilead I have in the saddlebag.

I knew your name, because it called up an image of a tree in my mind, Theo Van Gogh. It reminded me of letters, correspondence. Don't mention his name and his name will pass on I sat still to read the words from the courtroom, but I did not remark for one heartbeat the man who said them, to your 'gray-haired mother' (if you want some American schmaltz). Right now I am full up to here with names pronounceable and unpronounceable from history and news of the world. I would need wings to get above the detritus of the names of killers to whom we cede dignity wrongly by even writing their designated handles in any form of symbol.

As far as I'm concerned, the deconstructed void--your aporia or a lacuna--swallows up those names if we never report, remark, remember or rewrite them. So Sweet F**A** to your judicial system who made certain that your killer could never vote again, Theo, or hold public office. Well, Radical she-ite, man: not outside the walls of the polis!? Formerly, we sat hunkered down against the wall of anything civilized, blind Tiresias pointing Antigone in the right direction solely by the stench of a rotten corpse.

You don't have to be the Preacher or Johnny Cash or Tiresias to catch the whiff of a rot that started your lowland, Theo. Smells like the Somme. Or maybe in the London tubestation at midnight, it smells like the long spent breath of some last pronounced word. That's all going away. In Harare or Portadown or Netanya or Basra, we will back to rocks and clubs (then fists) soon enough. Let Be be the finale of Seem. A dying cowboy knew well-enough how to consign a killer to nameless nothingness. Le neant, Theo. Back in the day, someone wrote that "God was the silent answer to the Last Question."

I believe that. I believe it when the Preacher writes it or Johnny sings it or I proclaim. But right now, I am either the dying young cowboy or his narrator, the keeper of his memory, the light to the darkness that rots in the heart of this age. I'm with the Dance Hall maidens in spirit for you, Theo. Consider that Johnny and I are tanking up on Stella Artois and walking out into that dark, dusty street to piss on the grave of every nameless son-of-a-bitch who got us where we are today.