Legacy

When at the end of Mahagonny, Brecht writes in the libretto, "Nothing you can do can help a dead man," he is making a true statement. Yet it tells only half the story because there still is much that the dead can do for us.

When I put a Paul deLay CD on, or Little Walter, or Chris Connor, or Mahagonny for that matter, my experience of the music is not less because the performers, songwriters and/or composers are dead. Indeed, the opposite may be true: it may be heightened because I'm aware of the loss, that no more new music will be written (though newly released music may still come). The dead leave legacies, and these keep them alive for some of us. Friends and family have memories of shared experiences. Artists leave a body of work available to anyone.

Of course, the work must be made available. John Kennedy Toole was so despondent that he couldn't find a publisher for his novel A Confederacy of Dunces that he killed himself.

The book would never have been published if Toole's mother had not found the manuscript lying around the house and demanded Walker Percy read it. Percy, an author and college instructor at Loyola University New Orleans, reluctantly read through the manuscript, becoming more captivated with each page. Eventually, the book would go on to win the Pulitzer. Toole, who committed suicide in 1969 at age 32, did not live to receive the award. The original manuscript is currently at Tulane University in New Orleans.

That the novel got published is almost a fluke. How many mothers are so tenacious? How many fine books have not benefitted from such tenacity and are lost to us? Surely many. As Elvis used to say, that's the way the cookie crumbles.

My archive is important to me because it's my legacy. It offers the possibility of connection even after I'm gone. It offers the possibility that this favorite image and scene might be repeated:

One of the Composition-specific articles in this genre of radical sixties pedagogy, one which I have never been able to forget since the day I first read it in the dimly-lit stacks of my university's library, was written in 1967 by a young graduate teaching assistant at the University of Oregon, Charles Deemer. His article, "English Composition as a Happening," did what many of these articles did, but did it in a formally compelling way (the article is a collage of brief sound-bite snippets, alternating between Deemer's own poetic reflections-as-manifesto and quotations from Sontag, McLuhan, Dewey, Goodman, and others), and Deemer's ideas seemed to catalyze my own discontent with what passed for Composition during the 1980s."

The possibility of connection: you write something and twenty years later "in the dimly-lit stacks of my university's library," Geoffrey Sirc reads it, gets turned on, and goes on to carry the theme to book length. This the best thing about writing, producing work that turns others on so much that they respond the way Norman O. Brown would have it: "The proper response to poetry is not criticism but poetry." Not leaving a body of work for critics to argue about but for writers to be inspired by -- this is the true legacy of a writer, it seems to me. I've tasted a bit of it and it's wonderful. And I don't even have to be around for it to happen.

The dead can't be helped but they aren't exactly gone. Their legacy remains. I still hear Dick's laugh when I laugh or grin at things we used to laugh at together. I still am visited by images from my past. These seem as real to me as when they happened.

The dead remain with us.