This page last revised 4.20.24.

This memorial has been growing since 2013 and has a (mostly) reverse chronological order with newer posts put on top of earlier ones, so by reading it top to bottom, you are time-traveling into the past with more immediate aftermath reflections, mostly toward the end. Then there is a vast comments section after this very long In Memorium where you can hear from Jack’s friends and some others who didn’t know Jack but were moved by his story and poetry.  Contradicting that order are all the interspersed excerpts from emails Jack sent me and from his poems that date back as far as 2008. So there is no consistent order to this page which amounts to a giant Jack collage (I also made a giant Jack collage in 2013 on permanent display in my house in Boulder), but there was always something a bit transtemporal about Jack.

June 21, 2023 

This book (Parallel Journeys)  is dedicated to Jack and his full name and his poetry is mentioned in the text. Within 30 minutes of meeting Jack in 2008, he told me he was haunted by a story he was trying to write since high school, what he told me of the basis of the story was an exact parallel to the epic I’d been intending to write since 1978. In one of the last emails I got from Jack, he offered to help me complete it and thought it might help inspire him to complete his version. You will see his influence on the text.

The “modern” phase of working on Parallel Journeys began on the Autumn Equinox of 2013 and now on the Summer Solstice of 2023, also the 104th anniversary of my dad’s birth, the Audible version just went live so all forms of Parallel Journeys are now published.  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C8VQGHPT/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0…  You can also read for free on this website: https://zaporacle.com/parallel-journeys-start-page/

  March 4th of 2019—still have so much newly discovered Jack writings to add, just wrote  (see epilogue of March Forth!  A March Fourth Mutant Manifesto) a tribute to Jack who Marched Forth! from a dead-end job at a tax office eleven years ago today.

Here’s the epilogue to March Forth:

This manifesto was originally written and published on March 4th of 2006. On March 4th of 2008, a young man named Jack Spencer Savage, eighteen-years-old, about to turn nineteen, who knew nothing of my writings, had what he described as a nervous breakdown that would not allow him to report to his bleak and oppressive job at a tax office in a strip mall. Instead, he “Cast off the shackles of dead-end wage-slave bondage” and marched forth (unaware of the date pun at the time) to the Greyhound bus station and took the first out-bound bus to anywhere. A few days later he met me in Boulder, Colorado where within the first thirty minutes of an intense conversation that is still ongoing, he told me that since high school  he had been  haunted by the need to write a fantasy story about an elvish boy who lives in a forest and journeys (marches forth) into the city.  It was the precise parallel to my unfinished fantasy epic, Parallel Journeys, which has haunted me for decades.  

Jack, who marched forth to other worlds than these in the Spring of 2013, never got to finish his version of the story, but during an approximately two-year period of astonishing literary genius he created some of the most beautiful and haunting poems about the light and dark possibilities of the soul that you will ever encounter. 

See: Savage Reflections–the Poems of Jack Savage 

So, since this is a propitious day to embark on adventurous endeavors, as I would encourage you—I will state my parallel intention to seek to complete the story that both Jack and I have left unfinished. 

Best wishes on your parallel journey—March Forth!

June 12  of 2018: I promised a few months ago to add excerpts from the second archive of Jack’s writings I discovered, and I do have a lot of it digitized but got diverted from posting it. I’m going to gradually add some of it so the page can keep growing. Here’s the first installment, some journal entries and emails to me from 2011 with one brief email response from me.

Jack: Just saw the “Social Network.”  It seems the older I become, the more I am reminded that I live in a primitive, savage world, more resembling Planet of the Apes than the philosophically enlightened utopia I always imagined and hoped for. The idea of the false hierarchy is constantly put in my face; it is constantly reinforced. This is what defines human existence. And it only makes me feel more isolated and alienated from my fellow species than I already am. I am continually reminded that in order to make friends and acquire lovers, I must play this game, I must seek status in this animalistic world. Though it is not entirely a bad thing. This fact serves to hold my feet to the fire, to propel me to achieve, to keep striving.

10/2 I woke up this morning and the first thought that entered my head was what am I doing here. I can no longer answer that question well. It seems ridiculous that I am out here at all. There really is nothing keeping me here except my own stubbornness and fear of returning to Minneapolis, where I’ve made so many mistakes. I used to be able to answer that question, “What am I doing Here?” with assurance and confidence that I was in the correct climes, that my life here was most conducive to my souls needs and so forth. This, I can no longer do. There was just this sense of emptiness and meaninglessness as I looked about my room while laying in bed. It just does not make any sense, me being here.

I also have somewhat ominous feelings about going back to school in Minnesota. Minnesota is where I am leaning but, I am not yet walking on firm ground with that.

I am 21

10/5 I am feeling better. I’ve returned to my duties more assiduously than in recent months. Although it is mostly just typing already written documents. The reading of Novels seems to be particularly important now. When I was in Canada, I read a biography of him and feel like he and I are very similar people, though I hope my life is not as his was, filled with sorrow, isolation and despair.

It occurred to me today that so much of life is about breaking the vicious cycles that we fall into. Whether it’s lethargy, alcoholism, or any addiction, to just refuse once or twice to hold up that status quo, so much good can come. Diet is of critical importance, and I am glad I am vegan. It just instills a greater sense of purity as you go about your day.

I did an I Ching reading and had some very positive results.  It was 43 turning into 1, it was all about breaking through and making energetic progress in the good. It advised personal vigilance as well as tender receptivity to outside impressions and vigorous self-examination.

Jonathan’s niece is in town, so I have been spending some time with her. She’s an interesting girl but strange, draws on herself, wears strange clothes, etc. Though I feel like we get along quite well. I invited her along on some errands I had to run yesterday, and she acquiesced. Though we are not great friends, nor lovers, there is such a profound difference in life when you have a friend. Someone to accompany you, someone to call if you want, someone to sit a talk with. My god I was biking during this outing, thinking of this and it nearly brought me to tears. This has been the state of my life in Boulder since I arrived. My god it just made ever more clear the state of my life here, it is insane. I am 21 years old and I don’t have a life in the city I live in.….

Note added 4.19.24: A tragic irony is that the niece of mine Jack is referring to, Bernadette Salem, like Jack, was born in 1989. Late in 2023, she took her life. At the funeral in Brooklyn, across from her grave were old gravestones of members of  a family with the last name, “Savage.” There are three suicides in my life. My cousin, David Fishman, who took his life in 1989, and Jack and Bernadette were both born in 1989.

Perhaps this experience of solitude is essential for some later challenge, though at times it feels on the verge of being unendurable.

There is still no clarity.

Depression and sorrow are still with me. I am by no means paralyzed, but at times this prevailing sense of sadness washes over me like a wave, and I cannot do anything about it.

Not long ago, Jonathan said that when you are mistreating or ignoring your feminine side, it will still control you, but it will control you with moods. I would like to hear him elaborate on that notion because perhaps that’s the mechanism operating in me. Although I don’t see myself as neglecting the feminine. Rather, it seems I have an unhappy inner child and inner anima because of my life, not because of anything I am explicitly doing or repressing. In either case, I am tired of being brokenhearted and alone. I am just so tired of it.  Of course, I would not do that, but even the fact that I feel that way and that I could, it is just so disenchanting. And even if I am not paralyzed or depressed by any outward standard, the thing is, I don’t have much energy, even though I am young, and I don’t have much stimulation. Even extracting this record of my days has been a challenge.

I am going through a pretty serious revival of interest in Leonard Cohen, yet again. There is just something about the man that deeply speaks to me, something about him that I love. . . I still am riddled with the same urge to have an audience, even a small audience. I wish I had at least some outside encouragement to do my work. This is also another reason I deeply want a hermetic circle, or group of friends, so we can share our endeavors with one another and make suggestions and so forth.

Everyone I talk with says these years are supposed to be exciting and fun. I really ought to make so(me) changes, because I haven’t been experiencing that. I really wish this time of my life was fun. I’ve got to make big changes in my life.

10/24

I am afraid that I am bound to lose. being on the outside, coming close to achieving but just missing the mark, these have been themes in my life….

(tells story of a great disappointment in love when a friend got the girl he aspired to)

Beginning when I was 16, and to this day I remember lying in bed that night, in tears, falling into darkness, it was that night I took up smoking, I decided I would pursue… drinking. This episode left a very deep mark on me, which I can still feel ever so slightly even today. And it was this really, that led me on the course of my life which I am still living out. And this episode really seems to me now as a signature moment for my adult life. Capable of love, finding love, having it reciprocated only to  realize that I missed just barely, and everything I thought I had was slipping away from my grasp, that I was alone, forsaken, and cold. …  I am afraid that I am bound to live this fate, while others go about in success.

Still there are moments of grace.

Occasionally life is illuminated, there is clarity, the troubles which beset me are visible in another light. Last night after work, I came home and was sitting in my chair drinking red wine, listening to music and something was lifted from me for a moment. I realized that throughout all my adult life I have actively retreated from the masses, I have always forced myself, sometimes violently into situations of solitude. When I was younger, I told myself I did not want roommates or neighbors nearby because I did not want others to hear me sing. I was shy about my voice. Looking back on all that it seems like a cosmic metaphor for me dancing with my soul. But these moments of grace are only moments, and necessarily cannot be more than that. Its best to let them come and let them go, and while they are here, to observe them with a keen eye. Later these little revelations can instill tranquility when recollected.

I have often felt very, very ambivalent about myself being sensitive. In one way, it makes me more appreciative of beauty, of art and people and so forth and it also allows me to experience life more vividly. But I feel it is this same quality which is so intricately entwined with my essence as a human being on earth, is what sets me apart from my peers; what makes me unwanted by many people and rejected by some girls. It is this quality that makes me feel different. I have often felt like I  would be better off as a more of a brute, and have even wished it and sought to expunge these sensitivities. Simultaneously, though I understand that life is constantly progressing, and that the way I experience life now and the actions it leads me to, will perhaps someday take me to a more beautiful plateau than a more ordinary, insensitive person. At least this is what I hope. I have been meaning to send you an email, about your research on NDE’s.  Since I’ve been back, I spend more time with people who, though not insensitive, are not really spiritual; e.g., they believe our bodies are ourselves and when we die we are in oblivion. Though this is not entirely the way I experience life, I find that it influences me being around that sort of mentality so often. I am afraid that death is oblivion. More than this I am afraid that there are certain lifestyles that allow you to cross the horizon of death fully enact and other lifestyles that ultimately destroy you entirely. I am afraid, in other words, that there is something that I am not doing which will prevent me from crossing the great divide. I am also afraid that all of my spirituality is merely a comfort created by myself to ease myself and protect myself from a more terrifying reality

On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 7:10 PM, jonathan zap <[email protected]> wrote:

The irony of spiritual living is that you become more sensitive and subtle. Therefore, you become intolerant of the coarse. There is not much choice in this. If you want to catch the subtle things in life, then you must become refined yourself. But the coarser things will then accumulate all the more quickly. A coarse sieve in a rushing stream will hold back only debris and large rocks. A fine mesh will catch smaller things, but it will also retain the large…  —modern Taoist Sage, Deng Ming Tao

So this is the downside of being sensitive and empathic. The default coarseness of life is far more abrasive. A coarse person may be better adapted to thrive in a coarse world. My website generated the above quote when I was struggling to deal with the TV being on while working the front desk.

On April 12th of 2017, I discovered a second (and last) giant cache of Jack’s writings as I did a final sort of a storage unit I had in Boulder for 21 years but just closed out, finally moving all contents worth saving to the house I now own in Boulder.

Some of these new writings have given me a key to a much deeper understanding of Jack’s poems.

I intend to post some of this newly discovered content, including a couple of finished visionary poems I never saw before, as soon as possible.

I would also like to write out this deeper understanding and add it to: Savage Reflections—the Poems of Jack Savage.

I wrote “would like to” instead of “intend to” because I also realized the unlikelihood that I will find the time and energy (needed for other long- term writing projects underway) to write out the sixty or so pages it would take to do even a decent job of turning this interpretation into text.

 Anyone who was close to Jack or is close to Jack, should feel free to contact me, especially if they are coming to Boulder for any reason. [email protected]

Note added in December of 2015: A few days ago, I discovered a gigantic cache of Jack’s writings in a neglected corner of my storage unit. I had completely forgotten that these existed. At some point, Jack must have asked me to store these for him, and I put them away without looking at them. He never asked for them back. When he returned to Boulder with his brother to pick up his stuff from the Boulder International Hostel in January of 2011, there was plenty of room in the family car for these, but he never asked for them, and I had already forgotten. He also never asked for them back in the remaining 28 months of his life. I’ve been talking recently to a few of Jack’s closest friends to figure out what to do with these extremely intimate, revealing, and often beautifully evocative documents because some people would be hurt by what’s in them and not in them. There are poems not included in his poetry page, numerous alternate versions of some of them, and voluminous journal writings that reveal a great deal about what was troubling him and what he found inspiring. It took me several hours to read all of it so there must be 20,000 words or so. It’s also possible that I may find more. During the years I spent with Jack, he was in a writing phase, sometimes working hours a day. I remember that he had a whole stack of folders organized by subject that he showed me often, and some of the writings look like the contents of a couple of those folders, so I wonder if the rest of the stack might be somewhere else in storage. There are also some insightful and well-written passages on his approach to poetry and relating to the creative muse that I will add to his poetry page. I was also startled to find that there were many pages where my handwriting was interspersed with Jack’s –Socratic dialogue between us in written form, which I had no idea that Jack had saved. There are also many pages of notes that Jack took of things I taught him and ideas from our talks, etc.  I had completely forgotten that Jack often took notes during our intense conversations.

 While talking to Eli yesterday, it occurred to me that maybe the best way to handle this archive is to post this note about its existence on this page where others who knew Jack may return. Anyone close to Jack should feel free to contact me about the archive to help me figure out what to do with it. I know that some have writings of Jack from the last year or two of his life that I haven’t seen, and I would like to trade access so that if there are late poems or other excerpts that would be appropriate to post here or on his poetry page that can be made to happen. I would be willing to come to Minneapolis to share the archive and see handwritten documents others have (since none of us are probably willing to trust such things to the mail and might prefer to handle originals rather than digital artifacts). Any interested party close to Jack should feel free to contact me: [email protected] As I go through the archive, I will update this page and the poetry page with excerpts that seem appropriate to make public, so please check back.  In general, it seems like Jack has more to say, and new things about him keep coming up.

Note added 4.19.24–A few years ago, Jack’s sister Laura visited me in Boulder and took photos of many archive items. She also shared images of some Jack journals I’d never seen including some very late poems but I have yet to post any of that content here.

Yesterday, Jack’s friend, Nora, after hearing about the archive, said Jack had been greatly on her mind the last few days. I also noticed that “Elk” left the first new message to this page (by anyone). e.  I responded to Nora:

Jack has seemed extremely present, especially the last few days for me. I remarked on that yesterday afternoon to Eli, then later last night I invited Sierra, the partner of my closest friend Daniel (who was also close with Jack and their two boys, my godsons Indigo and Stryder  also met Jack who was their baby sitter for a while.) When Sierra saw the giant collage mural I made in honor of Jack, she asked cheerfully, “How is he?” Daniel had never told her about the suicide. I was struck by the present tense of her question since I had been remarking about how “present tense” (I used that specific phrase) Jack seemed earlier in the day.

I hope to hear from others who are also still learning new things about Jack. Please check back here and on Jack’s poetry page for further updates. If you scroll down to the bottom of this memorial page, just past the infinity sign, you’ll see where I’ve started to post excerpts of the “lost archive.” It begins with a touching holiday mediation, timely for anyone reading this in December.

Jack Memorial Altar —Leaves of Grass book he gave me, the glowing green tortoise represents gradual progress on the spiritual path

As the photos on this page illustrate, Jack was a young man of many moods. Whatever side of him he showed you, there were always other sides. Luckily, Jack was more gracious and patient than most of my friends with my ever-present camera and my endless picture taking.

See two videos I made of Jack at age 21 that really capture his essence and the immense charm and wit of his mercurial personality: https://plus.google.com/+Zaporacle/posts/

Jack, in a Boulder Canyon

Among other talents, Jack was a brilliant poet. After spending more time with the poems the last few days, I believe Jack was, and is, one of the greatest poetic voices of his generation. It’s not that I’ve read so many millennial generation poets, it’s a general feeling I have based on the power with which Jack’s poetic voice is the voice of the soul. Sometimes this poetic voice is celebratory, at other times it is struggling and even tormented. But it is always profound, authentic, accessible, and deeply present to the reader. Jack’s voice has a presence, an emotional immediacy and intimacy with a sympathetic reader that is comparable to Walt Whitman, who was Jack’s greatest poetic inspiration (Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan were huge influences as well). Jack’s poems, even the ones that he wrote when he was 19, do not seem like an awkward, adolescent attempt at being Whitmanesque. They are alike because both poets are voices of the soul. To experience these poems is an opportunity to hear the voice of the soul, a voice that gets drowned out by the noisy bustle and haste of modern life.

The voice of the soul is not always happy. It can experience glorious ecstasies and transcendence–Jack’s poems are filled with jeweled and glowing examples of this sort of divine exuberance. But the voice of the soul can also be the voice of the dark night of the soul, and Jack had his share of those to tell of too. As he puts it, “And I am divine in my worst hour as much as I am in my best.” When you read these poems, draw close to them, sit across from his voice with a glass of wine or tea, it will be a very deep and intimate conversation

For a while, Jack had a section on this website called “Savage Reflections,” which he allowed me to build for him with some of his best poems. Later Jack asked me to take it down, but I kept all the poems. I think the unexpected request to take down the Savage Reflections online collection was one of the first formal statements Jack made of withdrawing from life. At first, I posted the poems here, but when I finished, I found that his poems totaled more than 12,000 words and realized they should really be on their own page, which you can find here: Savage Reflections—The Poetry of Jack Savage.

Once again, the quality of the poems is outstanding, and so many of his lines are visionary and haunting. The poems reflect the exuberant ecstatic heights of the soul as well as its suicidal depths. If you read his poetry collection, you will see into some of his deepest thoughts and hidden selves. I left just a couple of his poems in here.

Like the poetry page, this is a living document with new comments being added and new content being discovered. So check back in the future to see additions.

One of the first things Jack told me was that he had a history of lashing out at people he loved. So if Jack loved you, you probably experienced that at some point (or at many points)–those impulses  came from Jack at moments of painful inner conflict and torment. If Jack lashed out at you, it probably meant that he felt safe with you and knew  there was a bond that could not be broken. The empathic and compassionate side of Jack was also very real and allowed him (at times) to peer deeply and appreciatively into people. But when Jack was in a state of inner torment, that same capacity for relatedness became an instinct to find out your deepest vulnerabilities and go after them. In his moments of inner chaos, Jack may have wanted others to feel what he was feeling, and so he felt compelled to  access the most vulnerable parts that we might have under control at the moment but that he didn’t. Don’t hold onto those moments or take them personally. To love a tormented soul is to sometimes be tormented. While Jack is still divine in the states in which he was eclipsed, hold onto the authentically radiant moments where Jack expressed his deeper self, the loving, playful, soulful, and creative Jack (that also comes across in his poems and in some of the photos).

A few years ago, I wrote a brief document called Defying the Dragons of Doubt, which was about a difficult evening of trying to counsel Jack during a dark night of the soul. Here’s the most relevant excerpt:

A friend was struggling with doubts about the value of life and even talked about suicide. While I tried to counsel him and point out aspects of the glass that were at least half full in his life and in mine, he lashed out at points of vulnerability in me, aspects of my life where I am most likely to have doubts and insecurities. The doubts that he directed at me had the sharpness that can only come from someone who knows you well and who can, for example, quote private doubts expressed in confidence to them by other people you care about. At times the onslaught of negativity had me on the ropes and raised Dragons of Doubt in me. But I also realized that I was counseling a soul in torment, and I worked to regain my center, to stay calm and not take the remarks personally, and to be a compassionate presence as my friend struggled with his doubts and inner demons. As I regained my center, the doubts were directed less at me and more at life in general, and he became quieter– still angry and defiant of the cosmos but not quite as tormented. When he left my house, it was close to midnight. But even after he was gone, the sulfurous atmosphere of doubt we’d wrestled with lingered, and I doubted if I had done any good and if it was worth it for me to have attempted to help.”

Jack has no more barbs to throw at any of us. Whatever doubts Jack raised about himself or others, whatever bitter thoughts or feelings he may have stirred up, should now be laid to rest. We need to be at peace with Jack and forgive him for any painful things he did while in states of inner torment.

The photo above (and just below) is of Jack with his backpack and guitar about to go off on an adventure. I put that image on top because I feel it is best for Jack to hold to the image of him at his best–loving, adventurous, talented, brilliant, creative and funny.

Once again, there is a comments section below. Feel free to share any feelings you have about Jack’s passing and any memories or reflections about him.

In a college application I was helping Jack with, he wrote about what writing poetry meant to him. Here’s the rough draft of what he wrote and sent me in an email dated 12/3/09:

Writing Poetry has been a hallmark of my adult life. When I began reading Walt Whitman at the age of fifteen, I felt a profound connection and union with the words on those pages. Leaves of Grass introduced me to a world of much broader horizons and much greater depth. While discovering Leaves of Grass I simultaneously became aware of a great river within me; that urge to create. Ever since that time my studies of the great poetic and literary minds of the past has been continually expanding, and so too has the scope of my understanding, as well as the sense of nourishment I derive from writing. Yet often times I resent this urge to create. When I spend my time, many hours, devoted to the creation of art, working with a diligent work ethic a question frequently arises “what good will come of this” “who will experience this” etc… Yet I have come to the conclusion that in order to live a fulfilling life, you cannot resist the currents within you.

Amidst my Catastrophe

by Jack Savage (first published June 14, 2011)

Amidst my catastrophe

(The one my hands crave)

Among the ruins of my loss

Inside the windowless chambers of my awful defeat

I will do this as long as I live

Until my living changes

The beautiful ones,

The mean spirited ones too

I’ll learn to live and love among them

Living sweetly,

Living true.

I’ll live alongside the unrelenting horror of this chaos

Knowing the fires of my pain

I’ll let myself be known to those who love me

As well as those who don’t

Earnestly, nobly

And I’ll struggle to love with a heart that’s true

And give them all my love mercifully

Mercifully as I’ve given the multitudes of it to you.

Inside this world

Its minor annoyances, fiendish desires and fortresses of hate

Amidst my catastrophe

(the one my hands crave)

Among the ruins of my loss

Inside the windowless chambers of my awful defeat

I will do this as long as I live

Until living changes

And I will let it be a part of me

Until my letting emancipates me.

Free from slavery,

Free from strength,

Free from the petty,

Free from rank,

Free as the gracious air

Graciously, reverently, humbly,

So graciously, all for you.

Jack (and the one above with the glass bricks) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art cafeteria in NYC

The Naive Urgency of Man

by Jack Savage (first published June 16, 2011)

My old life was a sanctuary

Where every flower grew

And love, she was my mistress

In everything I’d do.

All roads were open then,

Sprawling across the land.

I destroyed that monastery

With the naive urgency of man

Jack, in a Boulder canyon

_______________________________________

This is the rough draft of a college application essay Jack sent me for editing in an email dated 12/3/09. I haven’t been able to find the finished draft unfortunately.

Since leaving university originally I have undergone a great many experiences. When I first left I tried my hand at the more traditional fields of work, taking employment in a tax office as a secretary and accountant’s assistant. After the tax season had ended, I decided it was time for me to leave my home and venture into the great wide world. And since my departure, my education has truly begun. For a great many months I devoted all of my energies to the writing and studying of poetry, which I realize is a dead art. Sometimes this feels like a fruitless labour as poetry is so neglected in the 21st century. Yet this it is one of the most nourishing forms of art I have found. But this is not the extent of my education. I have further examined literature in a broader sense, including traditional American and classical world literature. I find the Russians and French of particular excellence. In addition to my literary endeavors, I have delved very deeply into the field of psychology. I have read the foundational writings of Carl Jung and more contemporary Jungian perspectives. I have grown most fascinated with this subject as it so directly relates and dictates human life. Furthermore, I have studied various world religions, including Zen Buddhism, mystic Christianity, and Islam. This last religion, Islam, is of particular interest as, for the past while, I have been working for a non-profit organization called the Women’s Assistance Fund, which provides refuge for abused women in the Middle East who have been subjugated as a result of Islamic fundamentalism. All these subjects have captivated me since my leaving university. But what is perhaps most important is the studying I have done on myself. I have examined with a rigorous eye the inner workings of my own psyche and probed into the integral question of “what is my true will?” I have come to understand what are my deepest concerns and truest interests. For many years of my life, pervading all situations, both solitary and socially, I found myself within a hazy fog. I was unconscious of the forces at work within me, unaware of the contents of my subconscious, and unaware of the profound complexity of simple living. Since leaving university, after having immersed myself for many years in the unconscious, allowing myself to be animated by them, I have come to identify the many forces at work inside of me and inside of people generally. In this way I have strengthened myself and in increasing my field of awareness, have increased my own free will. In short the time spent away from university was spent lifting the fog of my life, thereby allowing myself a greater clarity of vision.

Jack, showing me some poetry on a hike in Boulder

Jack, with one of his favorite books of poetry

Jack with his mom as we walked through the CU campus

Jack, climbing in Boulder

—————————————————————-

When someone leaves in this way, there is always guilt and a feeling of unfinished business, a wish to have tried to do or say something more than what we did. I believe that Jack’s soul found too much alienation and torment in this life but that he is still journeying and still able to benefit from our love. I know that many of Jack’s friends and relations don’t believe in the survival of the soul, and efforts I’ve made in the past to talk to at least one of them on that subject didn’t go very well. But for those who wish to consider the strong evidence that consciousness survives the body, I respectfully offer the following: Life Lessons from the Living Dead.

The unfinished thoughts and prayers we have for Jack, I believe, may still reach him. When I learned about his disappearance this morning (an hour or so before I learned about his passing) I wrote him the following email. The subject heading was “Praying for You.” I will paste it here and hope that others who have messages for Jack or remembrances of him will leave them in the comments section below.

Praying for You

Hey Jack,

I’ve been respecting the boundary of no contact you’ve set up—which has been very difficult for me—I think about you all the time and wish we were still in touch. I’m only breaking the boundary because Eli contacted me, and I know about the disappearance and some of the recent events.

 I almost broke the silence twice in the last two weeks or so. Once, when I had a powerful dream about you that showed you in a state of deep suffering… That was 2-3 weeks ago. The other time was only two or three days ago when I woke up feeling deeply concerned.

 As I said when you cut off contact, I love you and will always love you. You can call me anytime. If you are wandering the country, you can find a safe haven here in Boulder.

 I don’t know what I can say that will be of any help to you. I think you are a highly worthwhile and talented person that can come out of this. Your enemy is not life or the people around you but fixed ideas you sometimes form about others, life, and yourself, and this is why, I think, you have sometimes sought self-destruction—you are trying to go after the source of the problem (dark obsessions that distort your view of life). But to go after that darkness through self-destructive impulse is to fight dark obsession with even darker obsession. The only thing that can really fight it is self-love, and perhaps that is something that will only rekindle when you have really hit bottom. It is something you may be searching for through many dark nights of the soul.

Please get back in touch. Whatever flaws you’ve found in me, and of course there are many, I’ve always, however imperfectly, loved you and wanted you to find the wholeness you are searching for. You always have a friend here and I hope and pray you can come through the dark night of the soul and rediscover yourself.

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This is still what I pray for. I pray that Jack will find the wholeness and fulfillment that often eluded him in this lifetime in the next phase of his journey. I’m probably always going to wonder if I should have tried to reach out after the two recent dreams. I wanted to, but I also felt I should respect the space that Jack had asked for and that I had promised to respect.

The Lost Archive

(excerpts)

Painting by Nathan Zap, 1951

December 1st, 2015  (I’m just starting to add excerpts so check back for more)

In journals from late 2008, which reflect many inner struggles, there are also (as in so many of Jack’s writings) passages of lyrical appreciation.  This one is seasonally appropriate and quite moving. I’ll start with an image of Jack’s handwritten page and then transcribe. I’m taking the liberty of correcting a few minor misspellings and punctuation issues. In one case here, and in any future instances where I have trouble deciphering his handwriting, I will put a question mark after my best guess of what word he meant or a _____? if I’m not sure at all.

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That two weeks in winter right before Christmas and stretching until after the new year has been ingrained in every child’s mind as perhaps the greatest two weeks of all. A long, long, absence from the prison term, them being unwilling prisoners of education. Days to sleep, and the sleep on those winter days is the most luscious and beautiful. Waking to crystal frost clinging diligently to the window with refractions of sunlight bursting through being refracted into magnificent colors splayed across the room subtly. Hearing the wind hiss, taunting you, believing you will be sulking outside into as usual? ah but then pulling that enormous quilt up to your chin and rubbing that smiling face into the pillow and being gently wrapped in slumber. It is quite simply wonderful. And atop this celebration, feasts, gifts. The reunion of family around large candle-lit banquets, the cheering and anticipation of the new year awaiting.

And this effect, this thought of these weeks as the all-time greatest most blissful weeks has a lasting quality for most of one’s life. In spite of the eternally overcast skies and blistering air folks get together to smile and laugh. Friends and family of old. Everyone was a-coming home to celebrate together. And so in spite [of] worried beehive inside my mind, I consoled myself with these thoughts, the thoughts that really everything was going to be alright, that as long as I didn’t forget to love the ones I loved and sit with them contentedly in simple conversation things would turn out OK. Looking back now it wasn’t so bad.

So I thought about all the friends I had here, and wanted to see them, to have a great reunion…

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Many poignant journal entries, poems, and occasional class notes in a thick spiral notebook that Jack brought with him to the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg both times he went there—-when he was 18 and then after dropping out for a while when he was 19. No entries in this notebook or elsewhere are dated, and rather than filling the notebook page-by-page in a characteristic way, he apparently picked blank pages at random. For me, the lack of linearity and dating adds to the feeling of timelessness and the sense that I’m reading letters from the soul, and not from a chronologically-bound ego. The consistent nonorder is a precise reflection of Jack, someone who could not live comfortably bound to a schedule or long-term commitment but was relentlessly driven by the promptings of his restless soul.

The following poem comes from this spiral notebook overflowing with messages from Jack’s restless soul. It was probably written in Winnipeg when he was eighteen or nineteen. It looks like it was tossed off in one take, yet, for me at least, it is a deceptively simple, soulful masterpiece.

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Sometimes I feel a tug

pulling me forwards

My feet stumbling over on another

blindly, dumbly

This tug, this transient, ambiguous

all-pervading tug

Unbiased and unconcerned

Pulls me

and you too

Many times I find myself confused, scared,

a squirrel with his precious acorns

Sitting frightened in his nest,

heart pumping, eyes jumping

When all the while this tiny

little see-through striving

is pulling me along

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A poetic journal entry on restless longing from the same spiral notebook:

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I can’t quite say why I left.

Nor can I say what I was looking for or have been looking for.

And surely I can not know if I have found it. I suppose I was just thirsting for drink from a new well. All my life I have felt moved and dictated, at least to some degree, by outside forces. Most all my life I have more or less walked ground pounded down by many feet and known well by many people. I have lived on a certain timeline which is the norm for most people but can so often be so unsatisfying. Tongues controlled by gossip, feet aimed at fruitless ends, shallow mindedness.

I wanted to live more completely and hear more stories and see other lives. I wanted to see the vast land which is my country as she is. I wanted to touch the world and feel it as it is not with a glove or protection. And I wanted freedom, obligations no more than what is necessary to sustain life, I wanted to breath this air that surrounds every body and object and let the wonder of this land sink into me, on some bustling Chicago street during a business day, or some warm and lazy Memphis afternoon or the crisp inhale of mountain air when only the immense collection of stars are your company. To sing with my voice regardless of the idle carelessness of them dining at that most expensive restaurant, I wanted absolute freedom, I wanted my brain to cease trembling.

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Reading an old collection

of poems

by a poet long gone

from a generation long past

I sit and wonder

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The references in this poem, tossed off in one take,  tell us that it was written when Jack was 19 and living in Winnipeg in an apartment.

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These are the words

I am writing on this empty night

in this empty apartment

which echoes

when I clap my hands

these are the words

I am writing

alone

in this lonely city

blustery and wind swept

ancient and forgotten

I cannot disappear into death

when knights of hazard

strike to avenge lost battles

and so I write

words like this

on nights like this

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Another page from the spiral, another one-take poem from a lonely night in Winnipeg. There was one word I couldn’t quite make out.

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I

The sunlight pours in

Soaring through the sky

Vast impassable (loving?)

Grandfather continues to use

his buttons while

meantime the curtains are closed

II

Whose hands are these

and when can I command

their strength

Whose blood pumps through

the arteries

What are these demands

and why

I am a captive

III

On a night like this

alone and sitting

in the absence of

my previous life

here old

forgotten city

where I walk

all night and all day

along its desolate

streets

what led me here

what led me astray

from my golden garden

of eden

No it doesn’t matter

and would be impossible to trace

anyway

my feet are aimed constantly

at the horizon

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Another tossed off Winnipeg poem that describes smoking a cigarette while taking a bath. There are three stranded lines Jack left in the upper right-hand corner of the page, with no lines to indicate if he wanted them inserted into the poem anywhere:

Vaporous mist rising from this

Pavilion of

infinitely clear pure water

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There is

only this instant

soaking deep in these

mercurial steaming waters

steeping in this molten

liquid wrapping me

it will soon exhaust itself and cool

exhaling a cloud of hypnotic smoke

silk, gliding, as on ice, carelessly off the tip

of this cigarette

dispersing like fireflies into the

solid air

of this still,

illuminated apartment

occasionally reading

a collection of writings

from a poet

many years dead

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 A page of song lyrics that appear to be a Jack variation of a song by Blind Boy Fuller http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=155865 Definitely the sort of thing he would have played on his guitar and sung.

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Keep on truckin’ baby

truckin’ my blues away

Keep on truckin’ baby

truck both night and day

Reckon what the elephant

Said to the cat

got a belly full of booze

I’m tight like that

Keep on truckin’ mama

truckin’ my blues way

I mean

truckin’ my blues away

Keep on truckin’ mama

truckin’ both night and day

Keep on truckin’ mama

truckin’ my blues away

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One notebook is filled with poetry, much of it drafts of what is already published on his poetry page. The contents appear to have been written between 2008 and 2010. He left some interesting comments here and there on his approach to poetry.

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 Poetry is precise dealing with raw content, employing metaphor and symbol and subconscious association to depict, illustrate and portray life. It is a manifestation of ones own personal world. My poetry comes from deep self-reflection, from journeying deeply inward and howling out what I find to examine it in clear light.

Poetry should have vitality, it should come alive and transfer, only by intuition, something powerful.

Poetry is like harnessing the wind.

Have the courage to let go, let things go release, relax.

Free from abstraction!

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There are a number of beautifully written travelogues in the archives that begin with Jack reflecting on his restlessness and why he had to leave situations that he found too confining. Here’s an example:

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I had left school for inarticulate reasons in search of vague dreams. The kind which were like butterflies on a cool spring afternoon, the kind which are dazzling and enchanting but impossible to pin down or capture, regardless of the persistence of the enchanter. All my  life, my carefree and romantic ideals of how life should be lived free and easy were cast off as were childishness and irresponsibility which would be cured with maturity and commitment. Growing up through these traits proved quite challenging to me…  (omitting a sentence here that wouldn’t be appropriate to post–J.Z.)

A great deal of my life I felt a heavy guilt with my lack of bourgeois ambition or desire to fulfill the life style which a good well-rounded college education will provide. But time and time again the standards to which I was to live my life stifled all the life out of me and left me, lifeless. The plain and undeniable voice of practicality never was able to illuminate a clear and pleasant path to me despite all the reassurance of everything I was supposed to value in life. And because of this I was deemed a fool, mentally unfit, and even mentally ill. No, it’s not easy choosing to go your own way, to cast aside your upbringing but neither is living a life which would above all hold you captive in a castle of your own stagnation locked in by walls of inescapable and entirely too sensible security. And it took a great long while of conflict with my self to realize that in the face of an unforgiving and mechanical world I have no other choice than to follow my own feet. Regardless of what everyone else will deem it, it is the only law that I understand and the only law I can follow. Though this is easy to speak it is much more difficult to truly live out. Facing resistance at nearly every turn, in an infinite number of situations and finding wills? which seek to destroy it at every corner of the earth. It is difficult in a world with infinite regulations, unwritten standards, and precise formats to which each being is supposed to subscribe and retain as their fundamental grounding. To be your own man. The only true, pure, and meaningful life is the one which seeks its own roads and refines constantly its individual and unique doctrine. So against all resistance I had chosen to leave university… (omitting a few words—JZ) So rather than live in a sate of eternal purgatory with absolutely no lust or zest for life I chose to leave.

To find all the grandest adventures that had always lived in my mind. To search for far off exotic places to sink into my eyes, to dance on new grounds, to breathe new air, exhale new ideas and back in the warm wondrous story this world is always setting forth.

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At some point in most of these travelogues, Jack seems to come to the realization that Emerson did in the 19th Century: “The problem with traveling is that you take yourself with you.” No matter how much you keep moving, you can’t outrun inner demons. Jack and I talked about this at length, especially when I helped him with a paper he wrote (while he was in school in Winnipeg) about the American myth of going on the road as a secular pilgrimage and rite of initiation. Jack was clearly trying to write his own version of the on-the-road novel, and the archives are filled with numerous promising attempts at that, with profound meditations on travel as well as brilliantly descriptive scenes with well-rendered, memorable characters and a poet and songwriter’s acute ear for idiomatic dialogue.

Jack always framed his travel as a departure from a mundane, confining world. Sometimes, that departure is depicted as an ecstatic call to adventure, and other times, as a self-imposed exile from what Jack saw as a shameful failure to adapt or thrive. In that vein, he would refer to himself (and you see this in a number of the poems) as  “defeated.”

Although it might be easy to see these departures and restless travels as “dysfunctional,” and in darker moods Jack sometimes saw them that way, I think it is also legitimate to see them as classic expressions of the visionary artist who cannot find peace or an ability to thrive in the mundane world. Many of Jack’s comments remind me of parallel sentiments expressed by William Blake, “I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” Other prophets and visionaries say similar things:  If you give birth to the genius within you, it will free you. If you do not give birth to the genius within you, it will destroy you. — Jesus, The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas

Jung said something with eerie parallels to what Jack wrote above in a passage that I encountered through a stunning synchronicity twenty years ago when I made the decision to leave my teaching career and go on the road. I wrote about this in an essay on creativity, The Path of the Numinous—Living and Working with the Creative Muse. Although this might seem like I am indulging too much of my own thoughts and words, I am trying to make a point that could help you to help the next struggling young visionary you might meet. I have been the mentor to young visionaries both before and after Jack, and the most classic and difficult problem to navigate is the need to help them find a practical, viable adaptation to life and the simultaneous need not to clip their wings and to encourage them to pursue their visions no matter how unlikely that pursuit is to help them make a living. I have been on both sides of the equation myself—as the one giving advice and as the one needing it. Here’s the excerpt:

On June 17 of 1995, I went on the road, officially taking an approved year’s leave of absence from teaching. The decision wasn’t irreversible at that point; I still had about ten months to decide if I was coming back. Despite all the messages from the muse, this was no easy decision, as I had a tenured teaching job in the highest-paying county for teachers in the United States, where I made close to 60K a year (quite a lot for a relatively young school teacher in 1995) and was provided with health insurance, an excellent pension plan, etc. My parents and every voice of middle-class common sense and practicality were urging me to return to the economic security of a profession I once loved.

I had been on the road for ten months when the school district called, pressing me for a decision. I was traveling with some young friends with whom I had done volunteer work at a Navajo reservation near Big Mountain, Arizona. The little bit of money I had from cashing out my retirement fund had long since been exhausted, and I had been living close to the edge. We were camped out in a mesa near Sedona, Arizona, and the morning had arrived in which the decision had to be made. With my friend Jordie as a witness, I did an I Ching reading that seemed to strongly support leaving the teaching job. As I was finishing the reading, another member of the group I was traveling with, Seth, who knew nothing about the decision I was facing, came over to show me a Jung quote he had just encountered in a book on mountain climbing. The quote turned out to be stunningly relevant. This was the second time in my life when it felt like Jung had stepped forward as a spiritual grandfather to give me his blessing. Here is what Seth read to me:

The fact that many a man going his own way ends in ruin means nothing, he must obey his own law as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths. There are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice where upon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices. ‘You are no different from anybody else,’ they will chorus. There is no such thing, or if there is such a thing it is immediately branded as morbid. He is at once set apart, isolated as he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within. ‘His own law,’ everybody will say, but he knows better, it is the law.

The only meaningful life is the life that strives for the individual realization, absolute and unconditional, of its own particular plan. To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being, he has failed to realize his life’s meaning. The undiscovered being within us is a living part of the psyche. Classical Chinese philosophy names the interior way Tao, and likened it to a flow of water that moves irresistibly towards its goal. To rest in Tao means fulfillment, wholeness, one’s destination reached, one’s mission done, the beginning, end in perfect realization, the meaning of existence unique in all things. —C.G. Jung

 (end of excerpt from The Path of the Numinous..)

But in fairness to those, like my parents, who emphasized practical adaptation, and pursuit of vision in leisure, it was easier for Jung to go off the rails and stop seeing patients as he pursued visions because he was lucky enough to have married the second richest woman in Switzerland. And it’s easier for me to pursue my path because I have some inherited wealth too. So if you find yourself in the position of trying to help a struggling visionary, as I found myself when I met Jack, you will have to struggle, as they will, with these two hard-to-reconcile needs—practical adaptation and faithfulness to the creative muse. I realized that this was Jack’s struggle when I first met him in 2008, and in the first month, I wrote a Zap Oracle card, Adapting to Life in the Babylon Matrix, that was largely inspired by Jack’s struggle. He humored me by posing for the card images, and since the time I knew Jack and the time I wrote most of the 664 cards of the Zap Oracle coincided, there are quite a number of cards that have images of Jack or were inspired by our interaction. You can find some of them linked elsewhere on the memorial page. With so many people interacting with this oracle on a daily basis, these Jack cards, which include links to his pages, have been bringing new readers to Jack’s poems and interest in his story.

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Savage Appreciations

(Many of Jack’s documents are fairly readable in his original handwriting. I decided, where possible, to stop transcribing and instead put in photos of the originals.)

A theme that emerges from the archives is one that also emerges from the poems and from interaction with Jack. As much as he is capable of probing darkness and giving voice to alienation and bitterness, Jack also far surpasses the ordinary in his capacity for divine appreciation. It can seem hard to reconcile, but makes perfect sense when you realize that Jack felt everything more intensely than ordinary. That is part of what makes him a great poet. It is something that he was aware of and that he crystalized in one of his most memorable lines, “And I am divine in my worst hour as much as I am in my best.” Here are a few excerpts that capture this aspect of Jack– his immense capacity for divine appreciation:

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An appreciation of an elderly cat and the unconditional love of pets.

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Jack had great appreciation for both people close to him and sometimes strangers he passed on the street. Because of the extreme range of Jack’s feelings, if you were someone like me who could be the subject of Jack’s anger one moment, you were also likely to be someone Jack intensely appreciated during other moments.

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Jack’s intense ambivalence about reality applied to people and, sometimes, places. While he could eloquently probe the dark side of places, especially Winnipeg, he could also celebrate places and seasons.

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Here’s an appreciation Jack wrote of his dictionary:

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A consistent theme in Jack’s writings and life is his commitment to self-awareness. An aspect of this that often turns up in the archives and the poems is Jack’s awareness of himself as a multiplicity of personalities (as we all are).

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