John “Jack” Spencer Savage 1989-2013, In Memoriam

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.

Jack, standing before a mirror portal, gazing across time and dimension into the depths of the soul. 

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.

Jack, in the Spring of 2008, on the Hill in Boulder, marching forth into a Spring and Summer of adventure.

Jack, standing before a mirror portal, gazing across time and dimension into the depths of the soul.

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, heCast 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.

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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 at the National Rainbow Gathering in Wyoming, 2008

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.
—————————————–
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.
Two and a half years ago, just before Jack left Boulder, Jack gave me a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a birthday gift. He added a letter that really could have been addressed to any of us just as the poems were. In one line of the poems, Jack wrote:
And I am divine in my worst hour as much as I am in my best.
We should all remember this. Jack was a complex person, and all of us who knew him well saw both the light and the shadow, the brilliance and loving compassion as well as the bitterness and rage, the self-hate and anger toward those who loved him the most. So when you hear the words he wrote me, keep in mind that he cut off all contact with me for almost a year before his passing. For reasons he never really explained, he was unhappy with me, angry and frustrated, and at times, others who were close to him felt similar bitterness, anger, and rejection from Jack. But another part of Jack also still loved all who were close to him, and these excerpts from his last hand-written letter to me I believe expressed his feelings to all he was close to (despite the times of disaffection). If Jack ever expressed bitterness toward you, know that another part of him also felt toward you the way he expressed himself here, so if you are open to it, consider these words as standing in for the words Jack would have expressed to you during a moment when the higher angels of his being were present, and he was not caught up in inner turmoil:
————————————-
It is now almost completely certain I will be leaving in a short time. The past several years spent with you as my primary companion have, as you know, been varied. Still, I believe that as the years go on, I will look back on these days as some of the most wonderful and interesting, no matter where life leads me. I will always hold gratitude and love for you for emerging from the chaos of this world and helping me to find my strength at a particularly turbulent and chaotic time in my life. As the years go on, I will continue to consider you a friend and advisor no matter where I am geographically.
I can only hope that you feel these years, in spite of all the wildness and battles, were ultimately empowering and nourishing. I can only hope that you feel as enriched by knowing me as I feel by knowing you. As my gift for your 53rd birthday, I am giving you perhaps my favorite book on earth, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, a man I consider to be my spiritual grandfather.
I know you do not have much time for reading these days and I do not expect you to spend all day reading it. But perhaps someday down the line, you will open it and think of me and smile and be pleased. I especially recommend “Song of Myself” and “To Think of Time.” Forgive me of my faults and forgive me of my sins. You have my love and admiration, and I hope good fortune finds you and blesses you as you deserve to be blessed. Love, Jack
—————————-
_DSC0759-1Jack and me around the time of the letter, possibly the same day, just before he left Boulder. Jack wanted a photo with me to post on Facebook but I may have forgotten to send it to him.
Jack, you were right, I didn’t often find time to read from the book, though I always kept it close and treasured it. I will open it now and read the poems you recommended. I know you wanted all of us to read those poems, so here is a link to Song of Myself and to Think of Time.
1/31/18 Recently, I finally read Leaves of Grass (the 1855 edition) cover to cover as Jack wanted me to do. There are so many profound verses with great relevance to Jack it would take twenty pages or more if I excerpted all of them. Instead, I am going to paste in excerpts from the two poems Jack “especially recommended.”
These are the excerpts that lit up in my intuition, that seemed most numinous as I read them today and that seemed most relevant to Jack. The birthday letter I quoted above has a feeling of a last testament and of parting message. It was the last physical, handwritten letter I got from Jack though there were a great many emails sent from MPLS after.  Both Jack and Whitman wrote from a place of transtemporal and interdimensional spiritual intuition–a perspective that transcends the incredibly narrow and flat perspective of the linear-time-bound and meat-body-encased waking ego. Song of Myself is an epic poem of epic length. Whether or not  you take the time to read it and to Think of Time in their entirety, I recommend reading these excerpts. Like Jack’s and Walt’s poems, they can only be comprehended from a place of spiritual intuition, so I would not bother to read them unless and until you are in a space where you have some receptivity to spiritual intuition.
7
Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.
I peeringly view them from the top.
The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom,
To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.
I know I am deathless,
One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.
My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,
I laugh at what you call dissolution,
And I know the amplitude of time.
21
I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,
am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.
Partaker of influx and efflux I, extoller of hate and conciliation,
My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,
With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds.
To be in any form, what is that?
(Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,)
My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly different from myself,
Distant and dead resuscitate,
They show as the dial or move as the hands of me, I am the clock myself.
Eleves, I salute you! come forward!
Continue your annotations, continue your questionings.
39
The friendly and flowing savage, who is he?
Is he waiting for civilization, or past it and mastering it?
Wherever he goes men and women accept and desire him,
They desire he should like them, touch them, speak to them, stay with them.
To any one dying, thither I speed and twist the knob of the door.
Let the physician and the priest go home.
I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless will,
O despairer, here is my neck,
By God, you shall not go down! hang your whole weight upon me.
I dilate you with tremendous breath, I buoy you up,
Sleep—I and they keep guard all night,
Not doubt, not decease shall dare to lay finger upon you,
I have embraced you, and henceforth possess you to myself,
Not objecting to special revelations,
And when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you is so.
The supernatural of no account, myself waiting my time to be one of the supremes,
The day getting ready for me when I shall do as much good as the best, and be as prodigious;
By my life-lumps! becoming already a creator,
Putting myself here and now to the ambush’d womb of the shadows.
Ever love, ever the sobbing liquid of life,
Ever the bandage under the chin, ever the trestles of death.
Know my omnivorous lines and must not write any less,
And would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself.
Not words of routine this song of mine,
But abruptly to question, to leap beyond yet nearer bring;
Believing I shall come again upon the earth after five thousand years,
Waiting responses from oracles,
Drinking mead from the skull-cup,
Ranting and frothing in my insane crisis, or waiting dead-like till my spirit arouses me,
Down-hearted doubters dull and excluded,
Frivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affected, dishearten’d, atheistical,
I know every one of you, I know the sea of torment, doubt, despair and unbelief.
I do not know what is untried and afterward,
But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail.
Each who passes is consider’d, each who stops is consider’d, not a single one can it fail.
It cannot fail the young man who died and was buried,
44
It is time to explain myself—let us stand up.
What is known I strip away,
I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown.
The clock indicates the moment—but what does eternity indicate?
Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there,
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.
Long I was hugg’d close—long and long.
Immense have been the preparations for me,
Faithful and friendly the arms that have help’d me.
Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings,
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.
Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.
For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
The long slow strata piled to rest it on,
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with care.
All forces have been steadily employ’d to complete and delight me,
Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.
45
O span of youth! ever-push’d elasticity!
Old age superbly rising! O welcome, ineffable grace of dying days!
Every condition promulges not only itself, it promulges what grows after and out of itself,
And the dark hush promulges as much as any.
I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,
And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of the farther systems.
Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
Outward and outward and forever outward.
My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,
He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,
And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them.
There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage,
A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not hazard the span or make it impatient,
They are but parts, any thing is but a part.
See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that,
Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that.
My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,
The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,
The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there.
46
I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and never will be measured.
I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)
My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,
Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.
It is not far, it is within reach,
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,
Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.
Shoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth,
Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.
If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip,
And in due time you shall repay the same service to me,
For after we start we never lie by again.
Sit a while dear son,
Here are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink,
But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you with a good-by kiss and open the gate for your egress hence.
Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.
Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.
47
I am the teacher of athletes,
He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own,
He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.
The boy I love, the same becomes a man not through derived power, but in his own right,
I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me?
I follow you whoever you are from the present hour,
My words itch at your ears till you understand them.
I swear I will never again mention love or death inside a house,
And I swear I will never translate myself at all, only to him or her who privately stays with me in the open air.
many seek me, and I do not fail them,
On that solemn night (it may be their last) those that know me seek me.
48
I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is,
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud,
And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,
And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe,
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.
And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.)
I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.
49
And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.
And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,
(No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)
50
There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me.
Wrench’d and sweaty—calm and cool then my body becomes,
I sleep—I sleep long.
I do not know it—it is without name—it is a word unsaid,
It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.
Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on,
To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.
Do you see O my brothers and sisters?
It is not chaos or death—it is form, union, plan—it is eternal life—it is Happiness.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.
Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
Source: Leaves of Grass (final “Death-Bed” edition, 1891-2) (David McKay, 1892)
Think of Time
Have you guess’d you yourself would not continue?
Have you dreaded these earth-beetles?
Have you fear’d the future would be nothing to you?
Not a day passes, not a minute or second without a corpse.
The dull nights go over and the dull days also,
The soreness of lying so much in bed goes over,
The physician after long putting off gives the silent and terrible
look for an answer,
he faithful hand of the living does not desert the hand of the
dying,
The twitching lips press lightly on the forehead of the dying,
The breath ceases and the pulse of the heart ceases,
The corpse stretches on the bed and the living look upon it,
It is palpable as the living are palpable.
The living look upon the corpse with their eyesight,
But without eyesight lingers a different living and looks curiously
on the corpse.
Slow-moving and black lines creep over the whole earth—they
never cease—they are the burial lines,
He that was President was buried, and he that is now President
shall surely be buried.
Steady the trot to the cemetery, duly rattles the death-bell,
The gate is pass’d, the new-dug grave is halted at, the living alight,
the hearse uncloses,
The coffin is pass’d out, lower’d and settled, the whip is laid on
the coffin, the earth is swiftly shovel’d in,
The mound above is flatted with the spades—silence,
A minute—no one moves or speaks—it is done,
He is decently put away—is there any thing more?
He was a good fellow, free-mouth’d, quick-temper’d, not bad-
looking,
Ready with life or death for a friend, fond of women, gambled,
ate hearty, drank hearty,
Had known what it was to be flush, grew low-spirited toward the
last, sicken’d, was help’d by a contribution,
To think the difference will still continue to others, yet we lie
beyond the difference.
The difference between sin and goodness is no delusion,
The earth is not an echo, man and his life and all the things of
his life are well-consider’d.
You are not thrown to the winds, you gather certainly and safely
around yourself,
Yourself! yourself! yourself, for ever and ever!
7
It is not to diffuse you that you were born of your mother and
father, it is to identify you,
It is not that you should be undecided, but that you should be
decided,
Something long preparing and formless is arrived and form’d in you,
You are henceforth secure, whatever comes or goes.
The threads that were spun are gather’d, the weft crosses the warp,
the pattern is systematic.
The preparations have every one been justified,
The orchestra have sufficiently tuned their instruments, the baton
has given the signal.
The guest that was coming, he waited long, he is now housed,
He is one of those who are beautiful and happy, he is one of those
that to look upon and be with is enough.
The law of the past cannot be eluded,
The law of the present and future cannot be eluded,
The law of the living cannot be eluded, it is eternal,
The law of promotion and transformation cannot be eluded,
And I have dream’d that the purpose and essence of the known
life, the transient,
Is to form and decide identity for the unknown life, the permanent.
If all came but to ashes of dung,
If maggots and rats ended us, then Alarum! for we are betray’d,
Then indeed suspicion of death.
Do you suspect death? if I were to suspect death I should die
now,
Do you think I could walk pleasantly and well-suited toward
annihilation?
Pleasantly and well-suited I walk,
Whither I walk I cannot define, but I know it is good,
The whole universe indicates that it is good,
The past and the present indicate that it is good.
Slowly and surely they have pass’d on to this, and slowly and surely
they yet pass on.
9
I swear I think now that every thing without exception has an
eternal soul!
The trees have, rooted in the ground! the weeds of the sea have!
the animals!
I swear I think there is nothing but immortality!
That the exquisite scheme is for it, and the nebulous float is for it,
and the cohering is for it!
And all preparation is for it—and identity is for it—and life and
materials are altogether for it!
I wrote some Zap Oracle cards inspired by Jack and published with his permission. All but one has a photo of Jack: Appreciating Inner Riches, Adapting to Life in the Babylon Matrix, Accepting the Hazards of Relationship, Dealing with Moods,Reaping the Unexpected Harvest, Heart has its Reasons (shows a detail of Jack’s outfit), Defying the Dragons of Doubt (<<this card was inspired by an evening with Jack when he was having a dark night of the soul and lashing out at me and life), Soulful Reading (<<<this card shows Jack at the 2008 Rainbow Gathering in Wyoming with his battered travel copy of Leaves of Grass)
Here’s the image:
Jack in a Boulder Canyon
looking down at Boulder
Jack at Sprouts (formerly Sunflower) Market in Boulder
This last set of photos is particularly poignant for me. They were taken the morning Jack left Boulder for the last time, and were the last time I ever saw Jack. I believe this was early January of 2011 when Jack would have been 21. This was the morning he departed and I bought him coffee at his favorite coffee shop on The Hill in Boulder, The Innisfree Poetry Coffee Shop. They also show the many, mercurial moods of Jack.
.
Please, if anyone has photos of Jack they want to be posted here, send them to [email protected]. And if anyone wants to remember part of Jack in a comment, the light or the dark (all parts of his divine self as he stated) please post them below. Even if you don’t want to do that yet, please read the comments others have posted. Also, please visit Jack’s poetry page, where there are many moving and brilliantly written poems as well as several photos not found on this page:
Savage Reflections—The Poetry of Jack Savage
A Synchronicity About Jack? Note added: 4/25/13 11pm
For the last couple of days, I’ve been going through a vast archive of Jack’s emails. After hours of working my way forward from the past, I’ve only just gotten up to December of 2008. Those who know Jack may understand why this was the year we got along best—we were in daily contact but lived in different countries! Jack was going to the University of Manitoba in Canada, and I was in Boulder, Colorado, where we originally met. The geographical distance was helpful in mitigating Jack’s volatility. Even so, there were still some tempestuous arguments.
One of the things we made a lot of progress on that year (2008-9) was Jack’s writing skills—prose and poetry. In December of 08’, the month I am just up to in the email archive, there were numerous emails with drafts of a college paper I helped Jack with. The theme he came up with was the road trip as a somewhat uniquely American rite of passage. One relevance of this theme is that I met Jack through a rite-of-initiation road trip. In March of 08,’ Jack had what he described as a nervous breakdown and quit a job he had at a tax office, and took off on a Greyhound bus. I met Jack when he showed up at the Boulder International Hostel, where I was working the front desk. Jack had set off on a walkabout, seeking transformation. The paper was about this exact theme.
At the moment that I came across the last draft of the paper John Nemes (also a former hostel employee) left comment #6 in the comments section that begins with the line,
“Well, Jack, I guess you decided to continue on your journey and take your leave of your earthly form. “
Another excerpt from John’s comments:
“…There is some talk of an intermediary period after death, in which the recently departed can benefit greatly from thoughts and prayers in order to reach their next destination. Some Buddhists and Hindus adhere to this, I think it might be a 49 day journey, somewhere thereabouts…. It might seem weird to others that I would write something like this on your memorial page, but this is how we talked. “
John is remembering accurately because Jack did believe in the survival of the soul and afterlife journeys. John’s comments revolve around the theme of death, and an after-death experience as an initiatory experience.
Here are some excerpts from Jack’s paper, the paper I had just gotten up to when John’s comments arrived, which had the working title of “Road Trip”:
“Adolescence is one of these definitive and key times of change. It is neither childhood nor adulthood, a state betwixt and between (Turner). It is a transitional and transformative period, often very tumultuous, violent, and confusing. Rites of passage are employed to guide a person through these difficult times. In Arnold Van Gennep’s groundbreaking paper, “The Rites of Passage,”Gennep identified three key moments in this ritualistic time: separation, in which the individual becomes detached from his/her previous status; the marginal or liminal time, where the individual passes through a structure less realm which bears no resemblance to either the previous status or the coming status; and finally the aggregation when the individual re-enters the society as a transformed person. Rites of passage have been used in various periods throughout history and are widespread…”
“The journalist Bill Moyers has been quoted as saying, “Modern society has provided adolescents with no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind (Davis pg. 2).” With no real formal practices of initiation, adolescents often seek their own rites of passage. But with little guidance, they may easily turn violent or unhealthy and provide no real value. “One reason for the great demand for psychiatric services for adolescents today may be the lack of socially sanctioned rites of passage (Geyer, Mahdi, Meade pg xvii).”
“….In the beginning of the book Kerouac informs the reader that before he began his road trip he had the sense that “everything was dead.” This is the symbolic death of the child, which leads to the birth of the new person. And from this point Kerouac and Cassidy embark on several road trips across American wildernesses. This transformational journey was never pleasant or easy…”

(End of quote from Jack’s paper.)

The idea of Jung’s concept of synchronicity is that events happening in the same moment of time may have a relationship that is meaningful, but acausal (not mediated by cause-and-effect). Many parallel occurrences, like this one, can be dismissed as coincidences or interpreted to be meaningful synchronicities. In this case, like most cases, no one can make an incontrovertible case for one over the other. It comes down to the interpretive choice of the individual. I choose to see them as meaningfully connected. The upsetting dream I had about Jack two weeks ago seemed to show him struggling, confused, vulnerable, and a bit paranoid in what I felt, even in the dream, seemed like a Bardot, a difficult after-life place like the lower astral.
Jack’s paper seems prophetic of his continuing need for transformative rites of initiation. Geographic travel didn’t quite work for him because, as Emerson put it, “The problem with traveling is that you take yourself with you.” When Jack discussed suicide with me a couple of years ago, he saw it that way—as a chance for total transformation. In Jack’s own words from 2008:
“This is the symbolic death of the child, which leads to the birth of the new person….This transformational journey was never pleasant or easy…”
My feeling is that what I choose to interpret as a synchronicity further confirms my feeling that Jack is on such a transformational journey but that it may not be pleasant or easy right now. The painful concern for what Jack might be experiencing, what he suffered in life, and my own feelings of loss greatly lightened and turned into enthusiasm following the synchronicity. A debunker, of course, can dismiss this as wish-fulfillment thinking, and that is a reasonable alternate explanation and I respect their right to choose that interpretation.
People from various cultures have said that we, the living, can help those in such liminal zones through our encouragement—our positive thoughts, images, wishes, and intentions for them. If you are open to this interpretation, please help Jack through his journey of transformation by holding to the image of him at his best and wishing him well on his continuing journey of transformation.
Highly improbable (from the POV of ordinary causality) and symbolic-seeming events around someone’s passing are classic and almost ubiquitous. Often they involve animals, especially birds. I experienced an optical anomaly and was able to photograph it last September, on the morning after my dad’s funeral. I was fortunate to have my iPhone in hand when the image you see below appeared on the inside front door of my parent’s house:
To find out how this extraordinary image appeared, go to my dad’s memorial page and scroll down: In Memoriam, Nathan Zap 1919-2012.
These sorts of anomalies related to death are common. For example, I document another one I experienced a few years ago, that like Jack, related to the death of a young man: http://zaporacle.com/card/survival-of-the-soul
“You must have chaos within yourself if you are to be a dancing star.”—-Nietzche
Based on that, Jack, you certainly have the credentials to become a dancing star.
Jack, on his strange journey. This photo dated June 4, 2008. It was used in Zap Oracle Card # 483, Adapting to Life in the Babylon Matrix
Ah, just disovered an even earlier oracle card inspired by Jack: Zap Oracle Card # 405 Monitoring the Inner Pressure
Tears, goosebumps going through Jack’s emails, they are so prophetic. We have to stop thinking of Jack’s life as tragic. He expressed his intention to awaken through death so clearly and so many times. In an email dated 3/25/09 (close to his birthday) which had the subject heading “this should be to your liking” (yes, Jack, now more than ever) Jack copies a poem and then writes one of his own:
I count each day a little life,
With birth and death complete;
I cloister it from care and strife
And keep it sane and sweet.
With eager eyes I greet the morn,
Exultant as a boy,
Knowing that I am newly born
To wonder and to joy.
And when the sunset splendours wane
And ripe for rest am I,
Knowing that I will live again,
Exultantly I die.
O that all Life were but a Day
Sunny and sweet and sane!
And that at Even I might say:
“I sleep to wake again.”
After the above poem, Jack wrote,” and this is one of my own.”  His poem follows.
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The Man Who Dreamed He Died and Woke Up Dead
And so his careful thoughts,
Detailed with a cold baroque elegance,
Crafted an entwined complexity,
A sculpture of disgusting failure
And in it bore a promise
From which he could not escape
And the precious wineglasses
Of his dreams
Entrapped within the sinews of twisted, deformed limbs
Had been shattered
And so the sun laughs malevolently
From its condescending throne
And he can smell tomorrow’s grotesque hands
Hovering above the fever in his head
And the nightmare of today still lurks like
A lurid mist behind his eyes
The landscape becomes impure passing through him
So he laughs alone in the solemn twilight
A miserable laugh, a poisonous smile
And his acquaintances all hate him
No one shall greet him
In this desolate desert of days
He is buried alive
And suffocates inhaling the sand
And so he sleeps a sleep
Less generous than death
He commands the supreme alchemists of his sky
To pound their gavel upon his mind
Emitting ringing lies
Of overcast skies throughout all of time
And a church, with its holy cross, sank into the marshland nearby
When he awoke
He was dead
I put up a memorial altar to Jack’s death and awakening the day I learned the news. The Leaves of Grass was a birthday gift from Jack. The glowing green tortoise represents gradual progress on the spiritual path.
4/27/13 Saturday. I just arrived at the Minneapolis International Hostel, which is located right next to a giant art museum. Another Jack-related synchronicity just occurred. But it will take a bit to develop it. I know I keep talking about synchronicities, and not everyone really knows what that’s about, so here’s a little intro I wrote several years ago: http://zaporacle.com/synchronicity-very-brief-introdution/
Last night I was up till 3 AM in another of the stages of grief. This time I was feeling haunted by the ten months prior to his passing in which Jack had severed all communication with me. To work my way through it and find a stance that wasn’t all about me and what I was feeling, I wrote the following into the comments section:
Some may feel reluctant to leave comments because they feel that a grand summation of all they feel about Jack is called for. It doesn’t have to be. It can be ongoing. Barring some disaster that brings down the whole web, this page won’t go away. I’ve made arrangements for this site to continue past my lifetime. So feel free to come back as often as you want and even years from now to say something more. As you can see from the number of comments I’ve left– and I hope their number is not burdensome or irritating to anyone–I find that my feelings and thoughts about Jack are too many to get closure on, and there are drastic mood shifts. There are peaceful moments when I feel like Jack followed his soul’s plan and when I feel blessed to have known him. At other times all the many words Jack left in my care only seem to highlight the terrible silence of the last ten months when he severed ties with me, even used the words–severing ties–and never said or wrote another word to me and with no explanation. I’m grateful that a few weeks into the separation, he reached out for two crisis phone calls when he felt really lost, and I felt I was able to give him comfort and good advice. He was polite, but very firm in his messages severing contact. That rejection is very difficult for me, and I’ve been struggling with it since it happened and now, at times, it can seem to have a devastating finality. But I also realize that this is egocentric pain. What matters is the love we can give to a suffering person, not getting anything back from them. Jack gave so much back to me in the past and to all who knew him, but there were also darker times when he may have lost his love for himself and had no love to give to others. Jack is not to be located in any one moment or place, or even period of time. Jack’s most loving moments, the moments when he offered appreciation to us, are eternal. They will never not have happened. Although Jack’s waking personality said he wanted to sever all ties, the ties were not severed. The two dreams I had in the last week about Jack that located his suffering indicate that deep ties remain. What a person’s waking personality says or does to us often does not reflect the soul ties we have with them. The dreams I had about Jack show that Jack is not in one time or space. None of us are. This is why I located him in the dreamtime, the time of day when I, and most of us, are most unbounded by space and time.
In one of the last phone calls I had with Jack, he brought up a wound he felt someone had given him years in the past. I gave the usual response about the importance of forgiveness. Jack said to me, “I’m not a forgiving person.” I was shocked by his statement. I never heard anyone actually admit to such a thing. I asked him if he really meant it, and he said he did, that for him, it was a visceral thing, and he couldn’t do anything about it. I felt terribly worried for him when he said that.
As much as we might want Jack to forgive us, what is more crucial is for us to forgive him. In the same phone call, Jack also said he was thinking about changing his name back to John and that maybe it was a mistake to have ever called himself Jack. (John is the name on his birth certificate, but since he was a child people have always called him Jack.) This also made me feel extremely sad and concerned for Jack as I realized how deeply wounded his sense of identity was. At his funeral, Jack’s close friend Eli told me that Jack left behind a note that expressed deep forgiveness to everyone he knew, including people that he felt had hurt him.
(1/31/18 I would dearly love to see the text of that note.  I wonder if it would be appropriate to publish it here as a separate issue. In 2017 Eli told me that it looked “crafted,” was beautifully written and that there must have been multiple drafts for it to have been so eloquent. Note added 4.19.24–If a family member or anyone has access to that note, you don’t have to interact with me directly. You could anonymously leave an image of it in the comments. I think others would appreciate it. Many people other than close family and friends seem to be interested in this page, which has had more than 28K readers. )
While we may suffer because a wounded person has lost their capacity for love for a time, it is more important that we keep loving and forgiving them. It is also good that we ask for their forgiveness, even though there may be no perceivable answer. I know I never intentionally did anything to harm Jack, and I feel that I did the very best I could at the time to help him, but I also know that flaws in my personality, places where I needed, and still need, to mature were hurtful for him to be around. If I were further along in the very slow lessening of my issues, I would have been better able to help Jack. The insecurities that would cause me to want to show off and impress people Jack misinterpreted as me trying to compete with him or show that I was better than him. As many times as I tried to explain to him that this was not the intention of these neurotic tendencies, I’m not sure I was able to convince him. Finally, I wrote Jack the longest email I ever sent him, and probably anyone, explaining in great personal depth where the need to show off came from in my past and present psychology. Jack praised the authenticity of this email, but a couple of weeks later, not too long after the phone call in which he said he was an unforgiving person, Jack initiated the separation.
Jack misinterpreted so many things from other people as slights, as people trying to insult, degrade, or humiliate him. Usually, these perceived slights were just people like me who didn’t have their neurotic aspects contained. Through carelessness and our own struggles to become whole I, and many of us, caused Jack unintentional pain. Jack’s wounded pride and wounded sense of identity and persona were such that slight missteps we might make were hurtful to Jack and became painful and haunting memories for him.
Forgive me Jack, forgive all of us who hurt you in these ways.
Sometime in the Nineties, an eighty-year-old woman, who was a Jungian analyst, gave a talk I attended in Boulder. At the end of her talk, there were questions from the audience and the first one came from a young woman. “Now that you are an elder,” asked the young woman, “what can you tell me as a young woman about love?” The elder woman replied, “When I was your age, I was desperately trying to be loved. But now I know that it is better to simply be love.”
A terribly difficult part of the grieving process for me, and I’m sure for others, is that Jack isn’t here on this plane for us to get his love in the ways we would want and might miss from the past. We might also have painful memories of when Jack was alive, and we didn’t feel like we got the love we deserved from him. The way to help Jack now is to struggle to rise above our need to be loved and to be love, to be love toward Jack wherever he is. To forgive him even if he wasn’t always able to forgive us. To ask for forgiveness for the imperfect ways we tried to love Jack.
M. Scott Peck has an interesting definition of love: “I define love thus: The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”
Many profound and deeply spiritual cultures, especially Tibetan Buddhism, say that some who die struggle for a time to find their way. They say that excessive grief from survivors can be confusing and burdensome to them. This is why I am struggling to summon my will not to feel bitter or rejected or hurt by Jack, not to reflect on the love from him that feels so missing now, not to reflect on the way Jack left us as a rejection or punishment.
In my case, for example, whatever bitterness or anger Jack might have felt toward me in his wounded state is not what matters.
What matters is the will to be love, to send love to him, to hold in our hearts the image of Jack at his best, and to have the generosity of spirit to forgive anything Jack did in his wounded state that caused us pain. As you said Jack, you are as divine in your worst moments as well as in your best. Let both your light and dark inspire us to be more whole and to have the courage to be love.
Three hours after I wrote that, I had to get up to catch the bus to the airport.
Going through the 2010 archive of emails with Jack on the bus to the airport (to catch a flight to Minneapolis for the funeral) I read an email I wrote in which I saw evidence of serious mistakes I made with Jack. Unreliable memory had revised things to make me look better, but now the actual words, my own forgotten words, were convicting me, the cold light of morning glaring off the laptop screen, glowing words revealing serious mistakes I made, caught forever in time like flies in amber.
So often, you were right, Jack. In wise, compassionate, and diplomatic words, you pointed out ways I was failing to be the friend and mentor you really needed, and I was too caught up in my own grievances with life, my own sorrows, and egocentric neurosis to really get what you were saying. I never fully comprehended until the dream of two weeks ago the depth of your suffering and fragility. Yeah, I realize that overall, there was more good than bad, and it’s not like I was the cause of your trajectory, etc. That would just be still more self-importance.
I guess I’m left with that classic human lament: If only I knew then what I know now… Sorry I failed you so often Jack. All I can do is draw lessons from this to be a larger person going forward. Sorry man, I was one more person in this cold world who didn’t fully see you…
I wrote the above words at the Denver airport feeling guilt and deep remorse (which I still feel). I was trying to unload the confession into the comments section, but the plane was already loading, and there was no time. When I got to my assigned seat, I saw that the middle seat was empty and in the window seat was a very young guy who looked remarkably like a slightly more diminutive version of Jack when I met him (a few days before his 19th birthday). Take it with as many grains of salt as you want, but I immediately felt the presence of synchronicity. He introduced himself as Max, a young German who has been volunteering for the forest service in Colorado and was going to Minneapolis to catch a connecting 13-hour flight to Hamburg and then to his home in Eastern Germany, where he was soon about to go to university to study biotechnology. I asked him his age. “I’m 18, but almost 19,” he replied in excellent German-accented English. In other words, he was Jack’s exact age when I met him. For the hour and 20-minute flight we had a great conversation about numerous things, including the future of biotechnology and virtual reality, the causes of Germany’s high obesity levels, the meaning of synchronicity and some PSI experiments, the East German Stasi and some slightly humorous discussion of the Weimar Republic, the rise of Hitler, Nazis and the Jews, etc. He was obviously brilliant, talented, and full of potential, just as Jack was when I met him. I bought him an airline box lunch, and it was, overall, a multilayered encounter of forgiveness. A young German and a middle-aged Jew from the Bronx, who carries the Hebrew name of a relative who died in The Holocaust, joking a bit about WWII. His age and rather Jack-like appearance and body type felt like a gesture of forgiveness from the cosmos. Yeah, I wasn’t as good a friend or mentor to Jack as I thought I was. I failed him in some key ways, but by human standards (not a very high bar, of course), I wasn’t so bad and would be given other chances to be a mentor…
Here’s a photo I took of Max for you to judge whether there is a resemblance to the Jack I met at the same age. I think if you took a thousand people who were passing through Denver International Airport, you’d be hard-pressed to find one who matched Jack so closely in age and body type.
So if you also feel like you failed Jack in some ways, welcome to the fellowship. Instead of wallowing in guilt, I interpret the synchronicity as an encouragement to take the very next chance to do better next time. Jack, you broke our hearts, but also broke open our hearts to feel the suffering of the world, the fragility of people, and how easy it is to say or do the wrong thing and fail to take care of people as well as we could. Let’s hope there are new chances for all of us, including you.
And Jack, just in case you had any hand in pulling off that synchronicity, bravo, nicely done….
Note added 5/3/13 Actually, the degree of guilt I feel keeps fluctuating, as I’m sure it is with others. I think a fair appraisal that could easily be adapted to others is how we treated Jack directly related to our level of development at the time as we interfaced with his level of development. Most of us are not fully realized masters, and Jack no doubt bore the brunt of our less developed areas just as we bore the brunt of his. All sorts of things in my personality were not helpful to Jack at all, just as they weren’t helpful to me. The me at 50 (the age I met Jack) was in a much better place to help Jack than the me of 45, 40, 35, etc. Sadly, in some ways, good and inevitable in others, is that the me of 55, especially me at 55 plus the last 9 days, would have been able to help Jack so much better, and with my own issues better contained and with more respect for his suffering and his genius and the list of different attitudes and ways of doing things that I would do different now is endless. I did the best I could with where I was developmentally, but I feel sorrow that if I were further along, I could have been more helpful to Jack. Meaning can be given to Jack’s sacrifice of his embodied self if we use it as an impetus to be more careful and compassionate going forward.
(1/31/18—-that process continues, and now, at 60 I feel I understand Jack far better than at 55, especially after the last several weeks after doing a more careful reading of the nearly 600-page lost archive Jack left with me and other work and reflection with his presence—)
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Note added May 12: Video of Jack: My niece Bernadette sent me a video of Jack. Jack showed Bernadette around Boulder when she visited sometime in 2010. She’s the same age as Jack (both were born in 1989). She took this video clip with a camera I gave her when she arrived in Boulder. I play the straight man to Jack’s comedic self in a moment in which he is creating a spontaneous riff on what would happen if Leonard Cohen and Barack Obama had a baby. It ends with Jack saying he needs a Jungian analyst. Jack’s last line is: “I need a Goldberg” He’s referring to a friend of mine, Jonathan Goldberg, a Jungian analyst in his 70s whom Jack met in 2008. Strangely, I was just visiting with him ( I see him an average of 3 times a year) yesterday. He also looks at the camera during the brief video and says, “You stand guiltless in your predicament,” which was a nice if out of context, statement for Jack’s survivors.
Bernadette clarified some things later this afternoon. She was not operating the camera, I was, and she was not even present when the video was made. She found the video on the camera which I gave her as a gift when she came to Boulder. I hadn’t thought to delete the few photos and videos that I had put on the camera. For some odd reason, Bernadette decided to post the video to YouTube a couple of years ago for reasons even she is not sure of. She’s only posted 12 YouTubes in her life and she never even told me or Jack that the video existed. She only remembered about it last night when she was reading Jack’s memorial page. There have been a number of uncanny experiences related to Jack since his death, but for now I’m only going to share them with a few people who knew Jack and are open to such things and request hearing about them.
Bernadette:
Hi I read that you are gathering videos of Jack for an extension to the memorium and I remembered I uploaded this once from the camera you gave me when I went to visit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17HXWXyZCO8&list=UUmyEYSvfRtY3Q3RUO-LMbcg&index=6
Note added, August 6, 2013 : A number of new things have occurred related to Jack. In June (of 2013) I created  a collage mural called The Metamorphosis of Jack . It’s 6’10” by 4′ . Camping in Montana in July at the National Rainbow Gathering, I had a little digital voice recorder with me and listened to some old archived recordings. I recorded a dream on 8/18/11 in which I was told to design a program to help Jack. The one specific part of the program was that I was told to make him a giant collage to improve his self-esteem. Except for the giant collage I just made, I hadn’t made a collage since 2002.
Unfortunately, the collage didn’t photograph well at well, but if anyone close to Jack wants to see it, it’s on permanent display in my house in Boulder.
jack collage
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8
7
5
6
jacksign
The above sign, except for the ”need ride to Boulder” I did for him , was created by Jack when he was looking for a ride from the 2008 National Rainbow gathering. As simple as it is it captures his personality and sense of humor.
I just published a document I was working on the morning of April 24. It mentions Jack and some amazing synchronicities connecting Jack to The Invisibles by Grant Morrison:
http://zaporacle.com/are-you-an-invisible-manichean-mutant-metamorphosis-a-chaos-magic-artifact-brought-out-of-a-reading-of-the-invisibles-by-grant-morrison/
A few days ago, a co-worker said, quoting some spiritual figure, “We should pray for the departed, but not think about them because that only keeps them attached when they need to go forward.” That sounded right to me and I decided I would try to detach from thinking about Jack. I’d been carrying around an object with Jack’s name on it and decided to put it away. A few hours after this decision and action my niece Bernadette contacted me that she had found another Jack video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jzpOBb1wLYU#at=18 which really captures his mercurial moods and incredibly funny and expressive way of communicating. After a few weeks of not feeling Jack’s presence, a few days after the video showed up, I felt Jack’s presence return while I was out biking around Boulder. About 90 minutes after that perception, I came home and found my Facebook browser tab flashing “Jack.” It was Jack’s best friend Jack Davis contacting me.
Feb. 14 When it comes to certain paranormal experiences, such as what seems like communication with the dead, it is often best to just allow the ambiguity of not knowing on what level of reality things are occurring. In the following oracle card I record a conversation that I seemed (double emphasis on seemed) to have with Jack: http://zaporacle.com/card/dont-hate-discriminate
May 22, 2014  A Zap Oracle card created when Jack was still in Boulder and inspired by a day spent with him: Reaping the Unexpected Harvest. 
Notes added Dec. 3rd, 2014

The main way I’ve been working with Jack’s continuing influence on me is via writing a fantasy epic entitled Parallel Journeys. I’ve been creating different versions of it since the 80s, and the intention to write it dates back to the summer of 1978. In the first hour I met Jack he told me that he was haunted by a story he had worked on for years about an elf boy who comes down from the forest into the city. I was shocked when he told me that, because it contains central elements of Parallel Journeys, which is, among other things, an elf origin story where a boy who has potential elf genetics is forced to leave an intentional community in the woods to come down into the city. Jack expressed enthusiasm for working on my version of the story with me. Now it feels like he is. Any resemblance to any person, living or deceased, is purely coincidental, but I don’t think you will have any problem seeing Jack’s influence on the new version of Parallel Journeys I have been working on since September of 2013. Â A rough draft of 183,000 words was completed September of 2014. Since then I have been working with a couple of editors on a long revision process which could easily take a year or more. I plan to dedicate the book to Jack.

Note added: 4.20.24 One year turned into nine. The book ended up being 250,000 words and was completed in the Spring of 2023.

In the last few months I published two Reality Sandwich articles that included Jack photos and inspiration: Savage Reflections—A Portal into the Soul’s Most Intimate Thoughts (an introduction to Jack’s poetry)  Accepting the Hazards of Relationship, Reaping the Unexpected Harvest
  Another young friend of mine, Brandt Kempin, spent some time with Jack, and although they didn’t have long together, they immediately found much in common as both are highly intelligent, musical, and skillful with words. They were very close in age (Brandt is 27 this year, Jack would have been 26). I got both Brandt and Jack to work at different times at the now-defunct Boulder International Hostel. Brandt and Jack met up when Brandt came back to visit and then met up with Jack again at the 2008 Rainbow gathering when we were all camping together. In 2014 Brandt wrote a song about Jack entitled “Beneath the Teeth of Time.”  I should warn you, as Brandt did me, that it is a bit dark, but it is also quite powerful and original.  Another song on the same album, “Wrong Things Grow” is also inspired by Jack.  The same day that I learned that the studio version of the songs were complete, I found that Brandt’s band, Little Father, was going out on tour and would be coming to NYC at the same time I had a week there. On October 11, 2014, I got to see Brandt play at a venue in Brooklyn. He dedicated the show to Jack, and I got to take some photos of him performing the two Jack-related songs.  Here are some  photos from that show:
bran1
Bran2
bran3
bran4
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Jack, Thank you for leaving us so many haunting and beautiful poems. When I read them, you are so present, so available. Hey Jack, here’s my attempt at a poem about you. If it’s any good, it’s because, for the last several days, I’ve been learning from a master:

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Emanations of Jack

The emanations and ripples of Jack are everywhere,

Surrounded by plates and bowls that Jack ate from,

And cups and glasses that he drank from,

Still thinking about Jack and remembering so many moments,

Nothing about Jack will ever not have been.

Jack, everything you said, thought and did—

Ripples forever through eternity.

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The Lost Archive

(excerpts)

IMG_1146

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.

IMG_1147 (1)

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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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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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appreciations--people

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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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midwest

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winter

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Here’s an appreciation Jack wrote of his dictionary:

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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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multiplicity

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shadowcongrats

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54 comments

  1. Yes, absolutely, our love and prayers will reach and aid Jack. I’ll message you on FB with a reference.

  2. The comment you leave about Jack doesn’t have to be anything serious. It could just be a funny or appreciative memory of something you experienced with Jack. I’ll break the ice with an incident I remember from the 2008 National Rainbow Gathering ( a kind of big libertarian/hippie festival) in Wyoming. Jack found a kid he barely knew and had only just met, Noah, wandering around in a state of total confusion and disorientation. Apparently, someone had given Noah, who was a rather confused person to begin with, some acid, and Noah could no longer find his camp or function normally. Jack (who had not been taking any drugs, btw) spent the whole night taking care of this kid whom he never even particularly liked. Jack was himself having a week of high emotional turmoil, but took charge of keeping Noah (who was a few years older than Jack) out of harm’s way. Jack told me that at one point Noah was so confused that he asked if Jack and I (Jonathan) were one entity. This was Jack’s first gathering so he barely knew his way around himself. At one point Jack ran into Christopher, a friend of mine and member of our camp who is an EMT and mountain rescue professional, and asked him for some advice on how to handle Noah. But Jack didn’t try to put responsibility for the situation onto anyone else, even though he was getting rather annoyed by the predicament. He stayed with Noah all night until he was able to remember where his camp was and Jack was able to make sure Noah was in his tent, in a sleeping bag and out of harm’s way.

  3. Jack, may you now be wrapped in the wings of warm golden grace and sweet harmony,
    feeling the perfect divine crystalline love and wholeness that you are,

    i will forever remember you sharing your humor and music with me on those christmas eves, gracing the night with resounding and beautiful resonant harmony

    I know your soul soars on,
    I wish you peaceful transitions
    and blissful union with encapsulating love and divine grace

    I send you all my love and a warm embrace that i know is transcending the reaches of time and space!

  4. I plan to print some of these, if that is ok, to display at the service on Tuesday. Thank you for posting these. I hope he knew on some level how much he was loved.

  5. Nora C. Wynn Left this message on Facebook:
    Jonathan,
    Thank you, and thank you so much for creating this. A truly stunning collection of pictures and words that have brought me so much solace today. He was a wonderful person, with a beautiful mind, and an even more beautiful heart. He was “of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,
    Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,
    Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,
    Stuff’d with the stuff that is coarse and stuff’d with the stuff
    that is fine.” (Walt Whitman). We’re in this loss together. xo

  6. Well, Jack, I guess you decided to continue on your journey and take your leave of your earthly form. I am sad, as humans usually are when someone decides to leave unexpectedly. But I would never judge you, brother. I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling the urge to leave, fighting crippling bouts of suicidal depression. It’s not something many people can understand, but I can say I do. I have no way of knowing what happened or what you were thinking, but having been close and tried a few times, I believe that when it comes to that point there isn’t really much choice left, the pain has become so great that it is all encompassing. I believe in the continuation of consciousness. It’s the closest thing I have to a religion… I can’t prove it. There is some talk of an intermediary period after death, in which the recently departed can benefit greatly from thoughts and prayers in order to reach their next destination. Some Buddhists and Hindus adhere to this, I think it might be a 49 day journey, somewhere thereabouts. Interesting because this corresponds with the formation of the pineal gland in the human body, which leads to thoughts about the production of Dimethyltryptamine, which many believe is “The Spirit Molecule.” If there is a connection between consciousness and the physical body, I would guess that’s where it lies. The fact that Eastern religions seem to be hip to the fact that something like this is going on makes it even more interesting. I guess that’s why I have faith that you’re still out there. It’s not a blind faith. There is something else going on. It might seem weird to others that I would write something like this on your memorial page, but this is how we talked. You and I spent more than a few nights talking about everything and anything, philosophizing and drinking not a few beers.
    I remember clearly the last night you and I spoke. We were at the park on The Hill in Boulder, and we were arguing. I saw it so clearly then, that you and I were so much alike in some ways that we had reached an impasse. The way we were most alike seemed to be in our pain and suffering. We both carried a lot of pain. We both struggled with darkness, with drinking, with the existential search for meaning. We both were a bit older than our years. I was really sad that night, because I knew the wall between us wasn’t a real wall, it was just one that was there at the moment. I can’t help feeling guilty myself, now that you aren’t here in the same way you were. I wish there was something I could have done. I tried to get a hold of you a few times after our argument, but I never could reach you. In the end though, I know there was nothing I could have done, and really I know that you wouldn’t want anyone else feeling guilty either. Having been in that dark place myself, I know there was really nothing anyone could do.
    I believe in you Jack, I always did and always will. You are a brilliant soul, and I know you will make it to your destination. Your work was finished here and now. I would like to think your next stop might be a little lighter. I don’t know if I believe in karma or reincarnation or what, but I think you did work through some things here, and you added to other people’s lives and experiences. Your impact will continue to ripple through this world.
    Good luck brother, and godspeed. I love you man. I hope that you won’t mind what I have written, and that no one else will either. Anyhow, I feel like it is being written to you, so you can be the judge. I want you to know that I haven’t forgotten you, and you won’t be forgotten. Try to see through the illusions and go toward the gold or white light. I hope you find freedom from the pain, and I hope to see you again someday my friend.

    • Thanks so much for those comments heartfelt and inspired comments, John. I know you and Jack had many battles (as well as moments of communion) . Most who were close to Jack had battles. I appreciate your generosity of spirit in seeing past that and sharing your feelings that disappearing from a particular matrix does not mean you have left all existence. Wise people from many cultures have come to similar conclusions, not to mention evidence and direct experiences that some of us have had. So keep putting positive thoughts and feelings out there toward Jack. I think what we should all try to give Jack is what was so wounded in him in his last life, that confidence in himself as a lovable person, and as person who could succeed on his journey across life and incarnations.

  7. For the last couple of days I’ve been going through a vast archive of Jack’s emails. After hours of working my way forward from the past I’ve only just gotten up to December of 2008. Those who know Jack may understand why this was the year we got along best—we were in daily contact, but lived in different countries! Jack was going to the University of Manitoba in Canada and I was in Boulder, Colorado where we originally met. The geographical distance was helpful in mitigating Jack’s volatility.

    One of the things we made a lot of progress on that year (2008-9) was Jack’s writing skills—prose and poetry. In December of 08’, the month I am just up to in the email archive, there were numerous emails with drafts of a college paper I helped Jack with. The theme he came up with was the road trip as a somewhat uniquely American rite of passage. One relevance of this theme is that I met Jack through a rite of initiation road trip. In March of 08’ Jack had what he described as a nervous breakdown and quit a job he had at a tax office and took off on a Greyhound bus. I met Jack when he showed up at the Boulder International Hostel where I was working the front desk. Jack had set off on a walkabout, seeking transformation. The paper was about this exact theme.

    At the moment that I came across the last draft of the paper John Nemes (also a former hostel employee) left comment #6 in the comments section that begins with the line,

    “Well, Jack, I guess you decided to continue on your journey and take your leave of your earthly form. “

    Another excerpt from John’s comments:

    “…There is some talk of an intermediary period after death, in which the recently departed can benefit greatly from thoughts and prayers in order to reach their next destination. Some Buddhists and Hindus adhere to this, I think it might be a 49 day journey, somewhere thereabouts…. It might seem weird to others that I would write something like this on your memorial page, but this is how we talked. “

    John is remembering accurately because Jack did believe in the survival of the soul and afterlife journeys. John’s comments revolve around the theme of death, and an after death experience as an initiatory experience.

    Here are some excerpts from Jack’s paper, the paper I had just gotten up to when John’s comments arrived, which had the working title of “Road Trip”:

    “Adolescence is one of these definitive and key times of change. It is neither childhood nor adulthood, a state betwixt and between (Turner). It is a transitional and transformative period, often very tumultuous, violent, and confusing. Rites of passage are employed to guide a person through these difficult times. In Arnold Van Gennep’s groundbreaking paper “the rites of passage,”Gennep identified three key moments in this ritualistic time: separation, in which the individual becomes detached from his/her previous status; the marginal or liminal time, where the individual passes through a structure less realm which bears no resemblance to either the previous status or the coming status; and finally the aggregation when the individual re-enters the society as a transformed person. Rites of passage have been used in various periods throughout history and are widespread…”

    “The journalist Bill Moyers has been quoted as saying “Modern society has provided adolescents with no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind (Davis pg. 2).” With no real formal practices of initiation adolescents often seek their own rites of passage. But with little guidance they may easily turn violent or unhealthy, and provide no real value. “One reason for the great demand for psychiatric services for adolescents today may be the lack of socially sanctioned rites of passage (Geyer, Mahdi, Meade pg xvii).”

    “….In the beginning of the book, Kerouac informs the reader that before he began his road trip he had the sense that “everything was dead.” This is the symbolic death of the child, which leads to the birth of the new person. And from this point Kerouac and Cassidy embark on several road trips across
    American wildernesses. This transformational journey was never pleasant or easy…”

    The idea of Jung’s concept of synchronicity is that events happening in the same moment of time may have a relationship that is meaningful, but acausal (not mediated by cause-and-effect). Many parallel occurrences, like this one, can be dismissed as coincidence or interpreted to be meaningful synchronicities. In this case, like most cases, no one can make an incontrovertible case for one over the other. It comes down to the interpretive choice of the individual. I choose to see them as meaningfully connected. The upsetting dream I had about Jack two weeks ago seemed to show him struggling, confused, vulnerable and a bit paranoid in what I felt, even in the dream, seemed like a Bardot, a difficult after-life place.

    Jack’s paper seems prophetic of his continuing need for transformative rite of initiation. Geographic travel didn’t quite work for him because as Emerson put it, “The problem with traveling is that you take yourself with you.” When Jack discussed suicide with me a couple of years ago, he saw it that way—as a chance for total transformation. In Jack’s own words from 2008:

    “This is the symbolic death of the child, which leads to the birth of the new person….This transformational journey was never pleasant or easy…”

    My feeling is that what I choose to interpret as a synchronicity further confirms my feeling Jack is on such a transformational journey, but that it may not be pleasant or easy right now. The painful concern for what Jack might be experiencing, what he suffered in life, and my own feelings of loss greatly lightened and turned into enthusiasm following the synchronicity. A debunker, of course, can dismiss this as wish fulfillment thinking, and that is a reasonable alternate explanation and I respect their right to choose that interpretation.

    What people from various cultures have said is that we, the living, can help those in such liminal zones by our encouragement—our positive thoughts, images, wishes and intentions for them. If you are open to this interpretation, please help Jack through his journey of transformation by holding to the image of him at his best and wish him well on his continuing journey of transformation.

    Finally, I would like someone with high social skills and connected to Minneapolis to organize an informal wake for Jack. I would like to fly in from Boulder for that and stay at the Minneapolis hostel. At this wake I would like people, including me, to speak about Jack, tell stories and memorable moments about him which I would like to record and post to Jack’s memorial page as a podcast. I did this at the wake of another friend who died, David “Owl” Koppelman who was someone Jack met several times. If you go to Owl’s memorial page: http://zaporacle.com/owl-in-memorium-david-owl-koppelman/ you’ll find such a podcast. It was not all sentimentality and hagiography. We told many comic stories about Owl’s not always pleasant quirks. We all found that we had a lot to say and it would be a great record of what Jack was like, and maybe, depending on your point of view, a giant prayer that may help Jack on his journey. Does anybody have anything to offer to make that happen?

  8. Some of us walk the uncomfortable and uncharted ground between science and mysticism and I have always felt that you are a kindred spirit in this regard, Zap. It is the hardest path to tread, this middle ground. We recognize the immense value in science, but also its rigid orthodoxy and tendency to create inquisitions, and its inability to allow for that which lies outside of its domain. It is a good and valid path to try to walk this line though, and I encourage you to continue.

  9. I’ve been holding back tears for a couple of days, since I first heard the news of your disappearance. First I felt total disbelief. I couldn’t even wrap my head around the fact that you were gone. It didn’t seem real and so the thoughts I had were almost unemotional. I was trying to find some sort of rational explanation for what I had been told, but I wasn’t really able to connect it to the person I had grown up with and loved. It wasn’t until early this evening when it all came falling down for me. I started thinking about you and the things we shared and I just broke down and started crying, pretty uncontrollably, and although it let up at times, it didn’t really stop for about an hour. Finding out about punk and bonding over music in 5th grade. I remember when we were in 6th or 7th grade, playing music all day over at Brent’s, recording songs on his camera and then ordering pizza at 2am at my house and waiting for the delivery guy outside so that my parents wouldn’t know we were still up. Discovering girls in middle school, and you humping your pillow in a hilarious fit of self-aware and excited sexual frustration. You loved drinking tea and probably the first philosophical conversations I had were with you. You were able to take it to another level at a really young age and still manage to have a great sense of humor. I can hear your laugh and that weird voice you would always do. I think a lot of what we did together encouraged creative and spiritual growth, and I feel I owe a lot of who I am now to that early friendship. Eventually we started hanging out with other people and by the end of high school our paths had completely split. That shit happens. The last time we were together was about a month and a half ago, and before that, although I may have seen you around sporadically here and there, we hadn’t really spent any time together for about 6 or 7 years. That seems crazy to me now. We talked about the guilt we both carried and about self-forgiveness. I got to hear you play guitar and sing. It was like we picked up right where we left off. That night was a blessing for me. You seemed to come out of nowhere, and whether intentional or not, it was like you were saying goodbye. And now I guess that serves as some sort of closure for me, and without it I’m sure I would be dealing with things in a totally different way. You’re an incredibly bright and endlessly-giving person and you will be missed. I wonder if this would have happened if you knew how much you were loved.

  10. I had a dream about Jack last night. He was found and was safe, we were laughing. I woke up with a great, and very real, sense of relief.

    I wish he knew the incredible impression he left on me the last time we met, and how many times he’s crossed my mind since then.

  11. My friend, Rob Brezsny, just posted on facebook: “You must have chaos within yourself if you are to be a dancing star.”
    – Friedrich Nietzsche He must have been thinking of you, Jack, and he offered condolences recently. Do you remember asking me if I could introduce you to his daughter?

  12. If you’ve been here before, go back to the bottom of the main document (before the comments) I posted another photo of Jack and a few more things. Also, near the top, I expanded the explanation of why Jack so often lashed out at people close to him.
    I think it’s only fair for Jack to be able to make some comments on his own comments page. I can also hear him in my mind, taunting me as usual about my narcissism, “Ah, what a fine gentleman you are—trying to take center state at my own goddamn funeral!!!”

    So to redress the imbalance I’m going start posting more of Jack’s words. Here are some from an email dated 11/28/08:

    i understand that lately, and perhaps even for a long while, i have given you a sort of grevious rebeliousness about much. i do this because i have always hated the thought of nearly anyone teaching me anything, especially adults, whom i learned to view as the enemy when growing up. i doled out this agression becuase i am often too proud to admit my faults, and too arrogant to conceed myself. but speaking now, i am readsy for the apprenticeship or mentorship to being anewm, more seriously… i often curse the world for where i find myself etc, i think too much with my head which leads to ego dominance, and it feeds that venemous ego, and i seemed to have lost the art of living with my heart. but maybe this world provides you with what you need, points you in the direction you are supposed to go, rather than the one you think you want to go. perhaps this is why we met. i can see now that it is not expierence that makes a man wise but how expierence is used and evaluated. you can only be wise and strong if you allow yourself to be. and i know that i have had much more expierence and expierences of a more interesting kind than most of my lousy generation…i can feel an imminent failure descending upon me, with school etc.. and this often causes great despair which will in turn only lead to more failure. in short it seems i will not be here much longer…i need to evaluate myself, my life my mission etc…i will need to decide what is going to happen next.

  13. Jack does not want anyone to leave any sort of candy-coated remarks about him. On 12/3/08 he wrote:

    “i asked for this to clear up any mis understanding between us, i wanted it to be bare and completly honest, and before you wrote it i said “dont candy coat anything you think may hurt me, remember if there is something dark in the undercurent that remains unsaid it will still be understood when we speak, but because it is not identified it will only create more confusion and perhaps hostility” or something along those lines. anyways no qualms. i do hope though that you did not set these words on this page more lavishily then you do in you mind, as that would be untrue.”

    Never able to resist an opportunity for sarcasm I replied with words (the last line at least) which now seem sadly prophetic:

    Jack is like a giant caramel covered with rainbow sprinkles, his heart is of marzipan, his brain is like cotton candy embedded with ultra sour jelly beans imbued with a myriad of artificial flavorings.The confectioner’s glaze of his skin is like the hardened exoskeleton of an M&M protecting a gooey center of milk chocolate. But enough with the candy coating, Jack is a young mutant struggling with the choice of life in the Babylon Matrix or oblivion.

  14. Jack on 12/7/08:
    it is seven o’clock here in the frozen tundra of winnipeg manitoba. there is only one thing i am certain of at this point and that is that the sun is not shining in winnipeg, and i wonder whether or not it has ever shone here before. i have been drinking wine all night alone, and after i eat my oatmeal, i will go to get coffee….we are paying rent to the same landlord, with the same resentment for the currency that landlord demands.”

    In between the ellipses, even though he was having a somewhat grim day, Jack wrote about 15 lines that were, and are, the kindest, most generous words that anyone has ever, or probably will ever, write about me. It’s a great reminder that although Jack could be mean and rage at me, or you, like a thirsty dog trapped in an over-heated car, he could also, at the right moment, be the most loving and generous of souls as well. Again, being in different countries was helping us get along at that point. Now that we live in different dimensions we’re getting along even better because Jack can’t contradict anything I have to say!

  15. Jack, 12/14/08:
    its so fucking cold up here i get pissed when i am outside. i dont know whats happening to me, but again today i have felt extremely self conscious, consicous of deep depression, estranged from myself and estranged from reality. i dont really have a reason to feel sad, and i dont understand why this is going on. i have all the resources to have a good life, and all keep doing is fucking up. i am extremely tired and all i really wanna do right now is go to bed but i know if i do that i will have to face the night alone again… i would like to have a scene wherever i go. and by secene i mean a number of friends with somewhat similar intrests, and putrsuits, and women… i dont really trust myself, or my emotions anymore and have no idea whats going to happen. i can only hope that i will see some sort of light and make my way home and find some kind of place where i can talk eat laugh and dance.

  16. First two sentences of a college paper Jack wrote:
    Identity, as everything else in this world, is in a perpetual state of metamorphosis. Change is in inherent part of life. It is mankind’s struggle to keep in sync with the world around them, while simultaneously preserving the comfort they have come to know that makes life interesting.

  17. Jacky,
    Insightful and wise beyond your years I will never forget you my sweet friend. Remember Laying on our backs staring at the ceiling listening to your favorite records on Vinyl? You constantly posing topics of conversation that would trigger deep and intellectual thought.. (Especially for only being 14 at the time)
    Questions about the universe and philosophical renderings were always on the agenda. You lent me the Tao of Pooh and told me I had to read it and you often used the logic in that book to explain the greater meaning of life. “There are things about ourselves that we need to get rid of; there are things we need to change. But at the same time, we do not need to be too desperate, too ruthless, too combative. Along the way to usefulness and happiness, many of those things will change themselves, and the others can be worked on as we go. The first thing we need to do is recognize and trust our own Inner Nature, and not lose sight of it.” It was hard to hold onto that logic when things seemed tough… I know that. Do you remember camping outside under the stars with Elky,Heather, Hoan, Hutch,Bubba, Danny and Max? The “refuge” and also that amazing spot near Lyndale? I vividly remember you playing your guitar and softly singing while we all listened.. You were everyones favorite adventure companion always exploring new uncharted territories of Minneapolis…
    and lets not forget how much of a gentlemen you always were.. I like to imagine where ever you are now that you are wearing a ridiculous top hat, a monocle and are holding onto a really sweet wooden cane… just being Jacky. You touched the lives of so many my sweet friend. The lessons and logic you taught me will never be forgotten.. I will hold onto the many memories we shared and will think about you often.
    Love always.

    • You have and will always be Jacky to me -my childhood love that I will never forget. Julia mentioned some of our great adventures but no one will ever know how much you meant to all of us, and the wonderful/crazy times that we had. One of my favorites was sneaking out and laying with you at Newton hill. Thinking I was such a rebel and was so excited to see you I could barely keep the butterflies in my stomach. I just loved to listen to everything you had to say as I played with your hair. I always wished I could be as spiritual as you.
      I am sorry that we grew apart. I am sorry that I didn’t stay in touch. I am sorry I was unaware of the difficulties you were facing. But I NEED you to know that I have never stopped loving you.
      You will always hold a special place in my heart and I can’t wait to see you again someday.
      Love,
      ELK

  18. Oh wow, just found a paper Jack wrote about a William Blake poem. Jack’s words are so prophetic of his life path and of his inner, spiritual wisdom. Following is the Blake poem he was discussing and what he wrote about it on 2/26/09:

    Ah Sunflower

    Ah Sunflower, weary of time,
    Who countest the steps of the sun;
    Seeking after that sweet golden clime
    Where the traveller’s journey is done;

    Where the Youth pined away with desire,
    And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,
    Arise from their graves, and aspire
    Where my Sunflower wishes to go!
    —-William Blake

    dark aspects of experience. The sunflower rather than being in harmony with the world that has created it, is imprisoned by it. The weariness is a sign of fatigue that comes with living an extended period of time on earth. And this weariness is elicited by time, a dominant feature of this world. Rather than being content inside the world that created it, the sunflower is weary, feels trapped and therefore is imprisoned.

    The sunflower is unique within the botanical world not only because of its largess and vividness but also for the fact that throughout the day its head follows the sun across the sky on its voyage. While still very much a part of the earth that retains them, these beings are keenly aware of some higher existence. Their eyes watch the sun, existing high above and far away from earth. This is the subject of the second line, “who countest the steps of the sun.” While imprisoned on the earth and restricted by its limitations the sunflower is constantly aware of the sun, a celestial body, beyond earth. The sunflower follows the sun like a child mesmerized by a toy it knows it cannot have, “seeking after that sweet golden clime,” it longs to follow the sun on its “sweet golden clime,” a more profound journey than is known on earth.

    And perhaps the sunflower knows it is fated to remain trapped upon earth, and so only waits for death. The line “where the travellers journey is done” seems to indicate this notion. For life itself is a journey and each creature within is only travelling through. In olden times celestial bodies were referred to as “heavenly bodies” and perhaps this archaic theological mysticism is reflective of the first stanza of the poem. The being contained on earth is weary of life’s difficulties, and so looks to a higher more “heavenly” power to be their guide, just as the sun guides the sunflower throughout the course of each day. They seek after the “golden clime,” they seek after the divine.

    The second stanza begins noting mankind’s burden: “where the youth pined away with desire,” mankind suffers in carrying this weight of longing on earth. This line is identifying a most common and painful theme of life on earth, that of unrequited love. Blake is referring to sexual frustration, an inherent part of modern life. He follows this line with “and the pale virgin shrouded in snow,” Blake’s virgin here is hidden behind a veil of purity. Certainly behind this purity is desire. For snow, while pure and clean, is also cold and covers the world of its heat and its life throughout the barren winter. These sexual lines represent the problems of the world: the youth only recently acquainted with the world of experience and the virgin who inevitably will be “tainted” with experience. This is sought to be escaped during “the sweet golden clime/ where the travellers journey is done” where there is no more sexual repression, where worldly suffering is conquered.

    The final lines of the poem “arise from their graves and aspire/ where my sunflower wishes to go” signify that even in youth and innocence there is no safety. The line “arise from their graves” seems to indicate that this world itself is perhaps a grave, there are as many limitations in life as there are in death. Therefore all “aspire where my sunflower wishes to go.” And from the very beginning, in the voice it is evident that they are longing after what cannot be. “ah sunflower” so the poem opens, yet this poetic voice sounds like a man in old age reflecting upon adventures during his youth, “ah my younger days,” even though he knows they are quite gone. They are all in the same boat- earth- and are all on the same journey, for this they are all seeking after that “sweet golden clime” and therefore each and each, they all “aspire/ where my sunflower wishes to go.”

    • Deep in his soul Jack always had a map of his own trajectory in this incarnation. He used Blake’s poem to express that for us. Nicely done Jack.

    • Tears, goosebumps going through Jack’s emails, they are so prophetic. We have to stop thinking of Jack’s life as tragic. He expressed his intention to awake through death so clearly and so many times. In an email dated 3/25/09 (isn’t that close to his birthday? I forget the exact date) which had the subject heading “this should be to your liking” (yes, Jack, now more than ever) Jack copies a poem and then writes one of his own:

      I count each day a little life,
      With birth and death complete;
      I cloister it from care and strife
      And keep it sane and sweet.

      With eager eyes I greet the morn,
      Exultant as a boy,
      Knowing that I am newly born
      To wonder and to joy.

      And when the sunset splendours wane
      And ripe for rest am I,
      Knowing that I will live again,
      Exultantly I die.

      O that all Life were but a Day
      Sunny and sweet and sane!
      And that at Even I might say:
      “I sleep to wake again.”

      and this is one of my own:

      The Man Who Dreamed He Died and Woke Up Dead

      And so his careful thoughts,

      Detailed with a cold baroque elegance,

      Crafted an entwined complexity,

      A sculpture of disgusting failure

      And in it bore a promise

      From which he could not escape

      And the precious wineglasses

      Of his dreams

      Entrapped within the sinews of twisted, deformed limbs

      Had been shattered

      And so the sun laughs malevolently

      From its condescending throne

      And he can smell tomorrow’s grotesque hands

      Hovering above the fever in his head

      And the nightmare of today still lurks like

      A lurid mist behind his eyes

      The landscape becomes impure passing through him

      So he laughs alone in the solemn twilight

      A miserable laugh, a poisonous smile

      And his acquaintances all hate him

      No one shall greet him

      In this desolate desert of days

      He is buried alive

      And suffocates inhaling the sand

      And so he sleeps a sleep

      Less generous than death

      He commands the supreme alchemists of his sky

      To pound their gavel upon his mind

      Emitting ringing lies

      Of overcast skies throughout all of time

      And a church, with its holy cross, sank into the marshland nearby

      When he awoke

      He was dead

  19. Everywhere Jack left messages about his ultimate intentions. Somewhere on his afterlife journey, I feel that Jack is going to encounter another realm’s version of a smart phone with vast wireless broadband that spans dimensions. I think it looks like an old stone wishing well and I think Jack is wearing a straw hat when he looks into it. The well has a little shingled roof, shading it, which allows images and glowing words to show up better just beneath the surface of the water. Jack is reading through his memorial page and laughing. Like the latest Samsung smart phone that tacks eye movements, no track pad is necessary to scroll through documents. It’s all afterlife 3.0 technology—telepathic/telekinetic user interface. When Jack sees his words excerprted in the comments section, he starts to laugh, realizing the joke he played on us, and on himself… From a school paper he wrote on 3/12/09:

    The Problem With Travelling

    The American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.” Paul Bowles 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky…The main character Port is a habitual traveller, suspended in an adolescent mindset, who employs travel as a means of escapism. …senseless meander across Northern Africa. As they move from the more Western influenced regions of costal Africa inland towards the heart of the Sahara, and more unknown territory, the increasingly harsh desert landscape elicits their true characters and their inability to evolve. Though the potential for personal development and change is constantly present during their travels, this potential is never truly manifested. By the end of the novel the group’s cohesion is completely dissolved when Port dies, Kit flees, and Tunner remains where he is stationed. Ultimately Ports death can be seen as his failure to transcend the immature way in which he relates to the landscape around him, which is a manifestation of his own psychological landscape.

    The Sheltering Sky is the story of personal quest. Each of these characters has embarked upon a voyage of discovery, though this has less to do with the unravelling landscape around them than it does with their own interior landscapes. As Americans travelling in Africa, they are in about as exotic and foreign a landscape as can be found. Given the otherness of the landscape it would only be natural that these characters would come to address that which is unknown, to penetrate inwards towards the heart
    of things, thereby attaining a sense of understanding heretofore unrealized. …

  20. Daniel, my closest friend, a wise person who was also a friend to Jack, and who also worked and lived near Jack in Boulder (one of the few people Jack never spoke ill of on any occasion) Just sent the following from his phone:

    The soul does not fear death, for it sees it for what it is.

    Jack had a lot of soul. the false persona he found in others and himself conflicted with the timeless that he knew to be more real, more alluring, and infinitely more meaningful.

    Go then jack, there are other worlds than these. We all send you love and support as you have entered the beyond, to travel to places unseen and unknown– beyond your skin your beauty has grown.

    Be well and know the meaning of your life continues, through those you touched and loved; you are with us and we with you.

    Your brother on the path,

    Daniel

    Sent from my iPhone

  21. jonathan. watching the movie now. i dont think i will finish it tonight but if you want to discuss lets. it is humorous but disturbing and horrifying at the same time. what a world we live in

    — On Thu, 4/9/09, jonathan zap wrote:

    From: jonathan zap
    Subject: quote
    To: “[email protected]
    Date: Thursday, April 9, 2009, 8:46 PM

    Another Shaw quote, and something to keep in mind before getting into a verbal ruckus with an unconscious person:

    I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

  22. This might make you feel better if you ever felt like Jack was picking on you (you were right, but don’t take it personally, he did it with almost everyone). This is an excerpt from an email that one of Jack’s college friends in Winnipeg sent to Jack and he forwarded to me for some reason. I think we can all relate to what this anonymous friend was feeling!

    And don’t get mad at me for posting this Jack. You said no candy-coating! And you know very well that your candy-coating was often of the atomic ultra-sour kind:

    From: (anonymous Jack survivor)
    Subject: RE: it’s time
    To: [email protected]
    Date: Friday, April 24, 2009, 2:27 AM

    im not mad at you, but rather confused. you took the dumbest things and made arguments about them, and you did it over and over. and not in a friendly way, but in a more offensive way. you normally dont do that, but i recall you acting the similar way back in the dorms at one of the last times we met there. that was part of the reason i didnt want to hang out when you first came back here. its not like the arguing or discussions we normally had, which were interesting. its basically like you try and take anything i say, try to find some kind of thing you could argue about and then ignoring the actual reason im saying it, you just go on and on, finding more flaws in speech, things that could be taken in a different way if you took them out of context, and holding them against me. for example, do you still not realize that i was saying MOST corporate holly wood movies, from the ones that I saw, share a similar way of presenting that doesnt fit my taste, or do you still somehow think that my views on hollywood movies are basically racist, as in not liking a man because of his skin color? i explained over and over, but you still didnt seem to get it. you normally wouldnt be so illogical.

    and thats just one example, and i must say that i dont feel comfortable around you sometimes because it seems like you have something to hide or, something. you avoid answering things a lot with jokes, and even in the dorms you would suddenly disappear and the reason for it would be unknown a lot of the time.

    but thats just my views, and i know you are a good person and i like a lot about you. im sure i have my flaws too. id rather not hang out though. i hope you understand, and hope you do well where ever you go. as for me, im going to travel for a month and go back to school here, basically because i still have braces and it would cost a lot of money to transfer orthodontists, and although i dont really like the u of m art school, its pretty easy, and like you said, in times like this we seem to need degrees.

    i hope things are a little more clear now, and im sorry for not explaining and completely ignoring. bye (anonymous Jack survivor).

  23. I found two additional, awesome poems which I appended to the poetry page. This next excerpt from Jack also seems prophetic and aimed at all who were close to him. I’m going to title this message from Jack to all of us, “What You May Not be Taking into Account Because of Being Caught Up in Your Grief” Jack actually used that phrase and the word “grief,” though at the time I was more annoyed, angry and perhaps feeling hurt. Obviously “grief” can have non-mourning connotations, but the fact that he used that word seems beautiful and eerie in this new context. What Jack explains is that others don’t always realize how self-aware he was of his own dark side, that he held himself accountable for wrongs to others gross and subtle and these came from….well Jack will say it best himself:

    I can see how you may feel like you have been exploited recently, and that I have been selfish. If there is one thing I do not want to be it is a bastard. I want to be bright, I want my presence to unfold and warm others, I want to be a loving presence. You may just call this “lip service” as you have before and that would be legitimate for you, but I know that it is not so superfacial. I also realize in the past week or so I have faltered with my practices and my devotion to my path and to my self. I say self because when I am devoted to these higher ideals and devoted to goodness this is the expression of my true or highest self. And like I said I am well aware that for the past week I have not lived by this as I could have. I have been trying to figure out how to get back on the path. Yet you should also be made aware that when I am not living by my truest highest self I am most always well aware of that even if I do not express it outwardly, I am well aware of when I hurt you and well aware in the ways, even subtle ways I do so. I am not saying this as if it rectifys the transgressions, just to inform you that while I have a dark side, selfish side, inferior, narrow side, I am well aware of its existence and my other side knows the right way, just so you know I am not completely blind to this, though I may very well be blind to some of it. What I suspect you are not taking into account, being caught up in your grief is how difficult living can be for me, how much of a struggle life is to often. Though I also realize this is not really an excuse for being mean or anything, the struggle can often break me down and thats when I slip up. And this is where self pity can ruin me, when I feel like I am struggling very hard, I may pity myself and come to resent the world etc…and that is the danger. Self pity may also seize me when I see the kids I grew up with who do not seem to struggle whatsoever, or at least not to the degree which I feel I do, though I also understand that this is probably not true. It just seems at times nobody has it like I do, and while that may not be entirely true it is a hard thought to bear. I just dont know how to attain that life that I think I should have, I dont know what to do, or what I am doing wrong. Because I am so besieged with this thought, and with the incessant urge to find that life, and how I still have not found it I maybe come to hate myself to a degree or see this as a personal shortcomming in addition to seeing it as a way in which the universe is not on my side.

  24. In an email dated 12/22/09 Jack reflects on his ambivalence about his writings. At the end of it he reminds me about a synchronicity that has so many levels of strangeness that I’ll probably be wondering about it for the rest of my life:

    A new notion dawned on me earlier this afternoon and I thought you might have some good imput and advice. I came to realize why I had such ambivalence about poems. It is because in this modern day and age the poet and all artists to some degree have reputations as effeminate nancies, as fakes, as dreamers with their head in the clouds, and as being weak. This of course has nothing to do inherently with any particular art form but rather with the practictioners of this art form, and when that is taken into account it is no wonder why the arts and why poetry has such a reputation. And this is the reason why I wanted to rid myself of my sincere interest in the arts and in writing. of course I cannot do that without greatly truncating myself. what I realized I want to be and need to be is a warrior poet. combining the strenghts of both hemispheres, combining the best of both worlds, blending the qualities of the masculine and the qualities of the feminine. I would like to work with you on this aspiration. I have begun to read your document the way of the warrior. I have been thinking a great deal, perplexed, about what life I must craft, and how to best express and live by my essence. Being as how you are an outside observer your feedback would be a great assistance. I know you are busy and you may see this as selfish and so I will also say that If you feel you are being exploited and do not want to do any of these things I will not condemn you for that. I would also like to reitteriate my intention, though I realize you will object to the word intention as someting that will remain eternally in the future but in all honesty we havent had much time recently, to go through parallell journeys with you, as I have had a revival of interest in my own version of that story and I believe by going through yours it will not only help you but also stimulate me. that is all

    Jack’s last statement reflects a haunting parallelism or synchronicity I had completely forgotten about until I started going through the emails. Before I ever met Jack, he was writing and felt haunted by a story about an boy who was an elf who lived in a forest and came down into the city. He never showed me any version of the story, at least not that I can recall. The strange thing is that I have been working for decades on an unfinished fantasy work called Parallel Journeys. In a central part of that epic (that I began a few years before Jack was born) there is a boy named Tommy who lives in the forest in a small intentional community in the Green Mountains of Vermont and he is a proto-elf. His elf nature emerges in the course of the story and is an origin story for that species. When his community is destroyed, he comes down into the city which is a total shock to him as he’s led a very sheltered life. Elsewhere in Parallel Journeys there is a journey to a lower astral plane where the protagonist encounters a previously living young man. The young man is based on an actual person I know, a young guy who lost his life speeding in a car in the mountains above Boulder. I had eerie survival of the soul experiences with him. I wrote about one of them here: Survival of the Soul Even weirder is that in the dream I had about Jack two weeks ago that made me want to break the silence he asked for, I felt that it took place in the lower astral space described in Parallel Journeys. It looked and felt the same and I recognized it as such even in the dream. Now here is this forgotten email where Jack is saying he wants to go through Parallel Journeys with me. (You are in so many ways!) Jack was like an elf who come down from the forest and lost his way. He could never adapt to the life on this plane in a way that was fully satisfactory for him. When I met Jack, a few day before his 19th birthday, he showed up at the door of the Boulder International Hostel (a fairly large and rather institutional looking building) and knocked on the two large metal doors. In five years of working there he was the only person I ever saw knock on the doors instead of opening them and coming in. He had on a red hoodie and looked like an elf who had just come down from the forest and didn’t understand modern ways. It feels like a multi-layered parallelism that is still unfolding and that I may be puzzling about for the rest of my life.

  25. Some may feel reluctant to leave comments because they feel that a grand summation of all they feel about Jack is called for. It doesn’t have to be. It can be ongoing. Barring some disaster that brings down the whole web, this page won’t go away. I’ve made arrangements for this site to continue past my life time.So feel free to come back as often as you want and even years from now to say something more. As you can see from the number of comments I’ve left– and I hope their number is not burdensome or irritating to anyone–but I find that my feelings and thoughts about Jack are too many to get closure on and there are drastic mood shifts. There are peaceful moments when I feel like Jack followed his soul’s plan and where I feel blessed to have known him. At other times all the many words Jack left in my care only seem to highlight the terrible silence of the last ten months when he severed ties with me, even used the words—severing ties—and never said or wrote another word to me and with no explanation. I’m grateful that a few weeks into the separation he reached out for two crisis phone calls when he felt really lost and I felt I was able to give him comfort and good advice. He was polite but very firm in his messages severing contact. That rejection is very difficult for me, and I’ve been struggling with it since it happened and now, at times it can seem to have a devastating finality. But I also realize that this is egocentric pain. What matters is the love we can give to a suffering person, not getting anything back from them. Jack gave so much back to me in the past, and to all who knew him, but there were also darker times when he may have lost his love for himself and had no love to give to others. Jack is not to be located in any one moment or place or even period of time. Jack’s most loving moments, the moments when he offered appreciation to us are eternal. They will never have not happened. Although Jack’s waking personality said he wanted to severe all ties, the ties were not severed. The two dreams I had in the last week about Jack that located his suffering indicate that deep ties remain. What a person’s waking personality says or does to us often does not reflect the soul ties we have with them. The dreams I had about Jack show that Jack is not in one time or space, none of us are. This is why I located him in the dreamtime, the time of day when I, and most of us, are most unbounded by space and time.

    In one of the last phone calls I had with Jack, he brought up some slight or wound he felt someone had given him years in the past. I gave the usual response about the importance of forgiveness. Jack said to me, “I’m not a forgiving person.” I was shocked by his statement. I never heard anyone actually admit to such a thing. I asked him if he really meant it and he said he did, that for him it was visceral thing, he couldn’t do anything about it. I felt terribly worried for him when he said that. As much as we might want Jack to forgive us, what is more crucial is for us to forgive him. In the same phone call Jack also said he was thinking about changing his name back to John and that maybe it was a mistake to have ever called himself Jack. This also made me feel extremely sad and concerned for Jack as I realized how deeply wounded his sense of identity was.

    While we may suffer because a wounded person has lost their capacity for love for a time, it is more important that we keep loving and forgiving them.It is also good that we ask for their forgiveness, even though there may be no answer. I know I never intentionally did anything to harm Jack and I feel that I did the very best I could at the time to help him,but I also know that flaws in my personality, places where I needed, and still need to mature were hurtful for him to be around. If I were further along in the very slow lessening of my narcissism I would have been better able to help Jack. The insecurities that would cause me to want to show off and impress people Jack misinterpreted as me trying to compete with him, or show that I was better than him. As many times as I tried to explain to him that this was not the intention of these neurotic tendencies, it could never convince him. Jack misinterpreted so many things from other people as slights, as people trying to insult, degrade or humiliate him. Usually, these perceived slights were just people, like me, who didn’t have their neurotic aspects contained. Through carelessness and our own struggles to become whole I, and many of us, caused Jack unintentional pain. Jack’s wounded pride and wounded sense of identity and persona were such that slight missteps we might make were hurtful to Jack.

    Forgive me Jack, forgive all of us who hurt you in these ways.

    Sometime in the Nineties an eighty-year-old woman, who was a Jungian analyst, gave a talk I attended in Boulder. At the end of her talk there were questions from the audience and the first one came from a young woman. “Now that you are an elder,” asked the young woman, “what can you tell me as a young woman about love?” The elder woman replied, “When I was your age I was desperately trying to be loved. But now I know that it is better to simply be love.”

    A terribly difficult part of the greiving process for me, and I’m sure for others is that Jack isn’t here on this plane for us to get his love in the ways we would want and might miss from the past. We might also have painful memories of when Jack was alive and we didn’t feel like we got the love we deserved from him. The way to help Jack now is to struggle to rise above our need to be loved and to be love, to be love toward Jack wherever he is. To forgive him even if he wasn’t always able to forgive us. To ask for forgiveness for the imperfect ways we tried to love Jack.

    M. Scott Peck has an interesting definition of love: “I define love thus: The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”

    Many profound and deeply spiritual cultures, especially Tibetan Buddhism, say that some who die struggle for a time to find their way. They say that excessive grief from survivors can be confusing and burdensome to them. This is why I am struggling to summon my will not to feel bitter or rejected or hurt by Jack, not to reflect on the love from him that feels so missing now, not to reflect on the way Jack left us as a rejection or punishment.

    In my case, for example, whatever bitterness or anger Jack might have felt toward me in his wounded state is not what matters.

    What matters is the will to be love, to send love to him, to hold in our hearts the image of Jack at his best, and to have the generosity of spirit to forgive anything Jack did in his wounded state that caused us pain. As you said Jack, you are divine in both your light and dark aspects. Let both your light and dark inspire us to be more whole and to have the courage to be love.

  26. Three hours after I wrote that I had to get up to catch the bus to the airport.

    Going through the 2010 archive of emails with Jack on the bus to the airport (to catch a flight to Minneapolis) I saw evidence of serious mistakes I made with Jack. Unreliable memory had revised things to make me look better, but now the actual words, my own forgotten words were convicting me, in the cold light of morning display serious mistakes caught forever in time like flies in amber.

    So often you were right, Jack, in wise, compassionate and diplomatic words you pointed out ways I was failing to be the friend and mentor you really needed and I was too caught up in my own grievances with life, my own sorrows, and egocentric neurosis to really get what you were saying. I never fully comprehended until the dream of two weeks ago the depth of your suffering and fragility. Yeah, I realize that overall there was more good than bad, and its not like I was the cause of your trajectory, etc. That would just be still more self-importance.

    I guess I’m left what that classic human lament: If only I knew then what I know now….Sorry I failed you so often Jack. All I can do is draw lessons from this to be a larger person going forward. Sorry man, I was one more person in this cold world who didn’t fully see you…

    I wrote the above words at the Denver airport feeling guilt and deep remorse (which I still feel). I was trying to unload the confession into the comments section but the plane was already loading and there was no time. When I got to my assigned seat I saw that the middle seat was empty and in the window seat was a very young guy who looked remarkably like a slightly more diminutive version of Jack when I met him (a few days before his 19th birthday). Take it with as many grains of salt as you want, but I immediately felt the presence of synchronicity. He introduced himself as Max, a young German who has been volunteering for the forest service in Colorado and was going to Minneapolis to catch a connecting 13 hour flight to Hamburg and then to his home in Eastern Germany where he was soon about to go to university to study biotechnology. I asked him his age. “I’m 18, but almost 19.” he replied in excellent German accented English. In other words, he was Jack’s exact age when I met him. For the hour and 20 minute flight we had a great conversation about numerous things including the future of biotechnology and virtual reality, the causes of Germany’s high obesity levels, the meaning of synchronicity and some psi experiments, the East German Stasi and some slightly humorous discussion of the Weimar Republic the rise of Hitler, Nazis and the Jews, etc. He was obviously brilliant, talented and full of potential just as Jack was when I met him. I bought him an airline box lunch and it was overall, a multilayered image of forgiveness. A young German and a middle-aged Jew from the Bronx, who carries the Hebrew name of a relative who died in the holocaust, joking a bit about WWII. His age and rather Jack like appearence and body type felt like a gesture of forgiveness from the cosmos. Yeah, I wasn’t as good a friend or mentor to Jack as I thought I was, I failed him in some key ways, but by human standards (not a very high bar, of course) I wasn’t so bad and would be given other chances to be a mentor….

    There’s a photo I took of Max (near the bottom of the body of the page) for you to judge whether there is a resemblance to the Jack I met at 18 and just about to turn 19. So if you also feel like you failed Jack in some ways, welcome to the fellowship. Instead of wallowing in guilt, I interpret the synchronicity as an encouragement to take the very next chance to do better next time.

    And Jack, just in case you had any hand in pulling off that synchronicity, bravo, nicely done…. (I took a photo of Max so you can judge the resemblence. Scroll up to the bottom of the body of the document (before the comments section)

  27. Some of Jack’s thoughts about suicide from 2011:

    Since I’ve been back I spend more time with people who, though not insensitive, are not really spiritual; eg, 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 intact 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…

    But I tell you I just can’t foresee such a greater future. I realize that in some ways thinking of suicide is an indulgence, and is self-centered, but there is another part of me that just truly wants to die, that doesn’t see life as worth it, that doesn’t see life improving, or myself as being. Suicide just seems appealing. It seems like that best option at some times.

    The idea of suicide has been one that I have at least entertained since mid to late adolescence, but mostly when I thought about it then, it was never really plausible, more like a vain indulgence. But it felt much more real and intense than ever before, to the point where I was looking up how to make nooses and scoping out bridges around town and reading about famous suicide cases like David Foster Wallace and the Virginia Tech shooter. I just felt, rightly or wrongly, that it wasn’t recognized by you, or that you didn’t take what I was saying seriously, or that you didn’t care.

  28. But not all days were preoccupied with such dark reflections. Often Jack’s emails were filled with brilliant insights about life, himself, and others, beautifully expressed. Here’s an example:

    Hey Jonathan, good talking to you the other day too. The competitiveness is an interesting issue. It is something that is challenging to overcome because as humans we are biologically wired to behave like that. “Monkeys are natural politicians,” etc…. Also as human beings there is another societal layer added to this, not only is it biologically motivated, it is motivated by heroic alpha male movie characters, magazine ads, the general celebration of loud, assertive types and so forth, so even when you are aware of the negative aspects of the unfeminine, competitive state of mind, it is so easy to digress into it, as there are not only extremely powerful biological forces at work, but perhaps more powerful and more insidiously ubiquitous are the cultural and societal forces. This is intensified as we live in such a media saturated climate; the internet, t.v., movies etc…
    But its also a component of Nietzche’s will to power, will to power as the primary force at work in the world, and how virtually every situation can turn into a political, power situation. I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I’ve been noticing it in myself and in others. I thought that I had to deal with a lot of competitiveness and power struggles with you, but in retrospect that was probably not as bad. Its probably worse with my own friends because they are younger, less aware of it, more involved in the social world etc…it bothers me because any situation can turn into this mildly unpleasant grappling for power; comments are refuted, “where did you hear that,” “that doesn’t sound true” etc…no one wins in the end and the energy is just sucked out of the situation. several nights ago, for instance, I was with my friends eli and brent and we were talking about organic food. Eli, who is not someone who digresses into power struggles, was saying how part of the organic food revolution is misleading because some local farmers have been growing ‘organically’ for generations but are unable to claim the title because it costs money, is a three year process etc…and my other friend brent started saying that the ‘organic’ designation meant nothing, how it once was about sustainability but no longer is and how it “means nothing.” I disagreed with him and the situation just devolved into a mildly unpleasant power struggle that neither of us really cared about. It’s just so easy to digress into that mentality, especially when you’re around other people. It really highlights the importance of Jefferson’s “The Price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” But also the competitiveness and power grappling, I’ve realized, lead you generally to believing too much in the world, its victories, its failures, its hero’s and its losers. It gets you subscribing to the world’s superficial ideology, that leaves so many people depressed, angry and resentful. And this is damaging because it sharpens the pains of the world while simultaneously diminishing the pleasures. If there is an insight I have had recently that I’ve found useful, it’s that I shouldn’t believe too much in the world and shouldn’t take the world too seriously. Thats not to say that nothing matters, of course, or that you should just “do what you feel like,” all the time, but simply to do your work well as often as you can, but don’t take life so brutally seriously. I’ve found in myself the more I participate in that sort of competitiveness, the more I try and act like the type of character that contemporary america celebrates, smooth, and yuppie-ish, the more depressed and crazy I act. This also leads me more into the thinking that perhaps I ought to abandon the worldly ambitions I once had, and think more seriously about living a quieter life, more withdrawn from the noise and haste.

  29. Also in 2011 Jack, or his mom, Pat, or both, I forget how it was set up, but Jack was aware and approving of it, asked me if I could write up a summary of what I thought was going on with Jack’s situation. It still seems right, and might give some insight in why things were so tough with Jack and impossible for any one person to fix. It may also help give some insight if you know anybody else who is having struggles like Jack’s

    I have a few thoughts about Jack’s situation and though it’s probably all stuff you already know sometimes hearing it from someone else can be helpful. Admittedly, putting into words aspects of the situation and even possible solutions is far easier than actually creating a positive outcome.

    I’ll start with a possible solution and work backwards from there. The solution could be reduced to a single sentence, but is no easy answer as it would require the beneficent convergence of many different forces and people to bring about. Jack needs a positively reinforcing cohesive social group containing at least some peers in which he can make meaningful, appreciated contributions and that would be appropriate for a highly introverted, intellectual, self-aware person with social anxieties. Obviously, that’s a tall order to pull off, but not impossible. For example, just the right college theater group, or some altruistic, service-oriented group of young people uniting to help inner city kids, etc.

    A good part of Jack’s problems derive from general social trends that are causing epidemic levels of depression and anxiety. (I hope you’ll forgive the pedantic style, this is the way I think aloud) We are social mammals and we all need positively reinforcing cohesive social groups which have become increasingly rare. Many modern situations demand that we make contributions in the form of labor, but don’t provide meaningfulness in return. The meaningfulness needs to come from the feeling that one has made a life-affirming contribution ideally in the context of an appreciative, cohesive social group. Many people will lose their will to live if they don’t have that.

    For example, let’s say I’m in a pre-med program. In theory, in the abstract, I’m learning skills that in several years in the future might allow me to help people, but right now I’m laboring in an alienating, competitive environment. If I am diligent with my labors and do particularly well on a test, that threatens my fellow students because it disadvantages them on the grading curve. By contrast, if I were part of a band of paleolithic hunter-gatherers, my labors improve the well-being and chances of survival of the whole band and are immediately appreciated. As you probably know, when anthropologists visited tribal cultures they found zero incidence of most of the psychopathologies like depression and anxiety that are almost the norm in our society. I don’t romanticize or glorify tribal cultures, it would be regressive to try to emulate them, but they do illustrate something severely lacking in our culture that causes alienation and depression for Jack.

    Much more recently most people were living in agrarian situations where children were an economic necessity. You had to have sons that would be working the fields when you got too old, etc. But in our society children are an economic burden on their parents and this can lower their intrinsic sense of worth. At best they can please their parents by excelling at school where their peers are competing with them for grades and a place in the social hierarchy. The reward for doing well in school might be a corporate job where the more diligent they are with their labors, the more coworkers and bosses may feel threatened, competitive, jealous, etc. There is no social cohesion because they went to high school with one group, college with another, and then at work is a new group of strangers.

    Also, the activities of highest value to Jack don’t get meaningful, positive reinforcement from a cohesive social context. For example, Jack has made tremendous progress with his writing/thinking skills in the last couple of years. I’ve given positive reinforcement for that, but I’m not a peer. Even as he filled up notebooks and folders with exceptionally high quality writing he was continually lamenting that no one was reading what he wrote and therefore it seemed meaningless to him.

    Even the most solitary, introverted person pursuing solo tasks needs a positively reinforcing social context. For example, I feel highly motivated to get up at 4am and work on my writing, but that motivation is dependent on a positively reinforcing social context. Thanks to the internet, I might publish something I wrote in the morning and by afternoon get appreciative emails from people in other countries. It is even more reinforcing, however, when I get appreciative feedback from people I’m close to because I also need that cohesive social context.

    Jack’s depression, like many chronic problems, is tough to resolve because it is overdetermined by numerous factors any one of which would be sufficient to cause the problem. The general problem of our alienating society is compounded by a number of other problems.

    From what I understand of the research on depression the causal chain seems to be that a person is oppressed my negative thoughts, the looping negative thoughts produce negative emotions and the negative emotions create physiological changes, especially neurological changes which help to reinforce the vicious circle. As an emotionally volatile, introverted, restless thinker, Jack excels at creating dramatized negative thought scripts and life narratives that cause tremendous damage intrapsychically and interpersonally. For example, on the phone yesterday Jack described past occurrences in his life as “atrocities.” I tried to point out the exaggeration, and said something like, ”There are twenty-two year olds who have been in the military and really have committed atrocities or witnessed them, etc. but nothing in your past is an atrocity. Yes, you’ve had acutely embarrassing or uncomfortable social episodes, so has everyone by twenty-two, but none of them could be called an atrocity.” etc. The point is that in his mind ordinary setbacks are negatively dramatized as irreversible tragedies, but no doubt you are all too familiar with this tendency.

    Inner volatility then may cause Jack to lash out at those closest to him as you know, and that makes him feel guilty and creates conflict with those from whom he could have found solace, etc.

    With strangers and acquaintances many of the same factors cause social anxieties that don’t allow him to function as well socially as he would like to. Then he compounds this problem by greatly exaggerating it in his perception.

    Another huge compounding problem is that many of the peer social contexts are toxic and inappropriate for Jack. A lot of what he remembers as “atrocities” had to do with going to parties. As a thoughtful introvert, a typical high school or college party is a highly toxic and alienating situation for Jack (and a great many others). There is little positively reinforcing social cohesion, but there is intense, often ruthless competition for social status which is usually won by confident, superficial extroverts, etc. This type of peer social environment is disastrous for Jack.

    Although Jack ultimately has very high social and emotional intelligence, his social anxieties and inner tension can undermine social relations even in appropriate circumstances.

    On the positive side there are also a number of factors that could contribute to healing. Unlike many of his peers, Jack is very interested in eating a healthy diet and averse to abusing his body, though he’s had trouble with drinking at times. Probably the most satisfying accomplishment of his time in Boulder was his being able to quit cigarettes. I’m pretty wary of the point of view of much modern psychiatry that would reduce Jack’s condition to brain chemistry and solve it with a prescription for an SSRI. Both SSRIs and placebos have identical 40% cure rates. The placebos, however, are not addictive and do not cause the severe side effects associated with SSRIs. On the other hand, if Jack were prescribed an SSRI, it is quite possible that he would be among the 40%. My guess is that because depressed people are almost always oppressed by what’s called “psychic entropy” such as looping negative thoughts, giving power over to an an authoritative outside force—a pharmaceutical, a respected doctor or therapist, will sometimes work very well as an intervention. My personal bias is against the pharmaceutical approach, but at this point, if that were part of the treatment, I would hold back from criticizing it so as not to undermine the placebo effect.

    Unlike so many of his peers, Jack has lots of positive inner resources—-analytical and creative intelligence, social and emotional intelligence, acute self-awareness, expressive abilities in writing and music, etc. I got a very good feeling from the photo and website of the depth psychologist he just consulted who seems to have lots of clinical experience. I think it’s quite possible that Jack could benefit greatly from just the right therapist—probably male, experienced with depth psychology—and who must be someone that Jack admires and perhaps wants to emulate. I think just the right transference would be crucial.

    If Jack can find a positively reinforcing cohesive social situation he could do extremely well because he genuinely has so much to contribute that the right group will appreciate.

    Finding myself up much earlier than 4am, possibly because of worry about Jack, this has at least been a therapeutic writing exercise for me. I’ve probably just restated the obvious and what you already know, but hopefully there is something in here of use. My feeling is that if Jack can get through this rough phase that he has much better then average prospects for a meaningful and fulfilling life.

    Note added 5/3/13 Although there is nothing dramatically wrong with the above appraisal, in retrospect It seems too smug and over-confident. Even though Jack himself agreed with it at the time, it doesn’t beging to capture the complexity of Jack and all the seen and unseen forces affecting him. It is merely one cross sectioning slice at what was tormented Jack and is far from the whole picture.

  30. I am Jonathan’s neice and I met Jack when I took a trip to Colorado to visit my Jonathan. Jack also met both of my grandparents! Before he ever met me but he had already faithfully agreed to show me around in Boulder when I got there since my uncle worked long hours at the hostel. He had no obligation to me but it struck me that he was so helpful and kind. I saw so much of the kind, helpful, wonderful side of Jack. We had a lot of discussion about school and our plans as we were the same age. We were both worried about being young during the recession and how our futures would turn out Jack was friendly, intense, direct, and deep. We listened to music and spent a lot of time discussing his love of Leonard Cohen. When I heard about Jack’s passing, I didn’t want to believe it! I couldn’t imagine such a vibrant person gone from the world. Jack had a huge presence. I had hoped to meet with Jack again. I am sending him my thoughts and prayers and gratitude for the kindness he showed me.

  31. I found some more of Jack’s poems late last night to his poetry page, so if you read it before go back and you’ll find some powerful new ones.

  32. My mom (Jonathan’s), Bernice Zap wanted to leave a note about Jack’s poems. She met Jack in 2008. She is a retired psychologist who will be 90 in November:
    “I am not yet skilled enough to get around with any skill in the Internet and I at first found only a small part of your In Memoriam for Jack. I have kept trying from time to time and suddenly, by chance, found many, many poems, but no place for comments. How astonishing to see his photographs, so vulnerable and YOUNG, and to realize that they are of the CHILD who did such wonderful writing. Talented or Gifted don’t say it. GENIUS ! Like a Mozart, the rarest of prodigies, a special creation. (I am using capitals only because I don’t know how to underline or italicize. )

    One of the things I learned in my reading of studies of the most intellectually gifted children by Leta Hollingworth, of Columbia University, was that although their rare gift was an asset to them in many respects they had a difficulty as children because they were not emotionally mature enough to handle the existential problems of finding a satisfying philosophy of life, coping with an awareness of mortality, suffering of the innocent, the UNFAIRNESS of life, the seeming triumph of evil, and the difficulty of finding anyone in their environment who can literally understand and SPEAK THEIR LANGUAGE.

    There would be comfort for me, but maybe not for you, in the Jewish funeral quotation, The dust returns to dust,and the spirit returns to God Who made it. Jack must be in a place in his JOURNEY that suits him better.

    (My mom was a child psychologist for 44 years and made a study of child prodigies (she was a legendary one herself). She is also an avid reader of poetry and often sends ones she’s written out by hand in the mail. On the phone she said someone like Jack was one in a million, “like a Mozart” she said several times which is the highest praise I’ve ever heard from her—she’s a classical pianist and Mozart is like a god to her. She also said, “It’s like he’s a Walt Whitman, but not plagiarizing Walt Whitman… It’s like he’s looking down on life from a great height. I can’t get over that such wise words came from someone who looked so young!” She added that the children that Leta Hollingworth studied and called “gifted” could also be called “old souls.” Link added on 1/31/18 to this comment: Bernice Zap, her 91-Year Journey through Life

  33. 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 with the reader. Jack’s voice has a presence, and emotional immediacy and intimacy with a sympathetic reader that is comparable to Walt Whitman, who was Jack’s greatest poetic inspiration. 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 put 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 this voice with a glass of wine or tea, it will be a very deep and intimate conversation.

  34. I was fortunate to be able to have so many still pictures of Jack, but it never occurred to me to record his guitar playing, singing, or just Jack being Jack–and he had so many unique gestures and phrases. Does anybody have these who would like to see them put on this page?

  35. Collective Conscious,
    Bright Love,
    Eclectic Wave,
    Curious Vibration,
    Adventurous Hum…mmmmmm
    this IS the Uni-Verse.

    J-Sav IS transformed.
    And we can only see a small, incomplete spectrum of what this Uni-Verse IS. We cannot rely on our sight. We cannot see Jack anymore, not the way we used to, but let us remember he IS still here. As I see myself in you Brother, I will continue your journey of curiosity and discover through my own river.

  36. As Jonathan Zap’s mother I can feel how painful it is for him and for all the other family and friends who were deeply hurt by Jack’s death. (I use the word Death deliberately to acknowledge the stark reality which seems to me to be sugar coated by Passing.) More than one philosopher has written about mourners that we are weeping for ourselves,and I feel that is especially about the survivors of a young person who has taken his own life. It is too much to ask at first that we forgive Jack when he did something that brings us so much pain, especially the pain of thinking of what we should have done or could have done or might have done to prevent it. How hard for Jack’s mother! Eventually, when we have shed all the tears of regret and supposed guilt and un forgiveness of ourselves it won’t be hard at all to forgive Jack because his wonderful poetry so clearly reflects how much he was suffering and how he needed to end the pain in the only way he could any longer try. My compassion and prayers are for all of you. I believe that Jack does not need our prayers and is no longer suffering.

    • I’m absolutely stunned by the discovery of jack savage and his young departure from this life, I too lost a son at age 22 and he was similarly evolved, wise , articulate … My deep condolences to you Bernice , my son took his own life 8-17-11
      He was an amazing soul and beautiful human being and when I look at Jack I am reminded of him and his sensibilities and impact he made on the lives of all who were touched by his honesty and real-ness and sense of love ~ even as I look at jacks’ handsome young face and earnest eyes and expression I am reminded of my beloved son !

      Blessings and peace
      Andrea

  37. I met Jack during my first year of University in Winnipeg. I barely knew him, but when I heard he was leaving after the first semester I was devastated. I knew he was special and that I missed my chance of getting to know someone really great. I did get to see him again – a couple of times when I returned to Winnipeg briefly, and he was back in school. I was grateful to finally spend time with him. It wasn’t much time, but even a short time with someone you look up to, admire, and care for is enough to create a permanent presence of their soul in yours. I’m so thankful that he was, and always will be, part of my life. After the last few years of him not being in my life after losing contact with him, and me sorting my life out – I was trying to find him again (especially after just finishing ‘On the Road’ which reminded me of him), I wanted to go to Burning Man with him like he wanted all those years ago. I found this memorial page this morning instead of finding him. My memories of goodbye kisses, his suitcase that I hated because he was leaving, our walks and talks around Winnipeg in arctic temperatures, meeting for tea, his almond milk, songs he wrote that he told me about but I never heard, our Facebook messages about life and missing each other. Now thankful to this page I have his poems. Jack, I will miss you and love you forever. Thank you for your friendship.

  38. I created a new page called Some Thoughts about the Poems of Jack Savage http://zaporacle.com/some-thoughts-on-the-poems-of-john-jack-spencer-savage/ In the poems Jack creates a “contract with the divine” a certain trajectory that he defines in the verses. I also discuss how reading Jack’s poems affects the meaning of his life.

  39. Note added May 12. Video of Jack: My niece Bernadette sent me a video of Jack. Jack showed Bernadette around Boulder when she visited, sometime in 2010. She’s the same age as Jack (both were born in 1989). She took this video clip with a camera I gave her when she arrived in Boulder. I play the straight man to Jack’s comedic self in a moment in which he is creating a spontaneous riff on what would happen if Leonard Cohen and Barak Obama had a baby. It ends with Jack saying he needs a Jungian analyst. Jack’s last line is: “I need a Goldberg” He’s referring to a friend of mine, Jonathan Goldberg, a Jungian analyst in his 70s whom Jack met in 2008. Strangely, I was just visiting with him ( Isee him an average of 3 times a year) yesterday. He also looks at the camera during the brief video and says “you stand guiltless in your predicament” which was a nice, if out of context, statement for Jack’s survivors.

    Bernadette clarified some things later this afternoon. She was not operating the camera, I was, and she was not even present when the video was made. She found the video on the camera which I gave her as a gift when she came to Boulder. I hadn’t thought to delete the few photos and videos that I had put on the camera. For some odd reason, Bernadette decided to post the video to YouTube a couple of years ago for reasons even she is not sure of. She’s only posted 12 YouTubes in her life and she never even told me or Jack that the video existed. She only remembered about it last night when she was reading Jack’s memorial page. There have been a number of uncanny experiences related to Jack since his death, but for now I’m only going to share them with a few people who knew Jack and are open to such things and request hearing about them.

    Bernadette
    Hi I read that you are gathering videos of Jack for an extension to the memorium and I remembered I uploaded this once from the camera you gave me when I went to visit:

  40. Many updates added to the bottom of the page on August 6. About to create a podcast of all Jack’s poems which will also be a youtube to help people have access to his great body of work.

  41. I don’t know what it is about tonight but I can’t stop thinking about you. I miss you Jacky. I’m so thankful for this page that gives me the honor of reading your poems, looking at pictures, and feeling your presence. Rest well friend. Love you.

    Elky

    • Really interesting Elk because this month seems to have brought Jack into the inner foreground for me and apparently Nora as well.

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