The Sean Sullivan Thing
Adam Novy originally sent in the following on 8/28/05...
The Sean Sullivan Thing
Whenever I was around Sean Sullivan, I always felt lonely. It wasn't really his fault, he always treated me with kindness, paid the normal amount of attention to me, and made me feel a part of things, but there was only so close I could get to him. I felt a kind of wall between him and the rest of the world, and I think he probably felt it, too, which might be why he seemed, on the one hand, like the sweetest, most inquisitive innocent person, and on the other hand, like such a lone wolf. Sean's pursuit of intimacy somehow brought him face-to-face with the limits of what intimacy can give. There we'd be, at his house on Wash Park, with its joggers, birds and weirdly endless lakes, getting smashed on who knows what kind of liquor, pills, fungus, plants, or powders—all God's drugs—laughing at some perceptive question he had asked, or a wisecrack he had made—and I think we all agree he had the best comic timing of anyone we know—and yet, in the midst of all the joy, I believe that he felt haunted by the notion that, as good as things were, they should somehow have been better; he was plagued by a feeling of arrival that never quite arrived. I always headed straight for Sean at parties or on GCB lawn, and I sat next to him in classes; I wanted to be near him, I didn't want to miss a word he said. The feeling I would get when I basked in his aura was something like my definition of what it means to be alive, and yet it always, always left me wanting more. Life is that desire, I suppose; it is that feeling of never getting where you want to go, or never having what you want, from a friend, from a lover, or the world. The Talmud says that the closest we can ever get to happiness is to be the master of our appetites. Sean struggled with this idea, whether he knew it or not. To paraphrase Simon Barnes, he was used by his desires; his desire was a kind of cognitive incontinence, bursting forth beyond his control. Sean was that rare kind of person who everybody loved, who had his pick of friends, and yet he still convinced you with that hangdog expression he could never quite get rid of. His inner life was a secret that could never be expressed, his outer life a crude and perpetually failed approximation. In the core of Sean's personality was this strange incoherence. Once, he actually told me not to smoke. He said it was bad for me.
I can't write a word about Sean with mentioning destroying things. He somehow made the ruining of property into a kind of moral inquiry. My happiest memory of Sean is the ski trip, freshman year, in Crested Butte. Sean was in a different, cooler room than me, and I had gone to visit him there late the final night, having heard the rumors of chairs thrown from windows, televisions smashed, sofas glued to the ceiling, etc. The party was ending by the time I found his room, and I meekly asked Sean if wanted to go destroy something. He shrugged at the ruins of his room, the roommates laying unconscious on the floor, and the girls splayed across them. We can shoot a fire extinguisher, he said. And so we sallied forth through the halls of the resort, looking for an unused fire extinguisher, which, since Sean had already been there for a night, proved difficult to find. But finally we found one, and he boldly took it off the wall and shot it. Fire extinguishers may be small, but they contain an incredible amount of white goo, and it took what felt like a dangerously long amount of time to finish shooting all of it. I remember wanting to run, but Sean looked so confident standing there, such a cowboy, so Steve McQueen, that I couldn't move. I was frozen in place, in his thrall. He had that existential man-of-action thing going, in spite of himself; he was the perfect iconoclastic hero, a lonesome consoler of the lonely who only made himself lonelier. When the fire extinguisher was spent, he flung it to the ground like an empty beer can. We stood before the ruined hotel hallway turned to white, frosted like the inside of an igloo. The experience exhilarated me in a way I can't describe, though you all know what I'm talking about, or else you wouldn't be here. He put his arm around me, and patted me on the shoulder. We had made art.
We want our memories to have meaning, in a Behind-the-Music type way, even though that instinct is a kind of over-nostalgic sentimentality. My memory of the ski trip has no real meaning, but everyone who knew well has ten stories like it. Sean gave me a lifetime of joyful memories in the four years I was near him, and I can call up that joy whenever I want. He made me happy, and he still makes me happy. This is how he improved my life. I must've gotten more from him than he ever got from me. I know that he felt like his life hadn't started, and that he'd only just found his path, and his passion, but the life he lived by accident had more mystery and delight, more pure elation than any life lived on purpose. I loved my time with Sean. I want more. It isn't fair. I would like his mother to know how much I admired him, and how much he meant to all of us.
But while my memories of Sean will endure as long as I do, he himself is gone. In Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra asks her dying lover, Shall I abide in this dull world, which in your absence in no better than a sty? She says, It were for me to throw my scepter at the injurious gods and tell them that this world did equal theirs until they stole our jewel. But Antony is curiously immune to despair, and though everyone betrays him, though the world itself betrays him, he cannot hold a grudge. So it was with Sean, he was himself to the end. Yes, the Gods have torn our favorite from our lives; yes, so many of our hopes will go unrealized, and yes, we are frail and disappointed, but the death-god feeds on grief, he gorges on sadness and heartbreak and loss, and so we must defy him, we must make him choke on Sean, we must leave the death-god hungry for despair, as Sean hungered for life. We must make the death-god look bad for taking us. We may be the prisoners of Time, but let us shame it. The gods can only take our bodies, not our hearts, and this will be our triumph. In the words of Harold Goddard, the weaker we are, the greater the victory.
.
The Sean Sullivan Thing
Whenever I was around Sean Sullivan, I always felt lonely. It wasn't really his fault, he always treated me with kindness, paid the normal amount of attention to me, and made me feel a part of things, but there was only so close I could get to him. I felt a kind of wall between him and the rest of the world, and I think he probably felt it, too, which might be why he seemed, on the one hand, like the sweetest, most inquisitive innocent person, and on the other hand, like such a lone wolf. Sean's pursuit of intimacy somehow brought him face-to-face with the limits of what intimacy can give. There we'd be, at his house on Wash Park, with its joggers, birds and weirdly endless lakes, getting smashed on who knows what kind of liquor, pills, fungus, plants, or powders—all God's drugs—laughing at some perceptive question he had asked, or a wisecrack he had made—and I think we all agree he had the best comic timing of anyone we know—and yet, in the midst of all the joy, I believe that he felt haunted by the notion that, as good as things were, they should somehow have been better; he was plagued by a feeling of arrival that never quite arrived. I always headed straight for Sean at parties or on GCB lawn, and I sat next to him in classes; I wanted to be near him, I didn't want to miss a word he said. The feeling I would get when I basked in his aura was something like my definition of what it means to be alive, and yet it always, always left me wanting more. Life is that desire, I suppose; it is that feeling of never getting where you want to go, or never having what you want, from a friend, from a lover, or the world. The Talmud says that the closest we can ever get to happiness is to be the master of our appetites. Sean struggled with this idea, whether he knew it or not. To paraphrase Simon Barnes, he was used by his desires; his desire was a kind of cognitive incontinence, bursting forth beyond his control. Sean was that rare kind of person who everybody loved, who had his pick of friends, and yet he still convinced you with that hangdog expression he could never quite get rid of. His inner life was a secret that could never be expressed, his outer life a crude and perpetually failed approximation. In the core of Sean's personality was this strange incoherence. Once, he actually told me not to smoke. He said it was bad for me.
I can't write a word about Sean with mentioning destroying things. He somehow made the ruining of property into a kind of moral inquiry. My happiest memory of Sean is the ski trip, freshman year, in Crested Butte. Sean was in a different, cooler room than me, and I had gone to visit him there late the final night, having heard the rumors of chairs thrown from windows, televisions smashed, sofas glued to the ceiling, etc. The party was ending by the time I found his room, and I meekly asked Sean if wanted to go destroy something. He shrugged at the ruins of his room, the roommates laying unconscious on the floor, and the girls splayed across them. We can shoot a fire extinguisher, he said. And so we sallied forth through the halls of the resort, looking for an unused fire extinguisher, which, since Sean had already been there for a night, proved difficult to find. But finally we found one, and he boldly took it off the wall and shot it. Fire extinguishers may be small, but they contain an incredible amount of white goo, and it took what felt like a dangerously long amount of time to finish shooting all of it. I remember wanting to run, but Sean looked so confident standing there, such a cowboy, so Steve McQueen, that I couldn't move. I was frozen in place, in his thrall. He had that existential man-of-action thing going, in spite of himself; he was the perfect iconoclastic hero, a lonesome consoler of the lonely who only made himself lonelier. When the fire extinguisher was spent, he flung it to the ground like an empty beer can. We stood before the ruined hotel hallway turned to white, frosted like the inside of an igloo. The experience exhilarated me in a way I can't describe, though you all know what I'm talking about, or else you wouldn't be here. He put his arm around me, and patted me on the shoulder. We had made art.
We want our memories to have meaning, in a Behind-the-Music type way, even though that instinct is a kind of over-nostalgic sentimentality. My memory of the ski trip has no real meaning, but everyone who knew well has ten stories like it. Sean gave me a lifetime of joyful memories in the four years I was near him, and I can call up that joy whenever I want. He made me happy, and he still makes me happy. This is how he improved my life. I must've gotten more from him than he ever got from me. I know that he felt like his life hadn't started, and that he'd only just found his path, and his passion, but the life he lived by accident had more mystery and delight, more pure elation than any life lived on purpose. I loved my time with Sean. I want more. It isn't fair. I would like his mother to know how much I admired him, and how much he meant to all of us.
But while my memories of Sean will endure as long as I do, he himself is gone. In Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra asks her dying lover, Shall I abide in this dull world, which in your absence in no better than a sty? She says, It were for me to throw my scepter at the injurious gods and tell them that this world did equal theirs until they stole our jewel. But Antony is curiously immune to despair, and though everyone betrays him, though the world itself betrays him, he cannot hold a grudge. So it was with Sean, he was himself to the end. Yes, the Gods have torn our favorite from our lives; yes, so many of our hopes will go unrealized, and yes, we are frail and disappointed, but the death-god feeds on grief, he gorges on sadness and heartbreak and loss, and so we must defy him, we must make him choke on Sean, we must leave the death-god hungry for despair, as Sean hungered for life. We must make the death-god look bad for taking us. We may be the prisoners of Time, but let us shame it. The gods can only take our bodies, not our hearts, and this will be our triumph. In the words of Harold Goddard, the weaker we are, the greater the victory.
.
posted by GC at 10:30 PM
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