To All,
On Jul 18, 2008, at 4:50 PM, Paul Phillips wrote:
Died peacefully Wednesday, July 16, 2008, in Vernon, after a brief
battle with cancer.
Doyle;
Sharing death is powerful and community building casting of social
richness upon the wind. The hole in life that happens shows not so
much the conflict and frictions of struggles but the shape and feel of
community. How that person did what they did and made this place what
it was. Mourning is about celebrating the living, sadness is a
creative place to know someone. A grand state of knowing. Thank you
Paul for sharing your death with us.
We happy band of atheist, a 'hood, and refuge from the great forces
that shape society see in death that nothing happens from the person
again. They remain inactive each year afterward. Their person is
what the community is beyond death and continues, the work they did
to build human connection endures. Paul had a certain force in
things, coming from his place in Canada, not so much a direct part of
the imperialist giant, but knowing too well the giant. So he acted as
well as taught. Which socialist do.
The tiny part the personal has in things, the few close who knew him
that way and the many much more distant is a teachers lot. Or
intellectual work that others read sometime before and after one
lives. We can't then drive to a place to eat together with Paul. Or
sit and smell the morning on public transportation together. Our
socialism is not the intimate knowing, but the community knowing. A
knowing Paul in ways that the whole of society brings to knowing an
intellectual. Down the road things shift, change happens, we can re-
evaluate the intellectual and understand differently their place in
things.
Sometimes this is a promise of 'immortality', but words are not
immortal not community either. But Paul wanted words and community to
matter. So the brief loss and emptiness the death leaves behind
flourishes inside the community as work to be done. To feel the loss
as a way to go on living and loving. Goodbye comrade, long live
socialism!
Doyle Saylor
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