"We all want the stuff that's found in our wildest dreams." —Prince & Sheila E.
Prince died today. I was finishing up a presentation to a group of this year's freshmen, about to chat for a moment with our Odyssey editor, a member of the audience, when I saw the text from an old and still very dear college friend. Prince was dead, and in one moment so many worlds converged that I had to grip the podium to steady myself and make sense of it all, the way that what we think of as the order of things can change in an instant. A student can guide the work of a teacher. A hand from the past can reach out and slap us into the present.
A colleague greeted me on the porch a bit later and commented that the students were playing Prince in the Bowl. I remarked that I was sad at his death. She didn't know. In that moment, we were college students again, getting ready for a night out on the town while listening to "U Got the Look," and Prince's androgynous presentation seemed as much of the moment of his death as his entree onto the music scene in the late 70s.
He didn't have a name for a while — well, not a name as we think of them, some collection of scribbles representing articulable sounds that our minds can process into words that signify some concrete or abstract entity. No, in an attempt to transcend the tyranny and enslavement of words, Prince invited us to reckon with our own acceptance of the rules that govern our daily lives, to see through the structures that rule us and to be transformed ourselves, adopting a symbolic self-representation that transcended spoken language. He dared us to think of our very selves as ineffable.
We laughed.
This is what happens when a human being digs deep into the marrow of what it means to be human. When someone leaves the cave and tries to tell us who we really are, to show us what we can really be, we laugh and are incredulous. The shadows are too comforting, too safe.
We dream, though, and our dreams are sometimes colored with just enough of the new to help us open up that little bit more. If we're lucky, that seeing and awake human being can connect us to not only each other, but to ourselves, glorious creatures with glorious dreams of how we can gloriously be.
The think pieces are flooding my feeds, and every one seems to carry the same lesson, perhaps finally leading us out of the darkness through the extinguishing of his light. The paradox of life and death and how it affects us: that we can in an instant hold our human oppositions in perfectly balanced awareness. Light and dark. Teacher and student. Old and young. Life and death.
Rest in peace, sweet Prince. I'm going to try to live in your light.
