What We Leave Behind, flash series #6
On Nov. 20, 1970 Schuyler scribbles something about Erikson:
Life of Gandhi. Possibly Erik
Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth on the Origins of
Militant Nonviolence (1969). A psychoanalytical perspective. Earlier that
year during the summer while on GSHI Schuyler had penned a diary/letter to Joe
Brainard, commenting upon a drawing Joe had sent based upon a photo captioned
“Gandhi’s worldly possessions at the time of death” showing two pairs of
sandals, glasses, a book, a spittoon, a nailfile, a watch, a bowl, a spoon. In
a footnote Kernan (editor of James Schuyler Diary) writes that a various points
in his life Brainard was known to suddenly give away all his possessions.
Marie Kondo would be proud, I guess.
From his Diary, I can read that Schuyler loved shopping. He
was a fairly flagrant consumer, perhaps an outgrowth of his psychosis. It
covered over pressing financial insecurities and perhaps because he wasn’t
“getting on” like some of his other friends such as Ashbery and Bill Berkson
who taught at the San Francisco Art Institute and edited a literary journal Big Sky.
What would it be like to die with nothing? At the end of his
life in 1991 Schuyler wished for his ashes to be interred at Little Portion Friary,
Mont Sinai on Long Island. Towards the end of his life Schuyler through a
relationship with Tom Carey Schuyler was drawn to the Episcopal faith—from
Diary entry March 6, 1990
…On Sunday for the
first time I was lay reader at the Church of the Incarnation at the early
mass—Romans 5:12-19. Next on March 25th, then on Palm Sunday. Very
happy about the latter, indeed.
Schuyler not exactly a Gandhi, was at a point of trying to
see his way through, navigating a world of stuff and things where he would
never have it all. In the midst of the James Schuyler papers housed at the
archives of the USC San Diego Library is a box of notebooks labeled Little
Portion.
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