Good morning.
You may know me as Casey, or Barnabas, or Phoenix, or just "that big guy with the weird hair and beard and horns." I lived in the same building as Matt for four years, and during the one strange and amazing year that we actually lived in the same room, we had this whiteboard mounted on our door. At one point Matt wrote on it two lines from one of his favorite poems by Percey Shelley: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" The message of the poem is that nothing lasts forever, nothing is permanent; even the mightiest of kingdoms will someday crumble. It is a very haunting and ironic poem, and I find it ironically appropriate that this poem about impermanence has permanently dried onto the whiteboard.
But Lord Vetinari reminds us that "Kings and lords come and go and leave nothing but statues in a desert, while a couple of young men tinkering in a workshop change the way the world works." Matt's body may have crumbled, but his ideas, his sayings, his personality, his brilliant union of the silly and the profound will live on in our memories as long as we remember him. No more will his faded black trenchcoat on roller blades stalk the halls of the engineering building, but his battle-cry of "Frrrrau-Schnibbitt!" will echo in our hearts and minds forevermore.
T.'s father has asked me to read the following passage from the Tao:
Be completely empty.
Be perfectly serene.
The ten thousand things arise together;
in their arising is their return.
Now they flower,
and flowering
sink homeward,
returning to the root.
The return to the root is peace.
Peace: to accept what must be,
to know what endures.
In that knowledge is wisdom.
Without it, ruin, disorder.
To know what endures
is to be openhearted,
magnanimous,
regal,
blessed,
following the Tao,
the way that endures forever.
The body comes to its ending,
but there is nothing to fear.
Matt always seemed more comfortable outside--unusual for a programmer, I know. Perhaps there was just so much of him that he couldn't fit it all in one building. Back in freshman year we went on a weekend backpacking trip up near Tahoe. Wonderful trip, beautiful scenery. After that we were too busy for camping, but we still spent many gloriously late nights wandering around campus putting up silly and philosophical posters or giant smiley faces, goaded on by Matt as he danced around ahead of us, belting out pirate songs in the key of off.
Also in freshman year, I taught Matt how to play the bodhran, an Irish drum. We played together in a band for a while. If I remember correctly "eulogy" means "true words," so I really can't say he was a great musician--but he was awfully fun to play with.
[At this point I played "Mist-Covered Mountains" and "Shores of Lough Gowna" on the low whistle. I was a little shaky at first, but then ribbin joined in on bodhran, and the crowd started clapping along. Now
that was folk music if I've ever heard it.]
My brother and I are different in many ways, but tonight he said to me "Here I see something I thought I would never see: all of my friends and all of your friends together in one place." He's right--I look around me, and I see programmers, chaos crusaders, dancers, dreamers, gamers, music makers, politicians, Integrated Studies scholars, professors, hippies of all descriptions; friends and family, young and old: all brought together by the passing of this young man who touched our lives so deeply.
The Prophet tells us that if we would know the secret of death, we must seek it in the midst of life. Matt's lust for life burned like a forest fire, and every one of us caught a few sparks of it. Keep that spark and feed it, and you can light up the world.
Breathe deep, seek peace, keep your memories close and your friends closer.
-----------------
On that evening some of us spoke and some of us were silent, but we all shared in the experience that was Matt.
Afterwards fifteen or twenty of us headed out towards central campus, armed with tape, staplers, and 510 posters--51 copies each of
10 brand-new designs, each honoring Matt. I think we managed to put most of them up. Matt would've been proud. Feel free to print out some of your own (the .gif files may be a little ornery; make sure the "iterationMATT" is in the lower-right corner of the page and it should work fine) and put them up on or off campus.
-=-Barnabas
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