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BUDDHA: Long Live Timothy Leary


As you probably know, the Grand-Daddy of change agents, Tim Leary, died last 
month. This is an obit by John Perry Barlow forwarded from Dave Winer on 
DaveNet. I think it speaks for itself.

Whatever you are, Tim, we miss you.

------- Forwarded Message

Date:    Fri, 31 May 1996 07:21:44 -0800
From:    dwiner@well.com (DaveNet email)
Subject: Long Live Timothy Leary

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Amusing Rants from Dave Winer's Desktop
Released on 5/31/96; 7:21:44 AM PST
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  John Perry Barlow, barlow@eff.org, probably needs no introduction
  to this audience. Founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
  Grateful Dead lyricist and pounder of good and sometimes lost
  causes; Barlow speaks in lyrics, gets people angry, and makes fun of
  things that beg to be made fun of.

  When I woke this morning I learned of the death of Timothy Leary thru
  this essay written by Barlow. It's beautiful. I wanted to share it
  with DaveNet readers.

  ***Long Live Timothy Leary by John Perry Barlow

  A couple of hours ago, at 12:45 am Beverly Hills time, my old friend and
  the corrupter of my youth Timothy Leary made good on his promise to
  "give death a better name or die trying." Willingly, peacefully, and
  unafraid, he headed off on his last trip.

  He spoke his last words a few hours before. On the phone to the mordant
  William S. Burroughs he said, "I hope that someday I'm as funny as you
  are."

  He didn't, as threatened, commit suicide on the Net. Or have his head
  cut off and frozen. Or engage in any other the other spectacles of
  departure I had dreaded. In the end, he surrounded himself with the
  angelic band of twenty-somethings who have been uploading him into
  the Web these last few months and drifted peacefully out of here.

  I was headed his way when he died. When I was with him earlier this month
  he said, "When I leave here, Barlow, I want your face to be one of the
  last things I see." I think that was one of the sweetest things anyone
  ever said to me, and I was trying to make it possible, but death proved
  itself once again to be bigger and faster than either of us. The phone
  just rang in the middle of this rainy Wyoming night, and now I'm here
  naked in the dark trying to think of something to follow him out with.

  Two years ago, Cynthia and I spent our last day together with Timmy.
  When she died the next day and it became so shockingly clear to both of
  us how strange this culture has become on the subject of the second
  commonest event in the world, how weirdly shameful is dying in
  America, we both thought it time to bring death out of the closet. I did
  so by grieving her, and continuing to grieve her, more publicly than
  is polite in a culture that claims for itself the ability to conquer
  and control everything.

  But Timmy beat me to the barricades. He flat died. And he died, without
  pretending that he was "really going to get well any day now," without
  permitting himself to become a ghoulish and futile medical
  experiment, without contributing to the stupefying mass denial
  that causes almost 80% of America's health care dollars to be blown on
  the last six months of life.

  He died unashamed and having, as usual, a great time.

  A few weeks ago, the denizens of leary.com and I rented a phalanx of
  wheel chairs and rode them with him into the House of Blues on Sunset
  Strip, a place that likely had never seen fifteen people in wheel
  chairs before. After a truly merry time, we were headed back to his
  house and on the way came within a smile of Tim Leary's Last Bust.

  We cruised west on Sunset. And the sun was setting. The top was down on
  my metallic mauve rent-a-convertible. A couple of the web girls,
  Trudy and Camilla, were sitting on the trunk like psychedelic prom
  queens, shoop-de-booping to the funk station on the radio, volume at
  eleven. Both the girls were beautiful, Trudy like a character from
  Neuromancer, Camilla like a character from Botticelli. The air was
  sweet and soft as a negligee on our faces, and the light had that
  elegiac quality that makes people think LA might not be so bad after
  all.

  Timmy gave me a high five and grinned. "Life is good!" he shouted over
  the music. As I looked up to meet his raised hand, I saw in my rear view
  mirror, past the swaying torsos of the girls, the rotating reds of a
  real Beverly Hills cop.

  Of course we were in possession of several of those substances that we
  considered safe and effective but which this culture, in another of
  its dangerous madnesses, has declared lethal, probably to distract
  heat from its own deadly drugs of choice. Furthermore, I had only
  recently paid an astonishingly steep California fine for allowing a
  friend to stand up through the sunroof of a car I was driving.

  He pulled us over in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel. He looked like an
  Eagle Scout.

  "Officer," I said, nodding back at the still improperly seated
  girls, "I know what we were doing was wrong. But you see, my friend here
  is dying, and we're trying to show him a good time." Timmy, without
  saying anything, smiled sheepishly at the cop and nodded, caught in
  the act.

  He looked like hell but he sure looked happy.

  The officer gazed into Timmy's beatific skull-face and lost his
  starch. "Well," he said to the girls, "I'd be lying if I didn't say that
  looks like fun, but just because he's dying doesn't mean you should.
  Now get down in the seat and buckle up and I'll let you go." I felt like
  honest death had just made one of its first converts.

  In thirty years of following Tim Leary around, he's given me some
  wonderful and hair-raising moments. He has been father,
  anti-father, partner-in-crime, and devout fellow-worshipper of
  all that is female in this world. We loved each other, and shared more
  memories than I will ever relate. But I think the look he gave that cop
  is the memory I will cherish most.

  As usual he was "cocking snooks at authority," as Aldous Huxley once
  accused him. But he was doing it, also as usual, with wit. And with
  love.

  America managed to forgive Richard Nixon when he died. I hope they
  will extend the same amnesty to a real hero, Dr. Timothy Leary.

  Yrs,

  John Perry

  ---  --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
  A great TV commercial from one of the life insurance companies. It's
  brave like Barlow's piece is brave. On the day after you die... The
  phone will ring. Birds will sing and the sun will shine. It'll rain
  somewhere. People will make love. Yeah! But your chair will be empty.

  Events like this remind me that it's always the right time to have fun.

  Life is an artform! Leary taught us that. Let's not forget.

  Like Leary, I want to lead a designer life. Be true to yourself. That's
  what he said. That's how you have fun! The man proved it.

  Coooooool.

  Dave Winer

  PS: Leary's website: http://www.leary.com/.

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Barlow's Website: <http://www.eff.org/~barlow>



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