David Hillel Myers
David was a force. He was brilliant, confident, and full of heart. Growing up in Queens, NY, he quickly made a name for himself on the basketball courts of Van Buren High School, earning the nickname “The Mighty Myers” from the schoolyard across the street. In letters to his father, he signed off as “Sunbeam”, a fitting name for someone whose energy lit up every room.
In 1967, David headed west to UC Berkeley to pursue architecture, only to discover the major had been discontinued. Undeterred, he shifted to literature, much to the dismay of his practical CPA father, who feared writing wouldn’t lead to a stable career. While David eventually found success in sales, writing remained his passion. He authored several novels and poems, maintained a blog on the Stony Brook website, and even published a book on Amazon titled The Key Skill of All Skills: Learn How to Learn.
David was deeply shaped by the spirit of the 1960s. He was there for the Summer of Love, and he brought that consciousness-raising energy home with him, inspiring his younger sister (who still idolizes him to this day). His presence was larger than life, his creativity ever-present, and his love for learning contagious.
David passed away in 2020 after a courageous battle with pancreatic cancer. Though he is no longer with us, his words, wisdom, and spirit live on.
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Grammar is the mathematics of language, so they say,
And since nothing is apparently new under the sun,
Nor anything at all, but thinking makes it so,
One might rightly suppose and act accordingly,
That there is, or may well be, an answer for everything.
If it is possible to equate a tree
To ourselves, and what’s more, inverted upside down,
So the roots are uppermost what we see,
Then surely at least as readily
As one measures a parabola with trigonometry,
We can relate unknowns to constants,
Reduce fractions of situations
To their lowest common denominator,
And piece puzzles together from this and that infinitely.
And even if my reason doesn’t hold up to your scrutiny,
That still doesn’t make it worked out insufficiently,
And I see no harm in remaining calm,
For if a reasonable doubt is enough
To set a most likely guilty man free,
Might the same not apply to all I think and see
By invoking Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty?
If the physicists who measure how the very world goes round
Can live with it, why not you and me?
No, just because there is, irrefutably,
An answer for everything doesn’t mean
Everything on earth has to add up
And will shield you from the occasional shtup.
Wanting someone there for you, just not with you,
Is unquestionably an anomaly,
The way subatomic particles appear to be
In two places at once,
And punishing, if only with blame
Doesn’t prove someone right, unless they’re insane,
So being armed with an answer for everything
Enables you, in a heartbeat, to tell
What isn’t an answer for anything
Equally well.
There is an advantage and disadvantage to everything:
One person listens attentively and catches every word,
Noting your defensiveness about her suspicion of self-praise,
But calling herself a good listener is apparently okay
Since she never hears a word she would say.
Another misses the better part of what’s going on,
Then thinks that the food you covered to keep warm
Was being kept out of her way.
As surely as negative numbers exist,
Every action has its equal and opposite,
And every axiom, as I recall, its corollary,
Everything is negotiable except negotiating.
“I don’t wanna hear it!” has SUCH a hollow ring.
We ALL play games, it’s a second nature kinda thing.
Thems who play well, enjoy playing.
Thems who don’t just find it frustrating.
See, this is that incontrovertibly means
A positive equals a negative plus some other thing,
Balancing the books out
In the debits and credits over which we smile and pout,
As surely as fires and floods go with the territory,
Which is as much as one can ask
Of a life whose only meaning
Is what we bring to the table
And put on the plate--
The impetus and steadfastness to formulate,
If not the event itself, its derivative
As a function of something else
To a calculable degree,
That is similar enough to the matter at hand,
Be it ever so bland,
That it might well hold up, and stand
As an answer to the thing.
And even though I do not, cannot hope
For so much as a smidgeon of a guarantee,
So the angel with the shawl
Is less apt to misread what I say, after all,
And it really is impossible to say just what we mean,
That doesn’t mean a darned thing
In the grand scheme
Where a look or a smile, a touch or a hold,
A word or phrase, its pitch or tone,
Can still very well be the answer to everything,
And quake you to the bone.
In the final analysis, it all depends
On someone’s willingness to make amends,
And see that every living thing bends.
Yes, sometimes the answer is a bit of a stretch,
And the occasions I put into equations
Merely hold up temporarily,
And limits are applied to their applicability
As to where or when or with whom,
Just to make us feel good,
Lost midway through a dark wood;
It’s still better than being a miserable wretch,
And makes it no less an answer for the time being.
So if said amount of discrepancies still claim
This ectoplasmic Lost & Found,
And when all is said and done
A number of questions remain
To a given mind, however sound,
We have no one but ourselves to blame,
Thinking our lives are ours alone,
Not a set of problems that get passed around,
A fun board game of Boom or Bust;
And when you add them all up—
The assets, the interest, the last dividend,
From all the divisors and multipliers
With which you may abound—
The only absolute, on which you can depend,
Boils down to this: life is still just
A means of justifying death as an end.
So when you count it all up again—
The roads to Rome, their aqueducts:
The even more incredible wisdom compiled
Over millennia, with which to fill your cup,
It really isn’t too hard to fathom—
In fact, not asking much—
If a poet can grasp what thrush birds sing,
That there really IS an answer for everything!
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What am I doing, m’ dear? A director sets the stage, doth he not?
Unravels the obvious overlooked heretofore in the plot.
A sculptor prepares the stone, the hammer, the chisel.
An artist stretches the canvas, mixes the colors, beckons a riddle.
A pianist diddles with the keys, the mahogany answers.
The music yields itself up, beckoned by composers
My God, you’re like a dream, better than a magazine,
Lying here so still, moving to my will,
As soft as a bird, stirred by every word
Thrilled at the way I rub the little nub
Between the places I love to play
That seem like the treble and bass of a piece
Of music.
First the left hand moving slowly all around,
And the right hand moving quickly until each found
The very spot where the other left off, and they switch
Which moves quickly and slowly back and forth,
As the music connects us together,
So I am the music, and you are the instrument,
And the music is inside the instrument,
The sculptor inside the stone,
The painter in every brushstroke,
Each making the other their own
Instrument of a potentiality heretofore unknown.
-
To think no more of what you see
As something that just can
Leaven into poetry
Like batter in a pan.
Long looks' and paraffin's appeal
Lie not in their soft glow,
But we ourselves who make them feel
Like things we yearn to know.
"What's that?" you ask, "So daffodils
Have not the power to speak,
But get from me the very thrills
That I within them seek?"
That's why the works we most admire
Live on beyond their time:
They let us feel as we desire
To be, at last, as by design.
Ethan painted this portrait of Hunter Thompson from a photograph while he was in high school
