Not six months passed, after Robin Williams' ashes went into San Francisco Bay, before his terminal wife, and his various earlier children, commenced an ugly and public legal battle over his all and every monified possessions: "photographs, bicycles, fossils, and toys."

All parties, to all suits, screaming "mine! mine! mine! mine!”

Williams became early dead because, as his sister bipolar sufferer Carrie Fisher expressed it, "Robin had rampant empathy. Everything would end up on his grid. He'd walk in a room, and all the energy there would impact him. He was the opposite of selfish. Anything would hurt him."

Williams finally hurt too much. He was just too sad: he didn't want to be here anymore. And so he died, as frenetically as in his act he did live: "this knife's not working; let’s try the belt."

And now, the people he most loved, degrade that love, in bickering over "everything from his clothing to his action figures."

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFwaf1uXtUM]

We know now that Williams, diagnosed in life with Parkinson's disease, was additionally afflicted—as diagnosed after death—with Dementia with Lewy Bodies. Which results in extremely vivid hallucinations. People, animals, other beings, appear to the sufferer as real—or more so—as conventionally perceived "realities."

Just as with Williams' character in The Fisher King.

Director Terry Gilliam, recalling Williams inhabiting that role:

"This scene wasn't a challenge to shoot as far as effects are concerned, but it was very hard from an acting point of view, because Robin was tearing his guts out emotionally. The interesting thing about Robin in all of those scenes was that he always wanted to do another take. He felt he had even more anguish and pain to spill out of the character. And I had to really stop him. I had to say, 'Robin, you've reached a point here, way beyond what we expected. We've got what we needed. Now you're just hurting yourself.'

"That happened a couple of times while we were shooting this scene. The most worrisome moment for me was after he's been chased by the Red Knight, when he's running through the streets, and then he comes to the river, where the teenage punks arrive and knife him. We had to do other things on that night shoot, too, and things were going very slowly. Suddenly, we realized that we had like an hour until the dawn.

"The last shot we had to do was Robin running at the end of this scene, in this hysterical state. You can even see the light ever so slightly beginning to come on the river in the background. But Robin was so angry because it was such a crucial moment, and he felt he'd been cheated of his ability to really give this moment his all. And Robin was an incredibly strong guy: when he'd worked himself into this state of madness for the part, nobody could approach him. The first assistant, the stunt guy—nobody wanted to get near him.

"So, I had to go up there and tell him, 'Robin, what we have here is very good. And if we look at the rushes and it isn't, I promise you I will reshoot it.' And I had to hug him basically, and hold him.

"But that's what was so extraordinary about him—how he would commit everything and more to what he had to do. That's also why I think his character in The Fisher King is in many ways the closest one to Robin, just that range—the madness, the damage, the pain, the sweetness, the outrageousness."

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtqyPFhubVs]

You don't recover. After something like that. You just don't. And everyone, eventually, experiences something, as emotionally shattering as that. And then is asked if they'd like to recover. Because that is among what people are here for.

The Vikings of yore are not people one would want to wholly emulate—for instance, they favored most as "food" a thing called svartsoppa, which consisted of various semi-edibles, and paralyzing alcohols, tossed into a steaming vat of pig and goose blood. Also, they were seriously into murder, glutting, and rapine.

However, I do like that ofttimes, when some Viking died, s/he would be placed aboard a ship, together with all the now-departed's worldly belongings, and then the ship would be set adrift, set afire.

No possible Williams-like quarreling over the remains then. All gone up in smoke.

The Robin Williams spouse and spawn are hardly the only anathema to behave in such a way.

For, like, after Jerry Garcia died, two of his wives thoroughly debased themselves in a Jerry Springer-like roadshow, across countless courts and other embarrassed venues, squabbling over his music-based worldly goods. Based solely upon the premise that once upon a time, and pursuant to some sort of "legal" papers, they had taken his penis into their bodies. They filled, endlessly, the public prints, with vicious and vile remarks about one another, of the sort that Garcia himself never publicly uttered, anywhere, at any time, about anybody.

Then there is Orson Welles. Who died with almost as many films in various stages of completion as he'd successfully released while alive. Long ago mouldered into corporeal nothingness in the grave. Even as, decades on, one of his children, and the lover of the last decades of his life, continue to duel, seemingly and stone-senselessly, to the death, over what he left behind. Each wedded to the utter, insane nonsense that his work, belongs to her.

His nearly-completed film The Other Side Of The Wind, for instance—and only Welles would have this sort of "luck"—was buried away in a vault for decades because some of the financing came from an Iranian associated with the regime of the Shah; when the Khomeini people came to power, they seized it as spoils of "the revolution." When, at last, they let it go, it again went to limbo, as the Welles spouse and spawn both shrieked it belonged to them.

They're still shrieking.

Money, it has always been so Wrong. But a blip in the history of the planet—invented by the Lydians in but the 7th Century BC. And it is so good, that it is, now, at last, over.

Stella blue.

The information we're plugged into is the universe itself, and everybody knows that on a cellular level. It's built in. Just superficial stuff like what happened to you in your lifetime is nothing compared to the container which holds all your information. And there's a similarity in all our containers. We are all one organism, we are all the universe, we are all doing the same thing. That's the sort of thing that everybody knows, and I think that it's only weird little differences that are making it difficult. The thing is that we're all earthlings. The earthling consciousness is the one that's really trying to happen at this juncture and so far it's only a tiny little glint, but it's already over. The change has already happened, and it's a matter of swirling out. It has already happened. We’re living after the fact. It's a postrevolutionary age. The change is over. The rest of it is a cleanup action. Unfortunately it's very slow. Amazingly slow and amazingly difficult.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckg6LH9mYNQ]

Meanwhile, it is not only people of means, or people seeking to suck means off art, who behave in a silly, a sad, monified, anathema, way.

For, when my brother died, my mother and I, with a massive assist from my then-partner, we were the ones who must needs roll away the dew. There wasn’t much of value there, there in his house; it was basically a clean-up operation. And in 115-degree temperatures that, statewide, killed that summer more than 100 people. In a house where, before his passing, the power had been unplugged. Fer sure: hot fun and games.

We were nearly through the three-week clean, not much left but his gun-safe, which I'd left for near-last, as—for one good reason—I couldn't find the key.

My brother, like a truly bewildering number of male people I somehow know, had, in his last years, commenced to gather many guns, in expectation they and him would Someday Soon be needed to beat back the gub'mint. (From a left bent, this was—for many years before his death he voted only Communist—rather than right.) Several of the neighbors had crept cross the street to whisper to me that my brother had many and valuable firearms in the safe; apparently he and these people would occasionally take them out and speak of their Need . . . as gun people will do.

There were various and sundry loose guns, out of the safe, that I'd already given to my friend J, a working cowboy, and a man who, I knew, would use, or not use them, or pass them on, or not pass them on, in a way that nobody would ever get hurt. I intended the same—giving to the right man—for those guns in the safe.

But then suddenly my brother's ex, separated from him for some years, discovered that though everyone—including her—long believed them to be divorced, my brother had not actually finalized the paper process. And so she technically was still married to him. And, therefore, the Heir. Before she cut off all contact with me & us, she indicated that she had become Aware of the Bounty of the Guns. And then she imperiously swept my mother and I and my partner clean out of the house. And laid hands on the gun safe.

I hear she got it open. I hear she sold them guns. I hear she made some money.

Yeehaw.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUI8U7Q-bZU]

Then there was the guy I know who began moving material things out of his parents' house and into his own—stealing them, to speak true—while his parents were still alive, but said parents wheeled off, increasingly infirm, powerless to stop the thefts, to old-folks' homes.

And the person who, decades before the parents' passing, went around affixing identifying initials to the bottom of various sundry objects of theirs that this person coveted. Marking them as "mine! mine! mine! mine!"

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wwf96OEaYBg]

The sage Harper Lee, in late age, observed that "greed is the coldest of deadly sins."

Right she is.

She also suggested, observing a ravine, "that perhaps she could toss all her belongings in there and burn them, preferably shortly before she died, so she wouldn’t have to worry about her personal things falling into the wrong hands."

Right again.

It is said that recently a novel was published that was written by Harper Lee.

This "novel" was discovered by an ambitious woman who assumed power over Lee's life and affairs after the passing of Lee's sister—the sister who had, for decades, kept the world well away from Harper Lee. The Harper Lee who had long ago identified herself, within the world of her novel, not as Scout, but as Boo Radley.

The "new novel" is out there, and people are reading it, and it is making Big Monies. But it was not published with the assent of Harper Lee. It was published by money-driven drones sucking up dollars in the slipstream of the name of an old, blind, deaf woman, one with no help, no kin, no one true to her at all.

Lee had said for decades she would publish no more fiction. And anyone even glancingly aware of the true story knows that both Lee and Truman Capote, for their deep involvement in the dark matter that became In Cold Blood—part of That Deal, was that neither would—ever—successfully complete and publish another novel.

Traces of this may be perceived in Capote. The film that bestowed an Academy Award on Philip Seymour Hoffman. Another human who opted out early. Because he hurt.

"Mr. Finch, you think Jem killed Bob Ewell? Is that what you think?

"Your boy never stabbed him.

"Bob Ewell fell on his knife. He killed himself.

"There's a black man dead for no reason, and now the man responsible for it is dead. Let the dead bury the dead this time, Mr. Finch. I never heard tell that it's against the law for a citizen to do his utmost to prevent a crime from being committed, which is exactly what he did.

"But maybe you'll tell me it's my duty to tell the town all about it, not to hush it up. Well, you know what'll happen then. All the ladies in Maycomb—includin' my wife—will be knockin' on his door bringin' angel food cakes. To my way of thinkin', takin' one man who's done you and this town a great service, and draggin' him, with his shy ways, into the limelight: to me, that's a sin. It's a sin. And I'm not about to have it on my head.

"I may not be much, Mr. Finch, but I'm still sheriff of Maycomb County. And Bob Ewell fell on his knife."

Bob Ewell fell on his knife. To Kill A Mockingbird is Harper Lee's only novel. And those are them that. Facts.

There are pure forms. They do exist. And to apprehend them, all that is required, is to throw off the chains, that in any event do not exist, much less forever confine one, to the muckabout mists of Plato's cave.

Just walk outside. All of it is waiting for you there. The great wide open.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK3Js9yo5qY]

And, in the end: burn it, bury it, leave it deep. My advice. As you, yourself, fly away. Want to pass something on to somebody? Do it while you're alive. Otherwise, it's for the burn. For the ravine. Don't leave behind, what might tempt those left behind, to scrabble like shameless dung beetles, grossly feeding on a stinking shit-heap. And thereby descend themselves into Hell. Even as you yourself rise.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5MAjKXnh28]

∞

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvSl3Ny_R4I]

He would be there all night. And he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.