A couple of weeks ago, American author Jim Harrison died at the age of 78.  A prolific and creative writer, Harrison penned dozens of books, articles, and poems about living lustily and fully.  His plots are brazen, his characters singularly memorable; his poems intricately entangled in the puzzles of the present.  I share here part of a poem Harrison wrote while thinking about the poet Sergei Yesenin, who committed suicide in 1925 at the age of 30.
     "And what a dance you had kicking your legs from the rope--We all change our minds, Berryman said in Minnesota halfway down the river.  Beauty takes my courage away this cold autumn evening.  My year-old daughter's red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop."
     Such poignant words about about the beauty, the tarnished and difficult beauty, of earthly existence.  Life is confusing, yes, yet it's lovely, its vertiginous ripples generously dappled with moments of adventure and discovery and profound personal joy. It's all good.
     So it is.  Harrison relished in stirring up the waters of our existential complacency, ever reminding us that finding life's goodness is in the living of it.  I can't disagree.  Nor do I disagree with Harrison's position that this life is the only mortal one we will have.  Carpe diem.  Yet I'm also persuaded that unless I want to live with the existentialists' ongoing contradiction of life's freedom and life's death, I need to know that life and death occur in a much larger ken.  I need to be able to explain why both have to be.
     And this is very difficult to do if we've living in a world that is its own sum.  For this raises another question in turn:  how do we know?