11/11/2020
Thoughts from Michael Jordan of Connecticut, on David’s passing.
David Lee Barr was an extraordinarily handsome and magnetic man. Sir Sean Connery died within a few days of my wonderful friend. A story says Connery was given the Bond role on the basis of his walk. David walked through life in much that way. Confident. Graceful. Tall. Powerful. Devastatingly broad of shoulder, impossibly narrow of waist. If Jessica Rabbit had been a man, she might well have been young David.
As things were, Ms. Rabbit would have looked at him gliding and wondered what might have been. For women seemed immediately aware of him. Peripheral visions, their preferred method of lustful observation, as I see it, roared into warp drive along his pathway. I saw this roar no few times. Synesthesia is intended. David did nothing if he did not cross fences, borders, and pathways. The women silently roared because his eyes were also bright with knowledge. His gaze penetrated. His smile, broad as his shoulders, invited.
Invited much of the time. When it did not, it tautly declared war. As pastime, but also as believer in the act of belief. All this was somehow contained in the compressed coil of his physical presence. It combined the qualities of unexploded ordnance with the softness of the analyst’s couch. You had to put in the time to find out both nested therein, bolted together in the man, often overlapping in the radiance of any single social moment.
I knew him first from a comparative literature class we shared. Virginia Commonwealth University. Perhaps 1978. Perfect frame for David. Art. Music. Sculpture. Theater. VCU’s planners managed to buck the homogenization/monetization of colleges into the vocational schools and debt mills they have sadly tended toward since. VCU of the 1970s: Ars Gratia Artis. Find the universe. Mr. Van Gogh, please lend me an ear.
Perfect frame for fissionable, dangerous, light-casting, pinballing David. So Dr. Richard Priebe treated David as the equal that he was. After all, David had read everything Richard had. This astonished me. I was a young pup. Deep in the pack. Gripping anonymity with everything I had, 20ish, unsure of myself, fearing the humiliation of exposure as the imposter I felt myself to be. David was 8 years older. An eternity! We young pups still took our professors for unapproachable gods. We occasionally read our assignments. Adult David birthed me past this stage of personal evolution. At his invitation, which could have just as easily been a declaration of war, we both wound up drinking with Dr. Priebe at a local dive, Bogart’s, still comparing literatures into the night. Thus it began. It has not ended. It will only end with my own passing. He will be there too, for one last glorious embrace.
Bond. Bogart. Barr. My, how they fit! Two were famous. Yet David was as well! If only in that fabulously local way that seems much more important to me now than it did then. In proximity to you, Barr eclipses Bogart and Bond. This is the truth. It is a truth that he could not see. And it is the last gift I hope to give him, praying that I did already, but knowing too that I fell short where he did not.
Nothing illustrates this better than my return to Richmond for a career project. About a decade had passed. Having moved back, I contacted him. Within a few nights, a second old friend was hosting a party. She had been a member of my young pup pack at the university. She was no more ready for him than a kitten for an atom bomb. I knew that going in. But I took rediscovered David to her party of new adults. Not his crowd. He knew no one. I knew perhaps two people. The party was around 30 strong, circa 1987. Rising young professionals mostly, slightly on the fancy side. Cookie-cutter ambition and impending fatuity decorated the walls like blandly matched Pottery Barn gew-gaws. We split up on entering. We worked the room. Each in our own way. We connected again briefly at the end. I remember a cigarette package rolled into his white T-shirt sleeve, the isoseles of his magnificent back shrinking in the night down Adams Street. I thought of Brando. Barr was a contender.
Over the next few months, I would become friends with many more of those 30 people. I found this astonishing thing: Each of them remembered David Barr! Vividly! Once they realized I had brought him, they boiled over with pent up conversation. About him. All about him. Who was he? Where had he come from? All this from one contact, mind you! A few drinking hours, spread over 30 strangers. All had an opinion! And about half loved him. When could they see him again? Where? The other half hated him. Absolutely. Without reservation. When could they slay him? Where? David was an unbridgeable gap living in an unbridgeable gap spawning unbridgeable gaps into piles of unbridgeable gaps. Yet bridging all gaps. North and south, east and west, up and down, yea and nay.
David lived fuller life in almost exactly that way, to my intermittent observation. His wake was ever visible, ever seething, ever full of negative and positive spaces interacting in a complex surface that rivaled fluid dynamics for unpredictability, change, splash, and mystery. Because the man simply did not compromise. And he would not be silent. Never silent. I loved that voice. Loved it. Even cringing, for sometimes we all did. Him too. He knows. Oh, he knows.
He loved virtue. He cared deeply for the underdog. He counted and kept track, and never for one instant paused, in headlong pursuit of what was true. Truth. Bad, good, or indifferent. David navigated by only that one shining star. Truth. Philosophical. Moral. Historical. Categorical. Few were better at finding it, especially when it lay in unexpected quarters.
And I admired him for it every single day. Even for those moments we were at war. Because war was always a part of David’s motif, as was generosity, curiosity, and intellectual energy. And war yielded back to peace always. Once you were in a few fight cycles, you understood and loved this about him too. The man who will fight a war with anyone, at any time, for truth? Never for gain. For truth. Rare as Picasso. Unassailable as Chomsky. Those who wanted milquetoast accommodation, which has its charms and uses, mind you, were perhaps most of that half who fell back before David’s burning greatcoat that night in younger, rebel-shorn Richmond.
I will end this with schism. Only fitting.
First, he died unlucky. His last breath was taken under a collapsing United States. Our national morality in full retreat. Tragedy and anguish all around him. By our own foolish hands. He hated it. Within a few days of his passing, though, the correction has begun. He will not experience it. I am sad for that. Second, he died the luckiest man on earth. He had, as he often said, benefitted absolutely. Vida, his wife and mainstay, was, in his own words, “the best thing that ever happened to (me).” She was. We all saw that. She is here. We all watched her make his last years possible, pleasant even in decline, and we all knew that he had been right. He usually was. Truth was his business, his avocation, his God, and his glory. Rest in peace, my great friend. I love you still. You were the best of men. You were the best of men. The Dickens with Dickens. No schism anymore. Rest in peace, but have one last laugh with me, sir, here and now, at the absurdities and glories you have left behind with the mourners pondering the infinite silhouette where you once reigned.
David Barr: Celebration of Life 