Dear Sasha,
i am writing this letter thru a torrent of cathartic tears knowing that your stunning NYT Prince piece is probably, sadly the closest I will ever get to experiencing the remarkable netflix doc....sigh.... the estate has failed fans from the get and their hindering the release of this majestic cinematic opus is devastating but not surprising. I found great comfort by at least being able to read about it. The experience was deeply healing.
It has been 8 years but until today i had not been able to reconcile Prince's death. n the fog of denial i genuinely thought/hoped it was all a practical joke...that he would reappear any day now with a wink, a stack of pancakes & a treasure trove of new aural magic. That delusion prevented the ability to feel the pain & grieve the loss. I may never see the doc but experiencing it thru your magnificent tender elegy flipped a switch and helped me finally start the process of letting go.
I went to PP on his bday in 2016 to leave a piece of my heart on that fence. It came in the form of a drawing I did of a bunch of bereft bananas sobbing in the back of a truck that was also weeping, projectile tears shooting out of the headlights, "let's go crazy, let's get nuts, lets look for the purple banana before they put us on the truck"
I wish I could hug you and Ezra. It is a travesty that fans are being denied the chance to experience the doc but I am so profoundly grateful to have experienced it however vicariously thru you. As a lifelong Prince fan there was always an inexplicable sense of "something missing" that I could never quite suss out. That feeling was resolved today because I feel like you & Ezra revealed the human at the center of the music. I feel so blessed to have lived in Prince's time. I dont think its hyperbolic to say there will never be another. And thru you I got to meet the (hu)man of the myth & legend. What a gift.
Your piece gave me peace and brought with it the "soothing electric vibration" that Maya Angelou spoke of in her tremendous soaring poem When Great Trees Fall. I left a laminated copy of it with the sobbing bananas on the fence at PP. (That the estate trashed it and the other tributes underscores their longstanding disregard for fans.)
"When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.
When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.
When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory,
suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.
Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance, fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of
dark, cold
caves.
And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed."
Thank you Sasha. THANK YOU.
Jessie Jessup
