Dear Editor,
I would like to thank Stabroek News, the writer in particular, for the editorialized obituary on my friend, Samuel Bremner (“The Street Linguist” May 11, 2022). When The Citizen Initiative (TCI) was launched in November of 2019, among the guests in the front row was Sam, a man I had known for over a decade, all of which time he was homeless. The choice not only to invite him, but to give him prominence of place was not a difficult one.
For all the time I had known him, Sam Bremner was one of the most engaged citizens of this country I have ever encountered. Eloquent, well dressed even in rags, he transcended both his homelessness and the drug addiction that was the foundation for it; he was always ready to have a deep and meaningful discussion on some general topic, or some public issue he had read that I was associated with in the newspapers.
It is perhaps not surprising given the combination of his intelligence and his mendicancy that he wrote poetry, scribbled in exercise books that he carried around until some unknown diplomat transcribed and printed them in a collection, a copy of which he gave to me and which I have hidden somewhere among my own papers.
If you knew Sam Bremner for ten minutes or ten years, you could not escape the thought that here was a man who deserved a far better life than he was living. And yet, and yet, my mind could never shake the feeling that, in the grand scheme of things, he had found and made peace with where he was meant to be, that he was living according to the inscrutable, from the perspective of anyone else, rules of his own personal purpose and destiny.
In his masterful novel, ‘The Cider House Rules’, John Irving argues, through the character of Dr. Wilbur Larch, that a person should aim for the only meaningful thing in this life, which is “to be of use”. Sam seemed, through the decade I knew him, a lost soul adrift upon some calamitous, tempestuous sea of troubles of his own making, often so near the shore that as his friend you were always sure the next lifeline (a stint in rehab, temporary employment, transient housing, an urge to write more poems) would haul him in, land him on terra firma, until of course he drifted back into the dark squall of addiction that would eventually sink him forever.
In the time I knew him, he represented a particular and powerful paradox he was proof of the vulnerability of the best of human minds to the dangers of drug addiction, a condition of which he was philosophically and frankly self-aware; but he was also, equally, proof the resilience of humanitas, of human decency in defiance of what is, more than anything else, a dehumanizing disease. Sam was a drug addict, and he would be first to tell you so. He never became not through beatings, dire sickness, insults, hunger, homelessness, cold nights spent shivering while drenched by torrents of rain a drug fiend.
In brief, to my mind, Samuel Bremner was not an ordinary man, but something substantially more, a cautionary fable on the human condition, a contemporary Greek tragedy made flesh, a broken man for all seasons, who embodied the possibility of hope and dignity in the worst of situations. Which is to say, more than most of us can truly claim, that he was of use.
Sincerely,
Ruel Johnson
