David Bar Katz has written this prose poem for his friend Philip Seymour Hoffman, with whom he used to have coffee every morning after dropping off their children
23 July 1967–2 February 2014
Phil played many sophisticated and effeminate parts,
yet in many ways he saw himself as a jock wrestler from upstate New York.
As an artistic director of LAByrinth Theater Company
he sparked and nurtured literally hundreds of plays
that would not exist right now had it not been for Phil.
There was his note that got to the heart of things
and his smile that told you he believed in you
though failure was possible, sometimes inevitable and okay.
And then a word of encouragement and the bear hug.
His bear hug. Any of us would trade a thousand film roles for just one more.
Phil was the most compassionate non-judgmental man I have ever met.
He was a practitioner of the rarest most esoteric art in the world
the sincere, non-coerced and generous apology.
He told me once how he was troubled over how rude he once was to one of his high school teachers. Years later he found her and apologised for his teenaged behaviour. Of course she said it was fine and dismissed it as nothing. But Phil would never allow a sincere moment to be reduced to a superficial nicety. He looked her in the eyes. “It wasn’t nothing. I want you to know how very very sorry I am.”
The ferocity of his love for his children
could only be expressed in an opera or something written by the Greeks, before irony,
or in an ancient Vedic poem when love shredded mountains and created worlds.
The gaze of Philip Seymour Hoffman.
To look directly into his eyes.
Though that’s already a flawed way of putting it because when Phil looked you in the eye
what you were seeing became secondary
to the overwhelming force of how you were being seen.
Like a sun that emanated truth instead of light.
Relentless and warming.
Other actors, writers, directors.
They didn’t just bathe in it.
It brought out the truth in them.
He demanded it.
I saw Phil in his first professional theatre role.
A production of King Lear at a small theatre in the middle of New Jersey.
Phil played Edgar. And in one scene he was buck naked. I enjoyed teasing him about that.
I thought we made eye contact that night.
And like so many in the audience,
I felt like I was the naked one.
The gaze of Philip Seymour Hoffman.
I don’t remember if in any of his films Phil ever looks directly into camera.
But then the audience would get a taste of the limitlessness of the man.
And yet again and again Phil created such limited, deeply flawed characters
each of whom were also limitless.
Yet their limitlessness was a mere fragment of Phil’s.
A fragment he polished and gave life. Then gave to us.
A piece of flawed, beautiful absolutely complete humanity taken from his overabundance.
An eternity within an eternity.
23 July 1967–2 February 2014
Phil played many sophisticated and effeminate parts,
yet in many ways he saw himself as a jock wrestler from upstate New York.
As an artistic director of LAByrinth Theater Company
he sparked and nurtured literally hundreds of plays
that would not exist right now had it not been for Phil.
There was his note that got to the heart of things
and his smile that told you he believed in you
though failure was possible, sometimes inevitable and okay.
And then a word of encouragement and the bear hug.
His bear hug. Any of us would trade a thousand film roles for just one more.
Phil was the most compassionate non-judgmental man I have ever met.
He was a practitioner of the rarest most esoteric art in the world
the sincere, non-coerced and generous apology.
He told me once how he was troubled over how rude he once was to one of his high school teachers. Years later he found her and apologised for his teenaged behaviour. Of course she said it was fine and dismissed it as nothing. But Phil would never allow a sincere moment to be reduced to a superficial nicety. He looked her in the eyes. “It wasn’t nothing. I want you to know how very very sorry I am.”
The ferocity of his love for his children
could only be expressed in an opera or something written by the Greeks, before irony,
or in an ancient Vedic poem when love shredded mountains and created worlds.
The gaze of Philip Seymour Hoffman.
To look directly into his eyes.
Though that’s already a flawed way of putting it because when Phil looked you in the eye
what you were seeing became secondary
to the overwhelming force of how you were being seen.
Like a sun that emanated truth instead of light.
Relentless and warming.
Other actors, writers, directors.
They didn’t just bathe in it.
It brought out the truth in them.
He demanded it.
I saw Phil in his first professional theatre role.
A production of King Lear at a small theatre in the middle of New Jersey.
Phil played Edgar. And in one scene he was buck naked. I enjoyed teasing him about that.
I thought we made eye contact that night.
And like so many in the audience,
I felt like I was the naked one.
The gaze of Philip Seymour Hoffman.
I don’t remember if in any of his films Phil ever looks directly into camera.
But then the audience would get a taste of the limitlessness of the man.
And yet again and again Phil created such limited, deeply flawed characters
each of whom were also limitless.
Yet their limitlessness was a mere fragment of Phil’s.
A fragment he polished and gave life. Then gave to us.
A piece of flawed, beautiful absolutely complete humanity taken from his overabundance.
An eternity within an eternity.