The Great Peter Sobotkiewich
I stole the title from the Great Gatsby. For me Peter is as important and significant to life, art and existence, for many of the same reasons, as Fitzgerald’s Gatsby.
But Peter Sobotkiewich is, was a real person and not a story or a work of art.
I can’t begin to totally comprehend his being.
This writing is a recollection about the real person, and therefore not completely true. But only what I surmise and suspect, and imagine about Peter Sobotkiewich. Who, because I am not a mind reader, I could not completely know.
The pictures that follow tell much, and Peter himself posted them. And it is on account of those pictures that I felt urged to write here. Peter posted the pictures, but similar to viewing in an art gallery – there is a silence. I saved them after he died, and they represented to me who he had been. Subsequently the pictures were removed from the internet, and it seemed to me Peter had been deleted. I did not like that, it did not seem right. He was real, he should not have his existence just deleted.
Of all the people in the world who knew him somewhat closely I am perhaps the person he would least like to write of him. He did not like anyone to impersonate or interpret him. He would much prefer to be interpreted in his own right. But if I don’t write about him he will just be gone.
Perhaps Peter himself would prefer to just be gone. It is very possible. But that does not suit me, because he was, and I am still coming to grips with his existence. Therefore that is what this is, my coming to terms with the existence of Peter Sobotkiewich, and reconciling myself to that. And to a certain extent at the same time preserving some of his essence for posterity.
No doubt I would preserve him better if I could portray him exactly as he was, but that is impossible. No one can do that. I could also leave him alone but for me he was larger than that, and deserves to be remembered – deserves not to disappear, as if he never was. This writing, and his pictures, are a testament to his existence.
The photos are the best expression of Peter. But sometimes people and circumstances are helped, or imagined, or better explained with words. There are things pictures only hint at, and perhaps that is what Peter liked about pictures. even though he said he first imagined the pictorial art he created as ideas and words. That seemed very strange to me because so much of my thinking is in images and feelings which I convert to words. Peter seemed to be working in reverse to me.
What follows is but an aspect of what I interpreted from Peter and therefore not absolute truth. Much does come from Peter’s own words, and observed life circumstances, which I interpreted. But perhaps not always correctly.