LETTERS 

The writer had gone through an interesting trial while sitting on a lawn at the entrance of the great University. The students were casually playing and the eternal, incessant traffic was slow. He had found a tattered copy of The Social Contract by Rousseau and read it casually in the warm, blissful day. No, it was not The Social Contract but, rather, Discourse on the Inequalities of Men. The writer was filled with great round feelings while reading the genius of the past. 'At least, at that time, they took their lives seriously! Life was meaningful since it was lost so easily.' It was when thinking on these things that the writer was transported into an abysmal feeling of nothingness. It was a simple observation of time dissolving. The present was a series of motions without any connective tissue. The present in front of him appeared to hide away and leave in its tracts a languid feeling with teeth. The past, the past, all failure and the future, all doomed to fail, to progress, to fail. Perhaps, he thought, what was doomed were the distractions. Ah, there was a distraction! A ball hanging in the air. Perhaps the ball would lead to the very springs of life. It would lead to God. But what if the absurd ball were to discover that God was at the other end of the universe at this moment? The ball told the absurd writer to dream. 'You are a name that wants to change the world,' the ball said, as it floated from place to place.

The writer saw, floating with the ball, an infinite number of possibilities. The waters will rise. The Nile will be flooded. Invisible sprouts will arise, flavored and sensate. Be an omnivorous beast in the agriculture of dreams.

The writer struggled from his place and walked through the architecture and sounds of his city. It was voices, of woman and angry lovers and the crazed out on their lawns barking like dogs. He heard one screaming from an old, decayed balcony of a putrid green house. 'Writer, they'll drop the bomb on you the moment you write the greatest story!' When the writer got home he went outside on the porch. By that time light was against the cruel, crystal blackness of some emerging night sky. Suddenly he imagined what it would be like if the bomb were to drop in the dead center of this scene. Was he perverse, he thought? There would, no question, be an explosion. Then an enormous, crushing sound. Then a rushing flame burling into the sky. Then it would all be gone, everything gone, what one knew before would be no more. He must protect his writings. He must hide it somewhere the bomb couldn't get it. Go ahead, strip faith, relationship, feeling, thinking, making from me but leave my writings alone. The writer felt an inhuman rage. They will never be able to exhume the dreams they radiate with their bombs. A heaven is needed to hold the higher dreams from the evil of these creatures.

David Eide
September 22, 1999
Back to Jobs page
Back to Letters
Back to Laughing Sun
Back to Oasis