LETTERS 

The writer, haughty and proud, galloped on an invisible horse through the cramped avenues of his little city. He wanted to hold the severed head of some long dead prominent citizen; hold it up and out to the strange creatures that now walked the streets, pissing and garrulous, as though they had been sprouted in the doorway of some dingy music store. 'Here! Here is the ghost you destroy by your ignorance!' No. He was in a small alley watching street musicians dancing like the mad, cackling and hooting, while drawn, pale women watched with eyes wide-open.

I have to find Meke, the Buddhist priest, before it's too late, he thought to himself. He answers my questions.

Meke lived in a room above the street. His room was sparse and clean with polished wood floors and a tambourine hanging from a peg above his simple bed. Meke had a photograph of a famous actress on the wall.

'Why would a Buddhist monk have a picture of a famous actress, Meke?'

'She reminds me of sexual energy and how impossible it is to repress.'

'Are you secretly in love with her?'

'I love all beauty.'

In a movie she had disrobed in front of an artist, her fleshly breasts silhouetted against a painting by Rosseau. On her face was the expression of one who was proud to pose and was still mystified by what she could achieve with her magnificent breasts. 'I'm being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for this,' you could read in her eyes. 'I'm going to buy my mother a home.'

Meke always saw through the writer. 'You're too serious with this inner stuff. The mystery is simply what the world, in its infernal working, can not penetrate. It's what it always seems to avoid, what it seemingly always tries to articulate but can't. Beyond that, hardly anything about it can be said. Yet, out of it comes almost all things. And writer, stay away from trying to characterize the age. You're not a politician. All things are possible at any given time.' He removed the tambourine and began to beat it rhythmically while he chanted, 'To dream, to dream again, to dream...'

Now, evening had come. It was a crepuscular hour and the moon a thin edge on blackness. Mind filled with blackness and space and worlds and laughter.

It was a great pleasure for the writer to realize his private thoughts were dreamed in another state of being and enacted by a character who would, invariably, leap out unexpectantly to announce he was there to carry the burden.

David Eide
October 2, 1999
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