LETTERS 

Familiar with all the objects that surrounded him the writer knew the world, now, as a constantly moving, anonymous life where he rarely ran into the same person twice. Yet, he ran into many people. What, he thought, is the imagination if it isn't rooted in community? There are six million souls in my region, what is my relation to them? He walked in their midst like a wiseman from the ancient world. Walking had its perils and was not conducive to the world being built around the writer. It traveled in corpuscles of steel and listened to the fabricated communities of media. How familiar became the landscapes and faces! How powerful were those who manipulated the landscapes and faces! It was true that families and traditions were forms of coherence still necessary. But, then, they did not produce new vitality or new coherence.

These questions arose in the center of well-lit crowds going to a venue they were happy about. A buoyancy contained whatever doubts the crowd had. It sent out a silent challenge to the writer. 'Believe in yourself and don't be bowled over by any condition.'

What was more disturbing was the loss of spiritual matter. He had seen, on a daily basis, the constant transformation of spiritual matter into material uses by the technical world. He would not surrender Christ and Buddha to the car or nation and any other entity that wove an aura of eternity about it. After while he figured out that the trick was not to demand that the one destroy the other. Machine and smoke and noise you will be scorned in one hundred years. Many will perish in your name but few saved.

When he looked at the century he was born into he saw the machines all lined up like clever children who had mischievous thoughts in their nonplussed brains. They did not merely make life better and easier they performed a gigantic task of myth making in a secular era. After all, that which can carry and lift and delight and enrich is a god from which come lovely stories of its powers. The machines made demonstration of their ability to obliterate cities in a flash of light. They demonstrated the ancient desire of tyrants; make from the stupid powerful leaders and rob the people of their potential.

The troubling century was a liar and gambler in the seat of power mocking the free and innocent people.

David Eide
October 11, 1999
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