LETTERS 

As with all healthy young men the writer didn't particularly like the general condition of things. What he most especially didn't care for was the useless energy in trying to gain meaning or provide justification for a litany of things. The world now construed itself as a vast rhetoric where ganglion institutions had to key to meaning; the key to the qualities associated with freedom. He had come to the conclusion that an Assisi would be hunted down in the modern world and forced into a mental health program or make-work job to keep him from wandering among the animals. But, a Kenghis Khan or Atilla would be fully welcome up in the towers that dominated the city. Ah, so be it. He had no desire to become his own avenger. He woke, startled, smelling the mold of some transit bus and realized, in a flash, that he was occupying a place he had reserved for himself in some fantasy years ago. 'I am here where I saw himself those years ago,' he thought. 'Is this good or bad?' Even the sorrowful lessons had something to teach.

It was fatal, of course, to understand how the modern world had dismembered the gods and then get a taste of deicide oneself to become that which had been killed off. One became the killing and the gods went their merry way to be resurrected at another time.

The spirit of the age was that of a naked child kicking around the silt and muck and his ad infinitum forefathers to re-make himself in the full light of history; in the full light of knowledge, guided by the skepticism of science. The spirit demanded that one submit to a cool, painful, unwrapping of all illusion and a scrutiny of all guilt.

'I believe,' the writer whispered, 'but it's not enough. This belief is easily taken from me and shown to be a fraud. There is nothing but nerve.'

Perhaps it was evolving toward some secret assimilation that few knew about, planned in some unknown castle, where the first act would be to enslave the people with images that materialize like pop-up cartoons in the environment; what history denied had come to a material fruition and created an ambiguous sense of loss. The sense in every form of life, in every circumstance: loss.

David Eide
October 28, 1999
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