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[W r i t e r' s N o t e b o o k]

The writer doesn't choose sides. He is thankful that there is a stubborn insistent core remaining to prevent a vast killing from taking place.

The writer often, like an idiot, allows all the events, images, personalities to crash through into his mind, replacing his own sense of self. It puts him into bad situations from time to time. What the writer needs are a few simple actions. It doesn't matter how honorable the writer thinks he is, he has to pay attention to the present. He reads, he thinks, he thinks of all the energy taken up by these activities and then ponders on the present. What exists in the present that either inspires him or draws him out or makes him want to get acquainted with?

He doesn't tolerate the wrong kind of hatreds. To have, that is, general hatreds for all kinds of reasons. That creates, no doubt, a drain in the mind. It bleeds a few strengths. The hatreds belong in the lower order that still struggles with primitive conflicts.

And yet, on the first glance: hate, fear, stupidity, and greed! The papers and TV news shows humanity crazed. The hatred has an ineluctable draw toward the weakness in one's nature.


A witness to both the birth of a child and of a soul experiences a violent and wild affair. Perhaps what is destroyed is a fabrication of innocence. That sort of innocence, at any rate, that does not understand that, already, it has many adversary's. The soul understands adversary's. It strives toward conciliation, toward "wholeness" but not at its birth. At its birth it understands there are forces that would destroy it and so it takes on the face of a grotesque mask. Of course, if it stops there it is hypnotized and petrified by its adversary.


Pessimism is evidence of experience not yet integrated with imagination. It is an obstacle to overcome. Logically, one must be pessimistic. If you begin at any one point in experience and connect all the various other parts tangent to that original concern you will end in doom. To a logical mind an apple with a worm hole in it implies great terrors of destruction. And when things are so many systems and processes, the connection gets even stronger.

Pessimism can become a dance of the literal around the budding spirit. A ritual. One can nearly predict what will happen to a particular individual simply by listening to him or her talk for a moment or two.

Pessimism has its own particular forms. There is a naked form of it that can destroy the humanity of a person and regress him to an animal state. The most horrifying thing to the young writer was seeing so much pessimism sweep through his fellow writers and carry them off to the dim rooms of nothingness. If the writing soul can't find its way to health and optimism then the culture is dead.


There is pain in transition. Youth is the most powerful force in nature, and does not want to give up its claim to supremacy and only gives it up when it is proven that something better awaits. Oh, what a painful few years that is! It must be suffered, it must be allowed to pass through. The spirit of a person must search ceaselessly through this period of time to 'what is better.' The enthusiasms, the intoxication's, beauties of youth pale as the year takes on sudden significance. 'Why didn't we see this before!' And then scene after bitter scene of what we did, just a few years before, and how stupid it was and how we are embarrassed by the spell it cast over us. To the age of 24 most things are unreliable. After 24 you attempt to pick up the pieces and repair the vessel. To the age of 30 you begin to fill in the limitations and weaknesses that you have seen in yourself. The world becomes more substantial and is observing you, checking your moves, shunting you in the direction that it wants you to go.

Thinking and creating are ballast's against the pressures. These become the salvation against a world that strives to be free but which destroys it at every step. In the early 30's authentic ambitions appeared. Youth, in my particular case, was highly critical of ambition since ambition had led to utter destruction of the world, apparently. At least, between a perceived utopia and the real world were the ambitious schemes of millions of people. Thus, youth scorned ambition and its baubles. This was right and proper under the circumstance since it was necessary to find the true nature of the world between idea and reality.

The exercise of normal ambition became a slap in the face of the future.

Yet, the future is reached through profound ambition! So, the first dilemma to meet youth is what to do with its ambitions.

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David Eide
eide491@earthlink.net 
© 2002 David Eide. All rights reserved.