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THE SHORT, HAPPY HISTORY OF A WRITING LIFE :

The writer is not a camera. The writer is a human observer. He tries to observe without commenting. No, now he must comment, things have gotten too far. Ah, now he will simply permit the built-up energies running through him to exit in interesting ways.

Truth is more complex than any particular cause. Yet, the writer blind to the causes or those who carry them is not effective or truthful either.

He emerges from a kind of modern romanticism and see's himself and his culture in a more sober light; one that has darkness, one that has delight. One that has beauty, one that has evil. One where the forces of massification are deadly, yet one can escape the forces of massification.

If there is something called the democratic soul or a liberal, democratic spirit a writer has the obligation to try and flesh it out.

One thing was evident to me; modern democracy is a differnt social order and most of the literary and thought forms of the past came from a social order shaped like a pyramid. It had the salutory effect of taking creative energy up and up to please those who ruled. In the absense of the social order of that type there is nothing to get those creative energies moving up and up. Ideology came in to take some of those energies; religious belief a few others.

A lot of creative energy is driven through technical objects or organizations. The one out for the literary type is not a social order based on money, power, etc. but mindfulness. And mindfulness can liberate and make the citizen better than he possibly becomes in the social order now evident.

Democracy is an act of history. What is meaningful is a healthy system of goverance. Shots aren't fired between rival parties when there is health in the system. It is a good thing when it permits the literary imagination to take on more fundemental questions.

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A TABLE OF CONTENTS

Alone with champagne the waitress has flaccidly spoken of her contempt of strangers. The almond eyed, in all the grace of her age, lays quiet in the voiceless ground.

Once upon a time in a time that should perhaps be buried under stones of impunity, two people came together to mate and when the mating had been done they moved away from each other like strange ships in the harbor.

Simplicity! How they misconstrue your deliberate symbol! You rise out of the worlds fat and sour resistance. Simplicity says, move the many to the few. Simplicity says that when a structure believes it is eternal it is about to collapse. Simplicity says that all things begin and end in dream; gird, then, for the meanwhile between.

What is it that desires to dance around the terrible facts of the world? There is a color not yet sighted by the generations.

When the year 1984 rolled around he decided to take up the novel by Orwell and read it cover to cover as he had done 20 years before. He had felt the oppressive sense of silence in the soul that happens when television or modern contraptions begin to dominate consciousness.