BUY FROM KINDLE:

NIGHT THOUGHTS

---

---

---

AN ILLEGAL DAY IN THE HISTORY OF A SOUL

* * * * * * * * The manuscripts are under $6.

THE SHORT, HAPPY HISTORY OF A WRITING LIFE by David Eide:

Even though I read philosophy from time to time I consider myself fully, a "man of letters," a character who was much despised in the era I grew up in; a product of leisure and privilege. Americans are not good with leisure or privilege and no one can convince them that sitting on ones rear writing or reading is a productive use of time so, perhaps, the "man of letters," is a kind of civilized outcast; knowing the core and center but banished to wander along the steel, titanium edges of the thing he is part of. And, after all, it is but a case of one man or one woman with an imagination, intellect, experience, knowledge putting a world together with language; the language he or she possesses in relation to a world he or she does not make but there as solid as the stadium filled with crazed fans.

And what one looks at is telling. What dives deep into the spirit is telling. All the person of letters can do is present his language in as many forms as possible, try to focus on what he or she does the best, let go of vanity, serve the art, serve the language.

I operated, as a good poet will, with three or four myths intact. I searched for the mythologies and knew the light and dark of each. One came about because of the Internet; that is, the myth of the colony, cut away from the Empire but connected to it and struggling with that connection. The Empire has superior things, perhaps, and luxuriates in a power it will lose sooner than later. The colony takes the best virtues of the Empire and then tries to create the new future. And that dovetailed into the myth that the framers set from the beginning. "Make it new," but know the past 3-4,000 years of human achievement, degradation, genius, wonderment and comedy. Know it as well as you know your own name. A beautiful profound myth. And then the modern one that I discovered in the 70's. On one side the weapons that can destroy whole cities in a flash of light. And on the other the breaking of the seal of space and the universe becoming a tactile entity that leads the mind to infinity; a real experience and one that expands the present and gives hope for a future always threatened by the insanity of human beings.

I ignored ideology, even politics from time to time and the long odd parade that makes up any given time. I connected with what filled me with delight, wisdom, and knowledge. I ignored everything else.

I can't force the writing of poetry. It used to be that one time a year I would get into a poetic rutting season and have a go at it. I felt it was a mystical sort of activity, expressing the spirit in a free and meaningful way. It was a private art, didn't need a huge public. Prose narrative, the novel, is a public art and needs a lot of eyeballs to flourish.

That is one of its problems, certainly.

The commentary stuff came about as a way to re-orientate myself back to the present. In my teens and early-mid 20's I was fully and happily imbued with the present and rode in it in fine style. Then it became repugnant to me. As a good American I rushed way ahead to the future and speculated about a number of things. When that dried up I went to the past and absorbed that monster. The past at least had real people in it and events that had, in fact, happened. That lasted into my mid-30's I think. Then I left the past and tried to orientate myself to a new present. So, almost all of my commentary work is an orientation. You orientate through knowledge and experience in relation to "what is going on."

Go to the Writing Life Archive.