ENTRIES 1994
by David Eide .

Ah! A new slide is inserted under the microscope. Something is left behind. Something is revolving from behind the shadow of our favorite planet. Something demands our immediate attention and will fill us with either dread or great substantiality.

People who marry and people who die; the year will be sanctified and made graceful by our thoughts. A kind of gratefulness fills us when we perceive a world we understand. Is not this the place that denied us? Isn't this where the cold wind blew?

That war must end. It must end and the great flourishing commence. What is the war but the conflict that exists between the individual and all the forces arrayed and set-up by other individuals called, collectively, "society."

Dominating objects of the mundane day
Leaping objects that whir in the deepest ear
Relations that break into our wandering mind, contemplate the streets and rivers of a far-way capitol.

Machines we dance to transform into our favorite letter.

"Thou who stayest at the lower level, the foundation, will be manipulated."

"Know and love the foundation and build upward."

The coast is filled with happy idiots, rancid in the sunlight who dart perilously back to the shadows. The coast drinks up the pleasure of many lands. The coast is still filled with the ghosts of red men. The coast if fast and wired and does not stop for the monument builder. It's freedoms are its imprisonments. Down at the waters edge play the children of the world. I hear the sound of one man fishing before the storm. The women are made in myth with wild dreams of revenge. On the coast, civilization is a set of principles and a set of books. One of the principles is, everything that stinks will be made anew.

We laugh, not at the people, but at the evil spirits that surround them. We experience, once, history. This will become a culture when, rather than fascinated by information it cultivates wisdom, multiplies wisdom and transmits wisdom through the generations. Oh, you say that the system destroys every base of information each generation so that no form of wisdom may appear?

The path of wisdom always risks the wrath of the irrational. Always risks the unfurling of energies that are normally repressed. These energies can be depicted and given various forms; one thinks of ferocious animals. These ferocious animals lead the mind and spirit away from the contemplation that nature desires the most; that is, of itself, of life and death and the possibilities that exist for the future.

Perhaps life is corruption. That is why it is always good to stop once in a while and check out the basics. When the corruption is institutional it is overwhelming and bitter to the spirit of idealism. So we were put on the Earth to fight for something, just as assuredly as we were put on Earth to fight against something. Socialist and theocracies are just as corrupting as capitalism. It a simple case of the immutable law that energy flows from high states of energy to low states; from organized states to states of chaos. This singular principle should be learned before all else. I am not at all sure that this can be the basis of a social philosophy, but it certainly can be the basis of a personal one. And so what is required? Transformers that step energy back to a near approximation of its perfect state. If a person has those, if a society has those, if a political culture has those then it can renew itself. If corruption is so sweeping that even the transformers are done with then you have a rather difficult situation. That is when one man, one idea, one object of faith will rise up and be the one and only transformer while everything else is sacrificed to the natural state of corruption.

We struggle and struggle upward from our dance with death. We have seen into the face of death and build in memory of it.

In the middle of a crowd we recognize as our own, don't we imagine characters and stories? Aren't we excited when we perceive that even there, among our familiar types, there is enough humor and substance to make something that did not exist before? We don't judge them. They speak and appear in the mind in various guises. They are not the spirits of the underground but spirits of the common life- oh beautiful common life that leads me from the freezing walls!

Experience and accomplishment. The crowd says, "do not give me your terrible and heavy problems. Give me the ways you have transformed them into high humor." Marvelous stories slither through the last fifty, sixty years. The brain mad for money; the spirit wild for stability. Ghost of the President who would save us from something dark and secret; his damnable secret. Old and peaceful men who are luxuriant in memory like schoolgirls ready to move into womanhood. Laughter of the woman that is sharp and to the wounds of the male.

Disgusted wth ourself, we listen to the worlds barb. The world is a taunting warrior who stands with a great spear ready to thrust when it perceives that the body is relaxed and will not resist.

Consolation and cries from the eternal woman leads us to the hollow in the mountain of our deep aspiration. We see, then, pictures we scratched at the height of a desperate sort of intensity. In the silent alcove we hear the voice of the betrayer; the anonymous movement of things through the density of the world. We know we must emerge again into the light we fear. The light that kills the eye and does not fill the body with delight.

We would have beside ourselves a woman to tell us how wonderful we are. We hear her delightful voice and believe that she is fully experienced and knowledgeable about the world she so often talks about. It doesn't matter, she speaks to us and convinces us that we are of a special tribe of people who protect the spirit of things. No matter how many times we convince ourselves that we are terrible, that we are of the horrible tribe that wanders without honor through the eternal zone of the eternal men and women; no matter how much we fall into despair when we notice that we spy on ourselves in obscure glances and in the corner of pictures the relatives take, no matter that our face announces to the world that we have taken leave of the mundane no matter, she returns to us and speaks in a voice that moves the soul of things.

We look back to see if there is anything startingly; anything through which we can transform our sorry state. Well, we certainly see wonderful spirits that inhabited us at one time. And the events that wash through the brain leaving but a simple song; a set of whimpers, a set of dying engines. We see moments when we could have been extinguished and unfulfilled. We see moments when the world drowns us in its poison; moment of the fiendish leering grin.

Where are the great signals that open up the treasure bounty and allow the riches to flow?

Yes, the great internal war must end; this war was, at the root of it, male and female but it manifested through all the agencies of manifestation available. The war split one between the family and the society or, at least, the society of common interest. The war split the self between conservative values and progressive values. The war split the self between the sensual and ecstatic moments of the poetic imagination and the grinding necessities of the intelligible, rational world. The war demands a cessation of action as the sides are observed as they manifest from behind the mountain.

Here is the great revelation: The society is mightier than we are. We are charged to understand the society to the upmost of our capabilities and throw out the horrid orthodoxies of the misspent youth. Throw out the poison that seeps in when youth is hot and wanting to fight! Acts are solutions. That is the way in the society. It is the right way apparently. We have listened to the paltry voices, we have listened to tales of woe and doom, we have listened to the hatred that announces us in our most vulnerable state of being we have listened to the lies that shadow us day in and day out like some competitive sun. The root and source of the society is with those who work, who raise families, those who build as if the future counts, those who love life even as life turns bitter.


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