Chapter 1 

So the Poet of His Dreams, named Fid, wanders around and thinks he's a wise guy: He cuts epitaphs into the trunks of huge oak trees: Quickest way to Hell is to destroy Memory. Life sad, short, and tragic for all the kind and masterful rationalizations. Trust the soul, question the nation. Don't go after fame but manifest true nature. Theories are useless in explaining anything other than their own existence as theories. While it's no good to live in the past, it's no good to kowtow to nonsense. Easy explanation for any malaise is subterfuge. Who did I invite? Among them all who is it who has come to enlarge my spirit? What good is it to leave the misery of one circle and enter the misery of another?

"So Fid, why do you destroy trees?"

"I have learned a great skill in carving and want to master it."

He showed me the trees he had defaced. It was ugly and unsettling to see the crude letters etched into the bark. But I did notice as he took me from venue to venue that his phrases of outrage got smaller and more precise; they were a wonderful art like an oak scrimshaw.

This Fid was so ugly and bent up that I won't even describe it. He was so frightful most people jumped a little bit when they were introduced to him. And his poetry was not very good. He wanted to say everything all at once, put the universe in a poem, even a word, and it came out flat and meaningless. He needed to take a few breaths and relax. His shoulders, especially, kept leaping up and down like something ferocious was trying to escape the confines of his body. But then again, Fid was generous. And with nothing to do I would go with him to a little club that had poetry readings

I began to realize that a Puritan's sort of guilt overtakes the writer who writes primarily "on himself." But, finally, it is simply an aspect of self not yet known, struggling to be known. A voice, then, as authentic, perhaps more authentic as the minister he listened to on TV. The seed of the voice is at least as authentic he thinks and goes back to his deeds. This novel I thought. This novel, now, is a kind of novel of manners depicting a variety of levels abundant and mingling in good old American style. "Let them see who they live with!" That is one spirit in youth. Maybe it could be the story of development with idea counterpoised against idea or, at least, a spiritual opening. Ah, it will be left open-ended as to whether the rose wilts or blooms. Redeemed by love, the rose blooms. Suffocated in disillusionment, the rose wilts.

Bor says, "There is no static in youth. There are things all around one. The present as present and nothing else; things without association, things as things; physical things like buildings, planes, roads, bridges, houses, streetlights. Things. Objects. Common things. And then they worm through necessity, imagination, or, even desire. One object is in relation to an empty, littered lot and another in relation to hills filled with trees and birds. One sees through the eye, smells through the nose. But there is more. Yet there is another inner fluid that comes up and meets the things with its imperative and the things change. They can wither and die. Or, they can live forever." And I thought of what Bor had said and had a dream about it that night. A monstrous giant had taken out his erection and pissed on where we were and everyone was frightened and running helter skelter and the saintly Bor was drowned in it and I only escaped because of a princess who had a bicycle that could fly.

Pain and gentleness 
Under the eyes of the 
Wayward Girllost 
in what all lose 
prominent in her awareness 
ah, where have you come from- 
Where? 

It was ironic that in a town full of intellectuals the intellect will suddenly appear as grinding away with no pretense to the truth. It needs a conscience which says, "ah, you are only after power, enthralled by the obligatory antitruths and anti-life sentiments of the day."

"Yet, when the intellect is conned away from itself to let in other, lesser selves to walk out in the daylight aren't they revealed as horrible things? And who else to cauterize the wound but the old grinder itself. There is utter nihilism and around the corner is complete doubt; fast down the street comes slimy desires and then those small and petty conclusions that fret this way and that like a bug under a hot light.

A decent writer starts off wanting to write novels in the way that Hugo, Steinbeck, and Zola did; huge sociological tracts of criticism that writers are sometimes weaned on. They could cut their teeth on lesser things. Then comes the psychological novel where each scene is constructed as a psychological state of mind and where action and thought try to fuse.

David Eide
January 24, 2014