Chapter 1 

Fid was explaining to me what poetry was. We were in his ramshackle, off of Shattack Avenue on an afternoon filled with rain and sun and that smell that comes up when the two commingle.

"The first poems are intimate; a rarified relationship between self and ideal. Even if sex finally exhausts itself and is disillusioning it is a tasteful act in which the one scrambles back into the light. Perhaps sex is self-contained like art and only refers to the limits of the body. And after the sounds have quieted down the perennial question, "what am I doing with this particular being?" Sometimes I think Mr. Freud wanted everyone to have continual sexual adventure until the brain finally tired, spits out the libido and returns to contemplation or actvively pursue something without the damn interference of "those feelings." No, Mr. Freud wanted to intellectualize the women then they'd support their genius men and everyone would be happier!"

Fid has just lost his girlfriend or hanger-on I wasn't sure what she was. I think she was from the valley and was looking for adventure, "dangerous men," not those who did evil things but those capable of evil things who finally laughed and did a petty crime like illegal drugs. When he was drunk or stoned he could go off on these fine riffs that I never saw in his poetry. He was well-read, books were always open and laying about in his wreck of a place. Now he was drunk. It was not a staggering drunk but a soft and kind sort of drunk that allowed him to be himself for a moment.

"The song is subversive in that it desires the bored man to sing with fleeing birds who sing over city avenues at mid-noon as though their song were vibrating off the metallic traffic and into their precious beaks. A man riding inside his animal doesn't progress. And he's so stunned by it his face is a perplexed fear in front of the abyss; is he free or trapped? He can't decide. Surrealism, depth pyschology and other phenomena have effectively kicked some underpinnings out. A particular kind of classiscism has fallen and for awhile the beheamouth indistrial/scientific world has floated on clouds of its own invention until......well, everything catches up to it. And like the giant in the fairytale must chase the thief from the clouds down the preciptious stalk as the Earth mother stands at the bottom chopping with her happy ax.

"Comfort and relaxation in the forbidden zones opened up by pyschology and literature. Standing at the edges of the old world with sharpened claws and a glean in the revengeless eye. Stop me brother. An oppression is sighted. Men no longer have to be addicted to the kind of suffering where every value is destoryed by madness each and every one is put through. Mad machines dangling from the end of iron threaded fingers spun by the golden processes. There is delight in a strange premonition that they are taking a last stand and are yet at the threshold.

"People distrust a language when they feel it's not really theirs. It's a borrowed syntax, vocabulary, meaning; all borrowed and stuffed between feeling like foam. And since they lack language a space or hole remins in the mind which is always ineffable. It's even a source of pride. The pride of perception! of depth! But without language all this is a flabby passion; the hole is just that.

"If this "space" is filled with one's own language (contained in the spirit of each man, as any quality is) this space would vanish; it would vanish but re-appear deeper beneath the nexus of his inate language. But now he'd have the tools to "get at" the hole. Instead, they fill themsleves up with borrowed language and borrowed images which throws a loose net over the hole so they no longer have the disconcerting feeling that it is them. Their pride and discomfot have the same source."

Then Fid told me a dream he had recently: "Christ stands before Pilate. Pilate asks for a miracle, "out of curiousity," and Christ transforms himself into a modern businessman. They are in a room and the communication between them is done in their own language; Pilate speaks Latin and Christ, Armenian. A translator laboriously goes from one to the other. Christ uses various gestures and objects in the room to bring his point over. The fascinated Pilate is defending himself by throwing out the ideology of the Empire."

And then laughter as only Fid knew to laugh.

David Eide
January 24, 2014