LETTERS 

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.

In fact, he was beginning to make it a practice to read a special book during celebrated days. For instance, the previous Easter he had read The Murder of Christ by Reich; reading it as he stood in the center of a crowded BART train on his way to the games.

Television had swooped down quickly and taken him away from one flicking nonsense to another. He had started to use it as a background against which he shuffled the poor contents of his mind. Not only did this disturb him but there had been a spate of Orwellian prediction and comments on the famed work.

In his mind Orwell was describing a type of atmosphere that exists regardless if the state is organized as a republic, a feudal state, or a socialist one. He was describing the ease in which people submit to the total organization of their lives and personalities. And how odd it is that people assume they are free when around them can be heard the rattling of chains; even within them. So he came to the conclusion that freedom is a kind of morality that exists in the universe of choice. He had had odd experiences in America and come to the conclusion that the mechanisms for freedom are in place but that the mechanisms are not the freedom itself. And he had heard people say that the mechanisms were the freedom and anything to the contra-wise was insane. "The crazy," they had said, "rule a certain kingdom in their brains and they like to destroy or undermine everything else."

He thought to himself, "It is true that if a neurotic person goes to the insane asylum and comes away breathing easier because he is not there it is the sort of elation that men and women have always felt next to those who have lost everything."

He had initiated a kind of game with himself when he heard the politicians talk about freedom. He discovered the root of their choice and acts to find out how free they truly are. What have they done with their freedom? Are they conscious of the thing that organizes their sense of freedom? How does the seed of freedom prove itself? Through wealth? Conquest? Followers?

He decided that when he finished the book, '1984' he was to begin a new, fresh study on the understanding of forms in the environment that impress themselves with awe and precision into the spirit of things. 'Yes,' I will see all the shadows of things fly up and around the most profound dream I am capable of.'

He was reading M------ now, a fabled writer from youth who had turned into a buffon. He had cultivated a false edge about the world and sold it to the eastern crowd like an old apothecary selling jars of potions to make the people ill. This novelist, this buffon, wanted to sharpen his intellect on anything available and put on a show for the people who cared about such things. He wanted to become as famous as the well-known prostitutes who had formed unions and made the talk-show circuit. If he had had breasts he would have exposed them.

But, he read him in an old chewed paperback that smelled of dust and the sadness of mind perishing into the thoughts of others. He closed the book. His brother had said something very disturbing to him. There was something primal and extreme, even terrifying, in what was said and it disturbed him and made him put the book down and lean back in his chair. What was disturbing was not the event, itself, but the vulnerability of the deepest mind to the monstrous parasites and predators the age had let loose.

Not too long before a famous murderer had been set free after serving only 6 years of his sentence. He had killed, merely, politicians. But, in a flash, he connected the killer and the disturbing abuse occuring at the level of meaning; at the level of connection. Does not the assassin act out what the masses are feeling at any given time? Does not the murderer strike at the moment the people feel that they could, themselves, do evil?

Now, in the case of the recently freed assassin, it was a case of a person seeing himself as moral, as upright, as an inheritor of some right way suddenly confronted by new people, new circumstances, new arrangments of power so the 'other' becomes a reverse mirror with the ability to make things 'either/or.' It implied a deep division where each side of the equation had vanished from each other. From, certainly, the powers that move a man like the assassin.

Ah, he thought, such dangerous territory these mere mortals tread! They are willing to risk total destruction for the lure of complete freedom.