LETTERS 

The writer perceived the battle that youth wages. It is fighting the imposed; fighting for the spirit. Men against women, women against men; fight for the spirit, fight against the anonymous darkness sensed in every gesture and spoken word by those who have not passed through the initiation but who are trapped in it to the end of their days. He began to wander the parks of the city, sitting to read old novels as people played. And so, he thought, the soul is made through battle. It's not constructed but made by a kind of sex between self and battle. Hmm. Very good, that explains it. And, no doubt, the moment the battle is won youth is released for action. Action returned the moment the writer recognized that the soul is born, struggles, and dies before it has legs. The writer was terrified of the fetishes, obsessions, desires in the physical world. It is wasting its time! He thought. It is leaking its potential to the summer winds. Even in the summer-lit parks he felt anxious. 'I am forced to deal with persons and acts that are either too complex to deal with or too simple to challenge me.'

He had observed that the child, conscious that they are child, will deride the baby. And yet they look to the teen-ager and admit that what they do and say is too complex for them to understand. They want to hurry up and get to that stage so they know what's it about. The teen-ager is in the same relation to the young adult. The young adult to the maturing person. All the way up to the elderly who see life as rather simple and yet who have the great complex mystery of death in front of them.

In his most active mind he asks, 'where is the guidance, the wisdom?' Doesn't society put all the burden on me? It gives me a pocketful of money, a whirligig of products, a few books and classes and says now go on with you and choose the wisdom fit for your experience and knowledge. What a free-for-all it has become! What a task, the writer mused to himself. And just when he felt his soul had won the battle he began to notice a kind of nihilistic greed in people to insure that life did not rise above a certain point. They did not want to face what they had abandoned. Here, here is what you abandoned, the writer says. And when you abandon it you are reduced to an effort to control and manipulate through unlove. The evil eye observes in the yard the coming and going of the unsuspecting. And yet, the unsuspecting know so well that they use all their will not to look up to where the eye is looking down. What evil expects is that what has been planted in the brain of the observed are imaginable forms to equal the evil cast by its own eye.

Next to unlove is vanity in its ability to control and manipulate the observed in the yard.

With that thought the writer closed his book and laid his head against the root of a great tree and fell asleep.

David Eide
July 13, 1999
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