LETTERS 

Whenever the writer passed a television set he would stop and look at it as though it demanded something from him. 'Stand and look at me,' it said. 'I am an old magician and have you in my sights.' He believed that television was the people's invention. It's drama and comedy were kin to pre- Civil War melodrama and it's news filler items from newspapers. But it's appeal was that it was a modern invention without the burden of a past, without traditional forms to hamper its wild ambitions. The average man had two choices, the writer figured. He could listen to TV with the picture off or turn the sound off and watch the picture.

What perplexed the writer was the sense of being 'out of oneself' all the time. He blamed it immediately on the crush of population, on the urbanization that had taken its course in the century he was born into. Complexity on complexity brought down between the ears of the normal man so, suddenly, the normal man was floating out of himself as he walked down any city mentally registering the sights, crowds, and scenes. And the normal man, as well as the writer, passed people who lived totally different lives, with different values, different experience. But even with that common insight it was impossible to know, for certain, why that person was truly different. The writer was thrown back on himself. He tried to escape the combination of things that conditioned him. And those moments where he felt himself to be 'in himself' he reflected on this tension. He was fascinated by complexity. He was fascinated by the identity that emerged from the complexity. He was fascinated by the facts of the technical world; all around, all movement and sound. Every activity implicated in it. There was an organic need to discover the origin of phenomena. Sometimes it was as much as 24 times a day.

And when he was in a noon-day crowd in the city of light and phantasmagoric sound, in the waking hours, he felt under the spell of devices and effects. Ah, dreams, save me! He thought. And when he dreamt he was most outside himself, most inside of that which knew him best.

Now writer, he thought to himself. There are three aspects you need to understand. The otherness of the environment, dreams, and the person who is not yourself. You must understand these things or you'll get stripped of all value and meaning. But, more dangerous than that fate, you will lose your imagination. It must be ready to receive it's allotment of information whether it finds itself on the red plains of an ancient desert or the corner of Columbus and Bay Streets.

David Eide
July 28, 1999
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