LETTERS 

Dreams, he thought. Those things. Dreams. He had seen many phony ones, usually freighted with social or political ambition. Didn't the society, itself, support some dreams and deny others?

The writer was acute in watching the mind feel the unfreedom of this and then try to pass it on. It landed onto nature or other human beings. The unfreedom collected and built up. After while it appeared obvious that nature had had it, people had had it; a revolt breaks out. Maybe in the middle of the revolt a more fructifying dream arose. Until that occurred the people were mean and disillusioned and wanted revenge on children or nature or other groups.

Ah people, the writer often noted, surrender to reality as gracefully as possible.

Once in awhile he had the wistful belief that life was struggling from history, from a ghostly past. It was trying to meet itself in some new form.

But it was the writer's experience that there was a thing called a rite of rebellion when the underlying assumptions of the culture were brought into question. The rite of rebellion overturned the assumptions with wicked ease to reveal to everyone that they are but assumptions. But, then, just as the culture panicked, the content of the rebellion revealed the alternatives as very bad. There was a clean, healthy imagination in youth and its first gesture was a telling one.

David Eide
August 3, 1999
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