LETTERS 

Well writer, he thought on a gloomy, overcast day as he wandered in the city of his dreams where books floated effortlessly from the holes dogs dug in an effort to get away from their masters. Well writer, to gain a sense of eternity you will need to penetrate the hypnotism of things. The city of his dreams had fallen for the old political ploys that created enormous gravity around a once playful atmosphere filled with gaiety and color. It was the time when a new self was called into being. The political types reversed the image of culture and called that new. When the shadow called itself the light it was time to beware. This was one of the first lessons the writer learned. Second lesson: in any community, when people are unhappy, they will project any form of displeasure on an object of scorn. Therefore, things divide and separate and never return to the mystical unity of youth.

He lived where the trains moved eerily in the midnight silence. He would stand, often, and look at the train pass and think of all the trains he had seen in films and old photographs. He read about many trains. When a child the train was an object of power. As he became disillusioned of youth the train became an object of fear but now the train became an object of utility and absurdity. And it carried the people who lived with the writer. Are they good people? he asked as the train poured past him. Do their lives circle around a good? They drove, too, over the heavy bridges. No pennants few from the towers of the bridges. As they moved over the bridge they moved for those who moved before them and who would move after them. The writer often stared into the precise strands of wire to catch of glimpse of a spire or fleck of water. He knew every spot from many perspectives.

The writer never took the people for granted. He never ignored them as though their presence were a nuisance. He never rose above them to offer them perspectives that would make them upset. They crowded into him from every angle until the writer ran to the empty spots he cultivated out of good knowledge. Yet, the writer had a duty to forget them and remake images for them at their leisure. He forgot them since he had so much interweaving with them. They drowned him in their insistence.

The wonderful, terrible people.

David Eide
August 11, 1999
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