LETTERS 

The writer was explaining to his favorite animal, a coyote, what his goals were as a writer. 'I will start with the seed of growth and end deep in the universe. Everything that comes into living contact with my brain and heart will be included. I will shame all the ideologies. I won't let the confusions of the day interfere with my intentions. I will allow myself to be drawn toward the productive courses of human nature and turn away the destructive paths. I will strive to attain singularity. All the transactions that go into that singularity will be manifest. I will not reside in the brutality of the sentimental.'

The coyote was not amused and sauntered through the wood looking for cats to eat.

'Coyote! Listen! My writing suffers from the same disease that the culture does. It gets way ahead of itself. It desires redemption so becomes mad with abstraction and theory. This ruins writing as it ruins souls. Once the abstracting mind gets drunk on its power it feels a pang of remorse and goes around trying to save people. There's nothing worse than a person with confidence in a theory. What pollution it has created!'

Coyote invited me to run with him for awhile. All the while he was talking to me while making a path in the milkweed. 'Words,' says he, 'must be used precisely whatever large, profound vision lays behind them. Words are drawn from speech. Words in common use are the first speech. But words in common use are not adequate to speak all the dreams of the soul. At times it is elevated by the common emotions. It can even be primitive and barbaric as in mass entertainment. But, writer, the common language is like the common colors painters transform through their genius. It's there to be used.'

The coyote had stopped at a cul de sac of suburban houses. We could see people frolicking in the pool.

'Are you telling me coyote that the writer plays a thief in the night to the mundane?'

'The mundane world is a habit to be unlearned. It's a desert that robs dreams and replaces it with a machine. Your only attitude to that situation can be irony.'

'I feel in myself, coyote, a language of the internal man that fights and adjusts to imperatives of the social language. These are distinct images, visions, dreams, as well as words. It is flowing when I enter the society. It is an eruption of all the possible desires, possible thoughts, possible directions even in the face of the stone world.'

'Writer, don't make the mistake of identifying objects in your mind with objects in the world. Your spirit will be whisked away by some angry ghost. You'll end up with a fraction of what you contained; your potential.'

'I am confused, coyote, whether it's my job to deny or to confirm.'

'Your only role is to eat what is good for you.'

It was at that moment that coyote ran off without me, headed for a row of rabbits the neighborhood kids had raised as pets.

David Eide
August 16, 1999
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