LETTERS 

The peculiar vast sadness of the American beat through the writer. He was not sure of his voice or his desires. He was never sure of his faith, of his nature or just about anything but what impinged on his imagination from a thousand weak signals in the air. He always chalked it up to too much experience with crummy people. He wanted to be around those who believed the world was large and bountiful. Where the parenthesis of experience left space for joy and happiness. Give me friendliness and boundless energy over the neurotic pickings and foul mud smell of those with a certain mind-set. If a person was full of shit the writer had immediate disdain and a prejudice formed.

This ugly culture is not my teacher, he said. He said it to Quincy the bum. Quincy sat on a bench in a park behind the junior high school and watched the dogs mount each other. Sometimes it was only Quincy and the writer on a blue Tuesday afternoon seamed together by silence, a dog bark, the horn of a car. 'The development of other men and women are not my teachers.
My own confusions are not my teachers.
The strictness of time is not my teacher.'

'Who is your teacher?' Quincy dressed in black and found dimes in telephone booths. He carried a cane to fend off other denizens and would explain to the writer the logistics of being a tramp.

'You are perfect Quincy because you have released from yourself the desire to gain power over others. You don't judge Being, only Becoming.'

'Yeah, yeah....'

'Like me you hold self-pity in contempt and simply do what you must do.'

'Yeah, yeah.....'

'You've destroyed the anonymous biography of your self and become every state, every feeling.'

'Yeah, yeah.....time is perception. It sucks up the ground floor of illusion.'

'You have no fear of reprisal. No fear of ridicule. You've cut through complexity and demonstrate strength of character while tottering down the street. You've emptied yourself of the fear that what you possess is unreal and will be stripped from you.'

'Oh writer, you know me better than most.'

Quincy would sit on the bench, bouncing his cane against the iron work of the bench and then leap up suddenly and move, cat-like, to the street.

The writer was never filled with hope after he finished a dialog with Quincy. And invariably, as soon as Quincy left the iron bench that circled the great oak, the commuters would start to flow through the park. The writer felt shame. But, he felt giddy as well.

'In this city, with a book in hand, with a pad and pen, with time and an empty sky, with conversation between fellow dreamers I am powerful! I am unmoved by what would shame me!'

David Eide
August 27, 1999
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