LETTERS 

The writer conducted an ecological survey of the people who inhabited the classes below the saint class. The saint class remained untouched after years of trial. What emotions did these people have? They loved and sacrificed. They hated the dark and what they called the dark without naming themselves. They existed among props, moveable and immovable. Those props that remained inside the human breast dissolved at the passing of the next mind. And those props that were outside became heavily populated. There were people sitting on what was being pushed. It was a square cube of so many dimensions but within the reach of many hands. The people could not love like saints so what did they love like? They loved to rub themselves back and forth against that which was to pass away. They sacrificed to nothing but did, in fact, sacrifice. They saw no infinite circles of Bruno or visions of St. Joan. They only saw the constant passing, the breathing, as the sun, in and out at stupendous intervals.

The sun was the object the heart was seeking. It was constant and fiery from any vantage point. From one vantage point it was superbly round like the disc of ancient hearts. But, from itself, it was many rivers slow moving along the surface.

The people lacked a language. It was secret. The writer consulted the wise who said, 'first is action, then building up, then language to communicate it.' Without the words the people were laid out on cables of abstraction, one on top of the other like endless snakes whose skins buried all the snakes but the last one.

And then the writer was at the bottom of a hill and stretched out before him were the innumerable choices to make his decisions. Something willed him to the summit. He had no choice in the matter. The infinitude of choice was in front of him. Everything in front of him was information. That which made up his periphery was information. And that which was behind him was imaginative construction of where he'd been. Up the hill he went. His mind was working, now, at 24 frames/second trying to get a fix on his next step. And when he arrived at his destination his face lit up with pleasure, then the passion to move on; move on writer the last step has not been made. And the last step revealed a chasm. He stopped. 'Will I plunge to hell or simply die of a broken body?' Speak now so I may be seen!

The writer was then on the porch of his good friend Evan. Evan had left the country to travel around the world and seek his fortune. 'And what did you do writer while I was gone?'

'I took on all the problems with a desire to solve one to gain fame. I felt in a competitive race with the more established avenues of these pursuits. They had abdicated in a way. But I was stopped by my ambitions. The hero had no role in those ambitions that I had learned from the greater society. So I returned to my work and hardly emerged at all from it.'

'Ah writer, you should have joined me at the sacred rivers!'

David Eide
November 6, 1999
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