LETTERS 

The writer woke up in a horrible state. The night before he had had a dream about foreign intrigue; spies. He played tennis with a ravishing middle-eastern woman who had played Christ's wife on a controversial TV program. Then he was in the middle of a group of people who were being very frustrating and filled with rivalry and manipulations that he could not understand. He saw the implication for the utter lack of communication; in fact, the fear of communication had marked the dream very sharply. When he woke he found himself laying in bed and thinking about the origins of democracy and traced its history through time. It must have been formulated as an ideal in antiquity and criticized by the bias of the aristocratic elite's who understood a good thing when they saw it. Into the middle ages it was a tendency and finally had found, perhaps, its fruition in a huge land mass that could be created without the poison of the eternal, aristocratic elite's. It was really very simple, he thought. It is the free expression of the attributes of human nature and the free intercourse between free individuals. It is, as well, the ability to see and comprehend the whole.

The writer had started a futile study of the ancient world. One thing he had discerned before giving up the study was that the ancient world was a tremendous mirror to the present time. They lived in an irrational mind; in the reality of the other mind that the writer had met in dream and crisis; in madness. And, not surprisingly, the rational aspect of the ancients had been repressed just as the 'other world' was repressed in rationalized society. So that hints, fragments, possibilities that seemed prophetic in the ancient world had come to fruition in the writers world, the modern one, and made its appearance in the ancient world as the 'other world' existed among the moderns. 'Writer,' he heard himself think, 'this is obviously too pat to be true but it is true nonetheless.'

His friend had been right. 'We're all squeezed into the cities now and all vitality is there.'

This idea disturbed the writer since he had experienced them as dreadnoughts that resembled some assyrian element in the spirit even though they had been built from human brains and hands. Perhaps it was more a case of the city being a repository of various time frames; a way of life still existed in a particular building even though the way of life had long disappeared. Next to it was another building carrying along the life that had vanished. And the structure most extravagant in its claims of being modern was already viewed as an artifact by the writer. Where was the action? Movement occurred in the restaurants, clubs, parks, comedy and music clubs, bars, demonstrations, even riots, the fake intrigues in the skyscraper and city hall. There was, without question, expression in the city but it grew moldy after repeated experiences of it. Nonetheless, the writer was grateful for the expression.

The street level needed expression, the modes of transportation needed expression, the modes of communication needed the paradox of expression, the daily transactions of business needed expression all the way up to the wheeling and dealing that was sanctified by the parasites and scrofula of 'down below.' For the crowds there was the stadium and arena. For the repressed and crazy there were the talk shows. For the clever and ignorant there were the newspapers and sentimental editorials or the drug of television. The drug of television, the writer mused. Nothing could sum up the condition of society more than that phrase. For the sophisticates there was their sophistication and little else. It all became a black screen the writer passed through to test his natural optimism.

The way it devoured itself he was convinced that it was not the all.

David Eide
November 28, 1999
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