LETTERS 

Who is that man who can love language at the depths and yet flaunt it, abuse it, scorn it when he must face the world? Who is that man who can love faith at the depths and yet make a joke of it when he must face the world? Who is that man who loves woman at the depths and yet abuse women psychologically from the center of that which must face the world?

The writer walked the day in shame. It was the solitude and the process of making what he did authentic. He finally put on the mask of calculation and mistrust. He was ashamed of his own pettiness and his voracious desire to tear apart the natural opinions of human life.

There was, to his way of thinking, Poetry and the Instruments of Mass Culture. Some great upsurge played itself out with timorous restraint. The productions of mass culture were not done out of love but out of the mere necessity for fame or fortune and presented to the people an escape from the normal life. Ah escape, people! But escape the hypnotism's and breakage's from the connecting tissue with the living universe!

It created, no doubt, women who lost their sense of the magnanimous and were eager to shame the best in nature. It created the men who wanted them. Ah, women, the victims! No, women the victims always on the ready to become victimizers! A man could see his own development through his attitude toward women. First were the innocent creatures with crushed potential and burdens. Then, as the man opened himself to hear the sufferings of the women they turned on his weakness and hunted for revenge. And when the man was down they killed his strength like old amazons in some sunken city in the red sands, taking his strength for their own aggrandizement. The women said, 'we don't want your sacrifices, we don't want your pious noose around our desires.'

It was as if the women had decided, en masse, to drive their self-hatred from them out into the great, empty sky filled now with a gaseous smell from the city of steel ironies.

The writer sat hours in the city library hunting through old scholars books, trying to figure out what had happened to the women. They were always a key element, after all. And when he found the answer he slowly closed the last page of the scholars book and looked to the far horizon where the ocean quietly dove into the center of its cold heart.

David Eide
December 7, 1999
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