LETTERS 

What they didn't know was that the writer was in the process of collecting stories and information from all who would speak to him. It was far more exhausting then he thought it would be. It demanded a patience he had not learned yet. Men died in an instant night wailing for their mothers. Now writer, what are you going to do about that?

Ah past! Ah future! Obsessions that exhaust themselves in some happy moment when the mind is distracted and tempted with some scent of its own mystery. One could conceive, conceive faster, conceive ever faster without touching what it was driving the conception.

Lust, writer, always drives the conception.

He had gone through a period where he tried to predict the future. He gave up with only 10% of the available details in front of him. Patterns, now. One could understand the dynamic that created patterns. One could check that pattern against its own history. There was, the writer discovered, a visionary projection that intuitively knew or sensed something in the future. But, paradoxically, it had no reality unless one were to find the visionary projection that created the present.

He thought of the story he read while in college. In the future there would be computers on the desk of everyone connected in vast networks. The people would bank, shop, vote, talk, cheat, lie, fornicate, pray, through the network. But to ensure the stability of this seamless, frictionless world the state planners had to complete five large sweeps through the nation to round up the musicians, inventors, poets, artists, visionaries, and psychics. They shipped them into a variety of asteroids that circled around the earth. They built them excellent, albeit Spartan, habitats where the creative tribe could be free and without worry. Once a month an ambassador would arrive to write a report about the most significant activities on the 'stroids to bring boons back to the happy earth. When one asteroid broke communication with earth, technicians were sent to find out why. The story ended with the technicians renouncing the world they had helped create, resting naked under the fierce asteroidal night that felt like poisoned darts fired by an ironic God.

Yes, the writer thought, sometimes we are merely the projection of a single eye who has studied the mundane details.

David Eide
December 15, 1999
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