LETTERS 

The writer felt privileged to live in a city where the public libraries not only stuck the popular magazines in their racks but the journals of the specialists as well. The writer had several on-going conversations with the scholars in the journals and would reacquaint himself every week, after looking for work in the nation's papers down in the basement of the generous library.

There was a moment when the writer stopped in the middle of a great rush of feeling. 'I could do this for a lifetime! I could go from one scholarly, esoteric subject to the next and read them with the judicious eye of the citizen who knows when he sees a lie or when a man, even a scholar, is trying to mess with the mind of the reader. The writer could read between the lines and was not distracted by the exact, cold, and professional look of the page and type. A lifetime! He thought it again. A lifetime among the scholars!

Among these magazines was one devoted exclusively to the subject of Love. The writer had found it. It was in his hands. He found it because he wanted to be a useful citizen. He had found a journal devoted to different discoveries the scientists were making related to the emotion called love. It was printed on slick paper, thickly bound, and came out tri-annually. There was one crossword puzzle related to the contents of the current issue.

In the issue that was in the writers hand the editors had divided the subject into three: Love as History, Love as Biology, and Love as Salvation. There were the usual discourses on why love is transmuted through time by the idiot poets of the ages. 'They keep alive what destroys them!' One scholar had concluded. One scholar pointed out that rival literary groups mediated the question of love for any given era. Any given era wanted to overcome the previous era through its song and writ. What was pornography in one era became the way to fame and fortune in the next; what was considered art in one era was called pornographic in the next. There was a moment in any given age when an event or mass emotion determined whether the people of that age would get a degenerative form of a love or a new form of love, self-generated and profoundly effecting all areas of human endeavor. The writer concluded he was in a degenerative era; one that was dominated by its pornographers and not its poets. And always there was the scholar who boldly stated that if human beings were engaged fully in their sexual potential all war would cease, all injustice would end and the earth, itself, would fill with delightful moans from happy and eternal beings. The writer was prepared to leave happy and seeking his potentials when he turned the page to look at a picture of a glossy black and white view of female genitals that had developed some unfortunate disease. The disease, the scholars had concluded, was developing through synthetic foods. The photographs were graphic and horrendous.

In the twilight that was falling over the city of scholars, the writer went to store and bought 15 loaves of organic bread made by old hippies whose smiling faces reminded him of relatives who had lost touch with their families. My salvation, he told himself, is fresh and natural food.

He imagined the people who would be influenced by the scholars fascination with sex and love. They would emerge into the light of day with ugly spirits and make money specializing in the trivial pursuit of small sexual delights. It would create an enormous mansion of raw brains destroying their imaginations as they collected the eager money thrown at them by the repressed masses. The writer could see Priesthood's of Love and of Hate arising simultaneously to battle for supremacy.

Ah, the writer mused, there is nothing more invigorating for prose than a world full of smart people who have no meaning.

David Eide
December 27, 1999
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