LETTERS 

The writer had been trained as a journalist but, now, the thought of a long and useless life in the mass media made him cringe. He felt hollow as if he could see his future pass in a moment as they said happened when one was about to die. He told anyone who would listen. Only a few would listen.

'I want,' he said to George, as they stood in a great pine forest outside Lake Tahoe, 'to make something so that the object of one's desire is no longer an object but in the mysterious form that raises a man's thought out of the belly of daily life and into the ideal.'

'What? Are you the priest of new illusions?'

The writer pulled out a tablet and rifled through the pages, taking his pen and writing rapidly on one of the blank pages. He smelled the silence of the pines in the late afternoon and did not want to return to the cabin where the women were. Not yet, he thought. They will be there. I want to be myself out among the trees.

'So what does the priest of new beauty know that no one else does?'

George had been a medic and hung out in the poor sections of cities, in the blues clubs, and danced with the poor black women at 2 am. Then he would drive up to the woods and hunt and drink at the Sportsman's Lodge with old friends of his family.

'All this talk of yours sounds like burn out to me.'

'You are right, I'm trying to burn something in and burn something out.'

George chuckled to indicate he didn't have a clue about what the writer was saying and wanted to move on. He began to explain that action was the great affirmation not words.

'Words are dead and useless, now,' he said. 'Actions get the rewards.'

The writer kept silent and picked up a stone on the path and put it in his pocket to remind him of the woods and path. They would go back to the women and drink and talk about actions and laugh at the people they ran into.

But he did not fall asleep. He wrote several hours and realized he hadn't fallen asleep but was suspended among the revengeful truths, his devils, listening to them taunt his plans to accomplish the indomitable. At times, even, he felt himself to be a devil of some sort. Then she came into the room and he watched her. She knelt on the floor and remained with her head bowed for a period of time. Even as she bows, the writer thought, hundreds of fears and desires are speeding through her mind.

The cabin was lit in a faint luminescence. With superb grace she rose from the old plank floor. She had earmarks of beauty. Sometimes she appeared like a moon he wakened to out of deep sleep; it was there like a shiny brain, as if one could hold out their tongue and let it drop lightly on it. Little snowflakes went by the window. It was cold. He could hear the laughter and conversation from the room down below. George was holding court. The women loved George. She, too, moved down the stairs as he propped himself on an elbow and strained to hear what they were saying. George was telling them that tomorrow the writer and he were going to go on a 'wild boar hunt.' The writer knew George was drunk but he cringed. He did not like wild boars, guns, the hunt, or much of anything else. He only wanted to get a bit high and make love to the woman and dream of his stories and not have to prove himself to every person who came by.

It was the woods and lake. He was not himself next to anything that did not have buildings. Not with other people at any rate. By himself there was nothing better, nothing more transporting, nothing more tied to the root of what he was.

He had read, recently, the phrase, 'hell is other people.'

Yes, hell is other people. Then he fell asleep.

David Eide
January 3, 2000
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