LETTERS 

He was bothered by a sin he had noted in others. Whenever he wrote about the 'state' or 'nation-state' he wrote without a clear idea of what these words meant or referred to. An abstraction like this, he thought, is unwieldy since it refers to thousands of people, thousands of jobs, responsibilities, power, processes, and decisions. A state does not disguise itself. He had felt, from time to time, that there were unconscious assumptions at the bottom of any arrangement of power. But as it developed policies there was an intricate interplay between various aspects of it; as long as checks and balances were a reality there was no way to characterize the state as simply this.... simply that.

He had thought these things on the sly, on the basis of reading not simply political philosophy but commentaries that were popular when he was young. There were, for instance, a group of thinkers who had amalgamated the whole of America into a series of pejoratives. There was another group of globalist thinkers who thought nations were irrelevant. When it comes right down to it, he realized, the make-up of the person and their emotional needs determined much of this thinking. For himself, he needed the literary imagination to be able to comprehend a world, a part of worlds and substantially understand them before he could even begin to approach the question.

The worst contemplation was that of unmitigated power in the form of weaponry systems or ecological catastrophe. He thought these things on the sly since it was his experience that people got defensive whenever they saw someone truly and freely thinking. They thought the worst; that the person was planning the overthrow of everything.

He had really only discussed these matters with a handful of people. M---worked high in state government and possessed a sharp and aware mind. He knew what was going on. But he also got more and more pessimistic as he aged and more defensive of the whole set-up. Then there was Ron who came from the underground. The state was always malevolent and everything was a microcosm of the malevolent state. Both emotional forms represented something to the writer but when he thought about it he had only two concerns. One was the idea of democracy and the full development of the citizen and the other was the weapons of destruction that brought measures of good and evil unheard of in history. Only in mythology and the formation of the gods could one perceive the reality of the modern world.

In his readings of history he imagined the weapons interceding in any epoch. It always resulted in a strange rearrangement of the personality of the time. It threw everything off balance. And in every epoch, bar none, he saw the use of the weapons as utterly probable.

These abstract but absurdly real concerns always made him tired so he marked it down as a productive day when he had typed a great deal. He typed and threw away his notes and would feel elated. He would take the first story he had started. It was about the creation of a new man, fresh out of nature, blinded and driven out of nature. He would take the first story and read and see what could be done about it. Could it be extended? Did he have to know what it meant? Were there any people?

The oddest thing that had happened was this: he had returned from the mountains and was to visit his wife and daughter. He stopped at a local bookstore and thumbed through a book on the I Ching by Richard Wilhelm. The author discussed trigrams and one in particular caught his eye. It was the trigram of 'all movement, the beginning of life, emergence from the earth.' Just as he had described in his story! And more remarkable yet the movement and beginning of life was depicted in his story as a series of broken and unbroken lines representing sights and sounds the new man experienced on contact with nature. It was an exact fit! The writer had, unwittingly, described a trigram that fit the ancient I Ching. Anxious to see his daughter he rushed over to their cottage. He tried to explain everything to his wife who sat at the table overlooking the backyard without turning her head. But the writer was so filled with excitement at the little serendipity that he simply swooped up the daughter and carried her around on his back for an hour.