LETTERS

by David Eide

There was the man-who-talked-to-himself who worked the lathe run by a water wheel they had fashioned from the stream. There was a mahogany table and manzanita products in an air one can only describe as proletarian. He wore these old overalls with a Gorilla icon patched in various places. He was a graybeard and talked a long time about his old life as a radical publisher. He printed his flyers and newsletters on an old hand printing press. "There were good days and bad days," he told me. "The 30's were good days, the 50's were bad days. Now the days no longer belong to me." He was not sad at saying this, simply a wise old man. "Politics," he spat out. "It leads to misery." His hands were shaping a bowl, a dark-red bowl, from which he was going to drink his wine. "Wine, I drank when I was a radical and now when I am an old man in the mountains I drink."

He began talking without prompting from me. He told me that when he was young he was a disc jockey at an LA radio station and discovered a young singer named Woody Guthrie. "Me and Woody were pretty tight, then we hung with young Hollywood types before McCarthy. Those were good days."

He was going to speak no matter what I said. It was cool and light and though it was quiet I had a feeling of the air filled with life. Speak, old man, I thought to myself. Speak your memories. But rather than memories he began to declaim to the air, as though I wasn't in the little shack with him; as if I was invisible. When he could he punctuated his orphic exclamations with a hand shooting out when he could safely let go of his dark-red bowl.

"The distinctness of each thing of significance so that it can be viewed as complete, unsullied by the horrible working hands of the fierce judgment."

"The knowledge that the Muse is Real, that God is Real, that the Spirit is Real, that the Mind is Real and that he who knows these things the best and with ease and joy empties what he knows; and he who knows that he can not possibly know what is supreme in its totality is the man of deepest happiness."

"The politician is a clot that an idea must move through in searching for the future."

"Hope and be happy because the people strive to be free!"

"All strive toward their happy destinies; earnestness negotiates away threats to the future."

"There is no rest for those who see the future."

"To learn to be delighted by the surprise and the sensuous that lurks behind the next corner."

"Scorn shudders from the obdurate buildings and moves the massive shift of humanity walking through its shadows. It is dripping from their faces and breaks out, occasionally, in hysterical laughter."

"Abundance, excellence, sustenance; these are some words that save humanity!"

"The world is full of itself at this point in time-joy be to that!"

I had started to back away from the man-who-talked-to-himself and leave the shack as unobtrusively as I could. He was not looking at me. He was declaiming like a great prophet from the Old Testament. I wasn't going to interfere with him. I felt he was capable of writing great poetry if he sat himself down and disciplined himself but he was always in the shack, standing in front of the lathe and singing his talk to the birds, dragonflies, and waterbugs.

As I walked up the path to the mainhouse I thought to myself, "If only the works of genius could be forced out as a corporation forces out its products!"

David Eide
April 6, 2000
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