LAMENTATIONS

by David Eide

He was reading M------ now, a fabled writer from youth who had turned into a buffon. He had cultivated a false edge about the world and sold it to the eastern crowd like an old apothecary selling jars of potions to make the people ill. This novelist, this buffon, wanted to sharpen his intellect on anything available and put on a show for the people who cared about such things. He wanted to become as famous as the well-known prostitutes who had formed unions and made the talk-show circuit. If he had had breasts he would have exposed them.

But, he read him in an old chewed paperback that smelled of dust and the sadness of mind perishing into the thoughts of others. He closed the book. His brother had said something very disturbing to him. There was something primal and extreme, even terrifying, in what was said and it disturbed him and made him put the book down and lean back in his chair. What was disturbing was not the event, itself, but the vulnerability of the deepest mind to the monstrous parasites and predators the age had let loose.

Not too long before a famous murderer had been set free after serving only 6 years of his sentence. He had killed, merely, politicians. But, in a flash, he connected the killer and the disturbing abuse occuring at the level of meaning; at the level of connection. Does not the assassin act out what the masses are feeling at any given time? Does not the murderer strike at the moment the people feel that they could, themselves, do evil?

Now, in the case of the recently freed assassin, it was a case of a person seeing himself as moral, as upright, as an inheritor of some right way suddenly confronted by new people, new circumstances, new arrangments of power so the 'other' becomes a reverse mirror with the ability to make things 'either/or.' It implied a deep division where each side of the equation had vanished from each other. From, certainly, the powers that move a man like the assassin.

Ah, he thought, such dangerous territory these mere mortals tread! They are willing to risk total destruction for the lure of complete freedom.