Missive the Forty-Fifth
Let's Lie.
DATELINE: Tuesday, December 19, 2000, at 2300 hours CDT.
Conway, Arkansas, USA
By D. Ebenezer Baldwin Bowles
CornDancer & Company
Do you think anyone outside the diaphanous borders of Cricket Song read my two-thousand and eighty-two word Missive the Forty-Fourth, the palliative to obedience and isolation, all the way through? Do you think I care?
I do.
Let's lie. Lie again and again. Lie long enough and loud enough until the lie becomes a self-centered truth. Some do. It helps them sell jaggery and lapis lazuli to the masses for the mere price of a soul.
What's a soul worth to one who believes he has none?
These Christmas-season, pseudo-personal form letters arrive in the mail. They test my resolve to NOT BE CYNICAL. Where does my misanthropy come from? (My eleventh grade grammar teacher urged me to ne'r end a sentence with a preposition. Nowadays it seems so sensible to break the rule.)
Misaligned and Miscast, but Misanthropic?
No.
"You're no misanthrope, Ebenezer," interjects Oksob, bellowing his mandatory counsel from the prefecture of all good conscience. "You're misaligned, certainly, and miscast, but hateful and scornful of your fellow man? No. Deep down you don't even mistrust them. Don't deliver the death stroke to your own heart. Put away the dagger of your self-incrimination. Now!"
The abstraction I practice here at Cricket Song is an ultimate psychic luxury. In it I seek discovery. I am moored for a season in the luxurious isolation of my hermitage, so why not pursue a new voice? I wish my discovery could be essential to something other than the advancement of judgment.
I don't want to be obscure and unapproachable, but I suspect I am. I want transformation. I want to transform choice streams of shared reality, certain special streams. For instance, I want to assist all comers in overcoming their rashness and the tendency to make precipitous choices. I want to help them transform their poorly informed urges and swift passions into pearls of discernment. Is that too much to ask?
I just want to teach you how to judge me. If not me, then others. If not others, then yourself.
"Boy, you're pissin' in the wind," saith Major D., the wily veteran of the Boer War and brandisher of the waddy. He would lash me with it were I close enough.
Give Up Your Marvels, Or Be Tagged.
The rational elders of materialism urge me to come out of my hermitage of marvels so that I can better embrace their disillusionment. "Quit acting like the child at play," one of the chief enforcers commanded me this past weekend. "Listen to the esteemed Jung, who tells us that your marvels and wonders are trifles for children and primitives."
If I don't stop soon, give up the marveling, the mind patrol is duly instructed to seize me, tag my ears with staples and the disclaimer: neurotic, psychotic, trichinous unless cooked thoroughly till done.
They are sending agents from Texas to smoke me out. They are doing it with dollar bills. I may be press-ganged into servitude on a ship at sea. The voyage could be plagued by untoward incidents, atypical events, or accidental groundings on uncharted shores. What, me worry?
WATCH FOR MISSIVE THE FORTY-SIXTH
on Friday, December 22, 2000.
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