Missive the Sixty-Fifth
An Ultimatum
From the Life Force.
DATELINE: Friday, March 23, 2001, at 2245 hours CDT.
Conway, Arkansas, USA
By D. Ebenezer Baldwin Bowles
CornDancer & Company
Ignore me. That's the second-worst psychic offense you can administer. The first worst is to insult my imagination.
Something clever came to mind about the active incompatibility of the two offenses, but I was called away from the keyboard by a whistling kettle, and neglected to record the metaphor. Now I've forgotten it. I'm much too dreamy nowadays.
I will claim, however, that you can't ignore me if you choose to insult my imagination.
When I turn and go forward, I collide with insults. They are everywhere. Most are the silent type.
A Desire for Good
On the Hardscrabble Road of Judgment.
Man's desire to have an affect on the others who share his reality inspires and directs his actions, most times for the good and occasionally for the bad. Yes, I'm value judging again. I see good and bad around every bend of this hardscrabble road I'm following.
Do I seek to impress you with the depth of my psychic explorations and the occasional intuitive discovery I make, then make known to you? Yes, I do. I know the world is round, but how round?
Do I endeavor to move you to set free your private expressions of pathos? Yes, I do. I know, however, that too many of my dear pals and fleeting associates are apathetic about my precarious actions on this byted field of discourse. So be it. I claim no sovereign rights here.
Do I venture to influence your perceptions, opinions, or points of view? Could I dare? Was it my experience as propagandist for State and industry that led me to propagate again, this time from the novel platform of Cricket Song? How could I act with such lurid intellectual intent? Alas, I might be tempted, might fall to it, to the temptation, but only with conscious slyness — and 'tween the lines. No wonder I'm trapped in the agony of small effect.
What Attributes Move One Heart
To Embrace Another Heart?
Do I desire to touch your heart so you might embrace with fondness the identity I project? I do. I wonder, though: How does one touch another's heart? Is not my empathy for our common plight sincerely voiced to you? Does my sense of wonder at nature's delights, my respectful portrayal of the downtrodden and the disenfranchised, my spiritual opalescence — do any of these attributes move your heart?
Go ahead. Condemn me for my rodomontade. I'll drape my ideas in their astounding profundity over your mind's eye like a shroud — and be done with it. (Major General Dempsey, last living veteran of the Boer War, taught me the word, but he didn't think I'd be so audacious to employ it.)
I didn't mean to boast and brag. It's a byproduct of my rampant insecurity. Overlook my impertinence, please. Forgive me if you must.
I become the pot. I call the kettle black.
Do I long to strike you, O astute sharer, with the striking acuity of my style and vision? Ha! Naturally I do. I want to stimulate your interest in my letters so you might wander all the way to the end, so you might return, so you might reply — argue, commiserate, amplify, or rejoin — and by doing so, confirm my existence and my good effect.
Can you imagine how desolate it becomes here in the psychic jungle of the Bozarth when the only band of sharers I can muster chooses to ignore me? Does anything matter anymore? Did it ever?
I Count My Blessings
'Neath the Passing Thundercloud.
Gawd, I know it: Each of you fights a private battle or two. I'm not so special. It's not about me yada yada yada — sounds like a mantra of the dispossessed: thoroughly temporal, topical, and mundane. My desolation is bearable, a mere matter of angst, the passing thundercloud, but I can count my blessings 'till the cows come home and not find sufficient solace.
I rue the necessity to ask: Do I have an affect, even a small one? Do I matter? What good do I do for you? I didn't ask. You didn't hear me. Nothing matters.
In the mild despair of social nihilism, in the act of asking a desperate question, in the admission of meaninglessness, floats the fear, the free-floating anxiety, and the impending disconnect: No one shall answer. No one is out there to be affected, impressed, moved, influenced, touched, or struck by my contributions to the family of man.
What ultimatum does your life force deliver?
WATCH FOR MISSIVE THE SIXTY-SIXTH
on Tuesday, March 27, 2001.
That's the plan.
Most times the plan pans out,
like gold from the mountain river.
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