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Dear T.

After consuming them you'll understand my saying I'm being brave giving you these letters, and as happens in the midst of all bravery, what's manifest in it, a good amount of stupidity is folded into the act, the only heroics occurs in the decision which can't be seen unless I show it to you which is what this sentence does, and I'm both embarrassed and amused by my self-lauding; are embarrassment and amusement the raw materials of my personality?

This is preface to an environment you'll enter at its mention.

I was the type who confused geometry with geology. I fell sick into bed only to be well once embarrassment forced me to walk upright, imagine embarrassment evolving a race of beings! Embarrassment creates for the individual a place for him outside his virtue, a comfortable place; to escape into it is to accept disorder, all presentiments become vain, all overly serious emotions mawkish; entering it is diving fully clothed into the ocean; swimming in it is performing the duties of a season all by one's self, and, also alone, combining the stuff which makes breathing possible.

My actions weigh one hundred thirty-five pounds same as me. My voices come to a location I know nothing about. We'll find each other, all of us; one among us will invent motion, one will create direction, and one will discover existence, we'll all take part in it, belief will serve no purpose. I dreamed this is our origin and not our future; I stopped remembering dreams. My writing had been dreaming: I was living surrealism, not simply applying its doctrines to my writing; in dreams I didn't suffer, I've kept this one doctrine. By abandoning dreams I regained a confidence I hadn't felt since I was ten years old in love with every girl I saw, and even kissed two: the desire to be with females came to me early. My dreaming had begun providing me with more females than my mind could accomodate: I began enlarging and expanding until there were never enough; neighbor girls were resembling girls in dreams, I didn't consider the inverse, to have changed to that notion would've been the stroke of a genius, but I didn't even consider it, I have trouble with it now. I was the one who chased girls into dreams and then dreams into girls and then abandoned dreams its comings and goings, its intensities: I've found uses for it: when I can't sleep loneliness lulls me, when I go out in the evenings on long walks loneliness leads me where I go and brings me back, hours of thought unburdened by navigation.

Trying to sleep is to sleeping what thinking is to life. I made an attempt to keep track of time

during sleep: I believed I could suspend time. Then I learned to relax in the silence without odor without taste without reflex without vision. Pleasure was non-existent, unattainable, was kissing a girl I'd never kiss; wanting to was formulating; kissing was dreaming. I made the decision to become myself again and played with my plastic soldiers without my being each one of them, I was bored with dying, though still enthralled with killing. My interests changed, I was placing more emphasis on things, built huge fortresses in scale unmatchable in real life, built planes, twenty in one day, which I immediately destroyedr Battles were fought without objectives; assaults postponed until after lunch or dinner were dismantled upon my return; I was putting enemy soldiers on both fronts. My dog had died of distemper.

I was twelve then and wrote my first piece. I tore a geranium from its branch and put it in a glass of water. It was pink. I wrote... something about my possessing the ability to heal the flower. I set the subject on my desk and sat in front of it. I performed no rites; I wrote without diverging from the subject. The first moment of my scrawl. It began withering, turning brown I didn't know what to do but to try harder and harder. At the end of a week I threw the dead flower and the little book I'd made of my writing out. I'd failed. I continue to fail. This ends a beginning.

with love,

W.

(cornish)

After her nap from work's misery exhaust and soul's human purpose; her black drapery for the first time ever accents her beauty; her eyes' soft black frames have spread into a sheer gray anonymous heroes' mask that declares her identity; strangers would guess her name right off, and intimate friends would change their usual formal pity into informal appreciation; into her eyes, night; on her face, dawn.

The atmosphere smoke-like, with the gaps and phases of smoke clouds, with kindness of hovering and satisfaction from dissipating feathering into pale blue or into nothing; cloud is opposite light in structure, they imitate each other's design through their reaching, their motions play together; the purest form of action is found not only in their interplay, but in each one's individualistic properties and motives; cloud narrates sky, light reads cloud.

Dear T.

Two pieces which show my art its flailing and my art responds like an average movie goer to an average movie: What does it matter why it was made, it was made: its cost astronomical but sure to be recouped, and then some; no reason to consider the quality of color or the cohesion of scenes as anything other than props; soon it'll be on television. I step in and write a letter to you to be read before the others; this prefaces two letters bound for your birthday but one has been left in h. I'm on my way there right now and will retrieve it.

The airspace between la and h is delightful, some day I'll write its brochure, even though it's regarded as a mere inbetween; I'm sitting in it right this moment and have sat in it time and again and can tell you it's very pleasant for a place without a functional outdoors, in which there's constant engine noise, in which rum comes in such tiny bottles. What I'd said in the two previous letters, they're behind this if you're reading this in sequence, I haven't figured-out how I'll manage to have you read in sequence, perhaps I should hover above you like clouds while you read, but rain is embarrassing; I'd been surfing all day while working dinners and taking an order salt water gushed out my nose and I snorted it up which caused a coughing fit, I handed my ticket-book to a waitress, told her my tables, said I was sick, sat back in the kitchen for two hours until all the witnesses were gone, compared to the manager who waitered a couple of nights a week who dripped all over customers with his coke-nose, it didn't embarrass him, but that one incident of mine, though much more innocent, left a scar I can't to this day laugh about, the manager would make fun of his customers for not walking out; I want you to know my sense of humor so we cab become as we say we want to friends, not that love is unnecessary or unenviable or unattainable, as far as I've experienced, the love of friends is more intense than the other kind, perhaps this is the reason I don't love you, because I love you.

I wrote a poem (I wrote so many poems) when I was seventeen or so with the line: next time automatic love is out. I'm having difficulty reconstructing anyway, so even when I do meet the person I love for life I'll not tell her I love her, not at first; you may have gleaned this notion from the words I've spoken to you and language my body has hinted toward you and perhaps even from what I've written and shared with you and what I've written to you; I'll know I love the person who I don't tell I love and won't tell her until it's meant to be told; I won't tell her I don't love her; I'll know her when I see her and feel it when I feel her; this is how I know I don't love you, but I love you. We are will be wonderful friends.

I don't know why I hesitate to make love to a friend: perhaps I made love to you to venture forth from a pretended celibacy, not as part of an experiment but as an act of friendship; it wasn't making love it was rehabilitation FOR US BOTH; we didn't force each other BUT OURSELVES; we weren't forced but manipulated, BY OUR MINDS; our bodies just went along; once engaged they convinced themselves the event was their idea; once spent they denied it; we didn't fuck to please; it was like singing to one's self, finding harmony within one's self while in the immediate presence of the other.

I enjoy old newspapers; history is of the utmost importance, too important to study; texts are more removed from the events they inscribe than fiction which purports to have no historical reference. Some day I'll go out and dig up bones; my older sister's an anthropologist! Bones unearthed in my writing, skeletons of collected intelligence-souls, have no significance next to a splinter of australopithecus, or homo. 'Why do I exist?' next to 'How have I come to exist?' But then neither of them are significant. Soon I won't exist as we understand existing; all species communicate with fear, yet nothing of fear but the knowledge of fear is within me; the intelligence is what exists, or, I'm hidden from myself but know of this hiding so I'm not hidden from myself but from reality behind myself as if I started playing a game of hide-and-seek when I was ten and the child who's it to find me never has.

I read as if reading is food I'm unable to assimilate, and write as if writing not only manufactures, molds, scents, and flavors my excrement, but gives it ITS REVULSION TO THE OUTSIDE WORLD, what had been planned to be fascination, as if my writing has built in to it that it's bad, and I don't care! Why am I telling you this? You won't understand. How can you? I don't! I pretended I was after the perfect companion; knowing I was pretending made it easy for me to imagine whoever I was with at the time was perfect; then I believed there was no perfection; I uncovered flaws; a sad time, to focus on flaws causes one to forget one's own, causes a misanthropic sense as real, powerful, and affecting, as sight.

Embarrassment causes me to approach the world as if I'm an apology; I'm working on a change, I'm not be a lie: I'm an apology for being happy while others are miserable; I co-exist with others; where do I exist? Is locating infinity, understanding it, becoming infinite? Or does this location occur at death? Laziness is always my first course of action. I'm the tortoise, the hare has won and is squatting at the finish twitching-laughing; I haven't crossed it even though I've traveled much farther than the race had demanded.

I read what I can't read. Books I can read I bury, immediately forget where. I've spent whole days moving from one to the next in an order not contaminated by my consciousness. It's not chance; I've worked in the non-influence of chance, the difference between combing or yanking hair. I concentrate on the works themselves; most writers seem to have difficulty with this; A. was sullen one evening because instead of listening to my criticism of his work he heard me say things about him, as if writing is nothing more than 'self' discovery. Who would want to read my discovery of my 'self'? Not I. To attempt to write the discovery of the 'self' is ridiculous; this is the notion that A Season In Hell dispels.

I write fluidly while flying perhaps because the airplane moves fluidly. See location's effect!

with love,

W.

(just touched down, h)

(Written inside Aurthur Rimbaud: Complete Works, Paul Schmidt translator.)

(On dedication page)

Dear T.

I've just completed a letter to you that's on the back pages. You shouldn't consider what is written, but how it was written: obviously with pleasure. I write to you pleasurably; that's all you need know, its spirit: it's spirit; but also revel in the fact it has been done, and that I'm giving it to you; everything else is dross.

with love,

W.

(h to la)

(On back pages)

Dear T.

What can I say. I left your letter behind. It's the fate of every communication to become lost, either physically as in this case, or lost in the sense of the communication being received but misunderstood, either approached incorrectly, or it itself wasn't as clear as a definition in a dictionary; isn't clarity what we strive for? With the misplacement of my notebook I haven't paper to write on nor pen to write with. It's a yellowy cramped world here; heaven and earth can't be mentioned; sitting is an event and a wonder after sleeping sitting; I'd become a relief sculpture combined with wrought out of the seat; a seat close in front, a seat close behind; sitting here is like writing in the back of a book.

It's night and the windows are black.

The other letter, the one you'll receive late, said everything I wanted to say, and I sat here a long time trying to reconstruct it or at least some of it but I couldn't. This will serve as an introduction to that letter. I warn you, it's not cosmic or humorous so it's not pretty; I'd read it just before I'd landed (an hour ago) and it made so much sense I worried, but it belongs with you horrible as it is for making sense. I distrust pencil: I distrust meaning. This is a buffer between the harsh reasoning of the letter and the impermanent logic with which it was written; this is a letter to that letter, both addressed to you and neither necessarily written by me; well, they didn't write themselves, you say; but, why not? Letters are much more eloquent than I, exist more permanently. letters aren't painful to write anymore, they don't drain my mind, just my body. My ability to write them doesn't exist within me but out in front of me, right in front of my eyes; I enter into it at will and it writes; this explains everything, for the first time in many years, since I thought my writing came straight out of dreaming because my dreams are words and not images, I'm at peace with my writing ability; I'd held myself responsible for what I wrote; what nonsense; what relief to crawl out from under; I feel as if I could sleep straight through two days; but what if I begin reading and rewriting my dreams again? There's a fear in everything I do, and yet I'm fearless. Is such a contradiction merely words or am I on the brink of disaster? Back to the letter. It told you about our relationship, only what it itself thought was important when it was being written, as this is being written. You were important to the letter, you meant something to the letter which the letter tried to explain, but it felt itself failing to explain so it attempted description; it was pleased with its descriptions, it swam in describing; a grand event for it because the person who was writing it was drowning in description; then it wondered if the person had drowned, but dismissed the thought when it couldn't locate his floating body; 'he must have abandoned ocean' it held its thoughts until it turned blue and then transparent; 'what difference does it make if he's floating or not?' I don't see the difference either. I throw this letter to the other letter; this letter can be seen by it because that is the nature of letters. 'Put this under your arms around you so you bob and even if you fall to sleep you won't slide out.' Imagine waking up in the middle of the ocean with nothing. Now I understand such events are in the experience of this writing ability right in front of my eyes; not its memory, but what takes place each time it wakes up, what takes place even before it stands in front of the mirror and combs its eyes; it doesn't really have them but eyes are our only commonality; sometimes it leans on my eyes, when tired, once or twice a day; I'm excited by the contact; this contact changed my theory of its existence into my knowledge of it, but this contact wasn't my only prompter, one morning it crept inside my head and told me it had been there in front of my eyes for years, then it crept back out to its place; I feel it when it's in place; it leaves sometimes for days and returns without a word; of course I'd never ask where it goes; of course I expect it to tell me.

On certain pink nights
I hear the thunder of not knowing who I am
and I listen it into singing,
but the lyrics aren't about me
and the voice not angelic,
not demonic isn't mine
though it comes from the throat of my thought
and thoroughly entertains;
I can't take credit for it,
I can't control it when it sours,
I hear it and I listen,
pretend it really is part of me;
brave because of it but also ashamed,
Proud to be its keeper but also scared.

This book is yours now. Read Rimbaud's letters: this is a descendant, a bastard if you like; such genealogy is unimportant, I'd have to make things up to piece it together. A film term I like is 'splicing', the something my mind does to the things the ability letter written in flight between la and h that was left in a friend's car on the turn-around; I was drunk. Perhaps instead of the letter I should only send prefaces, a whole swatch of them. It has no poetry; it came from my insides like saliva, clear in the air, color of whatever it greets; a city in which people are arrested for spitting; the spit on the ground, the man arrested; the man responsible for the spit, the spit responsible for the man's dilemma; if he could just suck it back up into his mouth, he thinks, then all else fate has in store for him would be accepted with cheer, in commemoration of the negation of the event; but even if the spit were to be removed by the mouth from which it had been spewed, the crime would still exist, he must be tried.

with love,

W.

(On pages 137-141)

Dear T.

This is the only book of the four I own so I write in it; I've used up all the blank pages fore and aft so now I'm in a margin; just as the world condenses as people grow older, my space to write in becomes smaller; but it hasn't shrunk, I found it condensed; does this mean I'm not aging while writing here? I write to age, and I'm not aging. Why do I continue if it's valueless, if I'll end-up disliking it and feel guilty for doing so because it is my offspring. an heir-apparent? If only I didn't live like I do but write like I do things would be relaxed for me but my writing ould continue at its impatient obnoxious rate. If I were to escape into my writing a heart attack would sear down my legs to my feet down into the earth I'd cause an earthquake! I plan to raise tears in everyone's eyes all at once and to be the only person not crying; only for a moment, perhaps a complete minute; then I'll join in, I'll weep powerfully; those who see me will openly admire my sorrow, some will lap at my tears and be cured of innocence.

with love,

W.

(h to la)

Dear T.

What do you want from me, the truth? If I could hold it in my hands for an instant I'd pass it to you like a football, full spiral, and we'd be closer to, if not scoring, a touchdown; but truth's not in my hands as it's not in my mind; but don't despair, I pretend to know many truths; here are some about us:

1

We enjoy talking-listening to each other

2

With a security that intoxicates us like opium, we pretend to each other we're intelligent

3

There's physical attraction that although we've been intimate remains unrealized and may be unrealizable that's unimportant to both of us and in this unimportance we tend to swim to each other not sail to each other; reticense both fascinating and frustrating

4

There's reluctance to give fully to each other so we don't know each other's essence of life, both feeling too uninvolved to divulge

5

We as products of our histories separate ourselves from each other's presents in such a way as to ward-off all personal evils while in the presence of each other which is to sav honesty isn't the sacred rite of our relationship but is at its fringe

6

We promote to each other the idea we're in awe of each other instead of being in awe of each other; this has developed out of a rejection of our pre-relationship, as if we know each other, a falsehood both of us contrived and now live with saying to each other we don't know each other; our fate was to be born into a world dominated by absurdity

7

We've shown no emotions to each other other than the half-emotions lust, care, desire, and physical security (not in sex, but when sex isn't to occur, when we speak from our intelligences instead of from our whole beings, when we hug when we first meet and hug when we part)i our kisses don't render our minds and the whole of our bodies useless, supplicant, abberitious, reified, and other words I don't have meanings for

8

We don't send each other letters we write to each other and don't share our 'important' writings fully because in the dishonesty built in to us we pretend we can share instead of being able to share. I'm sure it's just a matter of each of us finding the someone we can share with; we don't-can't share with each other which poses a problem, causes pains, extorts our imaginations; we end-up each of us alone thinking, writing, dreaming, erasing, idealizing, chiding, formulating about each other in this alone we realize our estrangements but ignore or force ourselves past enslavement to loneliness when we should be facing it head-on, no holds barred, as if we're championship boxers; when I said I thought we should fight, this is what I meant; couldn't explain it fully then, I'm not explaining it fully now, but maybe you get the idea

9

We're children who repeat affection as if weaning ourselves off giving affection to dolls by lending it to real persons; what we should be doing is being affectionate. I find it hard to believe this is a cry from my male soul and your female soul is approaching me differently, which would make this observation of mine cruel. I relate what I see in myself and in you: as evidenced by my writing my ability to see myself is fully distorted, so what I'm saying is more about you and my reflection off you than about you and me. After pausing I see all this heaviness; I interrupt it to tell you I love you but not in a way wanted or needed by either of us; the idea of friendship has permeated us.

with love,

W.

(la to h)

Dear T.

I'm on my way back to h. This is going to go behind the letters, be a denoument. This will end with the end of these letters, not of us, there's no end to us. Yes, I've been home and not called; if you'd called I had planned the excuse 'I've been writing' 'Well you could have at least called and told me you were writing' 'You write, I thought you'd understand.' I appreciate not having to use my excuse. I feel you're worried about me; I sincerely hope this isn't so; I've told you before am telling you now I don't want-need to be worried about; my independence is alert, perhaps the only part of me that is, but isn't that plenty?

I bought two pairs of jeans, my first major purchase since having money. I said to my friends: 'Look, aren't they unreal! Eighty bucks a pair.' They said the jeans looked like the ratty old jeans I always wear. I attributed many miracles to my new jeans. J. was served an unopened empty can of Pepsi; whole rows of passengers came to look. My entree was a small top sirloin; the stewardess was amazed when she uncovered it because it wasn't on the menu. But they wouldn't believe me; they said the salesgirl flirted, which of course is the truth. See how truth pales in comparison to belief in miracles?

Language regulates itself through me through music but meaning regulates itself sometimes through me sometimes without me through my soul and sometimes simply without me, but I feel it; Otherwise the wisdom inside me is false, so for truth I must venture outside, must abandon myself for the stream of consciousness this at least appears to be;

But I don't let go completely: my mind keeps me.

Your eyes are like vallies more ways than they're holding water, they're incapable of deception as vallies are; I deceive myself as to how steep the sides are before I climb-slide down; I deceive myself as to how far I must walk to be at their centers.

My sense of smell stalks me like a private detective, and all my other senses follow me in a similar manner. What have I done to them or their clients for them to be so cruel? If you were a heart surgeon things would be different; you'd be able to not only interpret my heart's rhythms but to massage its rhythms into something less dangerous. How long can my soul hold-out against an intelligence that recognizes strengths and demolishes weaknesses? Isn't that why I reject existentialism? How can I become positive? Tell me how I can make it real. Is what I'm asking unimportant, vain, born of innocence or ignorance? Is what I'm asking so daring or so commonplace that asking it is to answer the question 'why does my writing fail?' What a question, don't answer.

What I want to say in this letter is that I practice at being a lot of the time instead of actually being. I let life go, sometimes for weeks on end, enter into what is not life. Xave you done this? I'm not describing the state of being of writing; I'm inside life during writing. If you don't understand what I'm talking about then you don't understand; maybe some day you will but maybe not; it's not something to strive for, nor can it be attempted; it occurs and at the same time is invented, as if I've taken an active conscious part in my birth.

I'm blind in a world in which sight is everything. I'm more than a simpleton. I'm a naked fool who doesn't remember ever having worn clothes, who sees people in clothes but doesn't feel the need to wear them; or, I create such fools and call them my writings; or, I'm the only person wearing clothes, the world's a nudist colony, and I'm out of place because of my modesty.

Do you know me now, at least enough to hate me if not love me? Why do I attempt to pull such powerful things from you? That's a problem. I need to, since you don't sling them toward me, pull things from you; but you are not in rows like teeth. I don't know how to describe you; this is another problem. But why think of problems that's the worst problem of all (according to most).

with love,

W.

(la to h)

Dear T.

Late night through my first little rum at the end of my tether, the beginning of a letter to you.

That this is being written I want to erase from what is written; done by saying from now on no more including in a work it is being written; taking from language the notion it's what's on the page; it's my soul and intelligence on the page; I've allowed the pretentiousness to remain, it's natural to the great works and this must be for a reason; I even allow it to create on its own, otherwise it wouldn't be true pretentiousness; in saying this alone I've become familiar to it in these letters in this very sentence it's become familiar to me actually we've been re-aquainted.

I don't exist in the paragraph above.

I'm going to go to sleep; I'll stop dreaming the future; I'll dream the present; perhaps then my dreams will remain dreams.

(Continued after nap, in black pen not blue)

The sunrise up from the mountains of east la like white bread popped-up by a toaster that didn't burn; and there's a gray haze all over the sky because of it.

I've decided to stop writing about the soul from the soul; I'm damaging something of myself I've been aware of this but only now have begun to worry; I'll abandon perception in a pursuit of truth, happiness, and justice if not for all at least for whom know.

with love,

W.

(lax)

Dear T.

Do I, now that I've finished at least in some ways, continue this letter, give this letters letter to you in its original scrawl with all its flaws most of which have remained intact through typing because such flaws don't interest me as stars don't interest me but for the spaces around them Blackness! So right now I'm deciding and my decision is to give you this typed for convenience' sake. The book is yours, I'll give it to you anytime; it's a lousy translation anyways but the only one of his letters in English. You will call me after you've read this and we'll talk; I'll be embarrassed about my absence, you'll hide your anger or, maybe, not speak to me.

with love,

W.

(cornish)

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©2001wfairbrother