Fragments of Letters Recieved 1978-1985

ON JULY 21, 1987 THERE WAS A STORM. I LOVE YOU.

I must explain the strangeness of hearing from you, and that it may be hard to distinguish how much time has passed. What we talked about was a mirror of what I’d been thinking, it was good to be true. 

You know you can’t leave it at that. Was it the drugs? In order to be a tragic figure you have to tell people about it. Here it is dark all the time, freezing, and I don’t care. So why don't you wander around and...

I’m out of here. I didn't manage to save any money, but I’m leaving before I lose my mind. If you still want to leave with me, speak up now. I will stop by and we can go to either California or Texas. Oh, if you see Sam tell him I’m sorry I couldn't make it, but there are enough ways to fuck yourself over without killing yourself.

Get out of there! You know the mode of not doing anything. I bet you are staring at the wall right now. I’m right, You don’t know how destructive that city is until you get out.

Wherever you are, how are you? I’m hoping that we are at the end of civilization. I saw something the other day which I felt truly summed up things here in the 20th century...it was a big, blue banner outside Skipper’s fish and chips that stated, “Baked or fried, it’s your choice”. I laughed my head off, twisting that around. It’s like the gas chamber or the firing squad, it’s your choice, but at least you have a choice. 

It is advised that we spend some time focusing inward, examining our goals, values,  and reinventing our futures. 

I’m going into my final isolation. I’ve got a room. Actually a mattress in the basement, and it’s hard to sleep down there because there is no window. It’s a very dark and disorienting place to sleep....have to turn on a light or something so I don’t go crazy. I can’t stand complete darkness because I feel like I’m going blind. Have you heard about blind people who have had their sight restored but could not look at the world with any sense of comprehension and preferred to keep their eyes closed, and go back to feeling their way through the world, or people who have their speech restored and are frightened of the sounds they make, that garble from their throats, and refuse to speak? I feel like that sometimes, afraid of my subconscious, of the strange, terrifying noise it would make if it was ever freed. 

Everyone I meet ends up being twisted in some ornate pattern of longing. 

So maybe I’ll learn to drive. I don’t know what I want except Bliss, so who knows? I can get in the car and drive, alone. Feels like being in my mind. 

A map leading to nowhere, a map loaded with dead end streets, avenues under construction, boulevards of emptiness, overpasses that crumble, freeways to absolute abandon of logic. The map is out of control, it is no longer a map but a maze with a sealed, lost and forgotten entrance, the only exit being complete self destruction, combustion by immeasurable degrees of heat. No melt down, but sheer high pressure explosion. The only choice besides eternal damnation is to combust, disappear and disintegrate like glass becoming a fine powder then evaporating completely. Why did my candle burn so effortlessly? 

I’m confronting the emptiness of my life in that concrete devastation called the City. Here life is corruption, time is disposable. Supposedly tomorrow the decision will be made about war.  

In my dreams I am trying to get to this other place, an ancient place. The tops of the hills kiss the sky, that city of hills upon which you ascend and disappear into the sky. That city in which you can discover cracks in the foundation and peer into the abyss.

People have seen him approach the light and he disappears, evaporates. He left his family, let his beard grow out and filled up his solitude with stones and mist. he arrived in the desert, his head wrapped in a shroud, his blood spilled in an occupied land. He was neither hero nor martyr, he was a citizen of the wound. 

His assassination? When he was killed everyone seemed to fade, I believe that was really when the threads began to disintegrate. I’ve always been dreadful over the future. What if he had never been born? God, why can’t I get him out of my soul. His hand prints are all over my heart and soul. I want it clean and he keeps creeping through me casting shadows all over and through me like a Zoetrope. If I could cast light in through myself he’d cast his shadow, and that is all I get is his shadow, his handprints that won’t go away, there are always these smudges, this residue of him. He is my angel, my eternal empty cup. 

It’s just no fun. I want to belong, somewhere.  

The night is a clean, shining razor and the day a powdery, weightless heat. 

My goal has been to go to Nowhere, somehow I lost my path. When one is Something they are Somewhere--when one is Nothing they are Nowhere. Something has an end. The Universe, which is apparently infinite, is dying. The Universe is Something, it has a death--even Infinity can die, Infinity can die! To be Nothing and to go Nowhere will allow me to exceed Infinity. There will be no beginning or end. 

I was born angelic. Born innocent I was not. Candy says you can disguise your emotions, you can even numb them, and finally you can paralyze them, and that is tragic. Our emotions are the only clues to our identity and the only true meaning in life is passion. Maybe all of us, we’re so intoxicated by the Dream, the Desire, that we don’t see another path. I am not possessed by Satan, I am possessed by truth and beauty. 

The fire. I love the fire so much. To build them and watch them burn and feel warm and light and safe. the shadows it casts are spirits. but it is not death, it does not kill. Out of the ash things grow. The ash is left. So much can be done with fire remains, charcoal for the drawing, soil for the flowers. I know this because so often a blaze of emotions has burnt me up and ash is all that remains. Amazing. Afraid of fire, but would feel a loss if I never gazed at it again, like a drug or a pair of eyes. There must be many more like us, and so many others who know no magic tricks. So many worlds to them wasted. This is a smile to you. I am happy to spite the world.

People still aren't terribly willing to look at the truth, but I felt it best to let you know about the hatred I have in my heart. It feels better inside me. 

I continued on the path even though it was crumbling. My lust is to fly, to fly the fuck out of here. From Chaos to Decomposition, these are my seasonal words. Markers for change, for the unknown, for life. 

That’s what fortune is, fortune is fate. Through many lifetimes, walking out of a dream, and that was enough. I’m not remembering much.

It was raining hard here last night. The river rose to the top of the wall. In every way challenging our belief systems. Today it has cleared and I can sit on the back steps and feel the sun. The photo I’m sending was taken at the exact moment I felt GOD. 

We climb stairs lit with abandoned candles. An invitation accepted, night eats him alive. I look up the stairs and don’t know who I am. The other night I dreamed of this and tried to remember what I really am. Pieces of me came back. It’s frightening to think about not being here, I wake up and am nervous. 

In a sense that we have been gravitating ourselves towards the sky for some time, we are unconsciously shifting in this process. I have been dreaming animals, and I talk with them, laying on the ground they talk to me. I am laying with them on the cool earth as they whisper things in my ear. They came from some other place, not of this earth. 

I didn't stop loving, but the loving cup tipped and poured me out, I fell out of love, but I’m still laying in the sticky pool of milk and honey that spilled with me, not to mention all the little parasites that feed off of it. 

I am hiding things from others. The closeness that I feel is ephemeral. My being is once again filling up with dark, musty, cobwebbed corners.

There was a bit of October yesterday that made me think of you. I was walking in the morning through layers of mist. The grass was radiant with rain and sun and there were crows.

All except for when I go to work which contorts my mood into a wrath of sourness, and I become incapable of talking myself into finding any false pleasure of being there. I spit my loose and bloody, stinking teeth into the face of those perfectly inept caricatures of humans, who day in and day ou Lt find their sole purpose in hanging out in that “ain't that America” shit factory. 

To me America is not the social/political structure. As far as that goes, it is time for it to go up in flames. It’s an idea whose time has come and gone. This America is like a play acted out by thieves which has run too long, but the rest of the audience, the population, has been tied to their chairs, drugged, and cannot leave.

I am waiting for the characters to move me out of time, and the world opens up. I want to see it again. I want to see there still is beauty in the world . 

Time will disperse, revealing a shadow. She went into a deep sleep, it was quite a scare.  They came out very blurred.

The creative instinct is greatest in those whose destructive instinct is also great. Potential is our downfall. Suspended in formaldehyde, everyone sees something different.

The sky is blue and the air is so clear. Where are you in this cruel summer.. ?

I will send you a ship made of Band Aids, and it will be waiting for you in the Atlantic ocean, in the middle, at the bottom. I think of you and Bethany exploring out in Nowhere.

I sat for an hour listening to my walkman and watching all the great people go by on the conveyor belt. Today it rains and is kind of sad out. Maybe I’m just reflecting too much on my past today. All these masks that we love to wear. Lying that they hide our true face, [knowing that some people see through and that terrifies me. Oh hell. But I am slowly gaining control over my evil. I’ve been so cold and frozen in my heart that it has been impossible to feel compassion towards anything, but I feel it’s changing. Fires in my toes and fingers. The sun is coming out. I just know something good is going to happen.

´

Young Americans never starve in foreign lands, they go to jail. You forget we are angry, young Americans who like to do drugs sometimes. You go overseas you go alone. I reign supreme only in America, but I have no objection to leaving this town. I’m safe up here, are you safe there?

I wish that I could tell them to fuck this shit, but I can’t. Well, one more year (hopefully) and I’m through living this lie. Sometimes I wonder if there is this thing called happiness. it seems everytime I try to do something it goes wrong. I feel like running and never coming back. But I don’t. I never do anything.

Well, it was said that a river trip would be dangerous due to the guerrilla/army fighting in that region, and that some people have just disappeared. I was determined to go on. I’d lost my fear of death. I don’t know where, when or why, I just accepted the possibility like I accepted everything else here. Have you ever wondered how much of your life is luck?

I want to say how good it makes me feel that you think about me and want to talk to me. I have packed a hell of a lot into my life, and there is still so much that I would like to do. but time is a thief.

When the sky is the darkest, and my head out the window, raindrops on my cheeks, I see you now. There are thunderstorms coming. I have to go because I am shaky, dizzy, and can’t think.I want to see it again. I want to see there still is beauty in the world.

I love you and the sun,

Yours, Legion