Dear (Redacted),

And it is amazing what the difference of one word is between parties, "in" versus "something else"!

Perhaps Whitman is the man to offer sage advice in this matter. Yes, Whitman is the Shia American who would rather die fighting than die missing one shaved hair from the grave.

"The American poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race of races."

"The greatest poet hardly knows pettiness or triviality. If he breathes into any thing that was before thought small it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe. He is a seer . . . . he is individual . . . he is complete in himself . . . . the others are as good as he, only he sees it and they do not."


"Past and present and future are not disjoined but joined." The Miss agrees to this. It is in a simple twist of time within a piece that the most universal concept is achieved without one ever knowing they've been bent backwards upon their own self and selfless reckoning. The fallacy of time is well known. That the sun continues to rise and set as it goes around. Abraham commented on it and found that the Moon too sets, dies out or shows up without notice early in the spring mornings and perhaps later in the fall. Not gods he said. Not gods.

"The direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet is today. If he does not flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides . . . . . and if he does not attract his own land body and soul to himself and hang on its neck with incomparable love and plunge his semitic muscle into its merits and demerits . . . and if he be not himself the age transfigured . . . . and if to him is not opened the eternity which gives similitude to all periods and locations and processes and animate and inanimate forms, and which is the bond of time, and rises up from its inconceivable vagueness and infiniteness in the swimming shape of today, and is held by the ductile anchors of life, and makes the present spot the passage from what was to what shall be, and commits itself to the representation of this wave of an hour and this one of the sixty beautiful children of the wave—let him merge in the general run and wait his development. . . . . . . . Still the final test of poems or any character or work remains."

Grass, the handkerchief of the Lord he said. Yes, he said that as well as to celebrate the loser as well as the victor because all were in battle together. One wonders what old Walt would think to say now? It is the denouement of his oratory it seems. And Lloyd George to Toynbee wouldn't be at all surprised I think.

It is such that the state here has agreed to depose the governor. So they say or, so someone tells me so I won't be estranged from my own self. This is what the Lady has agreed to.

To put it simply, Whitman must have been my great great grand uncle. What has gone missing though in places such as the Silliman? What young Asian man was quoted as saying, Brainwaves with line breaks? He probably knew more than he was thinking!

Smile O voluptuous coolbreathed earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of departed sunset! Earth of the mountains misty- topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!
Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!
Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!
Far-swooping elbowed earth! Rich apple-blossomed earth!
Smile, for your lover comes!

Death comes to us all it seems and how I fear death for some peculiar reason now that I know how much I've missed all these years fretting over something that really wasn't worth fretting over. It must have been what the priests told me and how they scorned the slightest lighting of a candle under the old science lab! How they repudiated any kind of little thing!

Hurrah for positive science! Long live exact demonstration!
Fetch stonecrop and mix it with cedar and branches of lilac;
This is the lexicographer or chemist . . . . this made a grammar of the old
cartouches,

These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas,
This is the geologist, and this works with the scalpel, and this is a mathematician.


It is such that even the tiniest news alarms me anymore. The slightest touch can disrupt the Anchorite. Yes, Anchorite. Do not love those little windows!

It is not going to be Persia one hopes. How they've gunned for our type for so long and those of the other sects with their own heritage in mind! Everyone with an agenda but could it be that blood runs thicker than water? Or is it, knowledge of a certain type runs only to the few? It is, inspiration that achieves the most and at night, inspiration is the only song a person hears save for the occassional flare up of the dogs outside fighting over a scimpy meal. That little female up on the roof had her ears cut off by the Syrians and fed to her. Her imagination must run wild and now, her safety assured...she must want to return to the pack very soon. Her eyes well now with poly-mixins. If only a person could just go live with the dogs where one belongs!

I visit the orchards of God and look at the spheric product,
And look at quintillions ripened, and look at quintillions green.

Yes....yes. I was shown this orchard in a dream. Resembled what one might expect a partridge in a pear tree might look like. It was only a tree with perfect spherical fruits ready to be picked. I was gifted that night and then the evolution of all dreams descended on me only, when I awoke, I could not speak of it thoroughly or at all! I was a mute. Try as I might I could not achieve any part of it in a word or in a million. Now it is such that bits and pieces light up now and then of that vast period of canonical awareness but I've resisted the temptation to make use of it just yet. It needs some time to rest on the soul. To understand what part of it might be useful and what part might be just the stuff they want to hear. The sell out. There are bigger things than being understood and even bigger things than being known. Much bigger. A heaven where dogs can talk.

I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that others will punctually come for-
ever and ever.

It is so. They are all over and to describe what they look like to the others is like talking to peas!

No...it was no lazy smile. Just a kind of jaundice.
And a cough. Terrible cough and memories of TB. That summer was a long one with the two of them en hopital. I think it was then I knew I'd have few to stand up for me in this world. And you? When did you realize such things? I'm almost embarrassed doogs to think that I am only just now getting an understanding of this thing called life. What a dingbat I must have been then when we first wrote like this. I must have been terribly idealistic then.


But as the hadith said...go to your mountain with your goats and stay there. It will one day be over and you'll be none the wiser.

And I should like to hear the name of anything between Sunday morning and
Saturday night that is not just as wonderful.

....and google it.

Cordially,

LJ Thomas