Viewing page 37 of 40

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

viciousness, his academic perversions, nor his insolent and specious humility. If he is still your friend I can only hope to be forgive for the rough words above. But believe me, I know thet character well enough to want no part of such a parasitical, publicity-chasing fraud.... You may quote me. Period.
------

I found your book, Eddie, an extremely interesting experience. It is difficult to speak of so much in a short few sentences without incurring justifyiable objections from the author. When we meet I would have you entered deeply into the spirit of those places and peoples and you made it felt and tangible as if I were there with you. May I tell I sensed a great lonliness, beyond that which is profoundly foreign to us, pervading the land and its burdened people. Whether of time or numbers or space or the historical condensation of its energies, I felt the comparison with infinities in many chapters. The weight of this called up a protest from my single will. Not against you, but in tribute to the effectiveness of your descriptions; - I would not relinquish my identity to the security of the "historical myth" or the "collective tide".Absurd I know; also futile. Scream of the child kicking out of the womb; shriek of a madman challenging the mountains. But somewhere in a crack between fate and the categorial imperatives a mans hand, or will, or cry, rises, and in that moment is borne that from which I would not turn away, - that which gave you the courage and will to write this bool, and for me to put forth my visions on canvas. Knowing that the next effort would be clearer, the meaning sharper, the vision increasingly lucid and free. And on to the next, and the next---

A frightening infinity isn't it?-that of :"the life" rather than the symbol. The vertical rather than the horizontal; the single projection instead of polarities; the thrust of the flame instead of the oscillation of the wave. Like all comparisons, basically absurd, but perhaps parabolically some of the implications may come through. You took me on a journey to a distant land and among people with a different heritage, and I came back with you even more sharply perceptive of my own strange ways, but with increased assurance that one must walk his own way, to find his own vision, or perish. In the "how one walks" is the man. It is not important that we all must die. If I cannot accept the equations which are the symbol of the Western man, nor take refuge in the cultural womb of the East, your bool adds its experience and clarity to whatever I have of my own. Therefore my thanks, and the hope that in some works of mine you have found a comparable courage and insight.

Yours    Clyff S.