I should like to share a letter sent to a great friend as we communed together on the origins of our immense love for language and the writing of it…I had meant to suggest a line of thought in regard to the power of writing to beget abstraction and thoughtfulness but as you may read it turned out rather differently from this beginning…Thank you Charlie for the great conversations we have on the subject of reading, writing, and thinking out loud on paper…

…in the spring and summer i shall be outside this year and more determined to leave behind for grandson carter a narrative of mind…an origin of imagination..i felt the old power almost all day either thursday or friday of last week and i would not venture to share it with anyone except linda or monsier coil or now i include carter who may have this power also…it is one i have of course hidden with great care every since i found myself atop the Golden Group in FIrst Grade with my beloved teacher of first words Mrs Sanderson…

honestly i have no memory of books or reading before a certain day perhaps the very first day of first grade when I was nearly seven years old in the year 1957…the thin and rather tragic figure of isolation that was mrs sanderson not an erotic image in any way but a thin dry papery human with a magical mind a gleam of intellect i would recognize as existing so rarely in others…kindred she was i could tell…

she wrote upon the board the LETTERS which i did know to be SHAPES that were as PURE BLOCKS OF UNCARVED GRANITE … i took three blocks and wrote C A T  and I knew the power of language reborn from ORAL into that completely human thing WRITING…

i mastered the tiny reading books without effort…i read every interesting book in the elementary library and in the city of Ashdown…bob son of battle…moby dick…peter rabbit.ellery queen…etc etc etc  i would not meet a true library until i stepped foot upon the college campus at Magnolia, Arkansas…and would almost weep with regret not having had the opportunity to go and study there to read the deep works of Nietzsche and Luther and the thousands of academic volumes and journals I have read since then and shall pick up again this spring at the nearby academic universe of nwacc…so long Dr Don White…whom i once saw scrapping a sermon together from a wretched book he found at the Rogers Public Library…rest ye well gentleman of godliness and friend of the lost species homo sapiens…

the feeling i speak of is very hard to describe charlie…

but it is a matter of internal scope and sweep…it is as if every thing before your interest has an invisible receptor verbal in nature and alive which reaches out to find connection to its silent equal in the unconscious mind…how can I explain this feeling…i regard it as a gift…i once thought everyone else had this same thing but just ignored it or let it remain unused…i now know better…it is non existant and not dormant…

in my youth then the world was afire with the spark of language molten with meaning…and more rarely now with older age longer stretches of a quieter version of this word world entanglement but when it is on full power i feel strong enough to blaze across a page of journaling as a comet against the night black starless sky…