Dear Bob Dylan,

“My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.” The French Renaissance writer, Michel de Montaigne wrote or spoke that, I’m not sure which.

Nabokov published a book entitled Transparent Things, in which he illustrates the difficulties of life and love, its demands perhaps and the reality of a future. “Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive…..”

Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities intoxicates us with Ulrich, the main character’s perplexing lack of characteristics, his acute disposition, fluxuations between enhanced or diminished faith, his recklessness at other times intellectual ideas which are nothing short of mind strangling.

His book reminds me of an ‘I care for all as I care for nobody’ type of leaking mentality.

I wake on a Saturday morning, the sun like a single bell in my ears, wondering if everybody wakes to find no details inspiring, dumbfounded to discover the world is a shallow mirror we all stumble into endlessly.

Of course, there is the mechanics of the soul, incandescent in its spiritual shell. If mute despair is a way of life what is soul? And if a soul is there, why does it migrate into darkness with its tail between its legs?

I wake. Inhale the geography of my day. Grace and beauty be damned. I’m awake. Kiss the black lips of humanity, carry the economy on my back, walk over splintered glass to my destination, irony intact.

I soft-step through mental stereotypes, grow intoxicated when love tries to implicate itself into my heart, which I thought I’d erased, reborn as a rare expression.

What did Musil and Nabakov know the rest of us, blindly bumping into mirrors, do not? How is it Rilke could speak to God and Thoreau could find all the affection a man could ever need in a pond? What is it that makes you like a house lit up?

I write you letters. My words tumbling onto the page, I speak to you privately, anonymously, without dread or intent, incessantly expounding.

You’ve changed me.

I wake, share your morning sky, sun wheeling across it. My dreams like pedestrians, trembling with curiosity.

Written from the inner church of my heart, wordy and sometimes unexpected, even by me, nevertheless, these letters are meant to salvage what I can from a life that to some is nothing but “an empty howl singing with grief“.

I look forward with immense feeling to your arrival out west. Its happening is filled with moments I can’t wait to embrace for to witness your devotion to your life’s work as you settle into your 67th year by every means, breaks my heart and separates my soul from all its human activities. Soul is, though often subtle and sometimes indistinguishable from thought-y emotion, as evident and existent to me when you’re nearby as a coarse wind or the sensation of solid ground beneath my feet.

I can’t wait.

The sun now is higher, stuffing its light into everyone’s pockets. I borrow its energy, pull the lint from my head and crawl out of bed. I adore you. I’m awake.

Dear Bob Dylan,

Air should only circulate inside the soul. Or so, tomaz salamun thinks.

Every man, or every temple of man, thinks in terms of fate, I believe. Yet, they operate on their moods. What is incomprehensible to one is nothing short of a compact accumulation of incipient ideas to another. Like saying the word: what. What is what but an existential moment of choice? And so, the battle begins.

Sometimes I think in tangibles. What is available to me, what can become available to me. What can I touch and once I’ve touched it, how can I alter it. Life is a variation of starts and stops. What was is no longer important. What is, well, that depends on a sober mind and a relaxed approach. Neither of which I own.

I once knew how to approach my day. I could wake very early in the morning and from my melancholic room, stand at the window to see the beautiful sun as it rose, the sky as it turned from deep sea to bubble bath with blue water and white foam. Silly, to see the sky as a bathtub I could sink myself into in times of stress. A whole sentence of strange ideas I read over and over in my head.

Lately I prefer night. Its dark, patternless ways. The security it provides by not jangling my nerves. It’s very noiselessness. This is my mood, my basic constitution. I want little noise. I want less chaos. I want people to fall away into the background like black shadowy figures against a pale orange sky.

I think in otherways. I think in terms of my lifelessness rather than my life. This comes from my being an inconsolable spirit. I am neither a poet nor an architect. I am a useless friend, often forgetting to call or write for months, sometimes years. I owe my ascent into isolation to the differences I perceive in the world around me. Moths are isolate creatures aren’t they? I wish I were a moth. To only tell where light was present and then to go toward it.

You will be in San Diego on September 5th. Apart from that and really all the way up to that moment, I will indeed wake each morning to witness the sun, speak correctly when my boss asks me a question, become indispensible to my dearest children, run for cover in preparation for the next day, occur on all kinds of occasions, like Goethe.

all my love.