Like the tide from a rock beach at night in winter, the moon a couple of nights on the wane, my soul withdraws, leaving a sense, in the dark, of some huge restless body, like a whale, stranded on the strand. Are our pathological complexes our theses, Bill? Our themes? Our callings?

This whole question of "self-esteem" and confidence seems so precarious somehow. The imagination protests weariness when asked to supply sensual images of confidence. A chest stuck out? Popping buttons? The ache in the bone lowers the corpse below all ambition. Ambition takes energy too, and from where do we begin to derive, or extract, our energy?

Wisdom always admonished youth to be one with its fun. But youth is melancholy: it languishes, it yearns, it longs: youth is vain, it searches all the worlds and closets of vanity for secure identity, until the act takes over. It broods into its failures, strengthens its muscles, dreams of legerdemain, tartuffery, card-sharping, justice, revenge, heroism, the love of others, and their admiration. Youth gazes into the mirror, avoids the mirror, is disgusted and wearied by the mirror.

Or were the wise in this admonition referring to our childhood, our infancy? These youths do not need admonishing: their very luminousity is an admonishinement; but we can't live like children, except as we, too, feel about us tall figures who oppress and guide us. The child's daydream is sufficient for his day--suffices for his energy supply, for the urgency of his heart. But what daydreams will suffice us?

The child (some anyway) had home to come to when night closed down over his projects: orange windows, figures in enchanted kitchen kingdoms, living rooms; the voice of TV which said nothing of or to the spirits of the night, enormous twilight brooding way up over little houses and coming down to gather trees into sound only, and the smell of them in the wind: some immeasurable spirit the child knows and takes as an assumption, an old open secret, a whispering night's sous entendu. There is benevolence in that spirit, kids want to sleep outside under the stars and have their participation mystique listening to wind in the firs all night, and the swift silent magic of the moon, and the crickets jamboree into hours after sunset and cool long fog rolling through the hours before dawn. Long hours and the clean curve of night carrying the sleeper-under-the-stars past all false sentences of daylight, commerce, and every lazy excuse for keeping from the ecstasy, the joy of such perfect living. Wishing that the night would stay, and that which would be its issue, the ultimate utterance of its journey out beyond the luminous ellipses at the day's end, rush hour, supper hour, TV hours, brushing of teeth, and bed; and beyond that. And out beyond that. Til the tumbling ganglia of the day, the jewels of strewn cities themselves go out, and then there is only the earth passing its glance, its old long glance, across the far countries of night. Until your soul is held on the moon like a dish of silence. Til the silence has finally got under you, under your back, and worlds fall away. Then it's time to wake up to the real world! What do you think of the situation at UNESCO, Bill? Do you agree with the oxymoronic assertion made by columnist William Pfaff, that "If an international organization with universal membership conducts its own affairs in a democratic manner, it will without fail adopt policies hostile to democracy?" So UNESCO, with its self-seeking secretary-general Amadou M'Bow, is exerting an "undemocratic" influence, and its budget is lopped since the U.S. quit that organization, and Britain gave notice. It has become something like a demonic parody of its founder's wishes--but is that not the fate of all institutionalization? (especially "democratic")? Does this have to be a psycho-sociological fact? The name serves in the stead of the spirit, as in "Christianity," and the issue is "endless rue."

I see school district Superintendent Art Holms has announced his resignation, protesting government cutbacks. What do you think of these "education" cutbacks? An "educator" in a letter to the Saturday Times Colonist claims that the ideal class size is 12, and touts the importance of such aids as films. This "educator," W.A. Martin of Victoria, writes, "...in addition to knowledge and understanding, an open mind and a desire to learn more... This result will not be achieved in a crowded classroom under the supervision of a harassed teacher who is in ideological conflict with the government." What a mess! Don't we know that schools have been, and worsen, as babysitting agencies, to keep young people from flooding the devastated job markets and the streets? Did you ever get up in the morning with joy and excitement to go to school--after grade 3, say? -All my true teachers were in ideological conflict with the government--Socrates, Jesus, Thoreau, Fuller, Jung, Miller, etc. None called institutional schooling significant in their learning, except as they were clever in the resistance. Except Jesus, who rendered unto Caesar Jewish law, to fulfill and complete old prophecies so that the people might accept the new. The news. The nous. The noose?

Read John Holt's joyous works for an eye-opening life-affirming view of the possibilities of human teaching and learning. If Sartre and his cohorts were kept vitalized by the French Resistance (1940-1945), I am kept vitalized by the Soul Resistance, now gaining some momentum, now apparently falling back; but determined, perseverant--the resistance of the soul and mind and body to the oppression of "public opinion," the infamous body politic, the gluttony of consumerism promoted by a $100 billion advertising industry in a world where men, women, and children still die of starvation, consumed by consumerism; oppression under bureaucratic juggernauts, cold reptiles who move mindlessly, cold-bloodedly no matter how compassionate the hearts of individual members; in a world of uneven diamond-and-puke corporate Capitalism, and a Procrustean edifice, false Communism, and the military regimes: none are worthy of my soul, or the souls of my teachers.