Imagining the Man of Letters and Flesh

 

 

I drove home along the deserted highway.   Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was playing, the sad hope of the soft piano.   I thought how I’d been listening to the same song four years ago, in 1997, and how nothing changes.

 

I thought about writing a story about a man who wished to die but wished it to be neither a selfish act nor one of self pity - so first he said his goodbyes and told them he was moving East.  But he did not go.  He stayed in Perth and he wrote many letters dated at various times of the year, with three letters for each of the years he could expect to be alive.  He hesitated over the final letter - over whether he would be aware of his impending death at age seventy-one - or whether it would happen so suddenly that the letter in no way hints that it could be the last one.  He wrote the final letter and bundled all one hundred and twenty into a large parcel.  He sent this parcel to an Eastern solicitor and instructed this solicitor to send these letters at the appropriate times. 

 

But I didn’t begin to write this story because when I got home the World Trade Centre had been destroyed and the Free World was (I was told) Under Attack.   In the midst of such history, I felt compelled to watch the TV as it replayed the same scene for hours on five different channels and found new ways to say they knew little.

 

I was thinking of the story again just then and I realised that the successors of the original solicitor grew fascinated with the case and could not let it end.  They fabricated increasingly fantastic epistles to follow the last authentic one as the man-of-letters passed one hundred and then one hundred and twenty and so on.  He dispensed wisdom, reminisced about events in the far flung past of the twentieth century and he talked of his home in a moss covered cave in the Queensland rainforest. 

 

But who by then was receiving these letters?  His baby brother and everyone else who ever knew the man-of-flesh were dead.  The man-of-letters passed into myth.  He was very famous and the whole world awaited the publication of each new letter.

 

But I do not know how to write such a story.  It would have to have a point; it would need a voice.  And I am wondering as I sit here past midnight with images of the rubble of America on each channel just what the name of this man of letters and flesh is.