Freud discovered mythology and meaning in the dream, explained Hamlet and charted the mind by means of Oedipus. Jung wrote of archetypes, of the recurring myth in art, of the common symbols of man. There is a racial consciousness, a spiritus mundi--human history is community property among the family of artists. But the word has supplanted the Idea.

I condemn you, who have made me an orphan. You attack the logic of religion and laugh, at cocktail parties, over totem poles and pillars. You dismiss mystics as paranoids and prophets as crackpots. You pride yourselves as Men of Logic when your understanding is mechanical. In your anxiety to reason, you have for gotten how to feel.

Yours is a motel civilization, from gentlemen farmers to university professors. Your literature has standardized the Bible and propitiated the cult of the Word. Your art makes no sense and your music is too loud. You cannot speak to one another and you have for gotten who you are. You have only dictionaries and manuals and wireless sets--tuned in to nothing and listening attentively to babble.

And you give me no home. No home but park benches and gutters and all-night motion picture houses full of sailors. No home but pinball machines and erotica shelves and occasional wine cellars, and a night in jail.

I do not begrudge my loneliness, not my persecution. But you have taken my lyre and broken it, and spit on the dead centuries, and rendered art into pornography. For what it availeth, I can do naught but curse you.

There aren't many soap boxes for men with bells on their heads. (The bells had a tinny sound, anyway.) And, what with his plaid patches and his broken lyre, the myth-maker was only marking time until a vagrancy charge or an asylum.

Besides, only a few of us saw him, and we were drunk at the time.