To define him, utter lunacy,

To spend a nanosecond without him, illegal;

Who, nav, What is this Master of Light we call Brautigan?

Shall I call him the electric-eclectic-unanimous-ubiquitous-anonymous-fecal-and-spiritual Essence that he is?

Yes.

II. A CONFEDERATE GENERAL FROM BIG SUR

Dear Helgruth:

I went out shopping last week, and when I came back, I saw my husband reading my copy of A Confederate General from Big Sur. When I tried to explain to him the divine nature of the book, he just laughed at me. I left him in a huff for my mother's and have sued for divorce. Do you think my actions were justified?   Signed,   DISTRAUGHT

Dear Distraught:

Your case is indeed a serious one. No, I am afraid I cannot justify your shopping without taking The Book with you. As I have tried to stress to all my reading Public, the owner of A Confederate General from Big Sur does not possess a material "book." He has, rather, a warm piece of earth, complete with weeds, dirt, three or four gross-thingies, and all the little strings than hang down from pieces of earth. A very drunk young Pakistani once told me --

"This book has no characters. They would ruin it. You can't have 'personalities' competing with a book like this."

Then he went on,

"Sure, the guy pretends to put characters in. You've got your usual two, maybe four-five, hippy-type guys climbing into your old car and going off to a beach. To groove, you know, To screw around, scream we're free! to rocks and sand. You've got your passing array of loonies, the guys who carry around pomegranates and sleep with logs. The guy who counts all the punctuation marks ("the rivets") in Ecclesiastes. So you say "they got no depth," right? You say there's no plot, right? You didn't get the Civil War bits mixed into the book. You liked the metaphors, but they were "out of place." Like the one--"My coffee was an albino polar bear--black and cold." Right?

Yes.

You see, my dear Distraught, characters and plots are pieces, and Our Author cannot deal with pieces. He must present the Life-Stream, the Continuum. But all our feeble intellects can perceive are pieces, so what could He do? I'll tell you what He did--He built for us a blank-white-nothing plain, peopled by two, maybe four-five hollow Kewpie Dolls. Very warm dolls, but hollow. Scattered on the white plain are hundreds of little tags, some of them hard to make out, but all right there. One will say