See here: there was no call to call. My letter was nothing urgent — a trial balloon, not a cry for help. But perhaps the urgency was on your end; on the phone you sounded, with every good reason, strung out to the limit.
Therefore, while I look forward to the promised letter amplifying your remarkable suggestions and too-generous offers of your own invention, I’ve no mind at all to accept the latter — certainly at least not before you’re calmly sure you’ll never use that Perseus material yourself, and not unless I can present you with some
So I shall perpend with thanks, but put by for the present, your suggestion that I make a chimerical book out of Perseus, Bellerophon & Something Else before tackling
On the other hand, I accept at once and gratefully your other suggestion: that the ground theme be not so much revolution or recycling as reenactment: the attractions, hazards, rewards, and penalties of a “2nd cycle” isomorphic with the “1st.” It’s what I’d thought
But the coincidence of that midpoint with your family griefs, and with what looks to be the climax of that crazy business between you and Reg Prinz, gives me pause. As I work and play through this bright hot Sunday (St. Bartholomew’s Day) on my upland lake, I anxiously imagine you-all down there in Tidewaterland “reenacting” today on their anniversary — which is also the traditional date of Muhammad’s flight and John Gilpin’s ride — the “Bladensburg Races” and the burning of Washington. Are you not, in your condition, playing with fire?
I must trust your excellent Lady A. to see to it you don’t get burned. Speaking of Conditions: is it premature (or presumptuous) of me to add, to my thanks and my best wishes to you both, my congratulations?
As ever,
“Mensch’s Folly”
Saturday, 13 September 1969
Dear Mr B.,
Enclosed, if I remember to enclose it when this is done, is a copy of my transcript of Ambrose’s taped letter of 1 September to (the late) “Author Morton King,” with whom we are no longer concerned. It will explain to you, more or less, a vertiginous business of 6’s and 7’s that I myself intend to think no more of, though it still directs our lives as did astronomy the ancient Mayans’.
Today, for example, is not really Saturday, 13 September; it is Wednesday 10th. But having written you faithfully for 21 sixth days straight (21 Sabbaths if you’re Jewish or 7th-Day Adventist) and then — for very good reason! — having missed the past two Saturdays together with another menstrual period, I’ve so much and mattersome to catch you up on that I’m starting this letter three days early. And I shall be lucky, even so, to get it up to the “present” and posted by its letterhead date.
My wedding day!
But there I spring already into the future, doubtless in flight from the shocks of the three weeks since my last: a period of being at sixes and sevens indeed.
