It was some time ago now when it first occurred to us to sell Pure Love. We spent a long time experimenting with different production, storage, and distribution methods. We refined our advertiser’s pitter patter and embellished our salesman-is-consman-ship. We became hardened businessmen, driven by the power and profit motives. We strayed from our calling, and in shame disorientation and self-cynicism slipped into drink, paired judiciously with raw cheese and mixed, unsalted nuts.

Actually, we’d always been in drink, and we always felt like we were at least trying to fight the good fight when it came to balancing the worthiness of Pure Love, art, and fun; and the iffiness of money, success and their exigencies.

Anyway, at some point enough is enough. And hard-driving businessmen and wind-blown poets alike have to take that ultimate risk: what will happen if I step away from my habit? Will I lose all my creative energy? Will I drown beneath the passions that I gave up trying to deal with long ago? Or do I have much real creative energy left anyway? And haven’t I been trying to deal with these passions ever since I found them, searing through the world, and slicing my heart apart?

Anyway, at some point enough is enough. Pure Love is God is Light is Godlight is Reality. The rest is True only to the degree it flows directly off Pure Love. We can’t sell the only thing that is. How could we take money, which is pretend, in exchange for the True Good, which alone is Real? How could we take currency, which is ultimately meaningless, in exchange for Kind Joy, which alone matters? How could we?

So please, take all the Pure Love you can pillage. Turn our stores over. Knock down our factories. Raze our fields. Loot our warped-stone castles on their winding mountain pedestals. Take all the Love while we fade like chimney smoke in the light blue springday sky. You can take all the Love and there will still be more, because Love is all there is, and taking never was anyhow. It won’t hurt us. We were just pretend anyway. We just pretended to exist. It was all part of the gimmick. You can take all the Love. It won’t deplete our infinite stores. You can yank It from us. It won’t change either our possession of It or our inability to access It adequately. It doesn’t matter anymore.

When I was a child I walked along the wide creek and watched it green-glass flow. Minnows darted hesitatingly under smooth flat shale stones. A strange thick orange liquid oozed down step after shattered paperthin step of shale. That was from a little pipe that I guessed came from GE, since it was on the side of the bank facing the brick GE locomotive factory (although GE was a dirt parking lot and a busy road away). Long trees with thick light-brown ravine-and-plateau bark fell across the creek and I scampered along for twenty or thirty feet five or ten feet above the sliding ripples. Crayfish scooted backwards into mudbanks. Tadpoles would sometimes suddenly populate a little stone-trapped eddy. But most wonderous of all, water striders — thin brown bug bodies with swept-backed layered “wings” (they never unfolded; I guess they weren’t wings) and four long side-legs and two forward-reaching prayingmantis-esque front-legs — would run across the water like Jesus in his prime.

oh, the soap part, yeah, well

Author: Bartleby
Editor: Amble
Copyright: Andy