Would you please buy Pure Love from us?
We’re so broke and lonely.
Working for nothing for the man’s dragging us down to the black lagoon, where the gill-faced monster waits, fish-lips ajar, frog-hands shaking on those muscular aquaman legs.
Plus we have no friends; and if we have friends we forget to talk to them until we don’t have them anymore as friends..
And we’re incompetent daters.
And we get everything wrong and then find out that we’ve been creepy.
And we just don’t know what to do.
So can’t you pretty pity pretty please buy our wares?
Then we could be successes and wouldn’t have to worry about money or where to put our private longings. Then everything would work out just fine. If we were successful Pure Love entrepreneurs, like in the movies.
If you could see your way to a purchase of say Ten Million US Dollars of Pure Love, that would really go a long way to resolving our woes. Then we’d be rich captains of industry and celebrated Pure Love pushers. Then we’d really be somebodies.
They say Pure Love is completely selfless. So how about this: we advance you some Pure Love, and then you see how you feel about helping us out.
However, they say Pure Love is wise, and would wisdom really counsel you to give us a wheelbarrow of $100 bills? Wouldn’t wisdom rather you spend you money on people who really need it?
I don’t know. So much waste happens. So much money slides into folly and nonsense. At least by giving us lots of money, you’d know where it was going: to fix the woes of the fictional Bartleby Willard and his imaginary employees.
Well, what about Andy Watson? He’s the copyright holder. Wouldn’t the money go to him?
Sure, but he could use some help too.
Would he know what to do with himself if he had enough money to buy leisure?
You know, nobody knows whatever happened to him. You used to see him walking his little soft-brown, gray-saddle curly-haired dog. Up there along the rocky cliff above the battering waves that forever besiege our windy sound. In a large brown overcoat in the winter. In a white dress shirt and gray, slightly overlarge and therefore a bit frumpy cotton slacks. He would walk really slow while the dog danced around, running ahead and then doubling back, flanking him on all sides, yapping and carrying on the way puppies do. Was never much for talking. He’d give you this wincing smile and a quick nod in your general direction. That’s about the most anyone ever got out of him. A little odd, but I guess years living alone in a rickety old house overlooking the craggy, slosh-and-spray sound would stunt anybody’s socializing prowess. You’d hear different things: failed artist; some love misadventure; a dissolute youth that wore him out body and mind; different stories. Probably none of them particularly true; but of course: who knows? Anyway, you don’t see him anymore. Story is somebody from the social services department went to call on him–because somebody else called them to report how they’d not seen him in some months and were worried he might be dead in that little old yellow wooden house overlooking the indifferently raging sea. Anyhow, story is they found the door unlocked, the place in relatively tidy order, and no sign of either man or beast. There’s rumors there too, but I don’t even listen to them: nobody knows what happened. When I think about odd ducks like Andy Watson, I think about some line from some medieval anchoress where she says that everybody knows God’s capable of doing every possible thing; what most people don’t realize is that God is doing every possible thing. So, you see, in a sense, Andy Watson, his dog, those silent promenades, the rumors, the mysterious disappearance: all as necessary as God’s will. Does it make God seem cruel to be behind everything that happens in this world, given that so much of it is at least a little iffy and not a small portion clearly bad? I don’t know. God is unlimited and must be unlimited: that’s just God’s nature. Now, what limits exist upon the unlimited? Only one: the lack of limits, of perspectives and illusions–of particulars. Therefore, to be fully unlimited, God has to also create all possible particulars and trap Godself in all possible perspectives. You see: all that flows from the nature of God’s unlimitedness. We aren’t pawns in God’s game; we are God wearing disguises from Godself because God has to be God and the nature of God is to be completely unlimited, which requires God to both be completely undifferentiated (One) and aware, but to also create and be and watch from within every possible particular moment. At the deepest level, the moments all flow together and are one and God as unlimited Soullight shines through all of them. All as a necessary result of God’s nature being completely unlimited. Not even God is free to be something other than God, and so must follow God’s nature. That, anyway, is how I figure it. And seen from that perspective, well whatever strange ruminations may have been Andy Watson’s as he walked though the gauntlet of billowing seabreezes, and whatever his plight may now be, on the whole: not a terribly unpleasant stretch of that strange sentence of infinite limitations God’s nature imposes upon Godself!
So we don’t know what should be done here. There’s also the threats to democracy and to these magical systems where a person’s allowed to speak their mind, wear their jive, sing their song, find their way. And we feel guilty and confused about someone locked up waiting for asylum denied a moment outdoors for two years because the US government wants to discourage asylum seeking. In general, we feel we’re failing ourselves and everyone. We’re not finding win-win; we’re finding self-indulgent writing-to-the-aether. No one hears what we say. Why should they? What do we have to say?
We sell 
as a logo, as a gimmick, as a novelty, as a joke, as a lark.
We sell Clothes Extolling Pure Love, because we thought it might somehow something, or whatever.
When we were in Heidelberg, I met you on the cobblestone outside the movie house. I waived and you came over. I was sitting on my mulit-colored leather Euro-shoes that looked like rockclimbing shoes, but that weren’t. I have a habit of folding my feet upon each other and sitting on that. I was sitting there smoking those skinny cigars–my stepping-stone to the cigarettes that lasted 1.5 decades off and on or so, and which still have their snug spot in the back of my falter-along brain.
We were in Heidelberg. We went to see that movie together. It was in German and artsy. I didn’t understand any of it. It was the beginning of the year, so my German was terrible.
We walked along the Neckar in the springtime and I took a picture of you in your red dress on the steel bridge over the passing barge.
We never went out. You offered to proofread my love letters. The English one was very good, but both the French and German ones were full of errors.
I made things worse and worse over the years and now we don’t know one another.
I could say I’m sorry but it feels empty and gone; anyway, I write only to the aether, and you’re a person somewhere in sometime.
We’ve created a brand: B. Willard’s Pure Love Shop. It’s just a joke. We’re only kidding. The landslides are pouring amazing quantities of earth onto cute sloped village roofs.
Author: Barleby Willard
Editor: Ambrose Whistletown
Copyright Holder / Far-Away: Andy Watson
This Logbook becomes a chapter book at Logbook of a Pure Love Mogul: Chapters