stirring in the thickets of long ago

i'm a scribe. scribbling away in my study. scratch, scratch, scratch. curmudgeonly hermit; get up and turn over some Satie record. smoking a pipe, eyes glaze over staring at the fireplace. i trade in ideas, send letters to other hermits smoking pipes and scratching away in their stdies. the world, the "social whole," seems to operate in another dimension, an inverted plane -- "the whole is false" said a sage, whose books fill a fond corner of my treasured collection, residing behind a glass door. any attempt to communicate verbally with regulars is like a time-traveling alien from 2096 dealing with ice-age cave men. the only message that ever gets across is the inability to exchange meaning. so here i sit.