To a Magazine

Mary Ruefle, 1952

I am rejecting your request for a letter of rejection. One must reject everything in order to
live. That may be true, but the rejected know another knowledgethat if they were not
rejected, heaven would descend upon the earth in earthly dreams and an infinite
flowering of all living forms would form a silveresque film over our sordid history, which
has adventitiously progressed through violent upheavals in reaction to rejection; without
rejection there would be no as-we-know-it Earth. What is our ball but a rejected stone
flung from the mother lode? The rejected know that if they were nonrejected a clear
cerulean blue would be the result, an endless love ever dissolving in more endless love.
This is their secret, and none share it save them. They remain, therefore, the unbelieved,
they remain the embodiment of heaven herself. Let others perpetuate life as we know it
that admixture, that amalgam, the happy, the sad, the profusion of all things under the
sunny moon existing in a delicate balance, such as it is. Alone, the rejected walk a
straight path, they enter a straight gate, they see in their dreams what no one else can see
an end to all confusion, an end to all suffering, an elysian mist of eternally good vapor.
Forgive me if I have put your thoughts into words. It was the least I could do for such a
comrade, whose orphaned sighs reach me in my squat hut.