Letters to Friends 1
I am not what you
suppose
This letter to you is meant to assure you of your presence
in my thoughts. I decided to write letters & the number 100 occurred to me
as a goal. I will write 100 letters to those I would consider the people who
have sustained me through my life, many of whom I know I have neglected and
lost contact with. Some are irretrievably lost, even dead. Many though are
still around and need to get a letter from me or at least I need to send it.
I want to concentrate on friends
but I am sure family will be involved as well. I also don’t think the order of
the letters or the order of the receivers of the letters is at all important.
Being an early letter only may be more problematic. The first ones will be
awful and ignorant of what I trying to do. They will be full of struggle of learning
to write them. And more proofing errors to. I will have to learn how to write
these letters. I expect I will start finding new ways in to approach them as
time goes by. The later ones should be better and I expect to save myself for
the remnant—the people who may feel left out at the start but are really the
chosen.
I have the general intention to do
all the letters in 3 to 6 months. We’ll see how that goes. I am sure that I don’t have the addresses for
many of my friends. But I will look for a way to get through. I want these
letters to arrive at their destination. But even if they are found later in
some other way, you should know they were meant for you. If you are dead, then
you can expect to get it in some magical way as well. I think I may have a
ritual burning letters in some way at the end. So the smoke will drift, upward
I hope.
Two things have stimulated me to do
this—or at least two recent experiences. First I am currently reading an
analysis of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Don’t be alarmed. I am not a partisan
for Paul. In fact, this letter is a good example of what I find wrong about
Paul. It is a reading of the first ten words of the letter by a philosopher,
Giorgio Agamben (The Time That Remains). To be brief that title indicates that
when we come close to the end times, time itself begins to contract in some
ways. It does not obey our fictional way of structuring of time anymore. For
Paul, it was a messianic thing,: we live in the end times. He wrote in Greek: ho kairos synesalmenos estin = the season shortened is (1 Corinthians
7:29) [Recall that Donald Trump got in trouble with the Ted Cruz Christians for
calling Second Corinthians “Two” Corinthians or something like that. It is a
silly thing, but we have our passwords, “shibboleths” as the bible says. But
Agamben is trying to say that the time is not just short but shortening. It is
collapsing around us. It is always time to be thinking these things. Maybe I
think them because I am older—just turned 67. Our time is shortening. I can
feel it in some ways.
I am very healthy though—he said
reassuringly. I am teaching in Salinas Valley State Prison (Maximum security)
in Soledad, this quarter and at UCSC next year. So that brings me to the other
reason I am writing these letters: That’s what inmates do. They write letters.
They do not have legal access to computers or email. They only have land mail.
They don’t have good opportunities to use phones or to converse with people.
They are very far from home or friends. They use mail to keep contact with
family, with friends, with lawyers or courts too, and with children, with
lovers or imaginary lovers.
The inmates have a singular, a
unique relationship with these addressees. They probably will not see them for
many years if ever or, if they do see them, only briefly in a room with dozens
of other people. They have asked me to help them write letters. The reasons
were not always easy to see but generally it had to do with desire, the desire
to create a persona for their children or younger relatives or to seduce someone,
a wife or a new partner. These relationships often seem to be founded on an
impossibility, at least in most cases. They may never touch this other person.
But the letter itself will be their touching. That made me think about what
good letter writing is.
Okay so these inmates also made me
think that for me my addressees are equally distant and maybe in fact impossible.
I am not sure. But for me I have some possibility of seeing you again or
hearing from you. I hope I do. But I guess those inmates hope so as well.
I don’t want you to think that you
are some kind of art project or on the other hand, some kind of memoir project.
But it is a project. And it has a bit of both. It is meant to enhance my life
by bringing you to mind and into my immediate life by trying to make a contact
with you. I hope you don’t mind. I need
this. I think most of all about how I am connected with others. I have seen in
my life my failure to keep good connections with people. I console myself with
this silly thought that imaginary relationships are best. They aren’t really.
You need to be in a dynamic relationship with people of some kind. You can’t
just do it in your mind. It also might help me to keep writing, to keep challenging
myself to make art that connects with people, whom I love respect and value.
I will put these letters on a
website TFletters.blogspot.com. I want them to be available in the whole so
someone who gets a partial letter can look at the whole thing and see what has
been left out. Then I can write to many people but not too repetitiously.
I also want to be frank with people
so I will be often anonymous about who is getting the letter and their identifying
info, putting the letters online with less clarity about the receiver’s name
address or whatever might embarrass them. But I hope to be frank in the letters
about what I need to say. Most of it will be not be that gripping I am sure but
I will write it with the best intentions to be saying something thoughtful or
worthwhile. Important to me sat least. No one is required to read their letter
to the end or at all. I hope I will get mail back at my land address: 107 Green
Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95060.
Please think about letter writing
when you write back and give me advice for my students and for me. How do we
make a letter work especially in these times of fewer and fewer letters and
more and more texts and messages in quick bursts? I have ideas that might be
okay. I think I will look at collections of letters by others and
see what I get from that. I have not been paying good attention to these
things. I just heard about something, a great exchange of letters (in the NYT ?); it is forgotten now. I will
look it up somehow. I am not being precious about the sadly lost art of letter
writing. I am just worried that in my life this art that I am neglecting might
be a way to accomplish some goal better than email, phone, gossip or some other
intangible method of interpersonal connection.
As I think about it, I am more
inclined to write these letters in pieces, even in fragments at times. I won’t
be silly about it but I want some energy, mystery and art in it. I can see that
the confusion brought on by fragmentation can be solved or mitigated at least by
looking at the web at the blog if you want. Or not. I will make them available
in the overall collection of letters if you want to read them all.
I guess it is an art project. Or a philosophy
of life project or something. I will not avoid being obscure or fragmented
about what I say. I think that tedious, slow and repetitious things might be a
bother. Maybe fragment means faster and is more true to the way we live in our
world as it is. I want the letters to go to one person. I do not want to send
the same letter to more than one person. That would be against the intention. So
something will always be left out. That seems to be the fundamental message of
this project and this life. I remember poem by Walt Whitman, something like “Take
warning: I am not what you suppose.” By being less structured, less focused on
being clear, complete and symmetrical, I can be myself. Whitman would approve I
guess.
