Letters To Friends 1

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.