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all dressed up: latest earliest send words scrawl in cement diaryland love: hopscotch (k)IF pellmell |
this is a letter scrawled in class the other day to my friend jake. jake, don't read this. you'll get your own version soon enough. dearest jake, i’ve decided to take advantage of your transatlantic silence and be the better man: he who writes. and not the tiptap clicketyclack of fingers upon keys without doors; the scritch scratch of messy blue upon the page and beneath unheard words of a lecture on the aesthetics of the object in twentieth century french literature. so this letter can, in fact, be read in one of two ways: lines of love and friendship from one distant friend to another or a guilt inducing doctrine, a plea for packaged things. take you pick. life and love have only been mixing these days through the means of the written word. today: julian barnes’ a history of the world in 10 ½ chapters. specifically, the ½ chapter, the parenthesis: ‘I love you.’ For short, we’d better put these words on a high shelf; in a square box behind glass which we have to break with out elbow; in the bank. We shouldn’t leave them lying around the house like a tube of vitamin C. If the words come too easily to hand, we’ll use them without thought; we won’t be able to resist. Oh, we was we won’t, but we will. We’ll get dunk, or lonely, or – likeliest of all – plain damn hopeful, and there are the words gone, used up, grubbied. Spring has been showing her head from time to time, in short bursts like an infant appearing and disappearing with the wave of a hand. peek-a-boo, now there’s a world full of love and tulips, locomotives and parentheses, and then, oh, nothing. grey and rain like the pink lines of the infants eyelids effacing the world with a single ineluctable gesture. the ostrich, also, knew all to well how to destroy and recreate the world with a single head-sized hole in the sand. but the world always wins, if only temporarily - a glass half full, and the ostrich finds its hibernation, a short term extinction, unlike that of the dodo. and we are allowed, forced even, to see this sad and beautiful world. all that, just to begin again. finnegans wake, over and over, like crimson and clover. i’m ready to live jake. it’s been a while, and i’ve been going through the motions of it all. breathing and drinking, eating and shitting, fucking and sleeping. i’ve been sick so long that i’ve forgotten exactly what it feels like to be well again. i’d have forgotten completely if it weren’t for those small instants, those moments of clarity – noetic if you will – where i remember, i hear, the music of the spheres in a stranger’s smile, the scent of love on the naked neck of a passer-by, anonymous in her clarity, mysterious in her simplicity. and for a moment, a brief moment in time, i love. all doubt, all anxiety about an un-heart-shaped heart, and its seemingly handicapped nature, its lost key for an unmoving and unenamored armor, all of that, i let pass by. and this, my friend, is a gasp of air after the circus performer’s feat of underwater acrobatics, a burn victim’s first glimpse after months of bandage wrapped blindness, the light of day after a winter of alaskan darkness, an olive leaf after forty days and forty nights of a deluge causing curse – in short, an awakening after a long and weary sleepless sleep. i’ve made you a tape to accompany this lonely letter. it is unlike most of my tapes but similar to this letter, or rather how i hope this letter reads. sad, but with patches of beauty between the lines, around the notes. i hope this letter finds you well. i, in my stolen and cited subculture way, await your response in 4/4 time. p.s. i miss you. tape: a) b) previous * next |