Function: adjective - Epistolary. 1566, English - def. 1. Of or carried on by letters (an epistolary affair...).
I wrote this letter to a friend just this morning - an email - and I realized that I had just said everything I want to say for this editorial, this Word, because it is the truth of the moment. It is, at least, how I feel. So I send it to you in it's entirety, with all of the boring details and the other details that I think are perhaps, worth sharing.
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Goodmorning love,
Health is holding up okay. I need a bloody root canal, which I am having this Friday and am naturally, less than thrilled about, but what choice? So i am going in for that - people tell me it is not as bad now as it used to be and that, in fact, it is no worse than a filling, which I find hard to believe, but I don't really have much choice in the matter, now do I, so I have to go... ugh.
Great about promoting the Carroll. I've attached the cover for you (two images; i think one is smaller, so you pick) and it would be great if you could build in any links. I have a piece to run on Cyrano, but don't know how to promote the piece. I want to run it on Tant Mieux on Cyrano. It is about Lewis Carroll and is called Love as Nonsense (which I thought you would appreciate - I know that I do... these days, I feel love is nonsense in that it makes no sense, and as Carroll wrote in one of his books, Reason? and Rhyme?
Good questions to ask any lover, because is there ever any reason or rhyme to the things we do to each other when we are together in the moment and after, after the split - no matter what caused it, even if caused by the boom of a third party - it becomes irrelevant because to my mind, someone who truly loved you would regardless "find a way" and I don't mean that in a Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights kind of way (one of Carroll's favorite books - an odd choice for a man who was an ordained Deacon and by all accounts, asexual and died a virgin, yet clearly, from his poetry, he had a clear sense of the romantic and surely it was purely an act of will not to act on it... an act of will... this is key).
So we make ourselves promises: I will not call "x" and further humiliate myself because the lines go both ways; I will no longer think about "x" because no doubt, "x" has moved on and is no longer thinking about variable "y" (that is you) and perhaps there is even a new variable on the scene, let's call that variable "?" for unknown, and we all know that it was variable "f" that came between x and y. F for fuck you, get fucked, fuck off, drop fucking dead, fucking cunt (not a word we are afraid to use in Scotland - it's tossed about so casually that I think no-one could ever say that word to me and offend me at this point: interesting that for the most part, especially in America, I have noticed that when you use the word cunt to apply to a woman she is so offended (and yes, I generalize here) that it seems to me she will practically melt or die of embarrassment or some such). To me, the question is Why? It's really not that big of a deal. We say in Scotland, or even in Tottenham where I was raised, "It's been a cunt of a day" as in, the day stank or sucked or however you want to put it. It was a difficult day would be the translation.
But here, the word "cunt" takes on an entirely different meaning and one is supposed to be leveled flat by it. That is the intent of the person mouthing the word. Screw me for laughing, but I find the whole thing rather absurd. Sort of like the way variable "f" had labeled me a "whore" (and just in case I didn't get the message, I was "whore whore whore" then oh-oh, the big capital letters came out and it was there, in black and white sans serif (bien sur, because she would never use a classy serifed type) and it just said "WHORE WHORE WHORE WE DON'T WELCOME WHORES INTO OUR HOME YOU WHORE." That's five times in the all capital, which I assume was intended to, oh dear, frighten me (it didn't), intimidate me (it didn't), make me believe it (it didn't - labels only stick if you believe them yourself and I do not. I refuse the notion). I know myself as otherwise and it is not as "whore" it is, my friend, au contraire and you and I both know it. Undoubtedly, it is likely that I have been with fewer men in my life than variable "f" (and "f" is for fucking!!).
No. In fact, variable "y" once told me that he was standing before a mirror and he saw my reflection next to his (as did happen in real life very early one morning as we stood before the bedroom mirror when he was zipping my green crochet dress), and he said he saw nothing but "all innocence". "It was strange," he continued, "It took me by surprise. There was just such Goodness."
I can only tell you all of this, mon cher, because I saved both sides of the correspondence for years, so I know verbatim what he wrote. Too bad I didn't tape conversations, though that would be creepy.
Isn't funny the things we miss - a voice. There is so much in a voice. A whole person is formed from a voice. His rich as molasses accented voice that he always claimed was a "whine" which it is hardly. It is thick and rich and most of all, it is what I want to hear. It is how he says my name and likewise, it is my voice his ears longed (and maybe still long) to hear. He wrote, "...the way you say my name...just as I like it). We know what that means. It is held within a sigh, within a moment, within an August or July or any summer day while the linden and the musk trees are in bloom and you sit with your skin summer-damp and humid and you breathe it all in and the subway smells good, and then you can smell the river as you cross it on the metro-north, and then you can smell the privet as you walk up hill and take the long way home and the privet and the mown grass (he used to say "moan grass") smells like him, or some thing you associate with a woman in your life. The city becomes, as one person said, a timebomb. Everywhere you go, because it is a small island, becomes yet another reminder of what was - or if you are still in it - what is. When it is what "is" then it is good and wonderful and joyful and you feel invincible as if it will never end and if you ask me, there is no reason for something that good to end. Not unless one of you wants it to - for reasons I cannot fathom if a third party (again with variable "f") determines to build / construct a wall between the two of you.
A love can be that threatening to someone that they actually think they can "forbid" two grown people from seeing each other. Forbid! That's akin to being "forbidden" to do something as a five-year-old. How preposterous and yet, variable "y" is so intimidated by "f" that this person you so once loved, you thought you knew, suddenly turns into someone totally different. And life as you knew it explodes, or implodes, but the building comes crashing down all around you - your whole world, (so implodes) and the weight of it, the weight of gravity, is just too much to bear and you sit Shiva for months, maybe years, I don't know. I just know that you don't simply "recover" when neither of you ended it. When it is ended by a third variable. But maybe that is just me, love. Maybe that is just my heart - I cannot know "y"s, because I don't know Why. I don't understand any longer the Why of "y". I am utterly lost, confused. Where did the "y" I knew and loved go? And why?
So you see, my friend, I am utterly lost still. Trying to sift through the rubble to see if there are any bodies left and the horrible realization in a dream last night that the only body beneath the rubble is my own and I am looking for myself but it is no longer a search and rescue mission, but a "search and recover" mission. A palpable difference. There is no rescuing anymore (I used to have dreams in which he would rescue me from even my epilepsy... I was being chased by 10,000 bolts of blue and suddenly, a hand would reach out from a giant helicopter and pull me in and it was him. I would be running down the broad avenue, past the United Nations building, my clothes tattered, my ballet-slippered feet bleeding and ripped to shreds and by magic, there he would be, pulling me on board and I would climb in and sit next to him, but in my dream, or maybe in my sleep in real life, I was seizing, and I said nothing, only flipped his palms over and traced the fine lines there - and odd dream, yet so beautiful. It was one of those repeating dreams. I had it over and over and over).
Now, I dream there is a wide-gulf between us. That he is on the other side of the river. Same things - I am running, I am a gamine from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, only I have no-one to dance with, no-one to turn a ramshackle shack into a home for. Nothing. It is gone, he is gone, and as they way in the Song of Solomon, the only worthwhile line in the song, to me, "I walk these broad avenues in search of my beloved..." Yes... That is how the city is for me. A horrible reminder of what was, and what is no more.
So, I am being boring. Have been utterly boring. I will end only by saying that I realize that there is no answer to "?" at the moment, that we have "x and "y" who were and, at least on one side, in love, and then variable "f", that cunty variable that comes between and casts asunder (oh spare me the talk of vows - it's so bloody boring, n'est pas?). So where does that leave you? It leaves you with a future that is so indefinite that you try to move on, but you don't know which way you are going. A time for departure, like Tennessee Williams said, even though you have no idea where you are going and no place to go.
Maybe I shall go back to Woodlawn or something (yet another self-torture), but in a way perhaps a cathartic thing and I will remember all of the good and I will think of the "since then" and the behavior and how I have been discarded like nothing, as if I ought pin a scarlet A on my breast - here, let me brand it in, feel the burn - she's like that. Never!
Gosh, I didn't know I had so much of this on my mind and all in response to your brief and kind email I send you this mornings Philosophy. How funny; how sad.
Life is bittersweet, isn't it. Perhaps this is my editorial for this week - and I won't say anything trite like "you can't enjoy the sweet without the bitter" because that's crap. I can do without the bitter - I've had enough of it. I deserve better and I know it, and frankly, so does, or so should, he. He deserves better, only doesn't believe it.
Well, as Bob Dylan would say in his song, "Tomorrow is a Long Time" which I have been listening to far too much:
If today was not an endless highway,
If tonight was not a crooked trail,
If tomorrow wasn't such a long time,
Then lonesome would mean nothing to you at all.
Yes, and only if my own true love was waitin',
Yes, and if I could hear her heart a-softly poundin',
Only if she was lyin' by me,
Then I'd lie in my bed once again.
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I send you all of my love, and of course, gazillions of baisers.
S.
