To incorporate the ache of Vietnam, the mistake of it, incapable of being erased or changed. To invent forms that might let that wound stand—
If we’ve learned anything, yet.
Summer 1885
Brother and Sister’s Friend—
“Sweet Land of Liberty” is a superfluous Carol till it concerns ourselves — then it outrealms the Birds…
Your Hollyhocks endow the House, making Art’s inner Summer, never Treason to Nature’s. Nature will be closing her Picnic when you return to America, but you will ride Home by sunset, which is far better.
I am glad you cherish the Sea. We correspond, though I never met him.
I write in the midst of Sweet-Peas and by the side of Orioles, and could put my hand on a Butterfly, only he withdraws.
Touch Shakespeare for me.
“Be not afraid. The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.”
Fifty years now since World War II. She sits in the corner and weeps.
And hurt not.
Six million dead.
“Well, we’ve been kept from ourselves long enough, don’t you think?”
We dare to speak. Trembling, and on the verge.
Extraordinary things have been written. Extraordinary things will continue to be written.
Nineteen ninety-five: Vinyl makes its small comeback. To the teenage music freak, to the classical music fiend, and to the opera queen, CDs are now being disparaged as producing too cold, too sanitary a sound. Vinyl is being sought out again for its warmer, richer quality.
Wish: that we be open-minded and generous. That we fear not.
That the electronic page understand its powers and its limitations. Nothing replaces the giddiness one feels at the potential of hypertext. Entirely new shapes might be created, different ways of thinking, of perceiving.
Kevin Kelly, executive director of Wired magazine: “The first thing discovered by Jaron Lanier [the virtual reality pioneer] is to say what is reality? We get to ask the great questions of all time: what is life? What is human? What is civilization? And you ask it not in the way the old philosophers asked it, sitting in armchairs, but by actually trying it. Let’s try and make life. Let’s try and make community.”
And now the Extropians, who say they can achieve immortality by downloading the contents of the human brain onto a hard disk….
So turn to the students. Young visionaries. Who click on the Internet, the cyberworld in their sleep. Alvin Lu: citizen of the universe, the whole world at his fingertips. In love with the blinding light out there, the possibility, world without end, his love of all that is the future.
Let the fictions change shape, grow, accommodate. Let the medium change if it must; the artist persists.
You say all is doomed, but I say Julio Cortázar. I say Samuel Beckett. I say Marcel Proust. Virginia Woolf. I say Garcia Lorca and Walt Whitman. I say Mallarmé. I say Ingeborg Bachmann. The Apu Trilogy will lie next to Hamlet. Vivre Sa Vie will live next to Texts for Nothing.
These fragmented prayers.
Making love around the fire of the alphabet.
Wish: that we not hurt each other purposely anymore.
A literature of love. A literature of tolerance. A literature of difference.
Saving the best of what was good in the old. Not to discard indiscriminately, but not to hold on too tightly, either. To go forward together, unthreatened for once. The future is Robert Wilson and JLG. The future is Hou Hsiao-hsien. The future is Martha Graham, still.
The vocabularies of dance, of film, of performance.
The disintegration of categories.
If you say that language is dying, then what do you know of language?
I am getting a little tired of this you-and-I bit. But it tells me one important thing: that I do not want it to have to be this way. I do not believe it has to continue this way — you over there alternately blustery and cowering, me over here, defensive, angry.
Wish: a sky that is not divided. A way to look at the screen of the sky with its grandeur, its weather, its color, its patterns of bird flight, its airplanes and accidents and poisons, its mushroom clouds.
Its goldfinches frescoed against an aqua-blue dome.
Wish: that the sky go on forever. That we stop killing each other. That we allow each other to live.
April 1995 in New York City and the long-awaited Satyajit Ray Festival begins. For years he’s been kept from us. Who decides, finally, what is seen, what is read, and why? And how much else has been deleted, omitted, neglected, ignored, buried, treated with utter indifference or contempt?
And in conversation with the man, my friend, a famous poet in fact, and the topic moved to someone we both knew who had just been operated on, and he said “masectomy,” and I said back, “Yes, a mastectomy, a mastectomy,” and he said “masectomy” like “vasectomy,” and I said only under my breath, “It’s mastectomy, idiot,” ashamed, embarrassed, and a little intimidated, that was the worst part, a little unsure. That it made me question what I of course knew, that was the worst part — because of his easy confidence saying “masectomy,” his arrogance, he hadn’t even bothered to learn the right word, a poet, for God’s sake, a man who worked with words, who should have known the right word for the removal of a breast, don’t you think?
Mastectomy.
The undeniable danger of the sky.
Adrienne Rich: “Poetry means refusing the choice to kill or die.”
Wish: that the straight white male give in just a little more gracefully. Call in its Michael Douglases, its suspect Hollywood, its hurt feelings, its fear — move over some.
After your thousands of years of affirmative action, give someone else a chance — just a chance.
The wish is for gentleness. The wish is for allowances.
“What is the phrase for the moon? And the phrase for love? By what name are we to call death? I do not know. I need a little language such as lovers use….”
Wish: that the typical New Yorker story become the artifact it is and assume its proper place in the artifact museum, and not be mistaken for something still alive. Well we’ve just about had it with all the phony baloney, don’t you think?
That the short story and the novel as they evolve and assume new, utterly original shapes might be treated gently. And with optimism. That is the wish.
That hypertext and all electronic writing still in its infancy be treated with something other than your fear and your contempt.
That, poised on the next century, we fear not. Make no grand pronouncements.
You say that language is dying, will die.
And at times I have felt for you, even loved you. But I have never believed you.
The Ebola virus is now. The Hanta virus. HIV. And that old standby, malaria. Live while you can. Tonight, who knows, may be our last. We may not even make the millennium, so don’t worry about it so much.
All my friends who have died holding language in their throats, into the end. All my dead friends.
Cybernauts return from time to time wanting to see a smile instead of a colon followed by a closed parenthesis — the online sign for smile. When someone laughs out loud they want to hear real laughter in the real air, not just the letters LOL in front of them. Ah, yes. World while there is world.
A real bird in the real sky and then perhaps a little prose poem or something in the real sky, or the page or the screen or the human heart, pulsing.
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections