Letter #1

July 26, 2006

Dear Melmoth–

I have wandered and wept. What sorrow?

Those are pools that were his body. In order to full fathom. To wander, to stray, to wend one’s way

wardness. oh vagabond oh boomer oh wayfarer or in Australia so says swagman, beachcomber, street Arab. Today there are crowds waving Nasser’s photo alongside the Hezbollah’s Sheik Hassan Nasrallah’s. Pan Arab ism. counter to Western hegemony. once –the community is coming. is a handbook. makes a primer for all who may wish to. anything that might be known opens up an abyss. I’m falling. of course you are speaking to family and friends of what is happening? Rather there is an obsession in Florida with tile, chemotherapy, cholesterol, hurricanes. a present delayed for an always receding future. warming global hot pot. pan.

In my living room my chest and abdomen are opened. the organs are lifted (like manna) and gently replaced. i am flayed frayed. discharged. effuse. issuing. effluvia. every part was segregated. then the sluice. flood.

xo
wanda
the wanderer
wand
wan
dear
reader

Letter 2:

August 17 & 22, 2006

Tahoe and San Francisco

Dear Melmoth–

The sin of this script is the corporate right wing logo–Curves–on the instrument of inscription. (The typeface here is an approximation since perhaps the font itself is trademarked?) It and the pen become invisible, absent, once the ink has dried and the words transposed into the binary logic of the computer. What might it mean to write with a tool of oppression. the pen’s ink is smooth and flows luxuriously across the receptive page out of which will arrive. person and the instrument. I am in the depths of vacationland–Keep Tahoe Blue–and on the very penumbra of some great darkness. Desolation. They may be one and the same. forests. Satellites trawl across the sky; there are no falling stars though the Milky Way thickens. Night blooms. I am here. Among sequoia and pine and Trex®. Also, in Kabul–The Bookseller of Kabul–a voyeur among the burkas (which were not always omnipresent), the devastation of years of Soviet occupation, wars, the Taliban, the eradication of tribalism for collectivity, and then September 11^th (though the US had been here before of course). On the radio a former military officer or guardsman speaks of the mistaken and disastrous plan to rid Iraq of tribal ways and the U.S.’s plan to save, restore (?)or install the individual.

In 2000 on a plane from Paris to New Delhi my sister, L ,was supposed to be in the seat next to me but had missed her connection and a young Indian man sat down. He was traveling from London to Delhi, returning home for an arranged (not his–yet) family wedding. We struck up a conversation (I rarely speak to people on a plane; a solo ride without child or partner provides personal time and space for reading or writing: Keep Out!); he asked about the American custom of divorce. His question cut close to the bone. This was a difficult time in my life with X. When the plane took off from Raleigh/Durham where I had left A with my parents, I was awash in grief. hot tears refused to stay inside; it was as if gravity had been the only thing (I typed "think"), holding all the disparate parts together. back with the Indian man (read slender fingers, coffee brown eyes, alluring shyness or the pose of it, or my construction of it) I explained that in the U.S. we are very big on the individual, the life and desires of the individual (in 2006 a luxury auto manufacturer billboard in San Francisco reads: "a very strong want is a need"). Of course, the matter is more complex. Some  individuals. Some who count  as individuals. Who have needs, desires, rights, privileges. "The individual is the pillar of democracy." American tribalism is called Late Capitalism and the tribes are corporations. Ok, but because I am revising this and the time of being in vacationland is mixed with computer time here at home and though I know I keep moving farther a field, I have to tell you about the large tractor trailer trucks zooming up my steep San Francisco street and my neighbor who is screaming at the drivers because the construction company has used PG&E NO PARKING  signs illegally to prevent people from parking on the street so they can get access to the site where they are building someone a home. I’m calling the fucking cops now; you know where I live. I ’ll find out where you live. I ’m not afraid of your retribution!  A mine field. Filed. Fled. 

At a yard sale across the street in vacationland the day we arrived I bought a bunch of books–someone’s old college paperbacks–a Viking Portable Victorians, de Beauvoir, Woolf, Lao Tzu. I don’t think I care for Lao Tzu though Duncan in "Human Communion. Traces" lists him along with Woolf and Shakespeare as one of the Beloveds. (Does Lao Tzu eradicate the individual? Or only some?) Duncan has been thoughtful in his diversity of literary lights–"the swarming radiance." Theosophy’s open door, intellectual hunger and the view from a point of increasing age imagine replacing the body and desire–"Set like a crying girl to sift cinders/ out of old passions. For a first fire./ For a light in old age to burn in the skull/ that lit youth’s loins?" But it is a question. Despite the enigmatic absolute into which Lao Tzu’s words (in trans.) disappear–" The Way is eternally nameless....The myriad creatures will be transformed by themselves./ After transformation, if they wish to rise up,/ I shall restrain them with the nameless unhewn log./ By restraining them with the nameless unhewn log,/ They will not feel disgraced;/ Not feeling disgraced,/ They will be still,/ Whereupon heaven and earth will be made right by themselves." One has the bitter aftertaste of the militaristic kernel that remains. This "absolute that lacks a name," a phrase that recurs throughout Bob’s Jack the Modernist is not the same (or is it) as Lao Tzu’s. "Writing channels the world into words once it’s understood how piecemeal we are, like gossip, bits and fragments from beyond the grave, added, circulated, altered and withdrawn for the sake of expediency or in the spirit of revenge or in response to an absolute that lacks a name."

I don’t know if I’ve missed your connection here or when you and I will be in the same room or on the same page again. New York draws you back. Just when you thought you’d gotten out. They pull you back in.

Ever your myriad creatures, and nameless unhewn log--

the Wand(er)er

Letter #3

August 22, 2006

Dear Melmoth–

It seems right that Melmoth should be cast as a San Francisco-loving-but-currently-New York-living-Bear. He and you have substance and so much hair!

Fitting it is that years later I have rediscovered your wake and I am riding it, stealing a bit of froth and foam to boogie board. Theft is part of our cultural moment. And while we are garnering something for ourselves from the work of others–Charles Maturin, Djuna Barnes, Dodie Bellamy, Bob Gluck, Lao Tzu, Kathy Acker, Robert Duncan, Jim Brashear, Kathy Lou Schultz, Camille Roy and so many others, unlike Tom Delay and Ken Lay, our thievery drops a spotlight on these predecessors, antecedents, and contemporaries; it is additive rather than subtractive. And the form–the letter, the epistle–is loaded, over-determined, yet capacious. At once theological and speculative (The Letter of Paul to the Ephesians), and simultaneously erotic and political, private and public (Abelard and Heloise), a ventriloquist’s art. It appears both under the sign of the writing subject and is addressed to a name and yet because it enters the public domain by being published, it is also addressed to the World. Hence, Camille Roy’s journal, Dear World. Blogs work on something of the same premises though sometimes they are more about projection and less about reception, relation, collaboration– dear my unknown readers. This is what I’ve read today. I have such and such on my bedside table. The letter instantiates relation and as such, it is a form I am eager to court and lick–with all the adoration and aggression those things (no I mean words) imply.

Letters entail, we can’t forget, risks. the poison pen. Lacan says, "...the sender... receives from the receiver his own message in reverse form. Thus it is that what the ‘purloined letter,’ nay, the ‘letter in sufferance,’ means is that a letter always arrives at its destination" (PL 53). Here both yours and my presences and absences are, at once, inscribed. the letter dictates the roles we play. by turns, we are Medusa and Perseus both.

A recent blog posting on K. Silem Mohammad's blog, limetree, responds to a posting by Lisa Robertson on the Poetry Foundation website about friendship versus community. Lisa said she preferred friendship rather than community and Kasey insisted that they are two different things. As a writer one must have community and it is not necessarily meant to be nice or enjoyable (I’m paraphrasing here). Melmoth, can we replace community with home, nation, sex, identity, love? You and I have discussed this often. The community can be so cruel and petty; we have a tortured relation to it. Is what we have a community in addition to a friendship? How would a Venn diagram picture this? Can a community cross the divide of centuries? Duncan certainly thought so. For him, reading is a kind of communion. cannibalistic. cabalistic. "The dead/ are departed therefrom. Whose/ leavings. Reading we partake of." What is it that Grigory Perelman in Russia has. Where is he? Living at home in his mother’s house. He produced work pointing toward the solution of Poincaré’conjecture about the deep structure of 3-dimensional objects. When the media contacted him about winning the Fields Medal he said I don’t think anything that I say can be of the slightest public interest. The mathematician from Columbia likened Perelman to Newton who secluded himself in some manor in an attempt to wait out and escape the plague. it was in this seclusion that Newton made his most important discoveries. Is it always death that adds the period? Shapes the frame. in it we who are mortal wriggle–cells sliding in goo between two panes of glass or plastic.

Perhaps eternal life is the escape hatch? I am willing to let you in on this special offer. It never expires. A long shelf life is good in the age of the apocalypse, the eternal war against terrorism. You will be located at some point belonging to none of the many sides and yet you will always be yourself, that point, in any dimension. The New York Times  said, "who needs prizes when you are free to wander across a plane so lofty?"

Let me know your thoughts,

xo

wanda