Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.61.0502130049570.4418@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>,
"WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines" <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: The Letter
Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2005 00:50:04 -0500 (EST)
The Letter Yesterday, Azure and I found a letter in a second-hand book on ecology. The letter was from a prisoner in a New York State correctional facility. It was addressed to a woman in Queens, New York. The letter used the word "nigga" extensively, and threatened to kill the married "nigga" who was fucking his woman, whom he loved. It was four pages in length, and veered wildly from death threats to protestations of love. It was awkwardly written, and the prisoner apologizes for the poor quality of the paper, almost school notebook paper, the kind with the thin blue lines. My impulse was to 'make a work' from the letter, which had been discarded in the book, to use the text in one or another fashion. But the text seemed too powerful, too angry, too sad, to do anything with it. I talked it over with Azure and our friends. At one point, I was going to throw it out; at another, file it away as a reminder of the vastly different worlds present in slaughter-america under the bush regime. I finally decided the best was to remail the letter in the original envelope to the original recipient. Perhaps she had lost it, perhaps it had frightened her so much that she subconsciously left it behind when she turned the book in for textbook credit. Our friends gave us two stamps and tape, and with the envelope resealed, I sent it on its way though a local mailbox. On the envelope I wrote, 'found this in a book and thought you may want it.' I didn't sign it, the separation was permanent. I had an odd sense of loss, which haunts me. I have used found materials if they 'resonate' before - for example, webcam images that are then transformed, arranged, semantically 'intensified.' But this letter was too strong - or if not strong - violent - or if not violent - symptomatic - it was too dis/comforting, as if real life permanently intruded on what, in my work, in all work, can be at best metaphoric conceits, no matter how we think otherwise. The letter was uncanny. It demanded, it appeared to demand, to be read, absorbed, to fit in, as if returning were a coward's way out - for there was no indication that she would have done anything but discarded it, perhaps after class. The envelope was thick, immediately evident within the pages of the ecology text, surely she would have put it away, somewhere, anywhere, if she had wanted to save it. And the undeniable violence of it all mitigated against this, I could only imagine that she had moved on, that she wanted as much distance as possible from the writer, that the letter was a reminder of an uncomfortable past, one which could never be absorbed, could never fit in with her current lifestyle. The letter was close to illiterate, she was in college, and the text was somewhat advanced, with a cdrom illustrating ecological processes, and quite clearly often played. There is a weakness and pretense in all writing, in all art, as if 'my love is like a red, red, rose' said anything at all that rearranged the molecular epistemology of things on the planet. Art murmurs presumably to the soul, it calls us to action, makes us feel better about the world, or gives us an expressivity for the violent tendencies of the times. Or it allows us to push the boundaries of comfort, dis/comfort, in new ways, for dis/comfort speaks in art of a 'newness' that is non-existent. It takes one letter in a book on ecology to contradict each and every other form of cultural construction, a letter from a sender who had no idea whatsoever that it would form the punctum of an essay, nor, I suspect, would he care. He would care about his woman who was no longer his woman, his love who had betrayed him, and he would kill the perpetrator of that betrayal who surely was not her. This short essay can't go anywhere, it can only point to a found object, a letter, which could not be subsumed. And within that lack, on my part, is an incredible selfishness, that the debris of the world is there, in the first place, to be used. To be primordially used. To be used by a writer or an artist. To be absorbed, to be robbed of originary content. And while that may be the premise and promise of art, it remains a hole in this page. Debris is never debris, or it is someone's, or it is no one's, but it is never debris, just like there are never vermin or weeds, words which I detest for their inherent elitism. Debris is nothing but the world, and it is the world which rends and renders artwork useless, meaningless, at best with meaning grafted by the reader who has no choice. _