Dear__,
There are times I wonder, is all that is left for me the indigence and remoteness of my heart? Everything I try to possess falls through my fingers. I shall have to renounce my hands. Each voice fades more quickly than the next. I shall have to renounce my ears. The visions, the foreshadowing of each successive moment, worlds revolving around a world, have all been proven spectral. I will renounce my eyes. In the fatal, internal black mass in which I will sink I will fold my arms around my knees as I descend and revisit the dreams a child dreams before he is born, the dumb dreams of one who knows only depth, murk, and a muted, strangely familiar beating sound.
Dumb and tacit my heart beats, encased in the body born to carry it. It could carry only this one. My mind races and my eyes expand their sight to enfold each thing that confronts me. Always things are projected toward and from, but the center remains still, isolated, a space within space, or a unique object among all that are possible. How distant is the self I knew, the counterpoise that results from balancing all points of degradation and replenishment, of silence and clatter, serenity and chaos. If I am careless with my thoughts I begin to find other people arbitrary, no doubt a result of this peculiar flow of apprehension. I begin to forget that the bodies in motion and the ringing voices simmering on the miasmic surface of reality are in fact relevant to my existence. I indeed forget my own existence entirely sometimes, or I become as sure of my existence as I am of anything else’s, that is, only as sure as it has moved me to reflect. But I reached out to you, and you returned my gesture; you gave me proof that we are alive.
These words are coming at me from strange angles, pursuing me through flashes of light and shade, but like Daphne I am helpless but to let them twine from my fingers. For only in that elusive moment when the untterable seizes form do I find my safety and reassurance. Only by creating that second skin, “another divinity”, encompassing all I am, am I able to solidify myself and take root in the earth. Our words and our letters one day will be unearthed, my friend, a petrified forest.
I am an object contemplated by my surroundings, a chimera of materials and movements, barely holding my memories and knocking the nails back into the framework of my corporality daily. It is torn to pieces by the wind, by the debris in the gale, by the force and teeth and breath of time. Your letters will be a bulwark. I will use them for foundations and walls, harmonic beams in the Doric columns supporting the weight of stone years. I am so far from everyone we knew, in mind and in place, but your carved visage emerges from the white hot stone walls, painted and sneering, with deep, absorbing eyes. Now more appear, caught in the physiognomy of different expressions, wild spatterings of color about the brow and cheeks, hundreds of marble likenesses of all your magnificent poses and profiles, all the angles that one could describe in stone or on canvas, a whole lifetime we lived together in stilled images. How glad I am, that you have returned my words.
For ever returning,
