Letter to a contemporary

Dear W,

I don't  know who you are really, but today I realised I've returned to your blog periodically, usually around this time of year, for over a decade now. It is one of few things that has remained, though I notice I check less often -- and you write less often too. But for whatever reason I typed in the address and clicked on the humbly small word 'blog' in the hopes that you had written something new there, or drawn something -- to give my repeated action new meaning. At what point does that become ritual?

My thoughts at times only approach yours, asymptotically almost, at most. I have to think of this geometrically and I don't know why. Contemporaneity is a funny thing, because it is a bit like that, always approaching, never meeting.

Is that why I still read your blog? I appreciate the approach, though it is often sad. It is sad but never mean; it is beautiful, like hands reaching, stretching out, each finger pointing towards infinity in its own meagre way, growing older and shaky with time and anticipation. We really would like to rest, all of us, wouldn't we? But we don't know what this means -- especially this.

More than once you've written about the struggle with language. It is also a struggle of language. And as Hofmannsthal has been my companion (even if not my contemporary) for a few years now, I can't help but draw his writing into the conversation: this writing which again and again bows before the image, before the sound, before the stone, the scent, the thought that flirts with articulation, La Gioconda's smile.

Language does not walk upright: its spine is curved, like most of Spenlove-Spenlove's portrayals of the human figure (N.B.: another blogger to whom I owe my thanks for introducing me and many others to images and words that insinuate themselves, always in unexpected ways, into my inner dialogues: here, Jane Librizzi's the blue lantern). Its body is too small for its song, it is imperfectly constructed; as an instrument, it is difficult to play and frustrating, it limps along and sometimes it often does not sound quite right, but when it does resound --- with the right pressure, the right constellation of forces -- it cannot be compared to anything else and sings for itself.  Haven't you sensed this before? Yes, it is rare, it's that all-too-elusive, pseudo-mystical moment that gives us such a strange perspective, that makes us doubt the way we experience the rest of the world, that makes us bow down in tears for no real reason; and it seems for that moment that the asymptote has lost its tension, has taken flight.

It is New Year's day. New Year's is my favourite holiday, maybe the only one that means anything to me, though usually I end up feeling more contemplative than celebratory.  In the middle of the street, in the middle of the fireworks and firecrackers (I am in Germany for a little while and Silvester here is something special, something North America, sadly, does not embrace), the overwhelming colour and light and noise, is the single silent cigarette, the half-empty glass of champagne, the solitude in the midst of celebration. Here language comes to rest for a little while, and that is okay too.


To my contemporary somewhere in New York City: Happy New Year.