You will of course forgive me my absence. I was, how shall I say it, detained. Thankfully it was for a minor offense and not my current project.
Still, I was in Pan’s world. More than I care to be frankly and that made it a bit tense. Seeing as I have been robbing Pan of a good chunk of his dinero over the last 3 months. But I have bored you enough already with small talk. Suffice it to say I am– intact. May this find you likewise.
My detention gave me time to ponder. Allow me to share one particular strain. Might I suggest a background song of M83’s Outro? Of course, to each their own.
The problem of communication is not rupture between spirits but letters that never arrive. It is not a problem of relations between minds. As in, we are so utterly different that communication is stifled. The problem is an erotic one. It is of relations between bodies.
Maybe this explains the popularity and yet insanity of the missed connections forum. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Words. They are but symbols. Blind guides. They point to a reality that never seems to manifest. I mean If I say, my heart yearns to be with you. Well. That is a sign. Signpost pointing you in a direction. Like an arrow.
But its not real. The words don’t make it real. Only the yearning I feel is real. And some might argue even that. But the words, they are just words. How can you dear reader possibly hope to understand all I mean when I say a word like love? How can I possibly presume to know how you read that word? You and all your experiences up until this moment. The words are dead on arrival.
I read an article about the postoffice and dead mail letters. A room where the grim task of determining the fate of letters undeliverable and unable to be returned ground to its conclusion. As I spent these last nights listening to the rummaging of societies forgotten un-returnable underbelly, the letters destiny churned uneasy in my soul.
Letters were opened. Valuables, if any, were removed and the letters, well, mostly just burned. Incinerated. Dead. Saddened me greatly it did that a necklace was considered valuable but the carefully chosen, then penned and pained over words... were not. The loss seems greater than, words.
I suppose that these letters here– these undeliverable missed connections ads– these stabs in the dark are a lot like the dead letters in the post office and the prisoner in his cell. We pick over the corpse. Find what we need and move on. If that could be called moving on. We ourselves are the letters.
The letter without the spirit, like the body without the spirit, is only a corpse.
But we may have here also a harkening back to an older time. A time not so long ago when all letters were not written as personal communiques between very private individuals. No, no. But instead intended to be read by all, and often were.
I’m told that prior to 1850, letters were rarely sealed. Postmasters read them. Papers in Colonial times quoted them without prior approval. Newsletters had margins for readers to add details to the story as the newsletter was passed along. Like postcards today the letter was both private and public. It reached out beyond the intension and into the eternal. Appropriated by the unknown other.
The letter never died. It became immortal. Living on. There is always a third party in any 2 way conversation. Even the dream contains the other other, the audience, the awareness of what you are accomplishing or failing at within the dream.
This is our missed connection with missed connections. The desire to not die. To avoid death. The cold grave that swallows all we hoped to be into its spiral of, well, who knows what or where. That desire is expressed sometimes rather crudely like in a glory-hole kind of missed connection but sometimes in the words we send out, often without a glimmer of hope. But the hope resides in the sending. Beyond the intension and into the eternal. Both are leaps of faith.
What is the meaning of the letter burned in the dead letter office whose writer does not know it is lost and whose recipient does not know it was ever sent? The same meaning it has here I suspect.
Words become our sign of loss. The second you utter them, there is lacking. And unless I act, then ‘Reality’ becomes a fantasy-construction which enables me to mask the Real of my desire.
Ṇ
the certainty on which an act relies is not a matter of knowledge, but a matter of belief: a true act is never a strategic intervention into a transparent situation of which we have full knowledge: on the contrary, the true act fills in the gap in our knowledge - Zizek
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