Sunday 11 October 2009

Document Folder 3.14159



The following letters were collected from two locations separated by a continent. They are not dated and no sequence is inferred. It was thought appropriate to intertwine these two disjointed monologues for the simple reason that having been produced from isolation, together they may find the meaning they profess a yearning for.


- The Society for Auto-ethnographic Exploration




He wrote me a letter that surprised me in its bitterness and vehemence. I should have expected it, after all that had happened, but I naively assumed that his early protestations of a love, of abstraction and perfection, would render him immune to ‘illogical emotionality’.

In his letter he not only attempted to turn secrets betrayed in confidence into poisoned arrows, knowing perhaps how much they would wound my heart but, more sadly, he seemed unable to enjoy the adventures that he was trying his best to render in exuberant detail, as if to overcompensate for the aftermath of everything that we had been through before.

...


She wrote me, of one day when she was walking back from a friends house full of thoughts of relationships that had no completion: of relationships that just continued on in embarrassing late night phone calls to ex-partners. She wrote me about how she had just discovered what it was all about, and how she just wanted to tell them that it was all ok now: It had been the right thing to do.

She wrote me about the small things one discovers on such days, when our heads are bowed down towards the pavement, full of thoughts about ourselves, and how suddenly we come upon a small piece of jewellery: a broken necklace; a gold teardrop earring. Hesitating to pick it up we leave it, sure that the person who lost it is to come back this way and pick it up, as if they will retrace their steps, sure in themselves that we will have left it undisturbed for their discovery.

She talks about these things as if they have their own internal logic of sadness, and yet she still believes in the fate of all things to find their way back to their true place…

Maybe it was thoughts of changing her career, of becoming someone again, on her own and in her own time. The fact that all things find their true place, of this, she was certain…
...


He wrote me that he was sorry; his last letter had been written after a week of strenuous over thinking: long dark nights brooding over the state of the drains. Winter did not encourage him to nestle in its undemanding warmth, instead it compelled him, to wander into the bitter wind, arms wrapped tightly around his body. During one of these bracing walks he had come across a rusty coin that glittered in the setting sun. He couldn't understand why no-one else had noticed it, or if they had, they had not been bothered to pursue its story.

He wrote me about the details of his coat stitching, which was coming undone, and the way he preferred his old clothes to the new ones, as they had worn-in, to fit his shape.

He wrote me of the warmth of whiskey and hot water bottles, of knowing that to try and communicate such things by speaking, would be to lose their very meaning, not of course, he said, that there was an essential meaning, just the one that at this point in time he felt: it was all in the feeling.

And as for time, he has been brooding on this a lot...

He wrote that time was curved and only perceived a certain way by the fleshy hardware we were currently using. That if we were respectively on a train and a boat, we would experience the same distance differently; that the distance was just a label we use, to describe how we are permanently catching up with the speed of light. Everything was loving outwards and unfolding but he was not sure, it was late, he was sleepy, and the hot water bottle had gone cold…
...


She wrote me of the journey about to be undertaken, that all had been decided now, and there was no other fork in her road to pursue or dead ends to confront. She was to leave the city by way of the River.

She wrote me of how, as inhabitants of this port town, we observe the River in its eternal rebound, with the slow tick-tock tide of the Moon's heavenly passage, and yet, the River’s secret is that it really never returns, it merely moves beneath the tide, hidden and silent.

She wrote me of how she had came to be a passenger on a trawler that was to leave the next day, and travel far out to sea. She wrote that, despite Fishermen being metaphors for Saviors and sacrifice, this was not what she intended for herself, that while men become entwined in their own mythologies, as a woman, she sought only the liberty of reality. She did not seek an end nor a beginning, only the comfort of the eternal sea.

...


He wrote me about how he had discovered the life in plants and the beauty of photosynthesis, of how his decision to leave it all behind and get back to something basic and true, had all been worth it. What he had before, his way of life, his way of thinking, seemed like a foreign place to him now.

He could not understand how he had missed the connection between things, the connection that was found in oxygen and in the delicate balance that was held between breathing-in and breathing-out. How could everything have been so beautiful without him even realising it: the colour seemed more intense and alive than it had ever done. More than that he could hear the sound of footsteps coming from afar; the sound of birds taking off; the sound of sand particles moving between his toes.

The sounds of the city seemed like a distant memory but he had to come back. Would it all be too much? Would he be able to find clear air and a sense of purpose within its labyrinthine maze of recycled ideas?
...


She wrote me, of the city at the end of the sea. Of music, sounds: the cacophony of humanity, simply breathing. During her great ocean crossing the sea had never seemed to catch its breath, but held it still from time to time, just long enough for the sailors to lose themselves in its stillness: chasing albatross and dolphins, looking for a current to lead them back home.

She wrote me, of how she had made preparations before her journey to save herself from the siren call of the sea. She had set her body adrift but kept her soul firmly anchored. She was Odysseus: bound to a past that perpetuated only in memory; blind to the future. The crew gradually disappeared: in the blinding light of a setting sun, in the fog off some foreign shore, in a hailstorm of seagulls; one by one, unbound from their stations by the lure of the untouchable reality that surrounded them, they vanished. Only she had remained to guide the ship to a safe haven upon a foreign shore.

Once back within the staccato of cars, machines, bells, alarms, and mobile phones, the spell of the sea’s silence was broken. The city was not the one she had left; it was larger, louder and more fragmented than before. Details proliferated once again. Rhythm returned to her life, and while in idle conversation with a sidewalk preacher, she remembered the myth of ‘The Man of Parts’ who resided within the city of fragmented dreams, and she regained her direction…

...


He wrote me, in jubilant sentences streaming over the edges of the page, hardly contained. He was back, but it was not the same place he had departed. He had brought pieces of his story with him, in his pockets, in his button holes and follicles. It was growing through him - this mystery, contained within discarded skin and processes that moved forwards perpetually. What had felt before like the clang and din of a civilisation, on the brink of collapse, metal and plastic all molten, conjoined, now seemed beautiful in its disarray. The jungle had life, the city too, and they were not so different.

Behind garbage and under moulded plastic chairs he discovered the emptied-out spaces; the spaces in which he could hear the internal rhythms. He wrote of how he could sit in-between things and catch the blended melody of a shoe heel tap and a mobile phone ring; the gentle swish of a cleaners mop through the disharmony of a hundred lives overlapping.

At night he dreamed of green and the cells, growing; the hypothalamus unclogging and synapses greeting each other; of time flowing forwards as through a newly created furrow made moment by moment; of the stillness of dead stars and the frenzy of archiving the world.

He wrote me of how he was more now that ever before, but that it had cost him a part of his memory. This memory now resided in a photograph, the one he had left me with. In it he smiles jolly and flourishing, a fake smile.

He knew who he had been but not why, perhaps that was enough.
...


She wrote me, about how in a world wholly known, planned and designed, only the detritus: the scraps left by other peoples lives, enable us to move forward. Life needs a certain ambivalence, as if every moment was that moment of apprehension before we leap off the high board and into the water: a joy in undiscovered things: things yet to be discovered. The fragments of another’s life, just passed by, a moment ago, are like a sign-post. We create our own mysteries, the pieces of which we break off and leave here and there for others to discover, and some, maybe only one, to solve.