Scribblings with Green Chalk

Animals and Your Soul
If you’re like most people, baring your soul is tough, so the first thing you should do is get yourself an avatar from the animal world on which you can project your fears, your loves, and, most importantly, your festering hates. We suggest finding an outcast member of the animal kingdom to represent your soul’s voice. Perhaps start with a lemur. Say what you really want to say, but as a lemur might say it. Everyone will be all “Wow, I’ve never read a poem from a lemur’s perspective before!” (“Poetry by the Numbers” by Gary Rudoren)

I don’t know what kind of writing animal I could I be. It’s difficult to type or hold a pencil with a paw.

I know. It seems I should quote one of her brilliant, ironic poems to celebrate her birthday. But wouldn’t the poet feel bored if she happened to stop by? Sto lat, Droga Pani. (Tak na wszelki wypadek, gdyby tu Pani się przejazdem znalazła.) I wish us all many more of those poems. And if Wisława Szymborska should ever click over to this blog, I link her discreetly to one of my favorite poems by Mary Jo Bang. Because what could inspire writing more good poetry if not reading someone else’s good poetry?

As much as I hate cigarettes, I love how delighted W.S. looks in this picture. There are songs about such moments…

Only silly things come to my mind like that I began to miss the earthy taste of soymilk last night around midnight. To spare the reader my adventures in the Őkoladen, I will divert their attention with a poem. I hope I don’t get shot for this, but I have a double excuse: it’s National Poetry Month in the US and this is an earthy poem.
 
 

In the evenings
I scrape my fingernails clean,
hunt through old catalogues for new seed,
oil workboots and shears.
This garden is no metaphor–
more a task that swallows you into itself,
earth using, as always, everything it can.
I lend myself to unpromising winter dirt
with leaf-mold and bulb,
plant into the oncoming cold.
Not that I ever thought
the philosopher meant to be taken literally,
but with no invented God overhead,
I conjure a stubborn faith in rotting
that ripens into soil,
in an old corm that rises steadily each spring:
not symbols but reassurances,
like a mother’s voice at bedtime reading a long-familiar book,
the known words barely listened to,
but joining, for all the nights of a life,
each world to the next.

Jane Hirshfield, “November, Remembering Voltaire”

Time’s dust is slowly accumulating between me and my essay on Elizabeth Bishop’s conception of poetry as a glass eye gifted with sight. I decided to close the process of revision and consider the essay done, though I still can’t read it without thinking that it could be improved in many ways. Today, I would also add other questions to my original inquiry. But that could be a separate essay, couldn’t it? The question of creative and created sight remains open.

Because the most interesting points about sight were made by Bishop, not by me, I hesitate to paste here any excerpts from my paper. One possible point of departure for more questioning would be this paragraph, which brings together many of the ideas that interested me then: Probing the limitations of perception is one of Bishop’s idées fixes. Regardless of whether we are dealing with objectivized narration or an emotionally-colored description, the problem of the sense and aim of observation inevitably returns. The knowledge gained through watching the world closely is always questionable, being a combination of what one sees and what one only desires to see. By recreating visual experience through linguistic means, the poem becomes, out of necessity, also a tale of the act of perception. References to other senses not only emphasize certain characteristics of the object but, above all, expose the limitations of sight, its dependence on memory and imagination. Naturalness and artificiality are therefore present in observation from the very beginning.

I’m glad I used “objectivized” and not “objective,” which settles the Krapp argument tentatively in favor of me being the same person now and then. Sight as Bishop constructed it in her poetry was never “pure,” innocent, or unquestionable. Not all-embracing, not all-knowing. Tricky.

About sight in poetry, she wrote:

Off and on I have written out a poem called “Grandmother’s Glass Eye” which should be about the problem of writing poetry. The situation of my grandmother strikes me as rather like the situation of a poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye.

(Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box 212).

Although this applies to representation of sight, I think it could be extended first to extraliterary representation and then to conceptualizing sight as such. Not that this hasn’t been done, because it has — if it hadn’t, I wouldn’t even be asking about this, because the notion of disembodied objectivity still has rather strong appeal.

I’m thinking of Bishop’s modesty as pitted against the Objectivity of scientific representation. Remember what she did in Georgaphy III? The series of questions that opens that volume creates a skeptical lens through which to view space, distances, places, and phenomena from the poems. Sight according to Bishop is a modest sense. So modest that in “Poem” Bishop cuts it off from visionary pretences–

Our visions coincided—“visions” is
too serious a word—our looks, two looks

Is modest sight too dubious for science? Is vision the locus of objectivity? How can objectivity be questioned?

I could probably turn now towards modest sight as a david to scientific vision’s goliath in Bishop’s poetry, but in this sketchy post I’ll go in the other direction.

Whether scientists like it or not (and I know a few who don’t, because they will insist that linguistic is not a “real” science), language plays with them and their findings. The “objectivity” that is touted as the ultimate truth of inquiry and representation is language pulling their strings (and having its strings pulled to some extent). The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after a bath in champagne. The legacy of sentimental novels, newspaper articles, and political propaganda entering “serious” research (not like the wishy-washy humanities) all the time, quietly, unnoticed. Sic!

Apologies for enjoying the irony so much (with probably more than a hint of a humanities “complex”). Being in language is inescapable as is being in culture, politics, society. An objectivity which claims that this is possible has ulterior motives. It’s an enticing objectivity, with pretentions of godhood, one floating above the mundane in an impossible trick of its vision.

Whatever I could say has already been said in a more cogent and convincing way by Donna Haraway, so I will let the quotes from “Situated Knowledges” do my work for me.

I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. This is the gaze that mythically inscribed all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation. [...]

The visualizing technologies are without apparent limit [...]. [...]Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters. [...]

A tribute to this technology of direct, devouring, generative, and unrestricted vision, whose technological mediations are simultaneously celebrated and presented as utterly transparent, the volume celebrating the 100th anniversary of the National Geographic society closes its survey of the magazine’s quest literature, effected through its amazing photography, with two juxtaposed chapters. The first is on “Space,” introduced by the epigraph, “The choice is the universe–or nothing” (Bryan, 1987, p. 352). Indeed. This chapter recounts the exploits the exploits of the race and displays the colour-enhanced “snapshots” of the outer planets reassembled from digitalized signals transmitted across vast space to let the viewer “experience” the moment of discovery in immediate vision of the “object.” These fabulous objects come to us simulataneously as indubitable recordings of what is simply there and as heroic feats of techno-scientific production. The next chapter is the twin of outer space: “Inner Space,” introduced by the epigraph, “The stuff of stars has come alive” (Bryan, 1987, p. 454). Here, the reader is brought to the realm of the infinitesimal, objectified by means of radiation outside the wavelengths that “normally” are perceived by hominid primates, i.e., the beams of lasers and scanning electron microscopes, whose signals are processed into the wonderful full-colour snapshots of defending T cells and invading viruses.

But of course that view of infinite vision is an illusion, a god-trick. I would like to suggest how our insisting metaphorically on the particularity and embodiment of all vision (though not necessarily organic embodiment and including technological mediation), and not giving in to the tempting myths of vision as a route to disembodiment and second-birthing, allows us to construct a usable, but not an innocent objectivity.

(Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of the Partial Perspective.”The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. 86-87)

Januaries, Nature greets our eyes
exactly as she must have greeted theirs
…

This is where the multiple Januaries come from. All the way back to the year 1501, weaving inaproppriateness, conquest, exoticism, leaves, and lizards in a January rush. I’ve always felt that January was a month running quickly downhill. My birthday is in January and each year I get the impression that the days are rolling towards it faster than I can count, which makes me feel irrationally old (but not wiser).

I got a lovely letter from Wildly Parenthetical, saying she liked the idea of multiple Januaries and I thought it’s worth elaborating on if only by means of random associations. Frankly, I didn’t think that anyone would be interested in my choice of blogging name (more on that later) and so I never bothered to explain it. It is more or less a play of associations: the month, a vague resemblance to my actual name, Elizabeth Bishop’s arrival in Brazil, this song. I’ve never had any ‘effective’ nickname, so I enjoy the impersonality of many Januaries.

It’s a good question, though, how people choose their blogging names and what to make of the choice to blog under one’s real name? Anthony says he’s more reserved towards bloggers who use their real names (Anthony, please write a post about this so I can link here), I would make an exception with fiction writers, because their kind of writing entails an additional degree of distance and play (though does it always?…).

I couldn’t find the poem online, so if you wish to read it in its entirety, I can only suggest you look for The Complete Poems 1927-1979. Bishop is my favorite poet. I admire her technical skill, her use of imagery, and the curious humor. Like in these lines from the final stanza:

Just so the Christians, hard as nails,
tiny as nails, and glinting

Hmm… There is (was?) also an LA band called The Januaries. Not that I’m surprised…

I blame it on Denise (on whom I essentially blame the existence of Scribblings). If it hadn’t been for this post, my forever overactive curiosity would not have been piqued, I would not have written to a musically-literate Canadian friend about the possible bonds between curling, Canadian serenity, and good music. Moreover, I would not be stuck wondering–as always–about my personal level of musical literacy and my taste.

Far from being a musical explorer, I tend to rely on friends’ recommendations and good poetry. I tend to think I’m easily bought by well-written lyrics, persuasive praise, and perhaps a good concert atmosphere. In high school I went to dozens of garage band gigs: I can’t remember any names, only that I had fun. I can’t play any instruments, I’m convinced that on some level I’m incurably deaf (maybe the garage bands are partly responsible?).

So in the case of the Weakerthans, I’m recruited via Denise’s enthusiasm, obscure hints at curling’s zen-like qualities, their indirectly experienced concert skills (browse!), great lyrics, and the cat named Virtute.

Samson’s not a dead poet, so I won’t paste the lyrics to “Plea from a Cat Named Virtute,” but go into an unlikely linking frenzy: the lyrics and the NPR interview.

I honestly don’t know how he does it, but he manages to be optimistic and disillusioned at the same time. Virtute’s a tenderly-written cat. And while my mother’s cat would gladly taste my tinny blood, I’m sure it wouldn’t cure my melancholia. (Maybe curling would help?)

(Image found here)

I have wanted it for a long time now. Ever since I saw my former advisor’s fridge, covered in magnets from various places, but mostly from Amherst. I want my very own Emily Dickinson fridge magnet, even though I don’t own the fridge in my apartment. I want Emily to guard my cheese, jam, and peanut butter.

This is a note to Gretchen before she goes home for Thanksgiving, so that she knows she’s dealing with an obsession

Bad poetry announces it’s about combat, a major battle in vaguely affiliated with hip-hop where cannons shoot out enormous words like Love, Trust, Honesty, and Innocence. The poet – or, more precisely, Poet – in a failing voice, with a dry throat, staggering from line to line, keeping in mind the unheard tune, thinking about the unmade video of him or herself reciting this, or of the blinding light, or of the crowd they are facing, a crowd lazily sipping alcoholic beverages, a crowd of fighters who had fought over the scarcity of chairs in the room – the Poet then (the hero of this lengthy sentence) solemnly declares that he or she is a Fighter.

Bad poetry has its allure. Its willingness to fight against the great roaring Something is truly endearing. All those declarations of love and manifestoes of disappointment with the world want to be revelatory. And somehow they manage to scratch out their bit of tenderness from the listeners’ drunken hearts. They are like grandmothers’ coffee tables with one leg shorter, those clumsy poems written by Fighters for Innocence, World Peace, Her Attention. You listen and clap with sympathy, like you would slide an unused dictionary under the table’s shorter leg.

What is good poetry then? Performed poetry, is must be added, none of the stuff that comes in ink on a page. Something that is shouted, whispered, half-sung on stage, that wakes you from the beer-induced nap. The Dionysian recitation that stands on its feet bravely and doesn’t remind you of flea market furniture. It might falter on paper but here it lives for the six minutes of the competition entry.

At the poetry slam I’m referring to it seemed that the better poems came from followers of Billy Collins. It’s, of course, one of those sweeping generalizations, it’s a drawer I put those poet performers into, although it’s possible that none of them had ever read Collins. Their poems were in German and one of them even dedicated his to students of German literature present in the room, so their performances may well have been a homage to a tradition I am completely unaware of (thus for a second I hang my head in shame). But the thought behind their poetry reminded me of Collins or Pope in that they aimed at lightness in their meditations without capital letters: on how one may couch attraction in commercial slogans, on the fate of mother-related cusswords in German, on the fate of rhyme, on the delays of Deutsche Bahn, and on the advantages of being a man from Eastern Europe.

Was it poetry what happened on that stage? I do not mean to dismiss performed verse by asking. My doubt relates to the magic of the moment. The poet chanting the lines, the audience responding to his or her skill… and suddenly the listener is swept under the wave of connection, not knowing whether it is expressiveness he or she is applauding, or the words. I certainly cannot recall any line in particular, any intriguing conceit or simile from any of the poems I heard that night, hence my question. If it was poetry, then its simple subjects did very well without the protection of cannons and bullets of Love and Capital Letters. If it wasn’t, it still did what poems should do.

I think that poems today ought to stick to objects. They should wrap themselves around bread knives and light bulbs, and come out from those places where only dust rules. And dust, as is widely known, is no fighter, but what each fighter eventually bites.

PS: I don’t know who won that night, I had to catch the tram back home. But if anyone knows who triumphed at the poetry slam in Heidelberg’s DAI on October 20, please let me know.

PPS: There was wine but it was ridiculously expensive.

I want to thank Asia, Anja, and Mika for making this a wonderful evening.

But first of all, before buying dresses, typing as quietly as I can, not to wake Asia, who does not even know I slipped her into my scribbling. Sneaking in friends’ names is a bit like using charms or pretending to be spiritually related to Frank O’Hara. Or showing off that one has read Barthes’ “The Reality Effect” and knows what Flaubert was thinking with the piano or whatever instrument was the bit of unchewed reality. But, above all, showing off that I remember a poem by Denise Duhamel where she says it more neatly.

Once again I find myself object-struck. Not with German milk cartons (which are modestly European in their sizes) but with cheap clothes and cheap Ikea stuff. Our little trip to Ikea with Asia and Dan was slightly epic in its mission of conjuring home in dorm rooms and rented apartments. Among my various purchases there was one I am particularly proud of: the cheap bamboo blinds I had always liked but never had a good reason to get. I put them up today after getting a set of curtain hooks at a big, confusing hardware store, where the assistant couldn’t help me although I put a lot of effort into explaining my intentions towards the curtain rail in German.

To this stream of non sequiturs let me add that I catch myself looking at gray clothes. I even bought a gray coat for my walks in autumn frost.

Sometimes, despite the blissful effect of the early autumn sun, I let slip in conversation a bit of my bitterness. And it goes like a snake in the grass or lead in a lipstick (a haunting factoid Asia scared me with), making me sound like a tragic recluse. As if I were just a step away from announcing how I enjoy to sit by the dead.

Yet since my apartment is in the basement I can neither jump out the window nor send notes to children in a small basket. What I can do is keep Asia’s fashion advice in mind and consider white dresses next time I think of buying another gray sweater. They would certainly go well with Rhine wine and the refrigerator magnet Gretchen promised to get me from Amherst. A homemade Emily Dickinson lurking in suggestions and objects… Because I’m back to Dickinson just like I’m back to drinking coffee.

She never had Rhine wines, but they are there among the buzzing bees. I saw a bumblebee today, like a last speck of dying summer, just when I was thinking of Emily Dickinson as a good excuse for my wine obsession. I have not tried the local wines yet, I was just staring at a vineyard on the other side of the Neckar. Come slowly, Eden.

… I’m rereading Jane Hirshfield. I say ‘rereading’ even though, of course, I’m reading many of the poems for the first time. But my idea of her poetry keeps changing as I go on and the poems I’ve known sound different now. So reading too plays out between knowledge and disbelief. And the poet says

Neither a person entirely broken
nor one entirely whole can speak.

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

– from “In Praise of Coldness”

My last visit to the museum of modern art in Vienna. For several weeks it’s been just my impressions scattered in notes and remembered titles of paintings, that I’ve been wanting to put together. If you happen to be in Austria before September, you can still see the exhibition I went to. The Sigmar Polke retrospective where Mary Jo Bang’s poems brought me.

I am hopelessly word-bound. I don’t think I was really conscious of it before going to a yet different exhibit. It was contemporary Korean art. Most of it I completely couldn’t get into. Maybe because I am not an art connoisseuse but a mere museum-goer, but maybe because I wasted a lost of time looking around the rooms for the works’ titles. It’s difficult to see the installations when what your eye desires most is writing. “What do you need the titles for?” asked the friend who was accompanying me. There isn’t any smart answer. Could it be a bit of masochism on my part that even when the artist refuses to put the image into language, I would still want them to throw into my face the eight letters of the word “untitled”?

For a brief moment in childhood I felt I wanted to become a painter. And then it dawned on me that what I like most is book illustrations. I don’t mean to say that ever since that discovery at around the age of seven I’ve been only able to appreciate botanical prints, Audubon, and Tove Jansson’s moomintroll drawings. But I do tend to like artists who seem to be chatting up the eye. Polke’s good at it. His early sketches use recurrent elements, such as objects, characters or short texts. They are like disjunctive anecdotes of the artist’s engagement with people and products.

In his later works, the story changes and Polke nudges you to think what an encyclopedia of art could do in a dressmaker’s workshop. In This Is How You Sit Correctly the superimposed images float on the surface of what looks like a child’s bedroom wallpaper. As if the smiling figure from Goya, balancing a chair on her head, wasn’t bizarre enough.

William Carlos Williams observed that we should not try to explain poems; however, explanation (or attempts at it) helps. As limiting as it may be, my dependence on text made me feel that I can sneak into this crazy dialogue. It was Polke talking to Goya, talking to yet another work of art, unacknowledged in the title (I remembered what it was, but tragically lost it), talking to the silly wallpaper pattern, and lines from Mary Jo Bang’s “This Is How…” interjecting: Anything can become // an object. The smiling girl is not a girl at all. These things are things and enjoy being things.

A finger would point

out a question. So sitzen sie richtig
(nach Goya). The hem of her floor-
length dress raised the tooth
of the surface, each hit of the fabric
made a wickerwork wave
until the motion became an alignment

of doors inside every which was a head
plus a hand, part of a life

The pleasure of ekphrasis is about having your cake and eating it too. Ekphrasis sits in Dr. Williams’s “however.” All that it tells you is that you can walk from one object (the poem) to the other (the work it relates to) along a line of somebody’s insights or non sequiturs. It does not promise understanding.

So after an afternoon at the museum I did not feel like I had a key to Polke’s world, but I was amused and intrigued. What may be given away, may be given away in glimpses. Baron Münchhausen levitates towards the Virgin Mary in Annunciation. Through the transparent background you see how the beams of the frame come together at the center.

The two takes at Dürer’s watercolor Junger Feldhase bring you back to the realm of things. The earlier painting breaks the realist detail of the image to a hasty outline on a white background, which is little more than a stain on a piece of cloth. The later work is perhaps the wittiest and most arrogant among the ones exhibited at MuMok: a plain blue background and on it a bunch of nails connected by a white rubber band. Is it the outline of the hare or a joke about imagination? Because we do want to see Dürer’s hare within the space outlined by the rubber band, it doesn’t take more than the few nails to bolster our efforts. Make your own Dürer, the hungry mind will fill out what was left empty.

Because it’s not about the nail and the rubber band, and because the wit may not be stolen, I didn’t even get a postcard from the museum gift shop. Do I want to make a big statement that memory is fallible and art is great, too great too be compressed, repeated or even recalled? No. I want to say it and make it small. I am remembering this (and inventing as I go) — the exhibition, the splinters of afterthought. Also the last day of February, when in a library copy room I was reading Bang’s poems to a friend. The whirr of the photocopier. The snow.

The snow is gone now. And I have my own copy of The Eye Like a Strange Balloon (signed, which makes me guard it jealously). Because, in some way or other, we are tempted to possess. Well, I am.

Or the doctor with soft hands who told me
it’s best to think of pain as a numberbetween one and ten.
– Mary Jo Bang, “Electra Dreams”

It’s two… sometimes three. Not sharp but persistent and annoying. Now that I’ve taken a painkiller it’s just the irritation caused by a tooth where there used to be no tooth. I would like to write about watching raccoons with Zuko, but then my tongue touches the unfamiliar shape of the new tooth and the tooth becomes the story. Maybe I should put up a category called “teeth” and treat this new element of my jaw more seriously. People get pets, beautiful objects. I got a tooth. If it’s not with me next year, I could always celebrate its birthday (hatch-day? eruption day? or, somewhat too proudly, coming out day?).

I still feel like Stevens’ “Snowman” quite often, which is why the header is trees crusted with snow. I might let them thaw for a while, I think. I took some pictures during the walk in the gorge with Debbie today and she told me about a woman who would take a picture of the same tree each day throughout the seasons. It does sound like one of those great ideas that you wish you had thought of but that are distinctly someone else’s. I cannot offer a photo-biography of any of Ithaca’s trees or of any trees anywhere. But I want to read my random snapshots can as hints at my decision-making. I wanted to see what was underneath the snow and here I am.

The differences have to be slight. Tiny displacements, changes of scale. I pick up a carton of milk from the fridge and get an Alice-in-Wonderland feeling that everything around me has grown and is stealthily continuing to expand. As for the blueberries — the berries were chalk-like, too. This has, of course, nothing to do with taste. They could seem like a mathematician’s joke; they are larger here. Thick dots.

I am having a great time. My ruminations on kitchen themes seem like research, watching fireflies is a serious study of nature. I think about the first naturalists who came to theNew World and named so many plants and animals after the European species that appeared to them similar — only to discover that there is more than meets the eye. I feel like I can appreciate such kind of misunderstanding.

Back in Ithaca after a few months to enjoy the contrast with winter as I saw it here. I’m counting on those small everyday slips and modest revelations. I do identify to some extent with Zuko, the cat, who gets lost immediately after he steps out of the house but nevertheless tries to get out.

Debbie told me that the Spanish words for blueberry and cranberry make little sense in Latin America. Not only are the fruits fairly unknown, but the names seem to describe nothing. I cannot remember what those words were and I feel that old sense of annoyance that I do not understand. I wish that I could understand that lack of understanding. I looked up “health” in the online Welsh dictionary today and remembered how much fun it was to play with my ignorance, collecting new words like glass balls or souvenir magnets. I wonder what counting blueberries would be like if the word “blueberry” made no sense. And I wonder if Bishop knew about the linguistic confusion when she was writing the poem. Was that in Brazil? Is there any dilemma in Portuguese? If those questions appear silly to you, please remember that I started with amazement at milk cartons. This is as far as I want to go — not straying from the fridge. Here’s the deepest thought that came to me: words like to go for a walk away from the concepts, as the blueberry/cranberry example shows. Or blackberries. Either way, it’s all about fruit.

Last night I laughed myself to sleep (yes) after reading Richard Brautigan’s “At the California Institute of Technology.” When you’re too bored to appreciate brilliance, grin and bear it. Like a Cheshire cat.

I hadn’t really thought about collaborative poetry before reading this interview with Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton. The concept of collaborative writing seems to have a sense of playfulness that works against the ego in favor of a careful negotiation of meaning. It intrigued me but since I didn’t know too many poems written in collaboration, I conceived of it more as a curio. Months later I had the chance to meet Denise Duhamel and listen to her talk about the different forms of poetic collaboration.

One of the poems she read to illustrate the techniques of composition was Angela C. Dancey’s “In My Mother’s Handwriting.” I wish I could simply quote it here in its entirety but — even though I believe it highly unlikely that the poet or any ardent defender of copyright should stray anywhere near this blog — I don’t think it would be right, so I post a link instead. While exquisite corpse pieces and those written by Duhamel and Ginsberg with their students strike me as jocular and rather abstract, Dancey’s has the colder and darker tangibility of a found poem. The poet took an entry from her mother’s journal and wrote into it a complementary perspective. It’s an impossible dialogue, written between and against earlier lines which could not anticipate the other voice. With the lucidity of a memory at once called to mind and created, Dancey’s words cut through her mother’s text but they do not deprive it of its former wholeness. It can still stand on its own, but it does not need to.

Whenever I reread it I wish my mother and I wrote letters to each other. We rarely do. In the past few months I got several packages from her. In each one she included a brief note beginning always in the same way: “I know that the things I’m sending you are not enough and that you will want some words from me too…” Following it was a brief account of the recent events at home. The letters were important because of that beginning, because in her own way my mother said through it “I got you there! You may be far away but I still know you.” Maybe between me and her it’s not so much about words but about outsmarting the other, our own personal ritual of exchange. There is a picture I stole from her shortly before I went to Vienna. It’s a sepia photo of her taken when she wasn’t looking. I pinched it from a box where she keeps old photographs, knowing that she’d never let me take it if I asked her. I told her about it this winter when I came home with a brief visit. She only smiled and wrote a few words on the reverse.