The Space Between Words
Will there be a last letter? After nine months of quarantine I proposed to my wife to write letters to each other. The five of us (our two daughters and our dog) have been living in the same space for nine months. We were tired of working without the distance we had to cover to the office, to the school. Our daughters were tired too (apparently it’s not cool to have your parents as teachers). On the other hand, our dog was very happy with that routine. For her, every day was a party that began and finished without people leaving her alone. At the same time there was another pandemic: the information one. A virus that gets inside our homes whether you want it or not: Sanitize like this, That Vaccine is the perfect one, The number of cases increases everyday, Look at Santino of Venice how he started singing from his balcony and everyone joined him from their apartments, The economy collapse (again and again and again). Also, I´ll be honest, it´s possible that watching the six seasons and the film of “Downton Abbey” could have influenced a bit too. In that TV show, letters are sometimes the main characters. Some scenes where somebody reads a letter, reminded me of Vermeer’s work about intimate spaces and their lights and shadows.
In 1994 Vivian Gornick, in her essay Letters Are Acts of Faith; Telephone Calls Are a Reflex, writes the story of Mr. Levinson and his overflowing heart and how he finds in writing letters variations of response he allowed himself only in writing, never face to face. Then she makes an interesting analogy between the letters of Mr. Levinson and the phone calls from her friend Laura:
Mr. Levinson´s letter resembles the social novel of a hundred years ago and Laura´s phone call a piece of 20th century minimalism.
Then, the letters of a couple in this Realistic Dystopia that we call “21th century”, which is living together in the same space: working, cooking, sleeping, teaching their daughters, the schedules, the video calls with the family, whatsapp, mail, zoom, meet, jitsi, uncountable hours of music, films, sitcoms, news. I think our overflowing hearts were looking for relief, and the letters came to us as a true act of faith.
So, I wrote the first letter:
A letter, yes, to get closer and keep a distance. A distance that I imagine arises from being in the same space for so long (hello pandemic), a way to create a temporary fiction? What can be the topic? Shall we delimit it or do we let what arises emerge? Are the events of our intimate daily life worth it? Can this mode be a way to create new layers of intimacy outside of time, day to day and all those minutiae?
And why all that wandering? I have no reason, I have no subject, just a feeling of emptiness, a kind of anguish because I don’t know what to write. So I start like this: the reflection of the November sun, a heavy and oppressive day where the north wind destroys you. However, the sun is reflected in the leaves of the ivy and thus I can go from the green of the Bougainvillea to the green of the ivy: two tones, two moments, two reflections. Today I did not see the hummingbirds, could it be because of the heat?
Now I can see that it was an exercise, a movement: raise your head and look at what a window can give you everyday. A description after the questions. Since I work from home I see the hummingbirds in my garden, I sometimes stay so quiet that they float in front of me at the window. After they go I remain as if My goal in life was to be an echo (…) floating fast like a hummingbird.
In 1983, Chris Marker released Sunless, a documentary. There’s a woman´s voice that reads letters and the same voice answers those letters while reading them. After five minutes you can get into an expressive intimacy and the documentary turns into a Travel Chronicle or Diary. During the journey you can see a lot of details: a ferry horn, three children on a road in Iceland, two dogs playing with the sea, a market lady of Praia that had lasted only the length of a film frame. The two characters alternate. When she reads the letters, she starts He wrote me / He used to write me / He told me :…But sometimes the images and the voice are so expressive, that it seems like you are in a chain made of instants. Pieces of images and phrases that become a constant presence. As if those images were pieces with familiar shapes, but, while images and voice dance, that familiar shape disappears and creates a new one. In a fragment, Sandor Krasna (the fictional cameraman that send the letters to the voice), wrote a variation about time, he wrote/she reads:
He used to write to me from Africa. He contrasted African time to European time, and also to Asian time. He said that in the 19th century mankind had come to terms with space, and that the great question of the 20th was the coexistence of different concepts of time.
Is it possible that the pandemic was the beginning of the 21st Century and the coexistence of different concepts of time and space?
I received her answer, she wrote:
So I bring this phrase: “In the true place, time gets rid of us” (Bonnefoy). Near and far at the same time. Familiar but strange. Disappearing to make a new encounter possible, like the sign of the lighthouse in the sea. What´s the sense anyway?
And the space transforms itself.
I don’t know if this exercise that started with a What if…? is going to go somewhere or it is only a reflex act of faith to survive this life anxious for the absolute. So, It was a useless exercise. A useless way to get out of the world just for a bit to recover and create a new language. Is that possible? We don´t know, that’s the beauty. In that useless way of not calculating, the flavor resides. Time to stop, a space to roam: a singular way to create something new, a way that gave the space between words a specific direction, an intimate place that remains there. Perhaps, the essay of Vivian Gornick gives us a solution that goes beyond writing letters. Now I think I can finally see what she means when she writes:
Letter is not the noble enterprise. Remaining fully expressive is the noble enterprise.
So, as Chris Marker or Alexandra Stewart´s voice or Sandor Krasna did in “Sunless’’ I finish with the same question: Will there be a last letter?
Did you like the essay? You can share it, applaud it and discuss it. All those options while you listen to the playlist focused in letters + two bonus track.
Cover Images: Johannes Vermeer “A Young Woman Reading” and Mike Licht “Portrait of a Lady Blogging, after Vermeer”.
- About Johannes Vermeer: Britannica
- Vivian Gornik in FILBA
- About Chris Marker IMDB and Chris Marker :: Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory
