#7
1. These days, when you’re together and there is silence, your mother slowly fills it up with stories about her childhood, her school days, the food she loved to eat, and so on. This offering is very precious to you. You never know what the right questions to ask are, otherwise. It reminds you of a friend who has often said encouragingly, “Share! Just share things with me!”
2. You were recently impossibly moved by this episode of Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel in which two childhood friends talk about their friendship—what brought them together, and the things that had before gone unspoken. The way this conversation unravels—it’s truly a gift.
3. You started writing poems when you were fifteen, but perhaps the peak of it so far have been the years 2018 and 2019. The germination of it was entirely thanks to your friend, without whom too much would have been different. Sometimes it feels as though you found friendship very late in life. There was a childhood best friend, and a few friends in school, a few neighborhood friends, a few dance-class friends, and several absolutely darling online friends—and yet nothing had quite as intensely built a heart inside your heart. In a letter she wrote for your birthday, she said, love should always be “liberatory”. It reminded you of a poem you read somewhere (or perhaps it was a Tumblr post) in which the person admits to loving people “into corners”. This invokes such a violent image in your mind. You never want to do that to another person, no matter how great your love is or how well you mean.
4. You’d gone out with friends a few days before the first lockdown was announced in 2020. You watched a movie and were later roaming around Fort, inevitably stopping by Flora Fountain where, to your utmost delight, you chanced upon books 1, 3 and 4 of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. A few months later, you devoured the series, and it changed everything. You will have to reread it a very large number of times before you can write anything interesting about it, but Lila and Lenu pop up in your thoughts often. It’s been a little over a year since you left social media. A lot of the time it feels like you disappeared, even escaped. In this essay about the novels, Franco Baldasso writes:
Like the eccentric protagonists of Luigi Pirandello’s groundbreaking play Six Characters in Search of an Author, Lila refuses to be a character fixed once and for all. By withstanding subjugation, she preserves the constitutional fluidity of her life, culminating in her choice to disappear. Remarkably, Elena Greco’s story of their friendship begins only after all the borders have collapsed. Lila’s story can start because of her attempt at self-erasure, the final sign of her unyielding commitment to otherness. “The disappearance of women,” Ferrante argues, “should be interpreted not only as giving up the fight against the violence of the world but also as clear rejection. There is an expression in Italian whose double meaning is untranslatable: ‘Io non ci sto.’ Literally it means: I’m not here, in this place, before what you’re suggesting. In common usage, it means, instead: I don’t agree, I don’t want to. Rejection means shunning the games of those who crush the weak.”
5. Baldasso ends the essay with, “As it is for her character Lila, Ferrante’s “I’m not here” means at the same time, “I don’t want to””—referring to the author’s own absence as a public persona (she writes, “I didn’t choose anonymity; the books are signed. Instead, I chose absence.”) In truth, having left social media feels like a kind of tidying up sometimes. This is not at all a kind way of thinking about all the people you knew but weren’t close to, with whom you have now lost touch. You wonder what the value of “reacting” to a meme posted by an acquaintance is. Maybe it’s an acknowledgement—a nod as you pass each other in the hallway or make small talk. After all, one cannot only have deep, intimate connections with other people. Still. You don’t want to do it. Perhaps not yet and perhaps not like that. This thread is useful. In Between Man and Man, Martin Buber writes that when it comes to dialogue, “There are no gifted and ungifted here, only those that give themselves and those who withhold themselves.” Sometimes it feels selfish to be withholding so much of yourself. (Other times the things you can give feel empty and loud.) Some people who love you believe that you have a lot to give, and are simply unwilling to take the risk of sharing. This is true, there is even an Anaïs Nin poem about it. Yet, when asked by friends what you have been up to, you echo Eloghosa Osunde, who writes, “I’ve been wearing my skin.”
6. You loved this very funny bit involving translation.
7. While writing assignments, you don’t always feel entitled enough to write freely. You substantiate your ideas with work done by other scholars. (This is not a bad thing. It is just nothing like writing a poem or a personal essay.) As you type, you’re hearing your voice (this voice) for the first time in so long. It feels so nice.
8. What had once seemed like a magical door walled up for you a few weeks ago, and you almost hurt someone terribly. You have since been reminded of this poem that you wrote a few years ago. Here is an old recording.
9. Your inner landscape seems to have undergone considerable renovation since the last time you sent out a newsletter. (Maybe, like sand dunes, things are always shifting within.) You are convinced that no more writing could’ve possibly come earlier—so much living has been done for this numbered thing to emerge.
10. You loved this The Alipore Post interview with illustrator-animator Karlotta Freier, especially the bit where she says, “It feels a bit like I am constantly trying to solve a very complicated Sudoku and I keep having to go to different areas to make progress. Solving something in animation will help me with my comic. Making a small oil-painting will help with my editorial work and so on.” Not only do you work in a similar way, you’d also never thought of Sudoku in this way before! How generous the act of solving the puzzle feels now! Going to different areas to make progress in the thing as a whole!
11. This photography project about motherhood!
12. These Sunday illustrations of mentions of food in Sylvia Plath’s journal entries by Lily Taylor!
13. At some point in the future, a dense forest of relations awaits you. You want to tread carefully. You want to love many, many people, and cook for them, and leave around little notes for them—as you have before. There are ways in which every encounter with another makes you more yourself. (Even when it changes you, it makes you more yourself.) You have missed it too much.