correspondences & dissonances
Letters come – and go – in many different forms. Scary letters in blue envelopes. Love letters (including those with scented words). Literary letters (Kafka´s letter addressed to his father comes to mind). Demanding letters. Cease and desist letters. Penpal letters. Suicide letters (no reply necessary). Apologetic letters. Ecclesiastical letters. And so forth and so forth.
Some letters are written in ink. Some others with a HB pencil – when writing meets drawing in an intimate manner. Some letters are written on a second hand typewriter from former East Germany (and the machine is named Erika for some odd reason). Some others electronically. And some…
Letters can be hand delivered or mailed. Some delivery systems are out of sync – the fax and the telegram are examples. Letters can be coffee stained or greased. Letters can have dog ears. Letters can get lost or misdelivered and opened by mistake. Contingencies – mistakes, mistranslations, misreadings and other forms of accidents – can also kick off comic conversations.
I prefer to write letters with a fountain pen: scribbling blue ink on paper. But I have also written letters with ballpoint pens, pencils and markers. Once I wrote a letter with a yellow marker on yellow paper to the dismay of the reader as reading the letter was near impossible, comprehension was sort of beside the point though, I only wanted to convey that I was thinking about this particular reader. And during the pandemic I exchanged letters with friends overseas using a shared Google doc.
I must have written thousands of pages. What happens with a letter after it has been deposited in a red mail box? Sending a letter into the world requires tacit trust in bodies: availability of writing devices (pens, pencils, erasers, sharpeners, paper, ink, envelops, stamps, laptops and etcetera), a distribution system to pick, sort and deliver mail, a recipient who reads and replies in kind, and ad infinitum (until one party decides to cease communication in this form). A degree of suspension of disbelief might be required. And an acceptance of leakage.
I must have received hundreds and hundreds of letters. I kept some, I lost some, I burned some more. I replied to most (I hope). Some letters were mere scribbles, and others were epistles. Some arrived with confetti.
The recipient and the writer enter a relationship of reciprocity by exchanging letters. Alas, that is the intention. Will a conversation commence? Will words be written with care? Will words be read? WIll words be replied with care?
For me, walking the city and writing – writing of letters, poetry, essays, and etcetera – are intimately connected. I pick up bits and pieces from the streets: floating conversations, soap ads on billboards, street signs, bumper stickers, election posters, slogans on t-shirts, scraps of music and other sounds, banners, murals, messages left on walls and lampposts, window decoration and so on and so on. And different cities speak differently to me and inform my writings in novel ways.
Rebecca Solnit writes in Wanderlust, A History of Walking: “Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.”
I do walk the streets of cities and towns I dwell in. I walk. I meander through urban and non-urban landscapes. And listen attentively (see Quantum Listening by Pauline Oliveros). I absorb and digest; my body responds to the world around me in languages that are always already social.
I both walk and write in an attempt to understand the world I inhabit. In both walking and writing the straight line is derailed. Both walking and writing necessitate a permeable body. No body walks or writes in a straight line. And no body writes in a private language. Tim Ingold writes in Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot: “Our principal contention is that walking is a profoundly social activity: that in their timings, rhythms and inflections, the feet respond as much as does the voice to the presence and activity of others.” And the same could be said about writing.
I relate to the different ´species of spaces´ – Georges Perec´s term – by walking and writing in and through different places. I walk and write to relate to what is proximate and distant, soft and loud. I am my body. I am not bodiless. I am not my disembodied brain (nor am I a brainless body). I am not a solitary body – ´I am not an island´ (John Donne). I am a body that is multitudes of correspondences and dissonances.
Intimacy and fragility – of walking and writing (I recognize that walking and writing require time, which is a privilege), of mutual hospitality – are part and parcel of life´s impermanence. Walking and writing follows traces left by others. Walking and writing leaves traces left for others. We write. We walk. We go on…
Roy Voragen
(poet & curator)
This text was written in response to the project Post op de Mat (2023 - ongoing)
2023, Post op de Mat, ongoing project more info soon, photographed by Jo Frenken, NL