This is the third letter in an ongoing handwritten correspondence with my friend and fellow writer Jonathan Neeley.
To catch up on our correspondence, see the post below for Letter #2, or follow this link to Letter #1.
4/16/23
Dear Jonathan,
My first question to you is about your slanted form. When did you first start writing this way, and have you always—or is it only in letter? And not just a slight slant—a practically perfect 45° angle! What is your relationship with those lines on the page? I want to know more.
You asked a direct question about what where I hope to go with my writing about my father—even saying it that way—about—as if my father is the subject matter isn’t quite right. Yes, that relationship has been fraught and challenging and in one way, I am writing to tease out new meaning—to help me understand it from different perspectives, to own and acknowledge the experiences I’ve had while at the same time, I hope, through the writing process, coaxing forward something I haven’t yet seen or understood. Courting revelation. You said in your letter, once you get the stuff in your head on paper where you can work with it, get it into your hands, “From there, change.”
What you said about writing as a way of shaping reality. “It’s where honesty meets volition,” you said. I like that, and it sounds right to me. I think as artists we are always shaping our realities. To be more precise, all of us humans are doing so. It’s just that artists tend to do so consciously—or at least somewhat consciously—though, truthfully, at times completely unconsciously. Yet, we make decisions. What word to follow the one that precedes it. What pen and paper to use. Where it’s bounded and where it’s loose. What is the flow of thoughts, words, energy, ideas? What is the structure, the form that contains it? Where am I going with this . . . ah, yes. Change. And what do I hope for? I hope to be changed in the process. And in a way that reveals something about life—me, my father, the world, truth, stories we tell or are trying to tell or are trying not to tell. I hope that something will change, something will shift, transform, even heal.
I was in Denver a couple weeks ago where I met the poet Naomi Shihab Nye. When Jody and I were splitting up almost seven years ago, she gave me a poem called ‘Kindness.’ It was handwritten, on a card, and it was my first encounter Naomi’s work. I think Jody knew I needed to hear it—rather, I know she did. I don’t think I really knew what kindness was. What I did know was blindness—blindness to my own inner world. Blind to my emotions. Blind to my depression, my despair, my suffering, my pain. Whether Jody knew I struggled was struggling to be kind to her, or to myself—for both were true, and I suspect she was aware that I struggled with both. I was lost and disillusioned. I remember cherishing the gift of the poem, but not really understanding what it was to be kind. There’s a deep truth in the poem, a revelation I wasn’t ready for then, one which I have grown to understand more and more with each day I am alive. And after hearing Naomi talk about this poem recently, I have been carrying some of the lines with me. They are alive. Here are some:
Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.
-and-
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth.
I know now that what I was blind to back then was my own sorrow. The grief I was unwilling to see.
I suppose, for me, something I am doing in my writing—trying to do, hazarding to do, is to give voice to that sorrow. And not just the sorrow. Also, the anger, the despair, the loneliness. We—the collective we—run from these things like they’re the boogeyman. I’ve lived a lot of my life afraid of these ghosts. The project of my writing, my art, my work, my life—the way I see it—is to reveal to myself what has been here all along, to bring those shadows home, to integrate them into a more expansive and hopefully more generous and more loving version of myself.
I want to see the size of the cloth.
Speaking of cloth, did you know that the etymology of the word ‘text’ is to weave? As in textile. Fun fact.
I look forward to your next letter, my friend.
Yours,
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