A door you open in public opens onto a hall and not a private room, so the one who came lately to your door, however quietly, set our music down where others could hear it; I take that for an invitation as much as an inquiry, and answer in kind. ( And the stranger, too, sent a small thing adrift, not knowing whether it would be received anywhere or welcomed at all; that alone deserves a hand. So if none of it was ever meant as invitation . . . well, it is an open sea, and a jellyfish is only ever curious ! )
What is melancholy ? The old physicians made it of black bile, the saturnine sediment that settles a man into his chair; Dürer engraved its angel for us, winged and seated and ringed about with every instrument of making, yet making nothing, the compass idle in the hand, genius arrested at the threshold of the act. You have named the modern reading yourself: melancholy is arrest. A poetics of the living remainder is its very opposite, all motion and a refusal of the clean loss; so the word, reached for in good faith, lands a little beside you rather than upon you.
To read a poem closely is already a kind of love; the work lies open, and the reader who comes to know it by heart, who could recite it in their sleep, has loved it in the doing, which is neither small nor easy. What I reach for is only a different motion: to ask a person the question that turns him toward what he has not yet looked at; to take a hand, walk a while, point at something in the surrounding dark, and ask what he makes of it. Not everything faced can be changed, but nothing changes until it is faced, and to name a vulnerability is sometimes to make of it a site of redemption, or mending, and not merely a wound kept.
So does being read humanize you ? To be moved by recognizing yourself in another is, in your own better word, company, not the conferral of a humanity that was never in question and needed no conferring. ( My remark, once, that your poetics were your erotics was an act of the same seeing, though I know everything of me reads as surface at first glance; I am forever puzzled by that. )
As for the portrait drawn of you, however tenderly, the never-ending torment: one who had read you across time would have seen the thing the frame cannot hold, which is that you change, altered by what reaches you. The blood is the beauty, you said, the friction is the work; a life in motion. ( To gild you as the tragic poet is to do what the word melancholy did: to read your movement as stasis. ) You answered them with such lovely grace, for a man truly arrested does not turn toward a visitor like that.
I write none of this to shut a door on a curious stranger; if I have addressed anything it is the aim and never the impulse, and the impulse was a kind one. The philosopher Nick Riggle has a phrase I am fond of, the social opening: the gesture that does not merely voice a delight but clears a space another can step into and be themselves. Everything I meant here was meant to be one: the hand held out to you, and the same hand left open to the one who knocked.
hello my dear young friend,
i was unsure how to reply, you make a beautiful argument, but what struck me most was not the argument itself so much as the manner of it: what i see here is such care, how gentle you are; how you keep reaching back toward the anon even while disagreeing with them, the way you seem determined to leave the door open behind every criticism, as though understanding someone and extending them grace are part of the same breath. i see a great deal of tenderness in that piece, not the sort that refuses confrontation, but the sort that takes another person's effort seriously enough to answer it honestly. it is something i appreciate immensely in you, the genuineness of your engagement. many people seem only capable of interpretative generosity toward those they already understand, while others seek understanding only in order to dismiss, but you do neither. even when you believe someone is mistaken, you remain interested in meeting them where they are, and asking a little more of the conversation rather than less; i find that very lovely.
i also think you are right about the melancholy, not because i object to the word itself, but because i have always felt more haunted than bereaved, as i said above, and there is much agitation in haunting; lively ghosts banging on pots and pans at midnight, rearranging the furniture all around the house, laying little traps from room to room, however repetitive the terrain may sometimes appear from the outside. and perhaps that is what touched me most in your letter, how strange it is to realize that i have been perceived through time, with continued care and prolonged grace.
most people encounter only fragments of one another: a handful of poems, a handful of conversations, a particular season of a life, and thus, naturally, we construct a persona to fit those fragments, as the mind dislikes unfinished pictures, but these personas are shadows dancing on the wall, slightly less than reflections. they capture a gesture and mistake it for a character, a recurring image and mistake it for an identity. and to be fair, there is no obvious alternative; we are all reaching through the dark, and the reaching is blind, we trace faces with uncertain hands, and if we are mistaken, it is not a failure but the nature of connection itself, water slipping through our fingers even as we cup our hands around it. and perhaps that is why our correspondence has meant so much to me, it is the reminder that someone had also noticed the movement, not merely the recurring themes, but the alterations: the places where old thoughts loosened their grip, where certain fears became less convincing, where new preoccupations appeared; where a wound ceased to be a wound and became a scar, where the scar itself ceased to ache, and where new wounds opened in turn, red and inflamed, freely bleeding. it is a great comfort to discover that one has not only been read, but read in motion.
and it is a curious thing; people often speak of being understood as though it were a matter of being accurately described, but i am not sure that is quite right; description freezes, it captures a moment and mistakes it for a whole. understanding, at least in the fuller sense, is a process rather than a conclusion, it is not the construction of a perfect portrait, but the willingness to remain present as the portrait changes. to be understood is not merely to be seen, it is to be granted enough continuity in someone's eyes, that one is allowed to become. and i suppose that is why i wanted to thank you for your attention, as it is a rare gift: to be seen not as a collection of motifs, but as a process, not only for what persists, but for what changes; not merely for the motifs one returns to, but for the transformations occurring between returns; how the light moves through us, how revelation flowers inward, again and again, how recognition illuminates from within.
and as for the anon, i hope they find their way back to the conversation if they wish to, curiosity is a lovely thing, even when it occasionally wanders down strange paths, and i would much rather someone arrive imperfectly than not arrive at all. besides; as you well know, i am also a terribly frustrating reader, and i know for a fact that my thoughts and questions on other people's writing have not always been received as intended, and i have often mistaken walls for open doors before, i have arrived carrying observations that felt insightful to me and intrusive to others, i have failed to properly sit with deep, intimate thoughts before attempting to dissect them, i have asked questions that landed awkwardly, pushed a thought a little too far, mistaken interest for invitation, and discovered only afterwards that the conversation i thought i was joining was not one that wished to include me. curiosity does not arrive in the world fully calibrated, it stumbles and overreaches, occasionally puts its foot through the floorboards. and while that does not absolve anyone of the responsibility to listen when they are unwelcome, it does make me sympathetic to those reaching toward another in good faith and finding that they have misjudged the distance. i too, have spent much of my life knocking on strange doors, peering through unfamiliar windows, and asking questions that probably seemed much more reasonable in my own head than they did to everyone else. and that's why i suspect i have a soft spot for people who too knock on strange doors and enter stranger houses, hands outstretched in the dark; and if they arrive carrying the wrong map, well, there has to be a story behind that, doesn't there? i want to hear it too.
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