A lei stessa
November 20, 2003
Dear guy at metameat,
I need to write to you now, at your worst, because this is the moment when you’re most in need of it. The good news first: you’re not the horror you think you are. The bad news is that you’re also not as important as you think you are, not by a mile; and knowing you as I do, you’ll take this to mean that you’ve gone up against the world and been defeated. Maybe so. But you don’t even know what this world is that you think you’re fighting, and you haven’t come round to understand that no one, really no one, is totting up these victories and defeats other than you.
I’m not here to chastise! I feel tender for you tonight, walking the wet streets of Portland in your tent of a black coat. Reading the taped-up neon flyers with everyone else’s happenings, readings, meetups, shows; halting on the sidewalk outside a corner bungalow because you hear OK Computer playing inside; offering your arm to the ghost of Elliott Smith every time you pass one of the streets, Alameda or Division, that he named in his songs; yourself haunting the door of the café where once, during rain, a girl shared your table, you exchanged two sentences about the novels you were reading and never met again; letting go your last dollars on someone’s new novel, a Sibelius LP, a cup of Stumptown because those transactions are the only connections you know how to make. I wish I could take you out for that cup of coffee. I know what a gift you’d find it just to be taken out for an hour, especially by a woman. By another woman, I ought to say, but you’re in no place to receive that. With these latest happenings that you think of as defeats, you’re not allowing yourself even to dream of it, and won’t for decades. You poor, touchy, proud, envious ball of need. Someone needs to undo your knots.
Gifts are coming to you. I’d like this message, which you can’t receive, to herald another message you’ll receive very soon, that you half understand you built this blog in order to receive. Read her carefully when she writes, and don’t outsmart yourself when you answer. You have no idea how much you’ll learn from her, nor how much you need to learn it. It’s a little painful to read what you’re putting on your blog right now, because you’re not yet writing well, and it’s obvious that you think you’re writing well, that under the raw pain you still pride yourself on knowing the way of the world, when you don’t even own an atlas. A couple years from now, around 2005, that will change. Your phrasing will start to settle into something recognizable as style, sometimes even recognizable as thought. But you’re not there now, and that really is another chapter. I need to show you the gift that will be deferred the longest.
Tomorrow I’m going to change your face. More than anything else that’s happened, this feels like it’s going to sever a connection with you; and I’m sorry I have to do it now, just as that connection is coming back to light. When I tunnel into the dark backward and abysm of time, it’s you, at this your worst moment, that I keep uncovering; because although you will get smarter, although you’ll put in the work to learn your discipline and craft and bring up some treasure from it, although you’re going to learn your existence is not a range of endless solitude, right now you are alive, and part of that life in you is about to go to sleep. At the same time that you clear the woods to make your own dwelling in a little corner of the world, something you never thought could be yours, you’ll enter into a slow path of abandoning your body. You’ll get heavier, shaggier and grayer, and you’ll tell yourself it makes no difference, that anything you’ve lost was never worth having. You’ll give yourself over to a stoicism of duty and compromise, something that you want to call Dante’s Paradiso but is really just the fate that was always threatening, that of Henry James nodding off under endless layers of misdirection, a head full of imagined scenes and a life unlived. And yet—I need you to know—despite all your years on that path, it will never narrow to a point, and in the worst crisis it will widen again. When I look back per angustam viam, through the whole span traveled, and see you there, it won’t be unthinkable to claim you for the addled girl you didn’t know you were. It’s not wrong for you to have hope.
When I tell you that someone is about to grind down your mandible and brow with power tools, cut a saucer out of your frontal bone and staple it at a new tilt, shift your hairline and crop your nose and whittle your chin and fillet the masseter muscle till you’re hardly recognizable, you’ll think that I mean to destroy you. Just now you’d probably welcome it; I know there’s a lot in you that wants to be destroyed. But that’s not the thing at all. It’s not sophistry or false consolation to say that I’m doing this to make you whole, to bring up what is suffering latent in you. That the end of this exploring is for you to arrive where you started and know the place for the first time. That there’s no wholeness this side of Eden and still it’s the limit toward which our twinned arc tends, hand in hand.
Dear girl at metameat, noli timere. I’m holding you.
