The Death of Correspondence

My Sweet Girl,
... I never knew before what such a love as you have made me feel was. I did not believe in it; my fancy was afraid of it, lest it should burn me up. But if you will fully love me, though there may be some fire, 'twill not be more that we can bear....

Keats to Fanny Brawne, July 10, 1819


We are gathered here today, ladies and gentlemen, to mourn the death of written correspondence. What for centuries was a time honored tradition for communicating events, wishes, hopes, prayers, and unrelenting love, has now become a page of history. The epistolary arts have perished on the altar of the text message.

And, what a shame! There is nothing much more beautiful than receiving a handwritten love letter, studying your paramour’s penmanship, tracing curving letters and smiling at misspellings. Written letters represent a bygone fantasy of true hearts and noble intentions, even if, a la James Joyce, these intentions are scandalously naughty. A clever letter through the post gets saved as a treasured memory next to carefully dried flowers and a nearly empty bottle of perfume. Yet, the same missive in a cold and uniform email oft ends up in the spam folder before vanishing into internet ether.

So powerful a medium are they that great novels have been written as letters alone, most notably Les Liaisons Dangerouses (Dangerous Liaisons) by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Goethe’s Die Leidden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther), and, of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Unhappily, today we are saddled with the depressing modern equivalent: books, such as young adult author Lauren Myracle's TTLY, that tell stories solely through instant messaging, complete with headache-inducing emoticons and abysmal abbreviations.

And what of collections of intriguing famous correspondences, such as those between Henry Miller and Anais Nin, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, to name a few? Will the Twenty-first century version be a collection of barely-legible Tweets? While convenient and quick, e-communication leaves something to be desired when employed for any messages meant to covey great ideas or emotions. Truly, the handwritten note is the only written form suitable to honest wooing -- even the most futuristic of ladies being uninterested in undying devotion summed up in 140 characters or less.

In a wicked world where all we find in our mailboxes are bills, let us take a moment of silence to remember written correspondence, and, perhaps, if our fingers are still flexible enough, grab a pen and jot a note, amorous or otherwise, to one we shan't like to forget, in turn allowing, hopefully, that the letter may be merely sleeping, existing on and on like past poets' fragile hearts.




Photos: author Clarice Lispector; Dangerous Liasions (1988) film; author Anais Nin

"One day Desnos and others were taken away from their barracks. The prisoners rode on the back of a flatbed truck; they knew the truck was going to the gas chamber; no one spoke. Soon they arrived and the guards ordered them off the truck. When they began to move toward the gas chamber, suddenly Desnos jumped out of line and grabbed the hand of the woman in front of him. He was animated and he began to read her palm. The forecast was good: a long life, many grandchildren, abundant joy. A person nearby offered his palm to Desnos. Here, too, Desnos foresaw a long life filled with happiness and success. The other prisoners came to life, eagerly thrusting their palms toward Desnos and, in each case, he foresaw long and joyous lives.

The guards became visibly disoriented. Minutes before they were on a routine mission the outcome of which seemed inevitable, but now they became tentative in their movements. Desnos was so effective in creating a new reality that the guards were unable to go through with the executions. They ordered the prisoners back onto the truck and took them back to the barracks. Desnos never was executed. Through the power of imagination, he saved his own life and the lives of others."

Susan Griffin on poet Robert Desnos, referring to his detainment in the Terezin concentration camp during WWII for working with the French Resistance.

Photo: young Desnos

In Defense of the Rose

The rose is a much aligned flower. True, it's still quite popular as the symbol of love, and many innocent blossoms are snipped en mass for a certain abhorrent February holiday, but in recent memory the rose has become considered common, its delicate, velvety scent infused with a definite whiff of the banal.

However, the rose has never stopped inspiring artists. Renoir painted them as a still life in a vase. Monet dabbed them growing in a garden. O'Keeffe, perhaps the best known painter of flowers in history, brushed them into her canvases, both on their own and adorning horse and cow skulls. Robert Maplethorpe even captured a few with his sometime-controversial lens.

But the reign of the rose doesn't stop there. Who could forget Lynn Anderson's too-catchy country sensation “(I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden”? Even 60s French chanteuse Francoise Hardy tips her hat to this fleur classique in her melancholy melody “Mon Amie la Rose,” singing of a tragic rose who is born beautiful in the morning but withers by dusk.

Writers, too, have paid homage. Modern language deconstructor Gloria Stein is known, most notably, for her line, "a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." Likewise, Ralph Waldo Emerson chimes in with, "The roses under my window make no reference to former roses or better ones; they are what they are.... There is simply the rose." In addition, Shakespeare himself puts this lovely bloom on Juliet's ruby lips as she ponders words and their meanings: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet."

Surrealist poet, and Willow favorite, Robert Desnos also found inspiration in the simple rose at the dreadful end of his brilliant life. During the occupation of France during World War II, Desnos, braver than most, refused to submit quietly to the new Nazi rule and began anonymously composing moving resistance poems, poems that eventually landed him in the Terezin concentration camp in what was then Czechoslovakia. Right after the liberation of his prison, Desnos, suffering from a fatal case of typhoid, was visited by two Czech students who recognized him from his photo in Andre Breton's Nadja. Later, they would recall that even at such an unimaginable end, the poet, holding a single rose with which he would later be cremated, instructed them not to relinquish the belief that one could always find the marvelous in everyday life.

After-all, the rose -- flower, symbol, and scent – is marvelous. Without it we would not be able to hop hopefully out of our homes each morning and slip on a pair of rose-colored glasses, pink being a color that imbues us with positivity, tranquility, happiness, and, yes, that old cliché, love.

related links

Rose Nuit de Mai Eau du Toilette from L'Occitane

rose color meanings

Lynn Anderson's "Rose Garden"

Francoise Hardy's "Mon Amie la Rose"

Photos: Virginia Rose take by me; Georgia O'Keeffe's painting Cow Skull with Calico Roses; Robert Desnos

Strange Relations: Ballet and Bullets

When one thinks of pieces of performance art that have something in common, ballet and modern crime dramas don’t come immediately to mind. However, Igor Stravinsky’s startling The Rite of Spring (Sacre du Printemps) and gritty HBO drama The Wire aren’t as disparate as appearances may suggest.

The Rite of Spring, subtitled “Pictures from Pagan Russia,” was conceived when painter and archeologist Nicholas Roerich related to Stravinsky a strange vision he had of a young girl dancing to death in a pagan ritual. Retaining much evidence of this inspiration, the final ballet has disturbing, dreamy choreography, and is oft plunged into nightmare-eque tableaux though Stravinsky’s radical, powerful score.

Repeatedly, Stravinsky lulls the listener, putting him at ease with delicate folk-inspired melodies, then hurling him into a storm of seemingly chaotic dissonance, full of anxious sounding clarinets and oboes, staccato horns, and primal drums. This musical savagery keeps the audience on edge, hearts racing, continuously uncomfortable. Yet they keep watching, intrigued by the unnerving scenarios that they are observing, aware of the performance’s currents of violence, terrified, but distant, safe behind the orchestra pit. So new and distressing was this ballet at the time of its premiere that the audience began to riot, the bourgeoisie screaming during the "Augers" in primitive wails of horror.


Likewise, The Wire, with its true and unflinching depictions of modern drug culture from the points of view of both the police and the criminals, puts its audience in a similar situation of fascination and discomfort. Unlike most other crime dramas, in The Wire there are no heroes, only anti-heroes, and nothing is black and white except for the squad cars. The audience is repulsed, confused, and uneasy, yet soon emotionally engaged with characters from both sides. Even so, like in The Rite of Spring, most viewers are unable to forget their eternal status as outsiders, enthralled by this base and violent world, its unique relationships and struggles, but comfortable in their seats high in the mezzanine, secure in their suburban worlds.


photos: The Rite of Spring performed by the Joffrey Ballet and HBO's The Wire promo