The following are photos and a live writing transcript in response to Episode 1.3.
Hello, Heaven Sent!
(that's how today's letter begins)
This process is teaching me new things about digital liveness.
That feels a bit aggressive for an r&d.
How, for example, to stay online on multiple devices - I record and photograph with my phone and type on my laptop - while simultaneously shutting out the world. It's quite challenging to do that on a regular basis. Perhaps I need a production checklist.
This is much more immediate the letters. I think about what my grandfather wrote in the letters, about the stamps.
The 500 envelopes went in 10 minutes.
Of the 5000 stamps, only 1000 were left a day later.
That's 4500 pieces of mail. I wonder how many people were there, buying these. However many there were - even if there were 4500 of them - that's a lot of post.
I think about letters. They're monologues. One way streets. They're for a particular reader, but, intensely and significantly, a conversation with oneself.
My grandparents write in pen. They don't cross out. I think of the way I hit back space, again and again. Choosing precisely the right words, the right emojis, the right tone. Back space, back space.
So I don't seem to care too much.
A moment ago as I was writing, a saw a reflection of a plane in my glass coffee table. It flew off before I could photograph it, so I just photographed the window as reflected. The sky on my table.
I think about my grandfather's mention of planes, in the letter. The loot he's managed to grab from them, like some mid twentieth century pirate. So he can make a picture frame.
That looks like this:
So yeah, back to letters. Monologues. It's a fine art, getting the tone right. It needs to be newsy - my mother always says I write a good, newsy email. I almost wrote 'used to say', but that feels too past tense, as my mother is very much present, happily. The used to bit sits with me, and my increasing dislike for the epistolary form. It's all much more immediate now. Messages. Phone calls. Things we don't keep.
I used to print off emails. My mother did too - the ones I sent her when I was studying in Ireland or Prague for the first time. I used to print off the ones I received from my first real love. I would scan them for bits about me. Because that's what we want from a letter from our loved ones, isn't it? A love letter?
We want to be missed, to be talked to, to be almost fetishised. The other person needs to be heard too, though. So there both parties are, at geographical remove, holding bits of paper that are somehow about self expression and being seen and also about being present, however disembodied (and yet more bodied, because paper, which we touch so much more intimately and indiosyncratically than we touch keys).
Being for us, but also for the other. Seeing and being seen.
I once loved someone who struggled to get the balance right. I was never really there. Even the birthday cards he addressed to me were a bit more about him than me.
I knew him to be fixated on things.
My grandfather is quite obsessed with film.
He gave me a plastic canister of coins once, from the Philippines. It strikes me suddenly that these letter were there. I haven't been, but they were.
He told me the coins had been buried in the yard, made a show of washing off the dirt. I don't know if they actually were. My dad and my grandfather liked the kinds of jokes that rely on the victim's gullibility, like the time my dad organised a twilight hunt for the snipe at the house our family had rented in the Berkshires. The snipe is an actual bird, but we weren't going to find one there, certainly not by running through the long grass with flashlights shouting here, snipe, snipe, snipe.
"Bye Bye for now my little hunk of heaven."
