photo: Paul Wade
So I found the missing letter. It's dated April 30th, postmarked 1 May.
As hypothesised previously, it was a relocation of camp that accounted for the temporary silence. This letter gives more insight than usual into what he's actually doing there.
Sometimes Jack's letters are so full of adventures in photography, Adirondack chair construction and side-hustle that it's almost possible to forget there's a war on. This was not one of those.
This letter appears to have had a harder life than some of its fellows.
He's also back to full-sized paper, though apparently Winnie is now writing to him on typed 3x5in file cards. I do love the specifics of stationary. It's one of those consistent things. The recognisability of letters.
I've been a bit out of sorts these past few days.
It's made me not want to be terribly communicative. That's a pattern I know well, this sense of wanting to disconnect. I find myself wanting to retreat from all stimuli and enter as complete a space of nothingness as possible. Ideally everything would be white and empty. There could be water. That's probably about it, though.
When I first moved to this apartment, it was very much like that. I consciously avoided accusing too much. I didn't want clutter. Just clarity.
Quarantine is not so terribly conducive to maintaining these standards. Maybe I am getting sick of it, or maybe I worry about it being over.
That sounds ridiculous to say.
Maybe it's not, though. I was listening to the current episode of This American Life the other day.
The presence of nearly all these things annoys me.
In this episode, which I've not finished listening to, Ira Glass is interviewing Esther Perel. If you don't know her, google her - she's a French therapist who specialises in couples counselling and her podcast "Where Should We Begin" is a revelation. Ira was talking to her about a couple she was counselling in which one partner has been cast, historically, as the "problem" partner - difficult childhood, lots of trauma, "needs" to be taken care of by the other partner who doesn't seem to have these "issues."
Except that the coping mechanisms she developed precisely because of those situations have positioned her to deal very well with what's happening now, whereas the "healthy" partner doesn't have those skills and is struggling.
My own partner and I took a walk the other, during which the topic of sailing came up. I got talking about the clarity of being on a boat - the way you have to do whatever the captain says - no discussion, no compromise, no existential or philosophical debate.
My father explained these rules to me the first time I got on his boat. I was very small, but I got it.
I'm perplexed by my affection for interregnums in the regular workings of things. Interregnums where things cannot be debated, are just X.
I also love nuance and most of the prefer leading to following. I don't see how these things fit together. They feel extremely juxtaposed. Maybe there's a chapter in my Life Isn't Binary book that will explain to me how they are actually the same thing.
The thing I am trying to describe is a similar feeling to being on a plane or a delayed train. You can't physically do anything. The situation is literally out of your hands. I worry that this implies a desire on my part to renounce responsibility.
But as I reflect and, indeed, puzzle, perhaps what I like about it is the way it forces me to live in the present.
The way one does on stage, the way you deal with what is happening. The way what is happening is what is true is what you do is what is real. The way they tell you to look at the surface details of what surrounds you during a panic attack.
Perhaps what I fear is re-emerging into a space of more consistent forward and backward tugging in time, a space of more negotiation, a space with more options, which I might or might not select and if I select might or might not have consequences. So much seems to come down to curation, rather than response to what is.
Are these different things, though? Isn't improvisation, for example, an act of curation-in-the-moment?
I am straying far from the Philippines.
In this letter, we also learned Jack's Commander did not approve of naked showers under the eyes of the local women. It's curious that he locates this impropriety in terms of the offending men's whiteness (the Commander does, not Jack).
Are they meant to be held to a higher standard according to some colonialist mentality? Is it somehow more offensive for local women to see foreign men in the buff?
Would they not be more offensive if they were dirty?
We learned too that Winnie and Jack have been married for nearly a year.
It's working for him.
There's such evocation of place in this letter - the mosquito nets, the tents, the palm trees. I find myself thinking again about the thing-ness of the letter. That it's been there. It's been in Pennsylvania, been in London and is here now, in Prague with me. This is both obvious and remarkable really.
I love this whorl bent into the paper, like a rosette almost.
The letter ends with a certificate - he wants to buy a stone for her dinner ring "when two said parties can engage in a shopping expedition in a world at peace."
That is a line that will stay with me.
Until next time, be good, be happy, be loved -
[PS - here's the track we were listening too earlier, celebrating the varied origins of the United States' war effort - The Smiths and the Jones by Flanagan & Allen]