Love letters, revisited

The ontology of love letter

Every love letter has the same longing: an answer. That longing is manifested in every alphabet, word, and sentence. Answer comes in various tones. It could be explicit (I have the same feelings for you), meandering (You deserve better), or confusing (I am not accepting you, not rejecting you either).

Answer comes in various forms. It doesn’t have to be letters, although it is the most typical. It could be a verbal statement, a melody that invokes certain moods, or little objects that refer to some nostalgic moments. It could even be nothing. A nonanswer is a form of answers too, right?

The most expected answer is of course a change of status: from single to in a relationship, or from in a relationship to it’s complicated.

Tedium in the medium

Love letter is a light object, both literally and metaphorically. Normally it takes shape in a piece of paper, scribbled with silly musings or melancholic longings. Even when it is longer than one page, a love letter could still be folded and inserted into an envelope. In that form, love letter could be put anywhere, from the most banal (tabletop, vase, toilet) to the most sacred (church altar).

Love letter is easy to write because it is light. Everyone could write love letter anywhere and anytime. In fact, love letter is so light that it resembles a prayer. When one prays, one thrives on the longing of an answer. Of course, love letter and prayer end at different hands: the former ends at a person, the latter a deity. When it turns into a habit, writing love letters is like enacting a litany. Churches use litany to create a correspondence between the preacher and the congregation. One writes love letters to create a correspondence with one’s beloved.

Correspondence is a reciprocal activity. One starts a conversation, the other finishes. In its reciprocity lies intensity. One could spend minutes on one letter, but have it replied in years. It could be the other way around. One sure thing about corresponding in love letters: it creates tedium. A period of intense writing tends to bring out certain tendencies in people. There will be one or several modes of expression that are used and used again. Grab a collection of love letters in the nearest bookstore, or read again all the letters you once wrote, then you will see how certain words or phrases are favored over the others. On a long enough timeline, you are doomed to repeat your own narration to the point of boredom. Therefore love letter correspondence is easy to guess: the mood is either meanderingly romantic or hopelessly hopeful. Both leads to one thing: confirmation of feelings.

If such things happen to ordinary people like us, then why worry. We are too entrenched in the mundane affairs of everyday life. We rarely have the time to learn the subtlety of language. Surprisingly, most of the great writers suffer the same syndrome. Voltaire’s love letters, for example, are drenched with superficial phrases like I adore you and oh my lovely. For your information, Voltaire is a legendary 18th century French writer, renowned for his sharp and witty criticism of the government. Shakespeare is no better. His love letters are filled with romantic clichés such as the most humble, the most worthy, and the most noble. Sure he is a romantic, but that is no excuse. Everyone is a romantic in his or her own limits. What differentiates us laymen and them artists is talent, but love somehow eradicates that gap.

World without us

Love letter is exclusive. It speaks of a world between two people. The world outside is negated and considered nonexistent. That is why there are very few love letters that could involve their readers emotionally.

Unless you are its subject.

Postman only rings once

Technology makes love letters nearly extinct. It transforms letter A and B into binary codes of zero and one. In the age of digital watches, love letter suffers the same fate as analog clocks: pushed into the margin of production, and used only by cultists and purists.

Telephone signals the beginning of love letter’s demise. Compared to letters, telephone offers greater illusion of intimacy. Listening to voices is indeed a more sensual experience than reading words. Telephone also decreases the time people spend waiting for replies, whereas letter is eternally married to the postmen. Without them, letter is nothing but a verbal masturbation of an individual.

Then come cellular telephone and computer. Both offer a similar feature: a virtual mailbox with space big enough to contain thousands messages. With that, both reimagine the sensation of corresponding in letters digitally. Modernity spares people from the physical humdrum of writing letters. Nowadays people could just copy things they find in internet, rearrange them, and claim what they just create as a love letter.

It doesn’t mean that love letter is immune to copy-pasting. Many people base their love letters from another source. Quotation, or plagiarizing in some cases, is one issue that is apparent in all communication mediums. But the real issue here is not originality. In receiving a letter or reading a message, people perhaps don’t care anymore whether what they are reading is original or not. What matters here is emotion: is the emotion manifested in what I read true or not? In the era of instant messaging, the physicality of a letter tends to make its reader asking: how much effort he or she put in writing this?

Letter is the product of a ritual. People don’t just write letters. There are several things that need to be prepared before a letter is produced. One of them is paper. Every paper has its own scent and texture, therefore every paper has its own emotional impact. Writing a letter requires one to make sure that the smallest details support the effect one wants to evoke. After that, one needs to think how the letter should be delivered. As pointed above, letter is married eternally to postmen. As a physical medium, letter needs to delivered physically too. Postmen is just one option, others include handing the letter directly or slipping it into your lover’s bedroom window. Many options are available, but all of them require manual labor.

Therefore there is one thing that letter could but digital technology could not create: the illusion of sacrifice. The consensus nowadays is that technology is there to decrease what people perceive as manual labor. In the case of writing letters, technology allows people to relax their muscle and focus solely on the construction of messages. The message itself could be copied from almost anywhere, and internet makes copying an effortless task. Because of that, people leave letters and go digital. Unfortunately, this leads people to distrust personal feeling that is expressed digitally. There is no effort in being romantic nowadays. With the right website, everyone could be a romantic in minutes.

Two or three things I know about you

Love letter is a fragment of its writer. When writing a love letter, people think about one part he or she wants to expose.

Meaning: they who write love letters are exhibitionists.

Alone, together

Love letter is a distinct way of storytelling. Unlike stories in general, love letter always happen in the present. That immediacy is created by the assumption built by two people that corresponds in love letters. They imagine they are facing each other in some kind of private haven. What they feel becomes what they write. Even when writing about the past, they tell it in present tenses. No wonder Goethe, a German literary giant, described love letter as the most immediate breath of life.

Love letter has two irreplaceable protagonists: “you” and “I”. This is the intimacy that love letter offers: a world where “you” and “I” no longer exist. “you” and “I” are transported into another world, less painful and more colorful than the world we live in. In short, a world imagined by “you” and “I”.

Therefore, a correspondence of love letters is no different than an anthology of monologues. The temporal gap between each letter isolates the writers in their personal space. There is no other audience except themselves. The writers then could only speak out what they feel to themselves. The writers become the first audience of their works. Thus their days are spent in expressing themselves. For love letter writers, expression become the image of their own alienation.

Sissyphus

A question that haunts every love letter writers: what is it that you write? Is it fact or fiction? No matter how true you write it, how total you construct your feelings, it is nothing but a product of your imagination.

Romance is in the head, life is out there.


—A very, very old essay of mine. Parts of it had been published in this blog. This is the first time the writing is published in its entirety. Partly inspired by ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (Michel Gondry, 2004)

Life begins from a plastic beach ball

When you begin to shape your life on anything round, there are only two possibilities: either you are a poet or simply mad. I believe I am the latter. This peculiar obsession stems from my childhood.

One day my father bought me a plastic beach ball, and I simply fell in love with it. You know how balls can be a man’s best friend, both literally and metaphorically. You could apply any force to it, and it would go to the direction you intended. Unless, of course, something obstructs its trajectory. Basic laws of physics, I presume. Time passed and I began to look for more balls. More kinds of round objects, to be exact. Soccer balls, tennis balls, marbles, round Christmas tree ornaments. I had them all. When I saw those balls roll around my house, I felt like a god, albeit an insignificant and temporary one.

However, living with my parents always involves some kind of moving. First, they forced me to move with them. For a male with twenty-three years marked on my identity card and initially zero ambition to be an explorer, I move quite a lot. Right now, I could recall six cities, seven houses and eight schools that have seen me growing and getting old. Next, they forced me to move on from the favorite things I used to play with. For my parents, it was a natural thing to do. “You are an adult now,” said my father by the time of my puberty. He separated me from my balls, and introduced me to a closet of shirts and belts, the usual advertorial package for a supposedly full-grown man. I was twelve years old, but felt twenty years older than I was supposed to be.

Separated from my lovely balls, I found solace in stories. Stories have circular quality too. It begins with a fall, from what the protagonist presumes as an ideal condition, and ends with a rise, to what the protagonist presumes as an alternative ideal condition. In between the two extremes, you practically have all the freedom in the world. You could apply any force to your protagonist, and he or she would go to the direction you intended. Unless, of course, something obstructs his or her trajectory, like illegal longings, unfulfilled desires, and regrets on what could have been. Basic laws of storytelling, I presume. Time passed and I began to invent more stories. More kinds of circular self-contained stories, to be exact. Symmetries are comforting, because they suggest a design where actually there is none. When I see my imaginary protagonists ride off to the sunset with their hard-fought love, I feel like a god, albeit an insignificant and temporary one.

Survivors of the wreck of a childhood, aren’t we all?

—A musing to pass the time, written in between drafts of a POSTCARDS FROM THE ZOO (Edwin, 2012) review. No connection to the film whatsoever. Just intrigued by the circular nature of the film.

In between beauty and melancholy, lies Rilo Kiley

The saga of everyman and everywoman

You suck. You are a failure at relationships. Your career is in a state of advanced entropy. And you just can’t seem to get your shit together.

This might be your life. Rilo Kiley feels your pain.

The saga of Ben Rilo and Stephen Kiley

It was 1909 in a small mid-western town. The protagonists were Ben Rilo and Stephen Kiley. Each an aspiring football player, and they were in love. The bright lights of their possible future somehow didn’t diminish the loneliness of their present lives. On a railroad, they bound their bodies together, with arms of flesh as their sole support. The conductor didn’t see them until it was too late. The momentum of the train was too great, as it cascaded through the ties that bound the two lovers, silently standing together, silhouetted as one.

The validity of the story above is questionable. However, of all the stories associated with the origin of Rilo Kiley’s name, this one is arguably the most interesting.

Being romantic is hardly a sin

On 14 July 2011, Rilo Kiley had officially split up. Blake Sennet attributed “deception, greed, and, betrayal” as the factors behind the end of the band. Journalists suggested more neutral speculations, such as Jenny Lewis’ side projects and the loss of Jason Boesel to Bright Eyes. In an interview, Sennet stated that, “I would say that if Rilo Kiley were a human being, he’s probably laying on his back, in a morgue with a tag on his toe. Now, I see movies where the dead get up and walk. And when they do that, rarely do good things happen.” It is safe to conclude that the saga of Rilo Kiley ends here.

Their legacy however doesn’t just end there. Many fans, including me, mourn their demise. Just as every mourning always comes with a salute, I intend this writing to be my salutary remark to Rilo Kiley. As I scouted the net, I could not find a single piece of text dedicated to analyzing the band’s body of works in depth. All I found were news, interviews, and live reports. Those are useful as historical documents, but not sufficient to portray Rilo Kiley as an artistic force, which they deserve to be. I hope this article could fill that hole a little.

It is easy to dismiss Rilo Kiley as a band for the romantics. To some extent, the stereotyping is true. The band’s body of works is filled with ballads, which are considered by critics as modernized torch songs. In the old days, a torch song is a sentimental love song, usually jazz or blues, in which the singer laments an unrequited or lost love. The term torch song comes from the saying “to carry a torch for someone”, or to keep aflame the light of an unrequited love. Throughout the band’s lifespan, the theme of love is revisited again and again in their four albums. Adding to that is the band’s aural packages, with which Rilo Kiley updates the old niche with pop-folk-rock tunes and hip stream-of-consciousness lyrics. The general consensus is that Rilo Kiley seeks to please their audience with bountiful hooks and sappy lyrics, hence the stereotyping of the band as consumption of the romantics.

On the other hand, I share the view of the stubborn minority, that is the romantics. Being romantic is hardly a sin. Romance and reality are too closely intertwined to be considered as opposites. If truth is something that you invent to live, isn’t being a realist is just the same as being a romantic? Living life as reality dictates is just the same as imposing your ideal views on your surroundings. In the former you choose to limit yourself, while in the latter you choose to limit reality. Both require selections, which are intricately tied to you as a human being. Thus, no matter how romantic Rilo Kiley’s songs are, they too speak about the profound truths that we encounter every day.

I believe there are two sides to romance. First, there is a world associated with happiness, security, and peace. The focus is usually on childhood, or an innocent pre-genital period of youth. Such world is called the idyllic, which brings to mind images of spring, summer, flowers, and sunshine. The other is a world of adventures, which involve separation, loneliness, humiliation, pain, and the threat of more pain. In the literary circles, this world is often called the demonic. Because of the powerful polarizing tendency in romance, one is usually carried directly from one to the other. Rilo Kiley’s version of romance, however, is not of the extremes. The band resides in the gray area, in between beauty and melancholy.

In more practical terms, the gray area is the gap between what one is and what the other expects one to be. It is either the becoming or the unbecoming of an individual. Thematically, such existential dilemma has become the hallmark of Rilo Kiley’s works. I take this as a sign of the band’s intelligence as songwriters. By this, I of course refer to Jenny Lewis and Blake Sennet, the band’s primary songwriters, even though Lewis would dominate the band’s later works. There are certain philosophical depths behind the surface of Rilo Kiley’s songs, which somehow go against the grain of what critics often say about the band. Rilo Kiley is not just a bunch of well-dressed indie kids, drunk on high doses of love-free-or-die-hard romanticism and too-cool-for-school cynicism. They are definitely more than that.

Modern life and old-fashioned feelings

A closer look on the Rilo Kiley’s discography would reveal the thematic development throughout the band’s career. This analysis is helped by the fact that all Rilo Kiley’s albums are tied to an overriding concept, even in the seemingly random Initial Friend EP (1999). In their first musical offering, the band reflects on love and life through a collection of bouncy pop-folk songs. All of the songs narrate tales of a protagonist stuck in a crumbling relationship. The protagonist has all these ideals about the relationship he or she is in, but finds the truth out of tune with his or her expectations. While complaining about how things should have been, the protagonist keeps on doing things the way things been going on for some time. In existential terms, the protagonist is caught in bad faith. The protagonist not only lies to others, but also to his or her self. Thus, the disappointments and the heartbreaks.

Such bad faith is explicitly displayed in the track Glendora. The chorus goes like this, “I cry, cry, cry, then I complain. Come back for more, do it again.” One could sense the circular regret enclosed around the protagonist. Yet one could also see how the protagonist keeps on returning to the same heartbreak, over and over again. The more playful version of the conflict could be found in the track Frug. The female protagonist makes references to some classic dance moves, before linking it to things that she must do in order to get through the relationship she is in. The dance moves become the conventions of her relationship, which she struggles to fulfill. The track Asshole narrates the neurosis of a male protagonist in a post-coital situation. The clue lies in the line “How can I change you?” in the middle of the song, and the line “There I go believing you again” in the end.

The theme of love would undergo an update in Rilo Kiley’s first full-length album, Take Offs and Landings (2001). Here, the band pits love in the age-old battle against money and time. The clue lies in the opening of the track Pictures of Success. In her bittersweet vocal, Lewis sings, “I’m a modern girl, but I fold in half so easily. When I put myself in the picture of success, I could learn world trade or try to map the ocean.” The focus now is on modern life, the setting in which the protagonist struggle against. According to social scientists, modern life is what happens when humanity begins to fiddle with the idea of rationality. Everything is calculated to the tiniest detail, as civilization seeks to promote clock-based reality and erase sentimental uncertainty. The standard of life therefore is defined by office hours and pay slips. Humans are only as good as their productive capabilities.

In Take Offs and Landings, Rilo Kiley longs for old-fashioned feelings, which are rendered incompatible by modern life. They bemoan the lack of human touch in the track Science vs. Romance, “Text versus romance. You go and add it all you want. Still we're not robots inside a grid.” They curse the tyranny of distance over human relationship in the track Wires and Waves, “There are oceans and waves and wires between us, and you called to say you're getting older.” They point out the capitalization of leisure times by work in the track Pictures of Success, “I'm not scared, but I'd like some extra spare time. I'm not scared, but the bills keep changing colors.” Last but not least, they criticize how psychology oversimplify human emotions in the track Don’t Deconstruct, “I'm not that basic, I swear. I've had enough of breakdowns and diagrams.”

Of course, there are some tracks that recall the naivety of Rilo Kiley’s previous effort. There is Always, which cheekily retells a girl-meets-boy story. The girl calls the boy a “phantom”, for pretending to be a man that he is not. She misses the real him, but she still loves him anyway. There is also Small Figure in a Vast Expanse. This time, the protagonist is a boy, who is trying to get over a girl. However, old habits die hard. He always winds up coming back to her, because it is what he knows best. In the end of the song, the boy sighed, “It's supposed to be real life. So let's pretend that we're not bored, and that we exist and we're resolved.” Again the gray area, the gap between what one is and what the other expects one to be, rears its head.

The years of loving dangerously

By their second full-length album, The Execution of All Things (2002), Rilo Kiley had achieved maturity. The record was a far more challenging record than the band’s previous efforts. Expanding on their usual fare of guitars, percussions and pianos, Rilo Kiley incorporated heavy electronica sampling to their repertoire. Musically, the record has a rather upbeat tone. Lyrically, it is often dark and morose. The reference to modern life continues, as Jenny Lewis asks the listeners to “get together and talk about the modern age” in the opening track, The Good That Won’t Come Out. Things however get more out of hand than before. There is no such thing as naive love. Here, love is a form of warfare against self, reality, and significant others.

Like in Rilo Kiley’s previous works, the protagonist of The Execution of All Things is stuck in the gray area. She (since the songs are mainly sung by Lewis) has all these ideals, but could not shake the fact that reality is tough to box with. As a solution, she turns into dreaming, creating pieces of editable reality in her head. Such existential spirit is perfectly embodied in the titular track, The Execution of All Things. The lyric shows that the protagonist is “feeling badly”. Reality is just too hard for her to bear, as she “rather not celebrate [her] defeat and humiliation” with the people around her. Therefore, she begs “soldiers” and “God” to take her away, and “crush all hopes of happiness with disease” for the people around her. “It’s not an attempt at decency,” she claims. She’s just paralyzed.

In less apocalyptic-minded tracks, such as A Better Son/Daughter and Hail to Whatever You Found in the Sunlight That Surrounds You, the protagonist resorts to pretending or putting a happy face. Tough times however are still happening around her. In the ballad Capturing Moods, the protagonist finds herself racing against time. She composes an imaginary timeline of her relationship and plays it forward. She sees “the laughs and fun up where the conversation flows”, “the coldest winter of [their] time”, and “[their] goodbyes”. At the same time, she reminds her significant other that “moods don’t command” him. There are works to be done and a life to be lived. She “[doesn’t] mind waiting” for him to return.

Rilo Kiley began to show signs of restlessness in More Adventurous (2004). Musically, the record is an amalgam of styles, as the band switches genres from track to track, from country ballads to to new-wave pop songs. Thematically, Rilo Kiley broke new grounds by referencing politics in It’s A Hit, the opening track of the album. At the time of production, various media sources indicated that Jenny Lewis was preoccupied with the war in Middle East. “Any chimp can play human for day,” sang Lewis in the beginning of the song, referring to the president and the gap between his true identity and his public image. Then, she followed it up with ramblings on war, sorority girls, Greek tragedy, writer’s block, God, and showbiz. Through the ramblings, the president is transformed from a chimp, to a sheep-wolf, then a camel. Human identity is indeed transient.

In the rest of More Adventurous, Rilo Kiley took their existential prose even further. The body-and-soul dilemma is thoroughly explored. In the track Portions for Foxes, the band created a spiritual sequel for their early hit, Glendora. The protagonist finds herself in a crumbling relationship, yet ends up being a war of head against heart throughout the song. Her head thinks the relationship is bad for all the parties involved, since she uses him only as “damage control for a walking corpse like [her]”. They just use each other for sex, with no feeling involved. Yet her heart craves for him, since the physical relationship “offers [her] another form of relief” from whatever loneliness she’s going through.

In the ballad A Man/Me/Then Jim, the band narrated similar existential dilemma through a triangular love story. It is about the reunion of two former lovers in a friend’s funeral. Together they talk about “the slow fade of love” and how it hits their deceased friend, Jim. The song is composed of three perspectives: a man’s, a woman’s, and Jim’s. The change of perspective reveals how the characters slips into “a gradual descent into a life [they] never meant”. The woman sees “living as the problem”, since she tries to survive by “selling people things they don’t want”. The man and Jim see life as a collection of painful memories. Both go through life cursing how things might have been. The difference is: the man bears on living unhappily, while Jim doesn’t. Upon seeing the woman, his “ex first love”, the man confronts her and reminisces about the past. On the other hand, Jim commits suicide upon seeing his “old lover’s house”.

Rilo Kiley’s dissection of the human condition peaked in the track The Absence of God. The title says it all really. Through lines such as “Planning’s for the poor, so let’s pretend that we are rich” and “We could be daytime drunks if we wanted, we’d never get anything done that way”, the song brings forth a godless reality, where humans are merely flotsams in the great sea of life. Without the idea of some omnipotent objective being watching us, humans’ action would mean nothing. Therefore, failures in life should not be regretted, since they are our “training grounds”. As Lewis sings the line “Just as your back’s turned, you'll be surprised...as your solitude subsides, everyone at some point in their life fails, so there is no need to worry. The Absence of God marries poetry and philosophy in such beautiful and accessible manner, that I believe the song is one of their best efforts to date, if not the best.

Happiness is a warm gun

Days of Rilo Kiley unfortunately were numbered. By the next album, Under the Blacklight (2007), the band had been divided, as its members were involved in some side projects. Jenny Lewis released Rabbit Fur Coat (2006), her debut solo album, which outsold every record Rilo Kiley had ever released. Blake Sennet released two albums with The Elected: Me First (2004) and Sun, Sun, Sun (2006). Under the Blacklight would be Rilo Kiley’s last act together. Technically, the record is Rilo Kiley’s. Spiritually, it is not. Lewis became the band’s de facto leader, as she controlled most of Rilo Kiley’s creative proceedings. Sennet and co was merely her support group. Critics speculated that Lewis was trying to design the record as her platform toward stardom. The validity of such speculation however still needs to be verified.

Despite the creative disparity, Rilo Kiley still sounded like a cohesive unit. In favor of new wave disco, the band ditched most of their country leanings and indie posturings. The glamorous package serves as complementary soundscape to the topic dissected in the album: sex. Here, Lewis sang a lot about sex, bad sex in particular. There is a tragic girl-gets-money-for-sex story in the track Close Call, hints of pornography in the The Moneymaker, the spoiled virginity of the protagonist of the track 15, and a saga about threesome in Dejalo. Despite all the humpings and physical contacts, as the lyrics suggest, happiness is awfully hard to find. None of the characters in the songs are satisfied with their lives. In this respect, Lewis is actually making a statement on the body-and-soul dilemma, which is apparent in practically every aspect of human life. If life is a game of chess, then happiness is a different game altogether.

At this point, I’d like to end my article by recalling a trivial event in Rilo Kiley’s carrer. When interviewing Jenny Lewis back in 2002, a journalist quoted Ernest Hemingway, "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know." Lewis sighed then smiled. "There’s a certain amount of comfort in that, isn’t there?"

-Naturally, a manuscript on Rilo Kiley. Inspired by and dedicated to Joan Lumanauw, a Rilo Kiley fan who once claimed that she could spend nights talking about her favorite band. Pictured above is Jenny Lewis (right) in PLEASANTVILLE (Gary Ross, 1998), her best acting to date, albeit in a small role.

Be humble or crumble

Man has a natural desire for knowledge. But, without introspection, what is the good of knowledge?

The Bible always considers a humble man is better than a proud scholar. There is nothing that one could be proud of, if you only spend your life observing the heavens above, and never give attention to your soul inside. If you really know your own nature as a human, you would set no value on yourself. You would take no pleasure in being praised by your fellows. Understanding a number of subjects is indeed impressive. But, there are many more of which you know nothing. You have no reason for pride. You only have reasons for admitting your own ignorance.

A theologian once said, “If you want to learn something that will really help you, aim at being unknown.” What he really meant was that one should understand one’s inmost nature and despise it. That is the highest and most profitable form of study. Wisdom does not lie in having high opinion of yourself, but in always thinking highly of others. When you see another person openly doing wrong, or committing some fault, you should not consider yourself a better person than he or she is. You never know how long you can avoid a fall.

We are all weak, but you should consider yourself the weakest of all.

—Just some thoughts of a confused graduate. Mostly written under the strange influence of DONNIE DARKO (Richard Kelly, 2001)

Wake me up when the postman knocks

Technology makes love letters nearly extinct. It transforms letter a and b into binary codes of zero and one. In the age of digital watches, love letter suffer the same fate as analog clocks: pushed into the margin of production, and used only by cultists and purists.

Telephone signals the beginning of love letter’s demise. Compared to letters, telephone offers greater illusion of intimacy. Listening to voices is indeed a more sensual experience than reading words. Telephone also decreases the time people spend waiting for replies, whereas letter is eternally married to the postmen. Without them, letter is nothing but a verbal masturbation of an individual.

Then come cellular telephone and computer. Both offer a similar feature: a virtual mailbox with space big enough to contain thousands messages. With that, both reimagine the sensation of corresponding in letters digitally. Modernity spares people from the physical humdrum of writing letters. Nowadays people could just copy things they find in internet, rearrange them into one coherent writing, and claim what they just create as a love letter.

It doesn’t mean that love letter is immune to copy-pasting. Many people base their love letters from another source. Quotation, or plagiarizing in some cases, is one issue that is apparent in all communication mediums. But the real issue here is not originality. When receiving a letter or reading a message, people perhaps doesn’t care anymore whether what they are reading is original or not. What matters here is emotion: is the emotion manifested in what I read true or not? In the era of instant messaging, the physicality of a letter tends to make its reader asking: how much effort he or she put in writing this?

Letter is the product of a ritual. People don’t just write letters. There are several things that need to be prepared before a letter is produced. One of them is paper. Every paper has its own scent and texture, therefore every paper has its own emotional impact. Writing a letter requires one to make sure that the smallest detail supports the effect one wants to evoke. After that, one needs to think how the letter should be delivered. As pointed above, letter is married eternally to postmen. As a physical medium, letter needs to delivered physically too. Postmen is just one option, others include handing the letter directly or slipping it into your lover’s bedroom window. Many options are available, but all of them require manual labor.

Therefore there is one thing that letter could but digital technology could not create: the illusion of sacrifice. The consensus nowadays is that technology is there to decrease what people perceive as manual labor. In the case of writing letters, technology allows people to relax their muscle and focus solely on the construction of messages. The message itself could be copied from almost anywhere, and internet makes copying an effortless task. Because of that, people leave letters and go digital. Unfortunately, this leads people to distrust personal feeling that is expressed digitally. There is no effort in being romantic nowadays. With the right websites, everyone could be a romantic in minutes.

—More explorations on the nature of love letters. This one is inspired by SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE (Nora Ephron, 1993)

If you tolerate this, your children will be next

I believe, love is as much a sentimental product as it is a sociological construct. It is a promiscuous conspiracy by the media consortium. Television portrays love as soap operas and melodramas, while newspaper turns it into stories of sexual and murderous obsessions. Hollywood treats it as a fairy tale for the feminine and a muscle show for the masculine. Hence, the terms damsel in distress and knight in shining armor come into existence.

The problem is, we are very much conditioned by the media. Most of us learn a lot about coupleship from the media, from those shallow portrayals of romantic affairs. As a consequence, we grow up dreaming. We grow up with the idea that fate would bring us to our princes or princesses. However, reality suggests otherwise, even to the real princes and princesses. Just look at the tragic love story of Prince Charles and Princess Diana.

My last romantic debacle impelled me to question myself: which comes first, media or misery? Do I consume these songs, films and books because I feel miserable? Or do I feel miserable for the media tell me so? Of all the hype about teenagers listening to suicidal love songs and housewives doing sessions of soap operas, people only worry that some kind of mindless entertainment will take them over. Strangely, almost nobody worries about grown-ups remembering thousands of memories about broken hearts, rejection, pain, and loss. Even less people worry that those grown-ups would continue living with the same flawed dream.

Love might be a comedy for the working class, tragedy for the bourgeois, and both for the enlightened bourgeois. But, really, the only way to survive in this day and age is to lose the illusions created by the media. In this case, losing an illusion is better than finding a truth. Success in love does not depend on the answers you have, but on the questions you ask to yourself.

—Some musings after a late-night conversation in a noodle shop, and a session of ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU (Shunji Iwai, 2001)

These are hard times for dreamers

P: I wonder what made Amelie so convinced that she was going to be together with that photomat guy, that made her determined and unbreakable...

A: Naivety and childlike sense of wonder. Mostly found in the protagonist of Spielberg's films.

P: That sounds absurd, don't you think so? Almost fairy tale-ish. Damn! I thought I could get some practical tips...

A: Oh well, love itself is never a practical thing, isn't it?

P: But relationship is.

—A twittering session with Pulung Uci, my lecturer and counselor for my thesis. The last sentence was a nice dose of reality, and makes me wonder about AMELIE (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001) too.

Expression as an image of alienation

Love letter is a distinct way of storytelling. Unlike stories in general, love letter always happen in the present. That immediacy is created by the assumption built by the two person corresponding in love letters. They imagine facing each other in some kind of private haven. What they feel becomes what they write. Even when writing about the past, they tell it in present tenses. No wonder Goethe, a German literary giant, described love letter as the most immediate breath of life.

Love letter has two irreplaceable protagonists: you and I. Everyone else becomes secondary character. This is the intimacy that love letter offers: a world where you and I no longer exist. You and I are transported into another world, less painful and more colorful than the world you and I live in. In short, a world imagined by you and I.

Therefore, a correspondence of love letters is no different than an anthology of monologues. The temporal gap between each letter isolates the writers in their personal space. There is no other audience except themselves. The writers then could only speak out what they feel to themselves. The writers become the first audience of their works. Thus their days are spent in expressing themselves. For love letter writers, expression become the image of their own alienation.

—A re-edited fragment of my essay about love letter. The revision was made after a session of YOU'VE GOT MAIL (Nora Ephron, 1998) at 3 AM in the morning.

Be happy with whatever you could be happy with

You lead a comfortable life. You have enough friends to neutralize whatever problems you are having. Your so-called loneliness is just the by-product of your business and your low confidence in your physical assets. You can always leave your work, and you can always renovate your physical assets. You have enough capital to do so. You instead choose the hard way, and complain to everyone about how helpless you've become. Typical middle-class. Always in need of a new adventure.

Right, you have a special condition. You could never express your feelings to your other half. You always feel that you are going to be alone for a long time. You could not do whatever you want to do, because you still live on the money of your mothers and your relatives. But, you still have friends. You still have enough talents to compensate your failures in love department.

Suicide, eh? I am not going to be a righteouss asshole and say it is wrong. But, please, think again. Be rational for a minute. If you think your life is hopeless, are you brave enough to leave the comfort you are having? Do you have enough guts to tell your parents that you wish to live your life the way you want it, with your own money, and on your own?

If you think you are alone in this life, do you dare to take that rope and betray the last person you always have: yourself? Do you think you can last languishing in the afterlife alone, while your friends and I live in this sad-but-beautiful world? Do you have enough guts to make that jump and scream those leaving words?

If your answer is no, then stop singing about tragedy. You are a perfect boy with a perfect life. Life is too good for you to beat. You should bear it until God decides your natural end.

—An angry note I wrote after confronting a friend bored with his own existence. This happened two years ago, and wisely he chose to continue living. SUICIDE CLUB (Sion Sono, 2001) naturally brings back the memories.

The ontology of love letter

Every love letter has the same longing: an answer. That longing is manifested in every alphabet, word, and sentence. Answer comes in various tones. It could be explicit (i have the same feelings for you), meandering (you deserve better), or confusing (i am not accepting you, not rejecting you either).

Answer comes in various forms. It doesn’t have to be letters, although it is the most typical. It could be a verbal statement, a melody that invokes certain moods, or little objects that refer to some nostalgic moments. It could even be nothing. A nonanswer is a form of answers too, right?

The most expected answer is of course a change of status: from single to in a relationship, or from in a relationship to it’s complicated.

—A piece of an old writing that I found in my harddisk. Reminds me of the day I was impressed by MARY AND MAX (Adam Elliot, 2009).