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).

From her to eternity

There once was a story that I wanted to tell, but I assumed it was one you all knew too well. I wondered the best way to tell that story, how to make it interesting enough to not make you drift off and start fantasizing other things. Funnily, that was how I knew this story would break my heart.

“So there were Rhett and Scarlet, they...” I started. 

“What are they?” You asked.

“A couple. From Gone with the Wind.” 

“Oh, can’t be true love.”

“I think, unrequited is more like it.”

“Really? I didn’t know that.”

“In the dictionary, it is after truth”

I watch French films to learn words we never communicate. But for you talking is just too delicate. All you want is a good crime, all I can give is a good rhyme. That’s why we never agree on time. You always mentioned forever, when you really meant was never. I said whatever.

—A collage of things I've been reading and hearing for the last three weeks. Inspired by GONE WITH THE WIND (Victor Fleming, 1939).

Faking it seriously

Meeting people might be easy. The hardest part is meeting the devil inside. It is innate. What we can do is delaying the confrontation with the devil. Or, simply deceiving ourselves that he or she is not a devil incarnate, even when the facts suggest otherwise.

—Again, another note after a phone call from a relative. Partly inspired by the Will Smith character in SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION (Fred Schepisi, 1993)