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.