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.
—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)
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