Diary 46

07.13.24

Had a profound experience of nature yesterday standing under a 270-foot waterfall, every surface cloaked in thick layer of moss that you could smell before you could see. In moments like these the scale of the earth seems limitless, nearly impossible to grasp. The air felt the way it does before a storm—swollen, damp, penetrated by these wild, immense gusts of wind—even though it was a cloudless summer day. And all I could manage to do was stand in awe, soaked in my clothes, one hand holding the hat on top of my head so the wind wouldn’t take it.

07.15.24

Whenever I go antiquing I’m always hunting for old paper: books, journals, prints, letters, etc. Few days ago I found a postcard embossed with rosebuds, and an envelope attached containing two letters—one dated 1910, and the other 1911.
The letters are written in pencil, from a father to his daughter named Fay. The content is sparse, but thoughtful—he’s asking about Fay’s well being, curious about the quality of her relationship and what her husband does for work. In both letters he talks passionately about going fishing. “I am staying with John and Winnie and expect to stay here all winter. I have caught so many fish since I came here that I am ashamed to look a fish in the face and I have ate so many that I feel fishy and want to go down to the river and swim,” he writes…

The thing about letters that really captures me is that conversations are intentional, distilled. I’ve spent most of my life relying on language to bring me closer to others, and the format of a letter just feels tailored to this endeavor, provides us an opportunity to sit down and be thoughtful about the way we speak with one another. So I think collecting letters is my way of reorienting within a society that’s almost entirely dependent on technology to communicate. Technology that’s changing the way we interact with one another on a regular basis.

I don’t necessarily consider this shift towards technology a bad thing; although I would argue that the way in which we communicate is becoming, in my opinion, increasingly shallow. Social media is a prime example. It provides us some semblance of engagement in another person’s life—i.e. watching someone’s story, replying to it with fire emojis, liking someone’s post—and that’s all good fun, but nowadays it’s rare we take the time to formally check in with one another beyond that. To be frank, delete your social media and find out who your real friends are. In the letters I’ve collected, conversations are intimate, purposeful. Only the marrow of what needs to be said is written down, and the information is personalized. It reads like the kind of interaction you’d have with a person sitting across the table from you. And I really think there’s some blueprint here for how to give and receive care through language, so we may not feel so estranged from one another long-term.

07.17. 24

Jude Nutter, “Love Walking out of the Room,” from Pictures of the Afterlife (2002).

The rain falls with less beauty,
now, to the open ground, and the shadows of crows
pass freely over the lawn. Here is an absence
that will never be undone by even the busy work
of wings. Your mother is dying. And a storm
has thrown down the cottonwood outside your window.

Pavlova’s dying words, your mother says, were a quiet request
that her swan costume be made ready; and Elizabeth Browning
in reply to Robert, who had asked how she felt, said
beautiful. And such a thing it is that carries
us over: the slight vessel words can make. This,

your mother tells you, is the final trick pulled from the dark
sleeve of the body; a wisdom we spend our lives
perfecting. It’s what goes with us, beyond reach.

There are no swans here. But each evening, as you wheel
her along that footpath between the river
and the open fields, there are Carolina grasshoppers
carrying their durable bodies between dark wings
hemmed with yellow. Like the right words, they arrive
when you stop looking, and your mother is happy
with their singing; with the way they launch themselves
out from under her wheels and vanish
into the grass. When she tires

of this you know there is nothing
more to be done. There are no heroics: hospice, please,
she says; ashes, please, and then stops asking
for what she wants. But you tell her anyway
how your heart invented the permanence

of the world for its own sake and came to depend
completely on the private erasure
of leaves, on a formal solitude it could enter
without going anywhere. You spend a whole morning

bullying one, small grasshopper into a jar,
which you then slip inside your purse and smuggle
past the nurses. Beside her bed it tests the boundaries
of its surprising world, its body tapping
patiently against the thin glass for hours until
you release it at last into the room where it sings
from the lax folds of the flowered curtains, from the silver
sling of the U-bend beneath the sink; sings, even,
from the pockets of the jacket your mother
has chosen and hooked over a print of van Gogh’s
Bedroom in Arles, shrouding

all its gold. After it alights there’s always a final
blink of yellow as a Carolina grasshopper folds
away the cloak of its wings, and it’s like that moment
when you look up just in time to catch
the last glimpse of someone you love walking

out of a room: an iridescent button, perhaps,
against the cuff of a blouse, or the polished heel of a shoe;
the shoulder of a favorite jacket frisked with rain.
And your mother is listening
because the consequences of not listening
are always dire. How lucky we are, she says,
from the threshold to whatever realm it is
she has been testing, that some doors stand open
forever.

Cy Tombly’s notes on George Seferis’ “Solstice.”