Letter - December 5, 2021
The thing about a milestone is that it’s transitory. You reach it and then bypass it immediately. It’s not a cenotaph but a marker of distance. It requires no ritual of recognition. Take a picture. Move on down the road.
As far as real letters go, I was raised with them, but it’s been years since I wrote a personal letter. I wrote letters to my father when he was away on business, and letters home when I was at summer camp. I wrote a few to friends when I was at college, well before the advent of email. I certainly wrote letters of love, and heartbreak. Sometimes I wrote a letter to myself and shoved it in a drawer, a time capsule to myself. But it’s been over a decade since the last one. I’ve become accustomed to the directness of email and the intimacy of online messaging, so the effort that consumes one in crafting a real letter seems unreasonable. Yet I can honestly say that learning to speak my mind for a public forum where people are actually reading my thoughts over and over again, has proved less daunting and more inspiring.
Let me pause the introductory ramble and talk a little bit about the actual subjects that are inhabiting my mind. The best thing about a letter is the honesty, and the concrete quality with which it imparts what I used to call the meat of the matter. My current writing pursuits follow along the lines that I have previously announced, although the complexities involved in the difference between what I would like to write and what I can present publicly is another matter altogether. I felt a twinge of this in a previous letter when I described the story of Hermann Hesse’s novel DEMIAN. This book affected me strongly upon reading it when I was 15, and subsequently, I decided that every seven years I would read again, a ritual that I honored at least five more times before letting it drop. I wanted to revisit the conflict of the novel, to live through the struggles of Emil Sinclair, a symbol for my own innocence. Likewise, many of the characters who affect us represent our buried innocence, and our desire for experience, and possibly transformation.
My next essay on a contemporary artist will be another entry in the Paper Rage series, on Bernice Sokol Kramer. She is an artist I met at The Governor’s Island Art Fair in 2019, though I didn’t glimpse her work until I saw it online. Even then I could make no conditional response, for I found her oeuvre expansive, intimate, incongruous, and powerful. It was mainly collage with slight forays into drawing and sculpture. The collages were small but strong. They mined depths of human emotion, creating labyrinths of meaning with characters exhibiting a strong quality of agency, their eyes staring directly back upon the viewer. As I scroll back through the entirety of her Instagram account, I am further befuddled by the richness and idiosyncrasy found there.
My next essay for A READING SPACE will be on the novelist and poet Jack Kerouac. My secret is that I’m a lifelong devotee of his, and at one time I began writing a biography of him, and met all the people who had previously done so at literary conferences and readings here in New York. I wanted it to be an oral biography called “The House That Jack Built” in which I addressed all of the ideas that contributed toward the formulation of The Beat Generation. I have also collected widely amongst Kerouac’s peers, and have put my hands on certain volumes with great luck at my disposal. Collectibles though none of them really valuable except in an esoteric sense to the writer in me. I have steeped myself in the rich tradition of literary and philosophical leanings that made up the ethos of The Beats. Perhaps this will shape itself into a larger essay here on my Substack, for paid subscribers only.
I expect to post these essays soon. A week at most. While you’re waiting to read them, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. I am currently offering a Happy Holidays discount on yearly subscriptions through December. Consider gifting a yearly subscription to someone you love.
Warm regards,
David Gibson