writing matters (2)

The forms of communicating with the other in his/her absence have multiplied and accelerated beyond belief over the past decades. At once producers and products of our changed, anguished sense of time and of our loss of intimacy, they have brought into disrepute that once quintessential vehicle for defending ourselves against the pain of separation: a painstakingly handwritten letter.

Maybe because your bodily investment into it is so limited (or at least so automatised), maybe because the sense of distance in space & time can be so easily deluded through its apparent immediacy and its lack of physicality, an e-mail can never be a substitute for that fiction of intimate connection which a letter aims to create.

Pace all e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, blog, etc., enthusiasts, no other space of communication gives you so much scope for self-creation and self-discovery than a letter to a friend, a lover, a close relative. In its unabashed physicality - the handwriting, the paper, the textures, the scents - a letter assumes itself as an idealisation, a fantasy of intimacy, and, at the same time, a testimony of distance.

The response it eventually elicits (or not) is beside the point, because the wait, the anticipation itself is part of the movement of creation - that transformation of affect hunger into hallucinatory nourishment, of loneliness into an imaginary communion.

A sustaining fiction, in sum, unlike all the other seemingly more sophisticated yet impoverishing fictions we continue to invent to tackle distance and separation.