dear Naomi, I lost your address!

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Dear Naomi,

I’ve lost your mailing address! I have your long letter—incredibly, deliciously long—but it doesn’t have your address in Peru on it. Your envelop got tossed accidentally, which I didn’t realize until days later. I’m desperately sorry. That was no unconscious desire to avoid responding. I’ve been doing too much, being too dissociative during a clean-up day. I expect your exasperated follow-up note about why I didn’t reply to a girl I helplessly adored 34 years ago. Meanwhile,…

thanks to you...

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... everything has turned into gardening (though I was using the rubric “conceptual gardening” before I met you). You couldn’t have realized last December how I took you to heart—you, writing in your flowing hand, inside the worn cover of a very used paperback of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities….

E.M. Cioran said…“He who doesn’t envy the vegetable has missed the human drama.”

I’m looking at a picture of Cioran. I think of the tragic condition of Europe that his generation had to bear. Europe’s modernity was premised on a negative sense of freedom, relative to centuries of domination. America, on the contrary, according to Andrew Delbanco, in The Real American Dream, is premised on a positive sense of freedom. We don’t envy the vegetable, we personify it, as if poetic license belongs to our nature. Even the notion of “America” is a poetic device.