... 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.
I recently read recount of the contemplative joy that Rousseau recounts—in old age, I should imagine—about his journeys out to exuberantly catalog all the diversity of life. Yes, as you wrote, “the whole world is slow and solitary” at times. There’s the poet Stanley Kunitz, nearly 100, watching the garden grow.
At my touch the wildI didn’t make a chance to share with you how much my life has been, long ago (you write),
braid of creation
trembles
more filled with signs of things I feel I need rather than the presence of things I’ve found. It’s the curse of a desperate reader.I didn’t make the chance because I was so thrilled through you with the presence of things found. You had so much fun showing me things, I could only hope to return the gift someday (beyond giving conceptuality to your darling—to me profound—improvisations).
I happily believed—and believe—that your garden, in the broadest sense (including your reveries as well as your vegetables), is your answer to the “the desperate reader.”
I’m not a desperate reader anymore, though it was a long way to this point. My Chaplinesque image of the endearing intellectual with his storehouse of books (as if never finding a satisfying one—no) is maybe exactly suited to how you
find hidden in dialogue or held up in final pages answer after answer, voiced by characters who don’t exist, written down by men who are dead, dead, dead….But their words are an invitation to live with them, and you evidently did find enough to gain in yourself “love that has no boundaries,” you wrote later.
We are not dead, and that counts. We may love dialogue with the word—an inwordness—like life itself.
In comparison, the room where I sit is airless, the book useless, my life awkward and directionless.I got great joy from Invisible Cities. You wrote:
Calvino is a storyteller who takes me by the hand and leads me around my airless rooms….and he gives me new eyes, leaves me with life in a new world.I started a romance again with Calvino, but it was you who gave me new eyes.
Walking the streets of The Castro that evening, we were sometimes laughing together so happily, I could hardly walk.
Fortunately, the likes of Calvino, your garden, the life you’re making now, I hope, is your “reminder of my wonderful, thrilling love affair with the world,” which is what I have, too, in my own way. The endless joy I showed with you, evinced by you, was ours, embodied for my part.
In my own way, all I seek to do, all I’ve sought ever to do, is make my invisible city, though it’s conceptual, rather than imagistic. You were such a complement, with your thrilled lines of poems on walls, oddities from online, and whatall—which is what it’s all about: O, whatall the world provides! Life is so much.
The hundred-year-old poet writes:
I can scarcely wait til tomorrow when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.
Dec. 20, 2008
Gary, the things you love about me are, to the most minute detail, the things I love about myself. Having you say them out loud is proof they exist, for nobody has touched them before. You’ve given me so many beautiful things, but this is the one that leaves me shattered and useless. You said, at one time, “and how could I not long to see myself through you as much as chance allows?” I wasn’t looking for that, but you brought it to me anyway and I’m changed because of it. I wonder if my life will allow me to thank you for that as you deserve.
You’re so much a part of me already....You’ve made me feel like even I might have a book inside of me. And, for all this, you aren’t asking me to give anything up. It’s the single most generous gift I’ve ever received. I want your friendship for the rest of my life, Gary. And, as you do know, I love you too.
