Carla:

There is something in your written voice that I respond to by wanting to address you directly.
Journalism would offer the illusion of everyone having been seen and heard. You writing exactly the inverse. I seem to want to answer you directly or is it that this voice of yours is simply more "out loud" than I am used to "hearing" when I read? So that having been addressed out loud I want to repond out loud. This has occured since I first read -Under The Bridge- in 1980.

Forms usually invite people into a private room to hear the author. Yours seems to invite me into a public room to talk to you. So, hi Carla! Nice to read you, just now in -Animal/Instincts Prose Plays Essays from *This* (1989)
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One ideal is to be able to savor the words while not having your own thoughts be disturbed at all. "Your own thought" really being your feelings of sharing a space. Two people sitting side by side feeling things and saying nothing. Not as in a movie by Michaelangelo Antonioni, but the people feeling things about being with somebody else. These are not necessarily romantic feelings, but just responses to being in the other person's company.

If you've promised yourself something for a long time and have also been waiting for a long time this not only doesn't make it more or less important but if might have becme meanwhile semi- or completely unconscious. This is how the arteries get clogged, the conduits and passageways are filled with awkward, even playful silences. These promises are fully meant and fully intentional.

Some writing you can read for years and not completely penetrate it while other writing completely penetrates you and surrounds you like an aura in seconds or minutes. It's hard to read both kinds of writing (even though you want to very much) because the one exhausts you in details, while the other, in a few details, exhausting you with so much connection and intertwining feelings you are immediately overwhelmed with a combination of unconscious pleasure, sympathy, grief, pity , anger, frustration, compassion that the emotions almost cross each other out.

It is because I am on an extended vacation that I have any of the time to see these feelings come to light and air each other out enough to permit their being seen. In a sense, this is more a public space than a private space, and, for once, I'm almost comfortable in the public space.

"A funny thing happened to me on my way to the public space."

(Now, don't forget to write that letter to Michael (Gottlieb), too- the one where I mentnioned -96 Tears- and wrote several passages in a way I wrote awhile back and haven't written like in some time.)

Reading- certain kind that makes you remember what you thought you'd remembered but really forgot. Carla- your writing does this. There is a contrapuntal aspect to this- and invitation to harmonize. You make me want to ask: now what is it about me that makes me want to be forgotten- when, what a writer needs more than anything else to be remembered. I long to retain my status of invisibility while appearing everywhere. Now, am I imitating you or have you recently asked me to be somewhere where, for once, I am completely myself- but still, I have disguised myself by placing all of this in a disruptive state- so, while it appears I've gotten nowhere actually I've filled up several pages while heightening with an excited mood only what I must have expected would happen- and would expect to happen all the time- when it felt like it was hardly happening at all while still allowing me to suspect it might still be happening.

At some vantage points everything looks like Beckett and feels like Beckett- a big desert with, nevertheless, ample space to breathe.
(8/18/93)