and wordpress is slowly - and perhaps uploading my text? (Yes text- how retro, time consuming and beyond a hundred characters.
Wordpress may or may not ever upload this file - or simply take longer. I'll try it here as well and perhaps google and wordpress can argue later about who really- really owns my copy ( I say I do:)
Blog Title: Letters To: W.S. Merwin From: Purgatorio
Title: Love Letter too/to/two/2/:
Subtitle: The beginnings of my affair with a man I have never met who is either in his 90’s or quite possibly dead.
November 16th, 2012
Dear Merwin,
I have only just begun the journey and already I want to edit Dante. This want(ing) to tighten the verse began in your forward and therefore I put both yours and Dante’s book aside. Perceived as a mere dabbler, or merely for dabbling, should I really be heading toward your weighty waters?
It was just such a similar urge, as to edit Dante, that repeatedly echoed in me all evening, then into the night and mo(u)rning finds me writing. Thus Merwin I gratefully picked you up again tonight for you and Dante are the surer of my urges. The other urge- no the line kept and keeps returning as a message I thus far wont send as those waters are far more weighty than dabbling with or in Dante’s ink.
Being that in my last letter I mentioned that I may have fallen a bit in love with you I would understand your finding what will follow to perhaps be: inappropriate, crass &/or emotionally inconsiderate.
However as we have never met, you don’t know that I exist, plus you may be dead, and even if alive are in your nineties, and too being that you are a full continent and ocean away- only thus can I feel comfortable bringing the matter up with you, or anyone.
You Merwin because I became nervous about making a phone call, that I was about to make a phone call. I dialed the number three or four times and hung up, I hope, before it even rang.
I was as nervous as I was when I first sat down to write you Merwin. An emotional congruity, slight certainly but there. And too there was a clarity, the few hours I‘ve started to get here and there where “the machine“ that is my brain “is beginning to work again“. Within that clarity is and was simply what would hurt least? How can I most help, and even if not help - how to at the very least not hurt him when there is so much hurt on his plate right now? Right now when I just wish I could tell him a single sentence and it could just be what it is, saying /meaning only what it says.
I learned today that someone who was and simply remains dear and important to me, I learned his father died. I learned his father died very recently and I so wanted just to say “I’m sorry about your Dad”.
Problem is I shouldn’t call him generally. Thus calling him to send condolences is off the table, at least it should be. I wish I could- in that I wish I could be of comfort. Problem is I have to balance that against reality- the likely reality that hearing from me may simply upset him during a time of great losses and pain thus causing him more pain and me more pain because then I’ll just feel badly about having called to say I’m sorry your Dad died and I don’t want to be walking around feeling badly about something like that.
So that’s my present purgatorial hell.
Though eventually Merwin I did arrive at a rationalization. A rationalization I may eventually go with: an opportunity for him to be really clear and in that one last thing his father can give him…in a round about sort of way. It would be easier for me to live with the entirety of it all as well. Thus there’d be some symmetry, something positive even if delivered in and as a negative. It’s a final scene/act I could live with because obviously I found a place where “The End” is workable in my equation.
My wanting to contact him in his time of loss. I want to somehow ‘make it better’ like blowing on a cut after antiseptic. Problem is, last I heard: I’m salt. Either I’d be salt or he’s “been trapped under something heavy” to quote a writer named Nora Ephron.
Ned’s wife though, see I’ve been on a journey to make sure all things left unsaid get said/expressed/known. They were married so long and in long or particularly good pairings when one goes the other tends to follow them quite quickly. I never got to meet him, I doubt I’ll ever meet her and I wouldn’t want to upset her either but there was something I’ve wanted to thank her for and I don‘t know if that happened years ago. I don’t even know if its her or one of their daughters but I’ve always been so grateful for something one of those women did.
For the last six month s it felt so oddly similar to before Uncle Kenneth died but of course its not the same thing with the recently departed because - well for starters I never met him.
But like Kenneth there have been nudges and around them a feeling like the arrangement of open windows is/was about to change. That nudge accompanied by a whisper of something to do and I didn‘t. I thought : its posted on the internet, he knows- mission accomplished.
Problem is I didn’t and don’t know that.
Not 100%.
The whisper was sending the shorter and tighter version to Pensacola College care of a ma who taught physics. He could decide whether to pass it on or not.
Like Kenneth even though I felt this pull, my head and experience said no. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Yet I’ve been wrestling with a single sentence for the last 6 hours or so which is how I’ve come back to writing you Merwin.
There’s nothing lyrical about the sentence: I’m sorry about your dad, that he died.
See purgatory is more than appropriate reading material for me at this point because there is someone I care about wherein perhaps the most caring thing I can do is NOT call and say I‘m sorry your Dad died.
So W.S I may dabble in editing Dante and hopefully fall a bit in love with both of you some more because I look at the storyline of all this, the timing and I just have to remember what Nora wrote - which applies to me most certainly: “desperately want to call but am/are trapped under something heavy”.
In nearing a close it seems only good form to quote you back to you though I believe ‘mo(u)rning star’ would work better but obviously I would. That optional spelling edit doesn’t change the fact that I found your sentence arresting: “And we are standing on a shore seeing the first light before dawn seep into the sky, and the morning star”. In reading that sentence I wonder(ed) if you yourself hadn’t wanted to insert an editorial carrot into Dante’s prose here and there. Whereas I want to rearrange the sentences a bit and occasionally make a red line.
And of course I always want to comma splice because commas aren’t always the literary comma but too are the musical variety of where to take a breath, or the comma of theatre wherein it is almost a beat and most certainly the rhythm.
I find it difficult not to splice, comma splice that is.
I must continue to resist the urge to splice- except in poetry where I think it might still be allowed.
Maybe you and Dante will guide me out from this particular canal of Styx. Or perhaps I’ll relent to the aforementioned rationalization and thus in all this perhaps one last gift a father can give his son.
Lastly, I’m sorry Merwin. I’ve been two-timing you while writing this letter because I haven‘t, except at rare points, been writing you and only you. I’m feeling very conflicted and I didn’t know who else and perhaps how else to say any of this.
Carefully,
M.C.A.
Wordpress may or may not ever upload this file - or simply take longer. I'll try it here as well and perhaps google and wordpress can argue later about who really- really owns my copy ( I say I do:)
Blog Title: Letters To: W.S. Merwin From: Purgatorio
Title: Love Letter too/to/two/2/:
Subtitle: The beginnings of my affair with a man I have never met who is either in his 90’s or quite possibly dead.
November 16th, 2012
Dear Merwin,
I have only just begun the journey and already I want to edit Dante. This want(ing) to tighten the verse began in your forward and therefore I put both yours and Dante’s book aside. Perceived as a mere dabbler, or merely for dabbling, should I really be heading toward your weighty waters?
It was just such a similar urge, as to edit Dante, that repeatedly echoed in me all evening, then into the night and mo(u)rning finds me writing. Thus Merwin I gratefully picked you up again tonight for you and Dante are the surer of my urges. The other urge- no the line kept and keeps returning as a message I thus far wont send as those waters are far more weighty than dabbling with or in Dante’s ink.
Being that in my last letter I mentioned that I may have fallen a bit in love with you I would understand your finding what will follow to perhaps be: inappropriate, crass &/or emotionally inconsiderate.
However as we have never met, you don’t know that I exist, plus you may be dead, and even if alive are in your nineties, and too being that you are a full continent and ocean away- only thus can I feel comfortable bringing the matter up with you, or anyone.
You Merwin because I became nervous about making a phone call, that I was about to make a phone call. I dialed the number three or four times and hung up, I hope, before it even rang.
I was as nervous as I was when I first sat down to write you Merwin. An emotional congruity, slight certainly but there. And too there was a clarity, the few hours I‘ve started to get here and there where “the machine“ that is my brain “is beginning to work again“. Within that clarity is and was simply what would hurt least? How can I most help, and even if not help - how to at the very least not hurt him when there is so much hurt on his plate right now? Right now when I just wish I could tell him a single sentence and it could just be what it is, saying /meaning only what it says.
I learned today that someone who was and simply remains dear and important to me, I learned his father died. I learned his father died very recently and I so wanted just to say “I’m sorry about your Dad”.
Problem is I shouldn’t call him generally. Thus calling him to send condolences is off the table, at least it should be. I wish I could- in that I wish I could be of comfort. Problem is I have to balance that against reality- the likely reality that hearing from me may simply upset him during a time of great losses and pain thus causing him more pain and me more pain because then I’ll just feel badly about having called to say I’m sorry your Dad died and I don’t want to be walking around feeling badly about something like that.
So that’s my present purgatorial hell.
Though eventually Merwin I did arrive at a rationalization. A rationalization I may eventually go with: an opportunity for him to be really clear and in that one last thing his father can give him…in a round about sort of way. It would be easier for me to live with the entirety of it all as well. Thus there’d be some symmetry, something positive even if delivered in and as a negative. It’s a final scene/act I could live with because obviously I found a place where “The End” is workable in my equation.
My wanting to contact him in his time of loss. I want to somehow ‘make it better’ like blowing on a cut after antiseptic. Problem is, last I heard: I’m salt. Either I’d be salt or he’s “been trapped under something heavy” to quote a writer named Nora Ephron.
Ned’s wife though, see I’ve been on a journey to make sure all things left unsaid get said/expressed/known. They were married so long and in long or particularly good pairings when one goes the other tends to follow them quite quickly. I never got to meet him, I doubt I’ll ever meet her and I wouldn’t want to upset her either but there was something I’ve wanted to thank her for and I don‘t know if that happened years ago. I don’t even know if its her or one of their daughters but I’ve always been so grateful for something one of those women did.
For the last six month s it felt so oddly similar to before Uncle Kenneth died but of course its not the same thing with the recently departed because - well for starters I never met him.
But like Kenneth there have been nudges and around them a feeling like the arrangement of open windows is/was about to change. That nudge accompanied by a whisper of something to do and I didn‘t. I thought : its posted on the internet, he knows- mission accomplished.
Problem is I didn’t and don’t know that.
Not 100%.
The whisper was sending the shorter and tighter version to Pensacola College care of a ma who taught physics. He could decide whether to pass it on or not.
Like Kenneth even though I felt this pull, my head and experience said no. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Yet I’ve been wrestling with a single sentence for the last 6 hours or so which is how I’ve come back to writing you Merwin.
There’s nothing lyrical about the sentence: I’m sorry about your dad, that he died.
See purgatory is more than appropriate reading material for me at this point because there is someone I care about wherein perhaps the most caring thing I can do is NOT call and say I‘m sorry your Dad died.
So W.S I may dabble in editing Dante and hopefully fall a bit in love with both of you some more because I look at the storyline of all this, the timing and I just have to remember what Nora wrote - which applies to me most certainly: “desperately want to call but am/are trapped under something heavy”.
In nearing a close it seems only good form to quote you back to you though I believe ‘mo(u)rning star’ would work better but obviously I would. That optional spelling edit doesn’t change the fact that I found your sentence arresting: “And we are standing on a shore seeing the first light before dawn seep into the sky, and the morning star”. In reading that sentence I wonder(ed) if you yourself hadn’t wanted to insert an editorial carrot into Dante’s prose here and there. Whereas I want to rearrange the sentences a bit and occasionally make a red line.
And of course I always want to comma splice because commas aren’t always the literary comma but too are the musical variety of where to take a breath, or the comma of theatre wherein it is almost a beat and most certainly the rhythm.
I find it difficult not to splice, comma splice that is.
I must continue to resist the urge to splice- except in poetry where I think it might still be allowed.
Maybe you and Dante will guide me out from this particular canal of Styx. Or perhaps I’ll relent to the aforementioned rationalization and thus in all this perhaps one last gift a father can give his son.
Lastly, I’m sorry Merwin. I’ve been two-timing you while writing this letter because I haven‘t, except at rare points, been writing you and only you. I’m feeling very conflicted and I didn’t know who else and perhaps how else to say any of this.
Carefully,
M.C.A.
