What is this ardent interest in the mail? Whether it’s email or post, I have to discipline myself to keep from checking every few minutes. It’s been this way since I was a child, when very little came in the mail for me–not that much ever comes now. It’s like some metaphysical longing, like I’m waiting for a letter from Being, a missive from Almighty God. But what might such a parcel be? And even were it to come, would I not have to go on with daily life after all, the round of eating and sleeping and work? Perhaps what I await is something to lend a shimmer to every waking moment.
I remember great excitement when, as a child, I started to order things–like Archie comics and novelties from the Johnson Smith Catalogue. After I sent away for things, I would start checking the mailbox the very next day even though I knew it was too early for anything to arrive. Then finally the wait was over, and I received the objects of my longing and anticipation: a latex Frankenstein mask, Venus Flytrap bulbs, a one-armed-bandit bank, a multiplying balls magic trick, sea monkeys. As wonderful as these things were, the anticipation was always the better part. The mask did not really cover my whole head, and its lips didn’t move with mine, as I’d imagined they might. The Venus Flytrap bulbs didn’t grow (I think I planted them upside down and in the wrong kind of soil). The slot machine bank was a cheap plastic affair whose dials spun regardless of whether one inserted coins. I became decent to fair with the sleight-of-hand multiplying balls, but still I was no magician. The sea monkeys sure enough hatched, producing not the adorable cartoon creatures one encounters in the backs of comic books, but rather something looking uncannily like brine shrimp. And the daily round went on.
When my sister moved to Gemany, I sat down to the family typewriter on Friday nights to tap out a letter in my hunt-and-peck style. Then letters came to our family in return from that mysterious place where they spoke a different language. And to think a member of my own family had cracked the code. Then many years later, when I was in high school, I wrote letters, early acts of literary fantasia, to a girl living in another town, the one on whom I had a suffocating crush. There was a kind of shimmer when her letters arrived in return, even though they never were the declarations of undying love I’d hoped to discover. And still I ate and slept and went to school.
What would a letter have to be to equal my feeling of anticipation? Surely it would have to be something disruptive, something that would halt the daily round. It would have to be more than several lottery announcements at once, more than love letters from the human race, more than a lifetime guarantee of wealth and book contracts. For even in each of these cases, some everyday life would go on. To match my anticipation, I think that what I receive in the mail would have to be death.
For those of us devoted to literature, I suspect that part of what we love are something like letters–literal letters on pages–from past ages. It was Stephen Greenblatt who wrote, I think at the beginning of Shakespearean Negotiations, that he went into literary study out of a desire to communicate with the dead. Those of us who embrace some kind of religious faith may well believe in a collection of scriptures that function in one way or another not only as missives from the past, but also in one way and another as the word of the Almighty Other. In my own case, as in the case of many, this belief is complicated and problematized (which is not the same thing as negated) by the realization that scriptures have come out of centuries of human tradition and movements of cognition and writing practices, so that to confront the sacred text at all adequately requires interpretation within interpretation within interpretation. To turn the sacred text into a fetish by means of literalism constitutes, I believe, an act of violence best avoided. In The Analogical Imagination (1981), David Tracy writes that the scriptures “remain open to new experiences–new questions, new and sometimes more adequate responses for later generations who experience the same event in ever different situations” (249). I take it that part of what Tracy means is that experience must remain on the move and that our reading habits, including our habits of reading sacred texts, must remain on the move as well. Part of what this realization of constant motion means to me is that I shall never receive the ultimate parcel so disruptive as to bring everyday life to a halt–not, that is, until I die.
There is one letter in my life that stands out as supremely disruptive. It was back in the days when I was teaching at an all-girls preparatory school in St. Louis. There was a certain student who regularly talked with me about all sorts of things–spirituality, sports, the boys that she was dating. One of the things she talked about was an upcoming trip to Haiti, where she wanted to go during Christmas vacation. Her parents said that she could go as long as she raised the money herself. It was a service trip that involved working in an orphanage run by the Missionaries of Charity, the religious community founded by Mother Teresa of Calcutta. I encouraged her to go. I think I must have contributed some money. She was a friend, and I wanted her to pursue this experience, which reminded me of some of the things I’d done and found very valuable when I was around her age, though I cannot affirm that I had anything like her creative energy and spirited engagement with the world. I was looking forward to seeing where she went with her life experience and where her life experience took her.
It must have been a day or two before she was to arrive back in St. Louis that I received a phone call from the school’s principal, who had some bad news, that there had been accident and that our student had not made it. It was no one’s fault, but she was dead. Of course, the whole school was devastated. We gathered in the auditorium and took turns telling stories about her.
I went out to her parents’ house to talk with them. They were grateful to have known their youngest daughter even for the short time of her life. I told them that I’d given her a copy of Thomas Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, which she took on the trip with her. Her father said that he wanted the book if it was found among her things. Several days later I recieved a letter from their address. On the back of the envelope was written, “I love that book.” I was impressed that the book had been found and handed over to the student’s father so quickly. I must have been several sentences into the letter proper before realizing that it was from the student herself. She must have used her St. Louis address as the return since she thought she’d be back well before I could reply. It had been about a week since I’d gotten that call from the school principal. It was like getting a letter from the dead. She ended by saying that she had lots more to tell me about, but that she was sick of writing, so she’d have to tell me later.
At the time I didn’t want the daily round to continue. It seemed somehow wrong to continue with everyday life if this lively person was no longer there. But of course we had a whole school full of lively, strong, and intelligent people, and what would we do if not live by the day? Of course, there was a funeral, and nearly the whole school went. The ritual of the funeral is one of the missives from the past that helps many of us face this kind of disruption. And thankfully everyday life goes on–not that the grieving ever really ends; it becomes subdued, maybe one can even learn from it, but it does not end.