on the lost arts

Recently, I’ve been spending some time on a poet’s correspondence in the archives. There is something to that captured bit of these people’s lives, in that moment. Little bits of history, scraps of someone’s thoughts, events, captured permanently, and then sifted out by a stranger’s hands. We no longer write letters to each other. We call, we text, we abbreviate and condense. Sometimes I am tired of texting even and think it’s just not enough to tell someone exactly of my thoughts, events. But I can’t make myself call. Mailing a letter is too slow. I don't even have my friends' emails. Emails are for work. So I leave out bits and text the important parts and chop up my language and my thoughts even more.

But these letters--to take that time, to write on a typewriter 2, 3, 6 pages of text front and back and cram more in ink on the sides and the envelope. There wasn’t enough space for their words.

We send cards now as novelties, I’d argue. It’s funny that so many of us don’t take the time to write a letter, because I don’t think the excitement of receiving mail has diminished for us. Most of us just get cards around Christmas and it’s darned exciting to open up those cards and slap those up on the fridge or on the table. But they’re brief too, you know. A sentence, mostly pictures. Half not signed, but rather mass-addressed. Last year James and I sent out one of those picture cards from Rite Aid. 

But I just can’t recall the last time I got a letter. I'd reckon the moment I'd start writing one too I would find it darn challenging to write just a bit over a paragraph. Or maybe it wouldn't be so hard. Maybe I'd just not be able stop, like those letter-writers in the archives with their zig-zag ink-covered pages. But I can't see myself writing one any time soon.

Where will the archivists be when dissecting a person’s collection from today, I wonder? A folder for Facebook posts from 2014? For Tweets? Blog posts? I cannot say. Likely they will take up less space in storage, I suppose.

I spend much of time in the past, with what I do. It's always at the back of my mind like a nervous itch, one I'm too lazy to scratch, when I read the words of those before us: 

where will our words be, the words we think to ourselves and shorten for a text? The words we leave unwritten and unsaid, because it took too much time and there was too little space.