Tension Envelopes # 22 (unmailed, until tonight)

4/18/07

So this will be the last Tension Envelope before you leave Exeter. And, interestingly, as I knew I would, I feel a certain lastness now that you’re leaving. I estimated that I would have about 9 months worth of letters in me. I think I found about 8 months.

Figuring out where to end a series that has tried to prevent closure (in my own thinking, in my own language) is, of course, equivalent to trying to coax coffee from a cup without putting your lips on it. You can shake the table and bend your knees in prayer, but nothing, nothing will facilitate.

Let me explain that last sentence—it is emblematic of my life right now and probably explains the lack of letters these past few weeks. While writing it, I completely lost my focus. I knew words were happening, and I knew I was spelling them correctly. I can type, as they say, with my eyes closed. But, actually, this is the culmination of the tension project, a technique I’ve been looking to master. How can I write with only half or part of my mind? This, of course, mirrors the way I am sometimes forced to live my life these days, more and more these days, in only fragments, fractures, of concentration.

But it is also tied to a strategy aimed at readers. Readers have to make sense of words. I’d say that, in our current context of reading, given the history of reading, the writing almost doesn’t matter. I mean, currently I am making sense. But if I wasn’t “making sense,” then you would be making sense. Why? Because as a reader who wants to read this letter, that’s just what you do. If we imagine that, at this late stage of reading, only the interested will find their way to the texts we create, then I’m truly not sure it matters. Perhaps personality is the most important text we can cultivate.

Last week, some students were sitting at a table in the lunchroom and I joined them with my dessert, an orange. As I peeled the orange, one of the students told me I would probably just leave the peels on the table. She was joking about my habits. I thought, “that’s actually a funny idea, considering that teachers are always yelling at students to clean up after themselves.” So I left the orange peels.

Later, the peels appeared on my desk along with a note from an angry (?) student. Its gist was my hypocrisy.

I wrote my accuser a long email about beauty. My particular point was the invention of beauty. How we all play a role in that. Not my fault, I wrote, that she looked at the pile of orange peels and saw garbage instead of opportunity. A few quick squeezes and she would be at the heart of a performance, students gathered around while tiny, pulpy explosions lept and splattered like tiny volcanoes.

At the approximately same moment, I later discovered, my accuser was circulating an email about violinist Joshua Bell.

Her email was about beauty. How we sometimes miss it due to the persistence of our seeing, our mis-seeing, our habits.

My email ended with a petition for the recognition of my genius. Her email ended with a petition for the recognition of any genius that, prior to her email, had gone unrecognized.

She had big plans, but I reveled in my small victory. For a short time, I was a genius, but not on purpose. Time and context had conspired to make me seem so, when I was really only joking. This seems to me the best way.