Closer

Photo by Batuhan Doğan on Unsplash

Closer yet I approach you,

What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance,

I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.

Who was to know what should come home to me?

Who knows but I am enjoying this?

Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?

Writing is ghostly in the sense that it takes the really substantive material of your consciousness and externalizes it. In this way, writing puts you outside of time. Interestingly, this keeps open, at least in one direction, an asynchronous form of communication. Here I am reminded of Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, where Whitman repeatedly flexes the temporal and spatial freedom of words:

What is it then between us?

What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not,

I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,

I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it,

I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me…

It has long been appreciated that writing can cast our voices forward in time, in a way that allows us to speak to people far in the future, and obviously at a distance. This asynchronous and bounded form of writing allows it to cast the subject, to project the subject into spaces and times where it cannot be.

But there is another aspect of this that I think is under-theorized. To the extent that one’s authorial voice contains the vital elements of one’s real voice, the object produced, the written piece, can cast or project the voice not just of a person, but of a friend. Particularly a friend with whom receptive channels have broken down for this or that reason, due to time, geography, conflict.

In a way, I can set some things down as standing speech acts. There is an implied stance that in an essayist addressing one, even indirectly, some communication is still possible without reunion, without reconciliation, without contact. This allows for the exchange of meaning. The public exchange of essays allows a kind of subterranean channel for communication that would otherwise be impossible.

By standing speech acts I mean something like a sign, like the sign over a building which tells you the name of the business, the kind of business, the hours that it is open. More richly, it is a kind of signpost.

In some ways the essays, even the consistent display of one’s voice in public, dispels silence. Silence has a way of growing and spreading and inhabiting and swallowing. The leaving of permanent markers of articulate intelligence allows for some vision. It is a light in the dark. It is a data point. It is a piece of grounding knowledge.

It says: here are some breadcrumbs that I have left behind. Here is a crystallized conversation. This is a way for me to speak. A beacon. A bridge. This is a way for me to reach you.