What purpose does the letter serve for who?
Came across some advice column thing recently where somebody the person writing pretty much would have been quite happy to hear had painlessly vanished from the face of the earth had been (or so they said) Doing Some Work On Themselves, and as part of The Process had written a letter to the person which really, DID NOT WANT.
I did wonder if the person who was (allegedly) Doing The Work had Got It Wrong and Misunderstood and the point was to write the letter as an exercise in self-examination but not to actually send the bloody thing -
( - a much less charged version of this happened to me once years ago when someone who had used to work at my workplace whom I had found a moderately trying person to work with wrote me a letter that seemed very much about Their Issues and I wondered if they were doing Some Process and had missed the memo about And Then We Burn The Letter, or at the very least, We Do Not Actually Post It.)
Or, of course, maybe it was 'look at my anguished self-flagellation' (let's not) 'as I become a better person'.
(Is this letter notion part of the Twelve-Step thing? I seem to recall from reading interwar novels about the Oxford Group or analogues, which I think that emerged from, that some of those involved writing letters confessing their bad thoughts about other people, but as I recollect, sending them, hijinx ensue...)
Which takes it into the same realm of performative letter-writing as that young man who (hand-)wrote vast numbers of letters to shove through the letter-boxes of the street where he thought a young women, who had prudently given him a wrong phone number, but he thought it was a mistake and they had a real connection, lived - cue, in the reports, mention of how sore his poor hands were...
If you are going to undertake Ordeals to Win A Lady Through Your Manly Sufferings, might I advocate going on a Very Long Pilgrimage with dried peas in your shoes, first having taken a vow of silence. And preferably without telling her.
This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/3124374.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.