Letters to My Tutor…
Reading: America Day by Day

My dearest Simone,

When I first started writing here I considered keeping a running illness narrative documenting my return from medicated mind fog.  For the most part I did not do this, but since it’s been a year it seems like a good time to add to the notes I did make here and there.

Reading of your arrival in New York, I see the perfect description of my return from the land of fog.  I recognize my mind again.  I recognize my thinking, but still it doesn’t feel completely real.  When you write, “All the world is in limbo. I say, ‘This is New York.’ But I don’t completely believe it,” it’s as if you have known my mind’s journey.  The mechanics, the structures, the pathways are all familiar to me again, but the flesh, the skin is missing.  It’s all a matter of exercising my faculties and rebuilding a certain level of confidence.  “Will I be able to reincarnate myself?” you ask, and this is my worry.

I admire your warm appreciation of the lies we tell in the convenience of everyday speech and their underlying truths.  You write that you are just a name bandied about among mutual friends when recounting a phone call with otherwise strangers:  “I say again, ‘I’d very much like to see you,’ It’s not even true, and they know it; it isn’t them I want to see because I don’t know them,  But the voices are almost friendly, natural.  This naturalness already comforts me, as a kind of friendship.”  As children we all struggle with this discordance as we learn language and culture.  Does anyone ever really settle into a place of prattling off these repeated and rehearsed lines without a steady dialogue that reads much like what you wrote?  Some people appear to carry out days and weeks and months and lifetimes of these exchanges without much underlying thought, notice, or discomfort.  As my mind becomes more energetic, I feel I must work harder to find the comfort in these exchanges.

Your talk of impoverished artists in America echo some of my current considerations.  “But in Europe there was nothing dishonorable about poverty: a poor artist experienced the favors and friendships of bohemian life.  By lending him money, people provided one of those services that is natural between friends.  Here, says C., no one would let you die of hunger, perhaps, but offers of dinner or a loan are alms granted grudgingly, making friendship impossible.”  I’ve been thinking that friendships with a wide range of people would be more comfortable if I made a bit more money.  I believe it true that if people here feel that your situation begs for assistance even if you do not, they feel less comfortable around you.  The services of which you speak are not natural between friends in America particularly when these friends could be said to be in different economic brackets.  At any rate, I am taking special pains to be more productive at my paid work with this very consideration in mind.

Many times I’ve heard that we are spoiled for choice in America.  A friend once marveled at the length and breath of the cereal aisle.  You write, “A thousand choices, but all equivalent,” and how this abundance of choice might create a false sense of freedom.  I’ve long believed that a false sense of choice has become a cornerstone of American democracy.  In what some have labeled a post-racial era currently, some political candidates take careful recognition of how American have grown comfortable with this false choice.  It seems several “ethnic” candidates have gone with the message that the fact that I look different is a sign a progress and increased choice and opportunity, while communicating strongly that in they ways that matter I’m the same type of candidate you’re used to.  You write, “There are a thousand possibilities, but they’re all the same.  A thousand choices but all equivalent.  In this way, the American citizen can squander his obligatory domestic freedom, without perceiving that this life itself is not free.”

And the clock ticks and tocks.  I should post before midnight.

Until next time,
S.

No related posts.