Please, Kill This Letter

One single slip, and a slip cannot be avoided, will stop the whole process, easy and painful alike, and I will have to shrink back into my own circle again.—“Resolutions.” By Franz Kafka

Who am I writing to? To you, whatever bored soul that reads this or to this lingering ghost of life wandering the cobweb decorated halls of this body? Does it matter? Consider this a letter. Not a message in a bottle, for that implies that I want it to be found, to be read. No, a letter can be lost with all the other messages, heaped together will all sorts of words. Words of enticement, words of threatening, words of encouragement, words of love. In the bottle, the message becomes the sole objective, the sole fact. You see, I want to be lost. The message leads like a map back to the writer, but I do not want to be found. The letter comes bearing its genesis on its envelope, and, since we know its history, we do not care to visit the address. To be invisible is to be seen. G.K Chesterton’s detective story, “The Invisible Man,” reveals that the most invisible among us are the ones we see everyday. They become an object in the landscape, blending so well with the everyday animation of our lives, that they are no longer visible. Have you considered the suicide note? We never call them letters, because it is a record, denoting a sudden appearance. We, although tragically after the fact, recognize the existence of that person. Their flesh and bone become painfully aware to us, and we are reminded of our own mortal frames. The note reflects reality, we know that this is happening. Notes deal with facts and figures. However, the letter is a dance. I am an enigma that requires an answer from you:

I am your company when you’re all alone.

In your own house I am often grown,

Though my hand may touch your shoulder in a crowd.

A disease you wish to remedy, a quest to vanquish me you are forever bound.

My presence is your heart’s calamity, a friend you wished you never found. 

What am I?

Words rise up from my memory, like bubbles rising to the surface of a body of water. Something lives under the surface, but cannot survive down there. “Prior to the work, the work of art, the work of writing, the work of words, there is no artist,” I am a nothing, you see, before I start the work. Before this letter, what was I? In this effort, am I attempting to make the artist? I must confess, dear reader: there is an anxiety inside my chest, percolating its cruel foam in my internal seas. In Umberto Eco’s Mysterious Flame of Queen Leona, a sentence still haunts me, stalks my mind like a leopard, “he was one of those sterile geniuses.” The main character has a stroke, thereby suffering a loss of memory. In essence, he has lost his old self. Since his self is lost to his mind, he can only remember what he has read. He puts together his history from old comics and novels that are stored away in his attic. However, is this not salvaging? Am I making my own history or merely letting others write it? There is a difference between being lost and being nothing. Are we satisfied with the pages we leave blank inside us? It is no coincidence that at the end of the novel the world turns into white light before the protagonist can see the face he has longed so achingly to remember. In Wallace Steven’s poem, “the Snowman,” we are introduced to a winter landscape. We must have “a mind of winter” and bodies “cold a long time” to appreciate this winter landscape, while not hearing “any misery in the sound of the wind, / In the sound of a few leaves, / Which is the sound of the land.” This wind blows in the “same bare place / For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” 

Listening “in the snow,” we are not walking on the snow. By this proposition, we are not separated from the snow, but inhabit this whiteness that covers the bare place. Our ears are attuned to the snow, we listen inside of it. What better description of the blank page, then a winter landscape? Of course, the poems drags us further than just staring at a blank page. The title hints at the listener. The snowman is us, accepting our role as part of the barrenness. After all, the listener is “nothing himself,” and “beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” This last line exhibits the conflict of the blank page. Nothing plays a double role here in its winter of discontent. There is the “nothing that is not there,” which presents us a world where we find nothing lacking. On the other hand, there is the “nothing that is,” where we find the absence of life. Possibility exudes out of this winter scene, remembering that spring will paint the white with scenes of flowers and leaves. Nonetheless, what happens to the snowman at spring’s arrival? He melts. He disappears. He belongs to the dead world. Although he can create the most beautiful scene, he can never reach that himself. He is nowhere to be seen, still inhabiting “the nothing that is.” Where does this leave the artist? A snowman that is nothing himself, but can find the possibility outside himself to create? Are we really nothing? Does writing actually fill up the blankness inside of us? Who can fill our pages if not us? Are we Whitman’s “noiseless, patient spider,” sitting on top of the fence post, depositing out silk into the air hoping it finally latches onto to something? Perhaps, we write that we ourselves might be read, dear reader.

I have quoted Blanchot’s sentence about how prior to the artistic effort, there is no artist. He does not exist, for it is “the production that produces the producer.” It is the work of writing that creates us, that brings us into being, “doing takes precedence over being, which does not create itself except in creating.” In a startling moment, we find being is not a constant, but rather a result of creating. We find something curious happening though, “before the work, the writer does not yet exist; after the work, he is no longer there: which means that his existence is open to question—and we call him an ‘author!’” Instead, Blanchot offers a different appellation for the artists, “it would be more correct to call him an ‘actor,’ who is… killed by the performance that makes him visible—that is, without anything of his own or hiding anything in some secret place.” Why should the author be called an actor? Did he not spend hours of his life creating this work? Should it not be his? Why does he have to melt? Blanchot makes an interesting prohibition. It is a “prohibition against reading that tells the author he has been disposed of.” In fact, Blanchot echoes the words of Jesus, “Noli me legere,” which translates into “do not touch me.” What an odd declaration. Blanchot’s prohibition is linked to the phrase “do not touch me.” Why? Because, the tools we use for creation do not belong to us. As Blanchot observes, “the written word, which is always impersonal, changes, dismisses, and abolishes the writer as the writer.” Years later, Octavio Paz would echo this when states that the “Poet moves aside from the poem to the Poet that reads the poem.” Words do not belong to us. We have no possession of the sound, we cannot grasp air. We see corporations attempt to cling onto their words with registered trademarks on certain phrases, but those words cannot belong to them or to anyone. To write is to disappear. Our words are consumed by other eyes, and taken into their own selves. They become the new writers, interpreting the work that the artist has thrown into the world. If a book is an extension of ourselves, then what happens if it can be so easily claimed by another? That all the materials we used to create the work are the same for everyone else? Have we ever existed?

The letter wrestles with the words of Blanchot, whoever is writing this has fought with himself for years. Fought to understand, when I already knew the answer, that we have both arrived at similar conclusions. However, I thought I could find the answers. I could manifest the ghost, fill the absence. I thought I was Don Quixote, instead I was a snowman. “What happens when you live inside books for too long,” Blanchot asks us in story, “The Last Word,” “you forget the first word and the last word.” To forget the first and last word is to forget the beginning and the end. One’s furtive genesis and inevitable eschatology. Perhaps that’s what makes death seem so cruel: life is a random thing to possess. One cannot ask for it, only be given it without their knowledge. It is not a certainty. On the other hand, death is the ultimate certainty. You know that it’s going to happen. It’s the spoiler alert to your life. Forgetting the first and last word is to forget life was never ours. That we are loaned this life and death is the time to return it. Therefore, is our self and life actually tied together? We are contradictory creatures. Bodies that yearn for life and selves or souls that yearn for absence. I am now convinced that subjective beings is just another terminology for ghost.

Why does the letter wish to be lost? Why does it hold it up its hands and proclaim “do not touch me.” Because, in the end, we are all the hunger artists. In Kafka’s strange story, “A Hunger Artist,” we are presented with the art of fasting. Such an act involved placing the artist into a cage where they fast for forty days, presenting to the public how much they could control their bodies. However, we encounter something strange from the very beginning. In the title, we can see that this is “A” hunger artist. Not a particular hunger artist, but almost just one randomly selected. In fact, the whole tone of the story is almost anti-narrative. It is more of a report about activities about the past. “During these past decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished” opens the story, which seems like something one would find in a newspaper. In fact, one could say that Kafka flirts with making the story too boring, perhaps an interesting piece to observe the unusual practices of past times, but nothing else seems to stand out except at the end. When the hunger artist is forgotten about, the overseer of the circus, who the artist has became a rather trivial act for, searches a seemingly empty cage with dirty straw in it only to find the dying hunger artist inside. The artist tells the overseer, who thinks the artist has gone crazy from lack of food, that he wished for everyone to admire his fasting, but knows that they cannot. When the overseer asks why people shouldn’t admire his fasting, the artist replies “because I have to fast, I can’t help it.” Of course, the overseer, indulging in a dying man’s fancy, asks why can’t he help fasting.

“Because,” said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and speaking, with his lips pursed, as if for a kiss, right into the overseer’s ear, so that no syllable might be lost, “because I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.” These were his last words, but in his dimming eyes remained the firm though no longer proud persuasion that he was still continuing to fast.

It does not take long for the overseer to clean the cage and bury the hunger artist. In the artists place, a panther now prowls his cage. A stark contrast to the enervated artist, the panther is a symbol of life. Although it is caged, freedom and a joy for life exude from the creature, enthralling the crowd who came to witness the majestic panther for themselves. Is it a tragedy that the hunger artist died from his craft or the fact that he felt like a fraud? That it was not something he wanted to do, but rather he must do. He had no other choice but to fast, because no food pleased him. Of course, do we not fade away when we write? When are compelled to write and yet this very thing we must do kills us. However, perhaps we need a different perspective. This letter wants to hide, wishes to avoid your eyes dear reader because it does not want to die. The nothing inside the snowman does not wish for spring because then the old body will die. Like the hunger artist, we must turn art into dying. The true tragedy of the story is not his death, but that he felt like a fraud. He could not find the food he wanted because his body did not have the taste buds for it. He needed a new body. The scariest thing in the world is to kill the nothing inside, because it allows the world to storm the crenellations of our souls. There is something strange about this panther at the end of the story. One almost has the feeling that the hunger artist is reborn. That his search for the food that pleases him is finally over. That death allowed for the panther to appear. Because, what is the constant in the entire story? The cage. The cage that the villagers would bring the hunger artist out of and give him some food to preserve his frail body, but he must return back to the cage. That cage is the body, is the words we use. We say “do not touch me,” because we are uncertain if you will kill us or will continue to use us as mere spectacle. Reviving us for another performance, instead of seeing the true nature of art, the search for ourselves. This letter wants to disappear because it wants to die, because only then can it be reborn. Only then can the panther enter the cage, when that new breath enters the cage. In the end though, the artist has to do the job himself, as the crowd merely eats the spectacle of the event and never interprets the whole affair. We know “the nothing that is not and the nothing that is” lead to death, but only one leads to rebirth, to spring. It is a vicious circle, like the name of Blanchot’s book, because our self must go through the seasons. Will we be forever stuck in a circle or will have freedom lurking in our jaws? Like the opening quote, it does not take much for us “to shrink back into my own circle again,” because we are stuck within ourselves while the world merely watches.

Did I ever answer the riddle proposed early in this letter? No? Would you like the answer? The answer is loneliness. We are nothing until we do something. Being is nothing unless created, and that is why we write—to create being. Our being. Other being. The being of our imaginary friends. Loneliness is nothing, an absence, and I am writing this letter to create something, to fill something. For you. For me. I now give you this letter. Please, do not touch me unless you are willing to take my life. 

Love, The Former Author of this Letter