Letter Litter

Dear Reader,

I am mulling over the idea that all denial is fundamentally denial about impermanence. So, I guess you could say my primary interest and practice right now is completely facing up to the natural beginnings and endings of things.

I spent the day continuing tackling a big box of filed letters people wrote me in the 1980’s. I was in my 20’s in the 80’s, a young revolutionary of the radical feminist kind. In the early part of the decade the internet was mearely a glimmer in it’s creator’s eyes. We had no fax machines, no scanners, no he copy machines. Calling long-distance was quite expensive, so we rarely did that. A good typewriter—an IBM Selectric—was completely out of reach cost-wise for young people, particularly countercultural types like my band of Midwestern lesbian-feminists.

So, what did we do? We wrote, and we wrote, and we wrote. We wrote on yellow legal pads, we wrote on spiral notebook pages, we wrote on a the continuous green paper that came out of computer printers, on construction paper, greeting cards, and quite often, the backs of extra posters from women’s cultural and political events we organized.

I have literally thousands of pages of these letters. Now that people don’t write letters anymore, and few people know there even was such a network as the earnest Amazons of the 70’s and 80’s U.S., I find it difficult to throw them out. So, instead, I am making pdfs of most of them. The criteria for keeping-versus-tossing is “Will this fit through my Scanner?” I am taking them by the handful, not reading them, just trying to get the pages right side up and roughly in order, and the coaxing them through the feeder. Big batches of them, hundreds of full color letters in one pdf marked with the approximate year received.

I’m trying not to read them, just plow ahead and get one grocery bag after another into the recycling bin. But, of course, the memories come back just seeing the handwriting. The stirs up many thoughts, like:
• where did we find the time to do all that writing!
• how romantic we were, about politics, culture, friendship and love
• how kind and nurturing to each other—since we didn’t have babies in those days, could it be we were lavishing that unspent nurturing on each other/
• how passionate about everything, we spared none of the emotions
• brave really, but overly proud of it
• how interwoven art, poetry, song and politics were with our lives

I thought I was tremendously important in those days. At that time one could just put out a newsletter or two, organize a few events, write a long article about one’s half baked ideas, and one could view oneself as an influential woman. I wrote everyone in our community, blowing off my mouth, no matter how old or highly regarded they were. And, what’s amazing to me is that they wrote back. I have letters from the lesbian glitterati of the day: Adrienne Rich, Holly Near, Alix Dobkin, and the leaders of virtually every women’s publication in the U.S.

I also kept unbelievable weird letters. A 1983 forty page critique of everything about me from my lover at the time, a letter from a masochistic man who wanted to be my slave, and a letter from a radical lesbian woman of color Dianic Wicca practitioner who wrote a raging diatribe to me in purple ink, enclosing in it a small swath of cotton carrying dried lavender flowers. Of the later, I remember having the feeling when I had received it 25 years ago that a curse was contained within it. When I think about that young woman now, I feel so much concern for her. She was from Oakland, and very troubled. Did she live or kill herself? Poor honey. I remember that even among the uber-radicals out here in Oakland she was viewed as distressed, but too defended to help.

After scanning that last batch, I felt dizzy and weak and needed to get some fresh air the lie down. Was there still potency in the hex-laden lavender?

With that I will close, dear reader, and write again another day.

Sincerely,

Yudron