Through strange fissures into magical orchards ~ Malinda Words

Walt Whitman, the great grandfather of North American poetry, writing about strangers, noting the pleasure offered in passing of eyes, face and flesh and the fact that he in return gave his beard, breast and hands, was convinced that the unknown individuals ‘was the he or the she’ he was seeking.

And he made a mental note and inserted it into the poem:

I am to think of you when I sit along
or wake at night alone,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

Leslie Jamison, writing the Foreword to a collection edited by her friend Colleen Kinder who had one been a stranger but was one no more, remembered Whitman’s observation. The letter she wrote, upon Colleen’s invitation, was addressed to a one-legged traveling magician in Nigeria, someone who had been drunk every time she had seen him as she herself had been.

It had come out ‘dark and gleaming and alive as if it had already existed insider of [her], fully formed.’ A secret stowaway, she felt this letter was, waiting for a home. The letter had ‘opened a fissure in [her] memory; an aperture that invited her to peer through it.

‘Letter to a stranger,’ therefore was a book of fissures where contributors peered into these strangers and through them enter regions of their own selves long neglected. They say, in Leslie’s words, ‘I never had you, I never knew you; I am to see to it that I do not lose you.’

We are made of those who touch us and those who we touch and in touching leave traces of persona, thought, feeling and encounter upon our skin or sometimes break through to bone and within. We are also made of the words we read and therefore those who wrote those words in the first place. We are made of conversations that we bump into inadvertently or which brush against us as we hurry to destinations unknown to the particular conversationalists. We are made of strangers. We are made of fissures we aren’t always aware of.

We all know of a traveling magician, drunk or sober. He or she may not wear a consume that screams out ‘I am a magician.’ Intoxication or sobriety may not be pinned in bold letters on the hat that he or she is wearing, or, if indeed there’s no hat then on the hat that ought to have been worn or for that matter on shirt-pocket or the back of a t-shirt. There’s magic of some kind which is what would compel us to think of this person if we received an invitation of the kind that persuaded Leslie Jamison to write a letter to a stranger who now is stranger only to himself and not to those who read Colleen’s book.

Any number of things can happen if anyone sits down to write about a stranger who obviously had taken up residence in some corner of mind or heart so long ago that resident and residency had both been forgotten. Colleen suspects that among other things both writer and reader would conclude that ‘intimacy and connection aren’t just the province of the main players in our lives.’

Colleen Kinder has sorted the letters: symmetry, mystery, chemistry, gratitude, wonder, remorse and farewell. There’s all or some of that in strangers and strange encounters. There’s much of it in each unforgettable yet forgotten but invariably remembered stranger, come to think of it.

Consider a few random ‘recipients’ of the letters gathered in the book: ‘To the woman we met before the flood,’ ‘To the traveler who hid cash in her underwear,’ ‘to the girl I didn’t love on the last bus home,’ ‘To the waiter who left me a tip,’ ‘To the taxi driver who looped back to get me,’ ‘To the first respondent after the storm’ and ‘To the face in the subway glass.’

How many letters can we write, each of us, beginning with ‘to the…’? We don’t have to write. Remembering and reflecting would suffice. That way too we have see to it that even though we’ve never had the particular stranger, never known the particular stranger, we nevertheless make sure that we do not lose the particular stranger.

If this is about fissures then it can also be about dissection. ‘Stranger’ can also be obtained from ‘The Familiar.’ We don’t know all the personas sharing a single name that is familiar and thought to be known, through and through. Within each person there’s probably ‘a stranger’ who brushed passed us or who we saw so briefly that we are not sure if it was a figment of our imagination. A traveling magician, a waiting who left a tip, a face in a subway glass etc., lost in the multitude of personas jostling the the crowded market place of their minds or our minds.

We may lose much by losing them. We may lose something of ourselves which, if noticed, acknowledged and cultivated, would turn our hearts into orchards and our minds into botanical gardens that add the most tender perfumes to the human condition. Who can tell? But think of writing a letter to a stranger, perhaps even to someone who shares your name. We are not alone. We are part of communities and those communities are part of who we are, even if no one knows anyone else's name.

And that, people, is my letter to the stranger who has conspired to write this along with me without my permission.

malindadocs@gmail.com

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is a new series. Links to previous articles in this new series are given below]

31 July 2023

Through strange fissures into magical orchards

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