Malinda Words: Passwords to unimaginable grace

A few months ago I wrote about Colleen Kinder’s Letters to a Stranger: essays to the ones who haunt us. This is how I described the book: ‘Letter to a stranger is a book of fissures where contributors peered into these strangers and through them enter regions of their own selves long neglected.’ I added, borrowing from the foreword written by Leslie Jamison, ‘I never had you, I never knew you; I am to see to it that I do not lose you.’

We often come across individuals, strangers who never share their stories with us, who we simply cannot forget. They travel with us even though they could very well be oblivious to our existence. They too may be haunted by strangers who don’t get discarded when memory fails or priorities and perhaps wisdom perceived prompt the occasional emptying of the mind. Indeed there may be specific strangers who hold on to one another in this way.

There is another category of strangers, a community in fact; those who breathe the divine fragrance of unrequited love. They are said to be suffering from a virulent form of masochism, but sometimes I wonder if this is in fact true.

Where do they go when the one place they want to be has been barred? Where do they take the words they are not allowed to speak? What do they do in the long years of silence? What strategies do they plot to keep alive their life-giving insanity, these people who have abandoned reason altogether and have chosen to worship disbelief?

The easy response to all these questions is itself a question, ‘who knows?’ I have no answer either, but I have thoughts about such things.

I have known people who do not stop writing although they are fully aware that some love letters are simply undeliverable because no postal service will accept them and moreover addresses and intended recipients have long moved to inaccessible addresses. I know of lyrics written and sung in secret with the hope that the winds may carry them through gates and over walls, real, metaphorical or imagined.

I like to imagine that such people who walk like ghosts past and through one another in the Republic of Anonymity are a resourceful lot. They write even though no one asked them to put pen to paper, even though what they write goes unread and even though their words are so many that they fall out of paper, unscramble themselves from sentences and in happy abandonment create their own communities of poetry. In fact, I’m convinced that when love is written, the letters catch fire, warms all hearts and that in this way unknown and unheralded poets unfreeze the long, solitary winter years of the planet.

Their stories sometimes get told by others who have heard or read them and had suffered or were spared the same agonies. Simply because in recounting they draw love out of mirrors and illuminate the passwords to unimaginable grace.

In a world where people are taught to compare marginal benefits against marginal costs, where purpose is required to be defined and life ordered in terms of increasing the possibility of obtaining objective, such people are called fools and clowns; they are described as insane.

I hesitate to concur.

I am thinking of a human so consumed by love that the body has decayed to skin and bone through sheer neglect. I am imagining that such a creature, spurred by love, swings across an abyss holding on to a frayed rope singing verses written in the invincible ink of silence on account of being forbidden to speak; only, it’s a rope that never was.

I cannot think of anything more beautiful at this moment. Such grace defies description.

One must, instead, offer thanks to strangers whose names are unknown, wander like ghosts in cities long abandoned and yet inform us in their own peculiar way that love always has another chance if words are kept alive because they teach us that even when we do not have those who we love, we can still belong to them.

['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 the 299th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

23 December 2023

Passwords to unimaginable grace

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