Dear J.D.,
For me with you it was always the post cards. In the Bodleian Library's gift shop you found a post card of Matthew Paris' rendering of Plato and Socrates, the philosopher kings. The P and the S. Like a good obsessive, you sublimated your cathexis into work. You romanced us and I fell. Every word I read ruined me though. As I read, I realized that the more I followed your addiction, the less likely my chance of recovery. I was right about that, but as you also know, being right is hardly a cure.
Love,
P.S.
Dear J.D.:
It's only now, years later, that I begin to feel safe enough to attempt to remember. I am no Freudian and I don't want to do an archaeological reconstruction. You'd have it toppled in a minute anyway. But I do remember things about the scene of reading, and I have a tiny bit of confidence about how to read a scene. I read your post cards late at night and invariably I dreamt. Maybe it was a dream of Hamlet's father that set me off: I can't remember the dream very clearly now, but I know it was something theatrical about a dead father. You wrote about how your father sent you a letter, a card, from the hospital. Your mother added a post-script about his trembling hand. All of this set out in the scene you assembled, notes written on the flip side of post cards of philosophy's fathers, Plato and Socrates. A proscenium thrust.
My own father died suddenly. He did not leave any writing. There was a will – but it was legally "frozen." My mother's hands tremble all the time now, a lifetime (lived in the shadow planted at the time of his death) later. But I get ahead of myself. Reading you, I was dreaming of death by infection, the deaths of men I loved. They spent the eighties dying. One month in 1989 I thought funerals had become as frequent as postal deliveries. In the United States, amnesia is a cherished aspiration, so now it is all officially forgotten. But I know it will return. Another history of the purloined letter spelling out so many death sentences, so many still to be read, to be written.
Love,
P.S.
Dear J.D.:
When I woke up I was not in the hospital, but rather in the university. They gave me a title. I became a Performance Studies scholar, a P-S-er. No one could have ever tried to become this. It was just a routine accident, not even significant enough to be a disaster, although I would like to claim it was one, if only to offer you a word I know you love. At the time I was reading your post cards I was desperately hoping to read a sentence that began "I love" and so when I came upon yours, I remembered it vividly: "I love all the words, all the letters, in the word disaster [désastre], its entire teeming constellation, all the fates cast in it, and even that it sublimates us a bit" [108]. How you worried over the dosage even then! Can sublimation ever be undertaken in bits and pieces? Not for you; it has been there in every book, in every lecture, in every post card, in every word, in every letter. It has been and it will be. It remains so. The tense that is so tense because it cannot find its end. Let's relax – let me send this brief one to you now. Not an ending, more of a pause. Love, like writing, endures.
Yours,
P.S.
Dear J.D.:
It's your birthday and you have already told me how to consider it. You inscribed it there on the last post card: "I will ask myself what to turn around has signified from my birth on or thereabouts. I will speak to you again, and of you, you will not leave me but I will become very young and the distance incalculable" [256].
Writing's dative tense. You paused over the lid of the post box, shook the envelope one more time, looked again at the address and let it go. It came to me, translated, in multiple copies. I am just one reader and I know where I have carried the cards. To do the math is to find an incalculable teeming constellation. A law of gravity, a genre of regeneration. You are beyond me in all senses. And yet you are somehow with me even now when I write so many decades after our first encounter, one to which you remain immune, while I remain infected.
Had you been content to satisfy yourself with philosophy, linguistics, music, architecture I might have recovered. Even now as you make your forays into Performance Studies proper, I am not especially vulnerable. All of this I could have survived I think. But not the post cards. They slipped under my immune system.
I have wanted to write love letters. But I have read yours.
You declared the cards a satire. Made them public. But there was something private in them too, something inscrutable in the extravagant stripping away of the personal. It is toward this inscrutability in you that I send these posts
With Love,
P.S.
Dear J.D.
Let me say it this way: the post cards you sent so long ago still act in me, on me, through me. You wrote them for you about them but they still arrive in me!
I was maybe too young to have read them. All the letters in those posts. A teeming constellation sent into the orbits of the unknown addressee. All of your speculations running amuck in me, even now, even still, when anyone else would have, should have, long ago, laid them all to rest. You could not rest. An insomnia of letters. Sleepless, you sent me again and again. Plato and Socrates. The P and the S. Your very own performative signature. Some you wrote en train, some came to me restrained, some came muffled by the pillow talk you also offered them. How can I not turn back and ask: did Orfeo have another choice? Did Plato have another chance? Did I? Do I? Austin said "'I do' is a performative," and look what happened.
"I will ask myself what to turn around has signified from my birth on or thereabouts. I will speak to you again, and of you, you will not leave me but I will become very young and the distance incalculable" [256].
An incalculable constellation between us. You cannot fathom the distance; you were right not to try. The law of gravity: even when you're punning that grave concern persists. A law of chronology: 'after the first death, there is no other.' But you insisted that there never was a 'first' death. Perhaps this is merely your resistance – but oh what it gives us! An aporia that leaves us blind enough to the ending to allow ourselves to love, to be loved, anyway.
You promised you would become very young. Have you?
Love,
P.S.
Dear J.D.,
The envois have not stopped coming. A strange fertility: the more you write, the more there is to write. The more covers that hold your words, the more you still have to cover. Olivers all, the orphans in you ask: "Please sir, can I have some more?" And you cover your eyes with your hands, transpose the letters again, flip the post card around, and repeat yes, si, oui.
I repeat: you are beyond me. I do not mind. I understand that the P and the S must take up their different positions in the scene – a different kind of pleasure principle, another way to spell Beyond PP. PP: the initials of my other name. The name of, for, the other – the limit that frames my own beyond.
Let me come to it again now: I have wanted to write love letters. But I have read yours.
It can discourage an ardent heart. Discouragement had left me exhausted. Looking for a way to be less daunted I began to employ you. Sometimes even now I turn you into my intimate envoy and send my intention to come to my beloved in your hand. I leave the letters open. There is an exquisite escape enclosed in every envelope.
You wrote about limping, about Freud's legacy, about the pas in every step. But that was all camouflage. It was not the legs that held you, not legacies you worried over. No. It was the memory of those trembling hands. His. Yours. Hers. Ours. Rifling through the philosophers' pockets you looked for every possible escape; but your hand kept writing. You fingered all the recesses in every speculation; you dreamt of an impenetrable archive; but you could not ignore the seepage. You dedicated yourself to a fevered encounter with what is not impossible; I caught an infection from what is.
Love,
P.S.
Dear J.D.
Having read your post cards all the way through, I promised someone else I would sleep in love's frame. I promised a beyond on a post card. Days, weeks, months, cities, countries, continents later I am still repeating the same promise, still signing the same intention. But neither one of us puts it to the test. We turn over the post cards, turn over the possibilities of arriving within the intended promise, turn over the speculations prompted by the scene. I have seen you writing. This is not the same as saying I have read you. You are arriving again at another anniversary and I wanted to send you a card. One thing led to another and now I am sending you this P.S., slipping it between your enveloping eyes. I douse it in electronic perfume. A heavy dose. An aroma of hope.
I wish you repose in a tender frame. A bed, a sheet, a square, a screen. You thought Plato and Socrates were turned around on the post card. So you turned them back and forth, you danced them in and out of the frame as you climbed in and out of planes, trains, sentences. I saw you turn it over, saw you turn it all around. But I am not Eurydice and you are not Orfeo. You keep singing and I remain blind to that mute darkness. We can play the opera as often as we like. There are so many chances now – it's all incalculable.
I'm citing your post cards as a way of saying thank you for helping me to appreciate something of the sustaining illegibility of the performative signature. I am signing this post again in the chiasmus that allows an eye to become a yes. Perhaps you can sense the crossing, although I trust you cannot seize it. It's a color, a scent. It pulses with what we promised to send way back then before we knew what our promises meant. I hope you endure until you need not promise that you will.
Love,
P.S.