Letters vs Postcards

At their most fundamental levels, sender and receiver must be at odds and this shows up in the ways in which they communicate with each other. The meaning a message takes on is proportional only to the meaning given to it.

The following is an excerpt from my personal correspondence.

What's the difference between a letter and a postcard? There's the obvious physical distinctions; it's hard not to tell the difference between a closed envelope and a single sheet card. There's an inherent secrecy to the former because save for the intrusion of prying eyes/hands the envelope hides and protects the sender's message. It would seem then that a postcard most likely represents one of two options: it is a watered down, sanitized or encoded message or the sender trusts the messenger to know the message. It would appear that the first is the more common occurrence because in its transparency the postcard leaves itself open not only to the messenger but any person who happens to come across it between the sending and receiving.

And so far as I understand, this is a bad thing because to send a message is to exert control over it. There's a narcissism involved in that "I" sent a message with a sole intended recipient. For others to partake in the message then is to diverge from that direct line. It interferes with my intent and therefore is unacceptable. But such invasions intrude on the recipients privacy as well. This letter/postcard was sent to me not to you/them. We allow these kinds of trespasses in post mortem and found readings because the reader is either an other in the sense that they are removed from the conversation as a stranger or are temporally distant enough that their knowledge of the message will make no difference. In both scenarios, the reader lacks a certain amount of context.

Barring the disclosure in the message of a preexisting dialogue, it is inherently more acceptable for the sender to violate this unformalized connection in correspondence because whatever is contained in the message is their words. It is less culturally taboo because by virtue of sending, I include part of myself as the message. The message represents an aspect of me that I send to you, but because I separate myself from it, it gains autonomy and becomes its own thing, the message. Despite its autonomy as a separated thing however, I am still included as a part of it, and this part of me contained in the message is vulnerable because it cannot respond.

Here, Alex, is the part where I question who has more (for lack of a better word) power in correspondence. Most everything I've stated thus far has been fairly obvious. What happens if the sender opens the message beyond just the intended recipient by making a copy and posting it on an open forum like their personal blog? It eliminates that vulnerability, yes, but devalues the message to the recipient. It's no longer quite so personal knowing the message belongs to everyone.

And historically, it's the ability to do the opposite, to take a message for the masses and make it feel like you were speaking to each audience member individually that has marked a good leader as also being a good public speaker and thus something more than merely a good leader in what they were able to do.

But the message is and would be the same regardless of recipient. The biggest change is in how it is received, how it is interpreted.

It would seem then that the role of messenger is to act not only as means of delivery, but as a mediator of sorts.

I’ve just received your last letter and am immediately replying. You’ve asked if I’ve received your last letter and if I intend to reply. If I may, please let me point out that your having sent your last letter makes the letter you previously sent no longer the most recent, and if I reply, as I am now doing, it is not in response to your second-to-last letter. I cannot, therefore, satisfy the requests you’ve made in your last letter.

While this is a nice discourse in semantic, the real meat of Monsieur Jacques Roumbaud's poem, Correspondence, at least in how it pertains to this post, shows up in Letter 3:

I’ve just read your first letter (dated 23 November, 1960. You have therefore written, on average, since that date, one letter every six and two thirds weeks (there never was an interval shorter than six weeks or longer than seven weeks between two of your letters)) and something has struck me. You had written (I remind you, in case you have forgotten): “Have you received my last letter? If so (and I would be quite surprised if you had not yet (though, should that be the case, do let me know)), do you intend to reply?”

The first letter implies and queries about the existence and response to a previous that, because this is the first letter, cannot exist.

Thoughts to be continued...

RB: I ask a lot of questions

This is actually a comment I posted to a friend's blog, but I thought it relevant enough to deserve it's own blog post. There's a link to the original in the title.

There's learning, and there's understanding. They're both kind of related, but I think the latter is by far more important. You can know everything about a person, but if you don't understand what that means and how it motivates them, then it's pointless. Or at least that's how I look at it.

But anyways, pen pals are fun. I've never really done the whole e-pen pal thing, just because I'm kind of old fashioned and like stamps, but I can totally identify with that feeling of connecting with someone on that level. When you take the time to write a letter or an e-mail, you actually have to sit down and think about what you're saying before you say it, or if you don't, you have the option of going back and changing it before you send. You just don't get that with IM and Twitter and the like.

I read an article a while ago *goes to find it* where scientists studied the brain and found that it takes longer for feelings of compassion and admiration to register in the brain than it does some of the less noble emotions. I see this as only helping my argument for the use of letter writing. When you go a week or a month (or for that matter even a few hours) between communications, you have a lot of time to reflect on what's been said to you and understand where it's coming from.

"Understanding leads to respect; respect leads to compassion; compassion leads to love for one another" - Tita Sicat, PhD

I'm always saying the world could use a little more compassion in it.

I want to write a letter

I want to write a letter to a friend of mine. He lives in Canada and I haven't seen him since we met: it's been almost two years. We met at a summer camp and while we've both returned to the camp, it's been different sessions so we haven't seen each other. Somehow though we're still in contact.

I've made plenty of other camp friends over the years of course, but I haven't consistently stayed in as close contact with pretty much anybody else except this one, crazy redhead I met on a bus to Leavenworth in July of 2007. I'm a pro-penpaller, but very few people have the same drive towards stamps and letters that I do, so it most always ends up being very one-sided conversations. Which, now that I think about it, has been the case here as well. I've only received one physical reply from Gabe, but where I send letters, he emails or Facebooks me so there's still the transmission of ideas.

The point I'm getting to is that we were talking about this the other night, and letters really are something that you treasure.

He said something that really made me think as well. It's mind boggling to think that someone's hand wrote the words you're reading and then traveled however many miles to get to you. Sure it's amazing that you can send the same amount of information in under 5 minutes, but the fact that the wrinkled piece of paper you hold in your hands traveled all that way to get to you makes it so much more special.

With how little we physically write anymore - I know plenty of college students who complain about cramped hands right after finals/midterms - taking the time to actually write a letter shows you care above and beyond. It conveys something about your personality by lacking the impersonal uniformity of type.

So the imperfections make us special and make the people we interact with feel better about it.

So then, what of perfection? Often, it takes so much more effort, but it lacks the personality, and it's the personality that enables us to connect. And like the hokey pokey, that's what it's all about.