Of course we’ve abandoned the norm, all that’s left is quite the opposite.
[REDACTED]
“Would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn’t read this sort of thing without her lipstick.”
Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Dreams—[IN AN ANNA] Spontaneous [MANNER]
Subject: A beginning is always a step in the direction we’re headed anywise.
Anna (of course it’s the beginning of one of those letters)
In another time, and another place, perhaps I’d be there, helping plan [one] of those unplanned weekends aways somewhere where we’ve neither been nor thought of ever going. It’s never about the place. Just the expectation of quiet.
There’s a calm in the unfamiliar which we both feel—people are props, building sets, a blank space populates as we see fit—only we [are] realise this … though we always pretend it’s real.
We sometimes start with a simple direction, a handheld compass the size of a penny, I think you were there when I found the thing, not unlike the kind of trinket cereal boxes would hide—this wasn’t found in a box of breakfast food, though the last time I poured a bowl—it wasn’t in the morning.
East, we’d go, as far as it’s convenient, no map, or sign to follow, just the [a] twitch[ing] a small metallic spear balancing, as they do, on who knows what. I vaguely recall one day magnetising paperclips in [REDACTED] class (5), Neptune or Uranus had been recently pictured [seen], the shuttle diastered, Halley’s Comet by-fly flew with much squealing, long division mastered, then forgotten (not by me by then, but eventually), and much curiosity about the peculiar arrangement of Berlin—at least the bit in a different colour to its surroundings—quite the thing at the time (and from time to time since).
I once asked if we could holiday in that small crumb or see it. The idea of a surrounded walled city seemed, if not romantic—whatever that was—but certainly worth a closer look—the request was denied, and Scotland deemed a wiser, safer, wetter, colder, more bitey-creature land to imagine the summer weeks from. And the weather was never better.
So, I picture stroking paperclips with those magnets, one half blue, the other [half] red—just like the two Germanys—colours which still make my eyes go funny when next to each one another—all while you take us East, then making the turns to keep us relatively tracked, hinged to the pointing of a pocket acrobat.
We’ll get there, where we’re ferrying towards in just as much time it takes to find where there will be. And something will be there, just so.
—JustD
Edvard Munch, 1902 – The Kiss, woodcut
The Kiss IV
Date:
1902
Artist:
Edvard Munch
Norwegian, 1863-1944
Artist
Title
The Kiss IV
Place
Norway (Artist’s nationality:)
Date
Medium
Woodcut printed from two blocks (one sawn into two sections) in gray-brown and black ink on cream Japanese paper
Dimensions
Image: 47.1 × 47.2 cm (18 9/16 × 18 5/8 in.); Sheet: 52.5 × 49.4 cm (20 11/16 × 19 1/2 in.)
Credit Line
Clarence Buckingham Collection
Reference Number
1963.292
Letters For Anna 
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