“My favorite means of communication is otherworldly: dreams—meeting in dreams.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva, from a letter to Boris Pasternak , (A Russian Psyche: The Poetic Mind of Marina Tsvetaeva)

Do you exchange personal letters, steady correspondence electronic or otherwise…? Have you? (You notably excerpt correspondence.)

nemophilies:

Yes, and I admire the distant intimacy of letters. I also feel, as Franz Kafka wrote, how writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost.

Yet I write, above all, poems, and poems, too, are letters. Paul Celan said, a poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to the sea with the—surely not always strong—hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on the shoreline of the heart.

So when we write letters, we write poems to ghosts.

neoyorzapoteca:

“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones.”

— Franz Kafka in a letter to Milena Jesenska

(via aquietdevastation)

objetpetita:

(“I is another”).

–Arthur Rimbaud, Letter to Georges Izambard; Charleville, 13 May 1871

writemeanna:

Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter to Lou Salomé:

“Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.”