stark major

XXII

I have resisted this for years, writing to you as if you could hear me. ..... It's been different with my father: ..... he and I always had a kind of rhetoric going with each other, a battle between us, it didn't matter if one of us was alive or dead. ..... But, you, I've had a sense of protecting your existence, not using it merely as a theme for poetry or tragic musings; letting you dwell in the minds of those who have reason to miss you, in your way, or their way, not mine. The living, writers specially, are terrible projectionists. ..... I hate the way they use the dead.

Yet I can't finish this without speaking to you, not simply of you. ..... You knew there was more left than food and humor. ..... Even as you said that in 1953 I knew it was a formula you had found, to stand between you and pain. [...].

That's why I want to speak to you now. ..... To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. ..... There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. ..... (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.) ..... I think you thought there was no such place for you now, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.