A Conversation with Elizabeth
1998
Snail Mail

From:          Elizabeth
To:            internet:mixsonl@acm.org
Date:          3/13/98 12:17pm
Subject:       snail mail
 
I am on my lunch break. I came in early and wrote you a long HM message, but even with save draft and cc to myself, it apparently was lost. I then on my break read your message and was struck by the synchronicity of what you wrote and sent and what I had written and was lost. I then reconstructed the letter in GW. I sent it and just as I deleted it from my outbox, a message came back that the address was unidentified. I then, once again, reconstructed the letter in HM, but I cannot get back into save draft. I'm beginning to wonder if I'm being tested about whether I really want to send what I wrote, or cautioned that I shouldn't send it. Anyway, I read what you wrote about "interests" being shared. I wrote you a long letter and towards the end I had written that sometimes I have found myself imagining that you were single, not in an obsessive way or a way which I would want to be injurious to you or to myself, given your present situation, but nevertheless imagining it. Yet, I am also happy for you that you have found a companion and that from what you have written your life is rewarding. Part of my imaginings are that I would really like to find someone to travel with and spend time with who has the same aesthetics as I do. From our exchanges it seems, in broad strokes, that share many similar aesthetics. Here in Alabama aesthetics has become very important to me as many people here do not share mine. By aesthetics I mean similar interests, similarly appreciated. I wrote to you about finishing the wall, but taking a break just before the end to go out and look at the full moon. The narrator had indicated there would be some tragic outcomes, she was writing retrospectively, and I had to prepare for the sadness, as I had become enmeshed in her day to day struggle to survive. I wrote that the book triggered a memory this morning that I used to feel as if there were a "wall" through which I could not seem to penetrate in terms of understanding either the world, myself, or my relationship to it. That feeling has either been cured, vanished, or diminished over time, so I am not as aware of it now. However, I recall it acutely. I wrote that I "browse" at AUM for books thinking somehow that whatever titles or subjects reach out to me or grab me are somehow meant to be, or synchronous somehow with my needs at the time. I also wrote of a "wall" between us, that I sense we don't/haven't penetrated, and at times in this correspondence I've felt like trying to reach through it, but I'm not quite certain what it is, and whether it would be wisdom to ask or act. I think The Wall as a book will stay with me as a metaphor for what seems impenetrable and non-understandable. I think I put our relationship there. I have to remember that once upon a time it did not work out. Shall I try once more to get this letter out. It is a more disorganized version. There was initially more of a flow, as I wrote first of The Wall as a book, then my memory of experiencing a wall in my life, then my imaginings of you, then the wall between us.

I liked that last sentence ending with, “the wall between us.”, which I hoped was being torn down.  

 Note the email address mixsonl@acm.org. I had been a member of the Association for Computing Machinery since early 70’s when I worked at the University of Florida computing center. ACM, as it was typically called, had many different special interest groups on various computer topics and I had been a member of several including SigGraph on computer graphics. With ACM membership was a “forwarding” email service which you could provide to people to mail to which then would forward the email to some other account.  Here I gave it to Elizabeth because leaving BVS I could no longer use their email.

Synchronicity