<%@LANGUAGE="JAVASCRIPT" CODEPAGE="65001"%> River Bend Chronicle

To contact Ben Miller write a letter as of old. Think hard. Spell if you wish, or practice phonetics. Meditate. Ruminate. Proclaim. Declaim (i.e. carp). Suggest and allude. Full instructions are below.

Mail to

Ben Miller
P.O. Box 8499
New York, NY 10116

 

“What Was a Letter?”



The letter writer started with something called stationary: a thin fibrous substance stored in a cardboard box with a cellophane window. The average box contained 100 sheets. Texture varied widely, ranging from smooth to rough. If not white, these sheets were a pastel hue—blue, pink, green—and often faintly imprinted with seasonal images.

After a durable sheet of stationary was removed from the box and placed atop a rigid object called a desk, the letter writer gripped a hollow metal shaft called a pen, filled with tannic liquid (usually black or blue) known as ink.

The sharp tip of this instrument was placed on the stationary sheet and the writer then exerted enough pressure on the shaft to cause the ink to flow . . . and the labor of personal expression began.

Words—representing objects, places, people and their many states of being—were concocted from various universally used combinations of letters drawn from an alphabet consisting of twenty-six units.

Sentences resulted from the combination of any number of words and clauses.

Paragraphs were then formed from sentences, which functioned together somewhat like film cells—developing a vivid message in an incremental manner.

As the average letter touched on many subjects, it was not unusual for the act of composition to consume a morning or even a whole day.
 
And all that work might be for naught, as clutching a pen between thumb and forefinger didn’t automatically make a person interesting, honest, or insightful.

Statistics indicate that for each letter sent, another was torn up.

Whatever pages survived were slipped into a rectangular pouch made of the same material as the stationary. The envelope was then addressed, sealed, and a first class stamp placed in the corner. (A stamp being a thumbnail-sized square of serrated paper with glue on the back and on front the image of an American flag, president, bird, actress or magician.)

Then came the trip to the corner mailbox—a blue metal bin with an oval top and a creaky door.

Once deposited in the mailbox, a letter (a.k.a. “missive”) could take as long as four days to reach Michigan or California or Texas or Illinois or Oregon. And depending on the mood of the recipient, a response might not be forthcoming for a month or more. Calls were reserved for emergencies. The phone was not supposed to ring after six o’clock. A ringing phone at night was trouble and prompted a sudden reach for the coat and hat.

How could the letter lifestyle be tolerated by the same human creatures who—within the century—would walk streets glued eye-and-finger to instantaneous streams of data?  

The time lag was considered by many correspondents to be a constructive part of the process. It taught that language was worth waiting for and, too, worthy of being wrapped and then opened like a holiday gift—each word not a slurred means to an end but a precious entity with an innate, complex value.

The danger of letter-writing, of course, was of the right words not coming. But if the right words did not come, there was, really, no hope for communication and no use for a letter, not yet. The silence of a mind, and a spirit, needed to be ridden out. In its torpor existed the dormant energy of important messages waiting to be born. Was the greatest voice always the voice not-yet-born? The greatest voice was always the voice unborn. It had to be. For that voice—only that voice—could be all the voices that had ever been, and then some.

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