Letter Being

[Envelopes of 50 out of the almost 500 letters presently in my archives,

the remains of the approximately 3,000 personal letters I had saved until 2023]

 

Rational Animals?

As human beings, we wouldn't be the same without art, which for thousands of years we have been able to create and appreciate for our pleasure and mental health. Often, of course, it is also possible to use art for physical comfort and other material benefits. In fact, this is exactly one of the attributes that, as they say, best distinguishes us from other animals. Foxes don’t paint pictures, seagulls don’t build stone sculptures, and frogs don’t write poetry. However, all species have their talents: their songs, for example, which they elaborate without necessarily thinking or realizing they are creating art. Furthermore, we have other beings in the animal world that dance like a ballet star while swimming, such as the Amazonian rays, or that build nests that are precious works of architecture, like the weaver birds, of the Ploceidae family, with 122 species of beautiful birds spread out across all continents. One of these species, very common in northern South Africa, the sociable weaver (Philetairus socius), is capable of erecting gigantic and charming nests that can house more than a hundred couples at the same time. Their communal nests are so solid that some manage to survive almost intact for more than a century.

 

[A giant nest of the sociable weavers (image by unknown photographer)]

 

Curiously, we call ourselves “rational animals” because, supposedly, we think a lot. Is it true that we are so rational—or, at least, much more rational than other animals? How can that be, when we watch and do so little as the planet is relentlessly polluted with filthy clouds, mutilated forests, dark and toxic rivers, or seas decorated from surface to bottom with plastic bottles? Can we still maintain such a status, considering that today a significant part of the world is collapsing under the bombs and drones of multiple, simultaneous wars, which are abusively and absurdly justified as “necessary” for the sake of so-called “national security”?

 

[A weaver, the architect of his own abode (image by unknown photographer)]

 

 

The First Letters

Forgive me, as it seems I went quite far into those initial epistemological considerations before touching on the heart of this chronicle: letters. However, it is still necessary to reference the backdrop of an undeniable and monumental difference between humans and other living creatures on the face of the earth: communication through drawings and, later, a system of written language. Many scientists today argue that following the totem-like sculptures as well as the drawings and paintings on cave walls, writing developed so that merchants could use clay tablets to record and control their sales—this was over 10,000 years ago. The first “letters” would follow. They would have been very heavy (literally), as they circulated via those same clay tablets some 5,000 years later, between 3500 and 3100 BC, in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq).

 

          [Oswaldo Costa square, in Paraguaçu, Minas Gerais, Brazil]

 

To the “letter being” that makes up the title of this text, I attribute a double meaning—with one of the plausible characteristics of art, polysemy. Let’s agree: a “letter being” can be, poetically speaking, a being that exists between the lines of what is transcribed on sheets of paper traveling from the hands of one flesh-and-blood being to another. On the other hand, the “letter being” can also refer to an individual who likes to write and/or receive letters, in contrast, for example, to many people who confess: “I’m not a letter person,” that is, “I’m not one for writing letters.”

My life story shows that I truly am a “letter being.” I started writing them at the end of puberty, around age 12 or 13, when my sisters would bring their boyfriends from Belo Horizonte—the capital of Minas Gerais, where they lived—to spend the weekend in Paraguaçu, our small hometown in the south of the state of Minas Gerais. Those boyfriends and I became friends, and our letters quickly brought us closer. I learned a lot from those correspondences. At that time, the need to live what was (or seemed) possible for me—in terms of friendship, coexistence, and new experience—also pushed me toward both the tireless reading of dozens of books each year and the assiduous correspondence with adults (or near-adults) from other cities.

That passion for stories and letters led me to discover the International Pen Pal Club. I soon signed up and began corresponding with people I had never met. They had interests and hobbies similar to mine, though, and best of all, they spoke different languages and were from other “worlds.” Dozens of people of different ages and occupations living in places like Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, the United States, Greece, Israel, and Nigeria became my pen pals. We exchanged photos (like windows into their lives), stamps (which I collected), postcards (showing me a bit of their landmarks), and personal stories (many of them, to my total delight). One of them, Sandy Kemner, originally from West Virginia, remains my friend until today, more than 50 years after our acquaintance via snail-mail.

When I got to know Sandy, in 1975, it was my turn to move to Belo Horizonte. At the age of 15, my regular contact with my parents was through letters. Of course, we didn’t have email or cell phones, and using landline phone calls at the time was too expensive for our middle-class pockets. Back then it was already so important to me that both my parents liked writing letters. We could ease our longing, and they would tell me about their daily lives. Through my replies, no matter how short, mom and dad could discover and share a bit of their teenage son’s day-to-day deeds and school stories in the big city.

Correspondence with my parents became much more significant six years later, when I came to live in the United States for the first time. During those two years (1981 and 1982), when I was studying in this country and had no money to visit family in Brazil, we exchanged letters weekly. Sometimes we even exchanged "audio letters" recorded on cassette tapes. With some courage on my part, and complacency, on theirs, I began to tell them details of my emotional tribulations off some fleeting romances and select risky adventures with my roommates. We enjoyed, then, the sort of trust I had never been able to share with them in person. This complicity through letters brought us very close and made us special friends for the rest of our lives.

 

[Liberdade Square, em Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais]

 

Closing the Envelope

With great pleasure, one day I realized that my father had saved and cataloged absolutely every weekly letter I had sent to him and my mother in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, I have them all with me. They are part of my collection of approximately 500 letters, a gathering which was once at least six times larger. Yes: for nearly 50 years, I kept all the personal correspondence I received from family and friends—thousands of letters preserved in large plastic bags stored at my parents' house—until that property in little Paraguaçu, in the south of Minas Gerais, was sold some two or three years ago. There were (and how could they not be there?) hundreds of love letters, including a large number from a very special girlfriend, Ann Willard Fifield, whom I have known for almost 43 years and to whom I have been married for the last 35.

I don’t deny it: my practice of writing, keeping, and rereading letters might even be considered an obsession, but I am not the only one. Letter writing is a subject of research in various fields of the humanities and social sciences. In these times of such technological and digital advancement, the topic is “retro” and also appears in various electronic magazines, newspapers, and podcasts due to the value of the spontaneous art of correspondence (like the spontaneous birdsong art of the sabiá, Brazil’s national bird) and its unquestionable importance in preserving history—be it national, regional, local, ethnic, familial, or personal.

Closing the envelope of this chronicle-in-the-form-of-a-letter, to you, dear reader, wherever you may be, here is a suggestion I received through a contemporary letter form (the text on the phone) from Leila Valoura, a friend and researcher. It is a simple oral gift narrated in Portuguese for everyone interested in knowing more about the power and pleasure of interpersonal letters: the free, journalistically focused podcasts from Rádio Novelo, a channel founded in 2019 by Branca Vianna, Paula Scarpin, and Flora Thomson-DeVaux. For a good starting point, here is the episode “Correspondence” (#167), which I will discuss in a future chronicle: https://radionovelo.com.br/originais/apresenta/correspondencias/.

In the meantime, good reading and good listening—and one more image from Brazil, out of one more of my other obsessions, photography.

 

[Aureliano Prado St # 382, the Borim home in Paraguaçu, Minas Gerais,

for 85+ years (photo by Cristina Schmidt)]