1/27/2020   Letter to Myself

Dear Naomi at Hampshire College,

Is your fear greater than your excitement to finally be at Hampshire College?

It doesn’t matter.  You are there, first living in Merrill House, then later with others at Enfield.

At this time, what matter to you most:  politics and poetry.  You hope Hampshire is the best place to develop both.  And perhaps find a boyfriend or girlfriend too.

  Andrew Salkey is one of your teachers.  He is the most inspiring teacher you have ever met.  You go to his office and you talk about Cuba and revolution and language and how words can change the way we think and feel.  You have coffee together in his office.  From his window you see trees.  Andrew says, “Poetry matters” and he tells you it is a labor.   Andrew takes your writing seriously.  He tells you that you can become an important writer if you practice and work hard with words.

You don’t believe your work will ever be important but what he says gives you confidence.

Barry Goldensohn and Lorrie Goldensohn inspire you to read more challenging poetry.  Lorrie inspires your interest in Elizabeth Bishop.  Barry marks up your poems with his comments and tells you not to show off when writing and be brave at the same time.

You don’t know it yet but all three of these teachers will go on to be life long friends.  In fact, you were just reading Lorrie’s new poems yesterday.   Barry and Lorrie will visit you numerous times in England and you and your partner Bruce will visit them in Vermont dozens of times.  Swimming in the lake with Barry, walking with Lorrie, reading poems to one another as it gets dark, or sharing a scrap of play.

You will go on to love theater more than writing poetry because you find writing poetry too solitary.  You want to create with others.  

But that comes later.

On campus, you like to walk around the outside of the building that houses the swimming pool for when its cold the blue pool looks like some steamy cloud-scape contained in glass. 

You hear Adrienne Rich read her poems one evening, only to a space full of women.  Her presence fills the room like her poems do.  Diving into the Wreck will remain one of your favourite poems.  

You take classes at Amherst and learn more about Latin America and US imperialism, colonialism.  Your parents are radicals so while your mind already has a radical bent, you don’t have the details of history.

Professors at Hampshire give you the details.  

You meet Lisa Schlesinger in your second year.  She will become a life long friend.  Both of you will write for the theater.  You like to meet up on ‘The Bridge’ in the early mornings for coffee and muffins.  That place, that space holds some of your best memories.  You will later meet Marianne Macy, who will go on to be a journalist  and a friend for many years.  And then there is your friend James Burde.  He is teaching you to play guitar and take care of sand crabs.  One bites your finger and I can still feel the pinch of its power decades later.  You will exchange letters with your friend James Burde for most of your life.  James will go on to become an eco architect.

And a young woman from Kentucky, where you were also born, will also go to Hampshire: Guinever Smith.  You will continue your friendship that you forged in high school.  Guinever will go on to become a painter.  Today, five of her paintings hang on the walls of your home in North Yorkshire, England.  

As a young woman, you carry a fresh heat in your chest from the outrages of the Vietnam war and the long list of your country’s crimes.  You think about how each Vietnamese mother, child, father, brother, sister, breathed in the world just like you.  At Hampshire, you learn that the  military adventurism of the US in Korea killed 10% of their civilian population.  Three million more in the war against Vietnam.  These do not feel like statistics to you.  The dead are not statistics.  

Sometimes you spend more time thinking about the dead than speaking to the living.

What you don’t know is that the ending of the Vietnam war is not the end of US wars.  Far from it.   U.S. taxes at work abroad will kill 1.3 million people as a result of the U.S. “War on Terror” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Yemen.  You don’t yet know that these statistics will continue to grow as the Middle East is squeezed between the violence and war caused by fossil fuel production and the climatic impact of burning those same fuels. 

Years from now you will attempt to bring these dead into your plays. You will try to make the stage a welcome place for the dead, the battered, the diminished, the forgotten.  In about thirteen years you will write a play, IN THE HEART OF AMERICA, and here you will write about the Vietnam war that haunts you most of your life.

Right now, while at Hampshire College, you vow to be a writer. You believe that you and others who work for revolution, who believe in ending white supremacy and racial capitalism, will triumph soon.  

From Andrew Salkey you learn more about resistance.  For a young person, its a beautiful, breathing word: resistance.  And yet, even now, you  know this word is in need of rescue, of careful definition.  At Hampshire you learn not to confuse the notion of real grass roots resistance, so often created and led by queer people of colour and black and brown women, with the so-called “Resistance” that is championed by the liberal elite and mainstream corporate media, a liberal elite that in just over ten years from your place in time will cheer on a ferocious twenty year war in the Middle East and lie about it to the tune of trillions of dollars for two decades – while hardly tweaking the systems of inequality and poverty at home. 

Even as a young woman, walking the perimeters of the college, you wonder:  How will we use our words, our breath?  How will we prepare for what is coming? 

In your classes at Hampshire, you read the work of every woman poet you can find.  You read more of James Baldwin. You also read Shakespeare, at Barry Goldensohn’s urging.

In Hamlet, Gertrude says to her son:

“Be thou assured, if words be made of breath,

And breath of life, I have no life to breathe

What thou hast said to me.”

That is to say: words count!

“If words be made of breath.”  You like how that line sounds in your mouth.

When its very cold on campus, as you hurry between buildings, your breath and those of your fellow students, rises in winter mists and disappear.

Naomi, you are only nineteen.  And you are very serious and a more than a little wild.  One night you drive your pickup truck that your drove all the way from Kentucky up the library steps.  All the way up.  You almost can’t believe you’ve done this.  The view from the top of the library steps, from the windshield of a pickup, is refreshing and strange.  When you drive down again you damage the underside of the truck and knock some pieces of concrete from the steps. 

Luckily, when you are found out, Hampshire College does not throw you out.  They give you warning and you take it.

Everything you learn at Hampshire and everything you find out that matters you will carry with you in your arms.  And I can assureyou that what you believed then is still true now:  If we do not take radical action now, there will be a last word, a last sound, animal or human, and that word or sound will not be remembered because there will be no one left to hear it or record it.  But this end is still avoidable.  

You fell in love with the works of Rainer Marie Rilke when you were at Hampshire College.  Maybe in Lorrie Goldensohn’s class?  I imagine you read these words below while on campus.  What did you think of them?  

Naomi, I have written you this letter and I don’t know what it means.  I can remember you but you also hold your own independence.  As the past holds its independence.

But I think you knew even then, even if you could not yet articulate it, that our world is poised in a precarious place; perhaps it’s the one Rilke, writing in support of revolution in 1919, described as:

Exposed on the mountains of the heart.  Look,

how small there,

Look; the last hamlet of words, and higher,

and smaller still, a last

Farmstead of feeling.  Can you see it? 

Naomi, can you see it?

What can you see ahead of you so far away from me now?  

I am looking closer now.  I can see you ahead of me.

I’m coming.

Thank you.

Naomi Wallace