A Small Invitation
             by Yannis Ritsos

Come to the luminous beaches–he murmured to himself
here where the colors are celebrating–look–
here where the royal family never once passed
with its closed carriages and its official envoys.

Come, it won’t do for you to be seen–he used to say–
I am the deserter from the night
I am the breacher of darkness
and my shirts and pockets are crammed with sun.

Come–it’s burning my hands and my chest.
Come, let me give it to you.
And I have something to tell you
which not even I must hear.

       translated by Kimon Friar

I would be a terrible mail carrier. I would tear open every envelope and wind up in federal prison. God took one look at people like me and said, I better make thoughts private.

The crime is called “Obstruction of Correspondence.”

…

A poem is an open letter. An open invitation, as the title of this one by Yannis Ritsos illuminates for us. A poem invites us to a party that has no start or end date. There is no dress code, and no address for the event. There’s no host, either—we don’t see the poet. This disembodied quality allows the words to spring forth from the reader’s own body; to transcend the constraints of the mundane; to speak through the voice of what Jung would call the Spirit of the Depths (as opposed to the Spirit of the Times), and what I’m inclined to refer to as the Divine.

…

The soul cannot speak directly to itself, except perhaps, through the arcane symbolism of dreams, which tend to evade interpretation even on those rare occasions on which waking memory can ensnare them.

So the soul needs to outsource its information. News from within—that which we glean from our own conscious cognitions—is biased, much like the media under a dictatorship. Each of us clings to a set of beliefs about the self, which functions as a bulwark against the destabilizing Mystery of existence. It tends to be when we receive dispatches from abroad–from others–that we learn something of our own place in the Mystery.

We are each other’s mail carriers.

If a poem is an open letter, each live interaction that takes place in the world is a private letter; it has epistolary significance of greater intimacy and immediacy. A poem is meant for anyone willing to engage with it; it is an invitation to everywhere, whereas a word spoken to me is a personal invitation; in the coordinate known as here and now, it holds me responsible. (Notice the shared etymology between the words “responsible” and “respond.” A poem, unlike an interlocutor, is unaffected by my response to it.)

As mail carriers, we deliver notes that we ourselves penned as well as those that come from unknowable sources. Even in the context of quotidian encounters—we cannot anticipate what we might mean to those with whom we share a given moment.

…

Once, I was in a particularly bad neighborhood of hell—one of those voltaic depressive states that makes one feel the urgency of one’s misery—when I passed a woman on the streets of New York City who asked me for the bus fare. I thought to myself, Hallelujah! A problem I can solve!

Another time, in a putrid mood, I had to get my fingerprints taken for a teaching job, and in the process, found myself holding hands with a cop. As this jovial and overweight law enforcement officer pressed my fingers against the machine, I found myself laughing at his jokes, and the rage that had been harassing me all day dissipated into the absurdity of circumstance, the comfort of connection.

Another time I was very busy, and a gaggle of international children knocked on my door to demand math problems and candy, and that I go outside and play with them.

The other day, I was in a tea room, and a retired couple told me about the wind phone in Japan. It’s a rotary phone in a garden–wired to nothing–that people can use to call their departed loved ones.

…

It is moments such as these that allow me to locate myself.

Identity is like a subatomic particle, which occupies an indefinite, unobservable superposition, and only becomes observable at a particular location as a consequence of the interaction between the particle and the observer.

…

Isn’t it exasperating—that we cannot read the letters we bear? That we have no concept of our own role in others’ lives?

…

Once, I was struck by the beauty of a Muscovy duck. I wanted to tell it, and couldn’t.

…

“And I have something to tell you

which not even I must hear.”

…

Isn’t it exhilarating?

…

In light of this insight–that we are mail carriers for the Mystery (the Grandeur, the Divine—call it what you will)—then every exchange we have with another becomes an act of faith. We say yes to the mail route; we deliver the messages we cannot decipher. We make offerings of words and gestures, and trust that they will be received.

…

We live in a more or less faithless age, and one of the ways in which this plays out is in our cacoethes for self-display. Unlike many social critics of today, I do not see this as a symptom of self-absorption, but rather as a fear-motivated scrambling for control in the face of both awe-inspiring existential Mystery and large-scale geopolitical madness.

Religion gave us a language with which to acknowledge the former, and without it, many of us seem to be unable to do so. We are left alone with the human-made chaos that threatens our earthly home and our deepest hope–that we are, in fact, indispensable specks of something Divine.

Our response to this untenable situation is to divest ourselves of concern for the collective, over which we seem to have little jurisdiction, and focus on that which gives us a sense of control. This may look like neglecting to vote, cutting off communication with family members (which is, of course, warranted in some circumstances), or abstaining from committed relationships. For many of us, social media outlets become very alluring, as they promise us a way to engineer our own appearance, if not our own souls–to tear open and edit the letters that we are, before anybody can read about what’s wrong with us. We obstruct the correspondence.

…

Imagine if your mail carrier spent all day preening in the rearview mirror, and day after day, let the post grow moldy!

…

Social media allows us to indulge the fantasy that we are “the royal family,” to seek refuge in our “closed carriages.”

This is a delusion of the absence of grandeur.

…

“Come, it won’t do for you to be seen–he used to say–”

…

Our strident hiding behind the visible simply distracts us from the terror of rapture and the pain of our perceived lack of agency. It keeps us from the “luminous beaches;” from having to see.

It is a new manifestation of an ageless yearning, as anyone who’s read Picture of Dorian Gray can attest. The state of our souls takes on secondary importance to our image. And if we have no faith–no belief in the soul—why shouldn’t it?

…

Would you rather stumble across a friend’s announcement on Facebook or Instagram, or have this person call you up and tell you some piece of great news? Anyone can speak to everyone and no one; it takes courage to address someone in particular; to invest in one transitory interchange; to risk the message being ignored or misinterpreted, to accede, by investing in the particularities of one’s own life, to being situated in place and time.

This concession is, paradoxically, the only way into eternity.

I cannot singlehandedly stop deforestation or war. I can, however, provide one teenage girl with a felony on her record the tools with which to work toward a beautiful future. I can listen to the story of one English teacher in Ukraine. I can help my father who is a hoarder, a conspiracy theorist, and possibly even a Trump supporter, to get rid of things in his house. I can guide my husband through a moment of uncertainty. I can send a poem to someone. I can stick on a fake mustache and make some children laugh.

“Come–it’s burning my hands and my chest.

Come, let me give it to you.”

Not to everyone.

Not to a million nameless people on the Internet.

To you.

Unlike a social media post, a poem demands this of us: that we enter fully into the infinite confines of the moment. A poem wants to point you back to your own life. To be a portal. A one-way ticket deeper into experience. A poem is an open invitation to the private parties to which the poet herself is not even invited.

…

Prompts for Writing and Living

• Go out and have an in-person conversation with someone you love, loathe, or barely know.
• Afterward, imagine the dialogue from your interlocutor’s perspective.
• Write a poem from this person’s point of view. Handwrite it. Vow never to publish it.
• Leave the poem in a stranger’s mailbox.
• Imagine the stranger’s experience reading your poem.
• Write another poem from the stranger’s point of view–with this poem you may do what you will.