Small Wire

Some of you received an email from me last weekend with an update on this new publication. It turns out however that if you set up a regular email address and try to email 2,000 people at once, that is considered “spam bot” behavior. Gmail is very unhappy with me right now.

So here we are. If you did not receive an email from me already, welcome to Small Wire, my new newsletter project. The name for this project comes from Anne Sexton's poem by the same title. The poem describes faith as "a great weight / hung on a small wire." She goes on to compare it to the fragility and miracles of the world: a spider on a thin web, a slender vine that can support the heaviness of grapes, angels that dance on the head of a pin. "Love and a cough," she writes in the most quoted part of the poem, "cannot be concealed. Even a small cough / even a small love." A thin wire is sufficient to connect you, veinlike, to all there is that is life giving in the world. 

I am not religious and never have been but I still find the poem very beautiful and generative and meaningful, which I think is a testament to its universality. Someone who reads my newsletter sent me a very beautiful reflection from a friend of hers who was explaining the physics of audio engineering to her. “For sound to be recorded digitally, air pulses of variable pressure travel through a cable and at the center of the cable is an extremely fine gold wire that moves as the air moves around it. The fluctuations of the wire are translated numerically, and that’s how music is digitized. I thought it all sounded very poetic. Which is to say that ‘small wire’ is a good name for a transmission.”

One of the first essays I wrote on this newsletter was about letter writing. You can read it here. I had taken a workshop with the writer and curator Legacy Russell about letters. We mostly read poetry and Saidiya Hartman and talked about who your writing is for. A letter is ostensibly for someone else, but it is also a mode of self-expression. There is a kind of reflexivity to it. You are trying to find ways to persuade, to connect, to describe the world in language that will speak to your recipient. Essays are also ostensibly for an audience but as that audience morphs and expands, its nature also changes. You cannot really write for strangers.

What I like about letter writing and by extension, the format of a newsletter, is how it assumes this mode of intimacy. Audio wires also capture intimacy, the sound of someone’s breath, ambient background noise, small tremors in musical instruments or in human lungs. Part of what has happened in the algorithmic culture we live in is an allergy to this kind of intimacy. It is described as a flaw. To succeed at making content, singers autotune their voices beyond recognition, people scrub away their pores in photographs, writing is formulaic, generic, devoid of experimentation.

The poet and writer Aria Aber just curated a poetry folio for The Yale Review that is themed “lovesickness.” In one of the poems, “Unsent Letter” by Marilyn Hacker, the narrator writes to a youthful love that gripped her so intensely that she had no choice but to chronicle it. “Desire for you once filled a book,” she writes. To channel her feeling, she would take out a notebook and prop it on whatever surface she could find to write her “shipwreck chronicle.” Endlessly sinking, never drowning. Neither lover is young anymore. The recipient will never receive the letter.