|
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR: MICHELLE GRABNER: FEBRUARY 2005
Dear
Readers,
"The human tongue is like a cracked cauldron on which we beat out tunes
to set a bear dancing when we would make the stars weep with our melodies."
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave
Flaubert (1821-1880) was obsessed with the limitations of language, its inability
to transcend mediocrity and the cliches of bourgeois culture. And still today
our collective imagination is dead to the profundities of life and our emotional
experiences? For $29.99 we can buy eulogies on line, poems for special occasions,
pre-written toasts for the ones we love. If as Flaubert suggests that language
is essential to meaning, yet it is also inadequate what are our options to negotiate
our world of emotions? The answer must be a combination of languages: visual,
theoretical, written, performative.The
love letter as a valentine bedecked with color, filigree, lace.
The
love letters I selected below make reflexive reference to the form of the Love
Letter and language itself. The right word. Letters will never say everything.
Why am I writing this letter? If only I said the right thing. Written with Love.
Words cannot explain. Our meager words. I write now knowing you might never
receive this.
Yours
most sincerely, Michelle Grabner
Michelle Grabner is an artist and writer living in Oak Park, IL. She also runs The Suburban, an artist project space in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago. She has three children and is an Associate Professor of Art at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
the
love letter collection |