Gretel Ehrlich writes, “A writer makes a pact with loneliness. It is her, or his, beach on which waves of desire, wild mind, speculation break. In my work, in my life, I am always moving toward and away from aloneness. To write is to refuse to cover up the rawness of being alive, of facing death.” Within that aloneness comes, now and again, the grace of a conversation—with a poem, with a forest, with a circle of readers, with another burning, lonely mind.
For Robert Frost, that conversation happened with poet Edward Thomas, whom he met in England in about 1913. After Thomas was killed in the war, Frost said, “[he] was the only brother I ever had. I fail to see how we can have been so much to each other, he an Englishman and I an American and our first meeting put off till we were both in middle life. I hadn’t a plan for the future that didn’t include him.” He told Thomas’s wife, “He is all yours. But you must let me cry as if he were almost all mine too.”
I met my friend Jilline Ringle in the mid-1980s, when we were eighteen-year-old college students. She was an aspiring actor, I was an aspiring writer, and we began a burning conversation that lasted until her death in 2005. We wrote to each other when we were callow, hopeful, untrained girls. We wrote to each other when we began to achieve our first tiny successes. We wrote to each other at moments of misery and epiphany. Today she has been dead for nearly a decade, yet our conversation continues, as Frost’s conversation with Thomas continued for the rest of Frost’s long life.
In 1999, when I was overwhelmed by babies and solitude and the struggle to make poems, Jilline sent me a letter:
“I love, I love, she cries into the gust.”
That is our mantra, yours and mine, each for our own reasons, each for our own sanity. This is why we have each other. There is a talismanic charm . . . that we cling to in order to return ourselves to this earth. Keep figuring it out, honey; I will be flat and frank with you if you will as well with me. If it is impossible for us to hold each other’s hands, we will charge each other’s minds telepathically, ethereally, and hopefully we will help turn on some lights in those dark corners.
With love, your lantern bearer.
[from a draft-in-progress of The Conversation (Autumn House Press, 2014)]
3 comments:
What a beautiful conversation! It speaks to the power of found family and how powerless distance is when it comes to friendship.
This is such a deeply felt post, so revealing of the meaning of friendship among women and your loss of your dear friend in particular.
Earlier this year I read Gretel Ehrlich's "Facing the Wave", which left me so moved by her experience and how she wrote of it.
Your book-in-progress is going to be wonderful to read, Dawn. Thank you for sharing this excerpt from your friend's letter.
Very moving and beautiful.
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