Two parts of a whole uncomfortably conjoined
Dear friends, dear first & early subscribers, dear oldest besties, high-school crushes, former lovers, dear man I live with, colleagues, acquaintances, & strangers, that is, all of you who floated up out of the interweb to hit the subscribe button and flood my inbox with your sign-ons,
THANK YOU for taking me up on the invitation, and thanks for giving me a bit of space in your inbox, your field of view, your limited time-scape, your consciousness. I received the gift of your attention giddily, and I will care for and nurture it seriously.
And welcome, to whatever it is FLORENCE intends to become.
why this, why now?
1/ Because I am weak* & because I love & because I am a writer & as a horse eats hay, etc (I’ll unpack all this in a minute).
2/ I have an epistolary history. This delivery system is a form I understand.
3/ Precious little writing is possible for me without a specific audience. I am conversational to my core. My “site” specificity is always, has always been, the site of your attention. It is literally true that your very sign-up is the cause for this composition.
A letter is an intimate object. Despite the veil of the screen, the distance between us, pixels, despite the many of you to the one of me —
I would like to write you so simply, so simply, so simply. Without having anything ever catch the eye, excepting yours alone, and what is more by erasing all the traits, even the most apparent ones, the ones that mark the tone, or the belonging to a genre (the letter for example, or the post card), so that above all the language remains self-evidently secret, as if it were being invented at every step, and as if it were burning immediately, as soon as any third party would set eyes on it . . .1
*Alright, not weak, not even exactly undisciplined
Before I write anything I have to think 40 things, see 80 things, read 120 things, forget everything, start again thinking about what to write again, but only when I’m driving, walking, in the gym, showering, sleeping (especially sleeping), forget everything again, sit down with a pen (as now) or with a keyboard (as now), begin again, erase again, start again, forget again. Think of you (you, you, and you) — stand up, sit down, sit down stand up, etc
That’s the procedure. Every writer recognizes at least a portion of that passage.
To prevaricate is not to lie, it is to wander around and away from the truth, to avoid. To go astray, to deviate — to avoid getting to the unpleasant point one wishes to conceal; to prevent reveal.
But let’s say simply, out of practice. I lost my strength, my tone, my writerly virility. I’d lost my will to risk, now, thankfully, regained.
What & how often & how much?
Over the next weeks/months (now til the end of December? from now til forever?) expect some some experiments in form and content while I find out what I’m liking to write, what you’re liking to read, and while I get familiar with the platform.
Substack offers a neat little real-time-n-space calculator that tells me how many words I’ve written & estimates how much of your time I’m taking. I’ll aim to achieve a beautiful efficiency, while letting the writing be what it needs to be. (You poets know what I mean.)
Every letter is encoded with desire for reply, someone once said to me. What would you like to see, to read, from me?
I reserve the right to revise my opening gambit next time, any time, every time.
Your friend,
Suzanne
P.S. On current events, longer than the post itself, awkwardly but necessarily appended, requiring approx 4 more minutes of your time:
FLORENCE will not be regularly commenting explicitly on world affairs. But at this time I wish also to address that which we are all looking at every day, by sharing a tiny fraction of my thinking and feeling. Every day and every night I am thinking about the people suffering in Gaza, and about what is happening within and to the people in, and of, Israel. It’s terrible beyond my capacity to understand terror. The grief is beyond grief, it’s a black hole of fear and grief. I don’t think only of that. More than at any other time in my life, I am thinking of people the world over fearing for their safety, the safety of those they love.
I have been thinking about the history of the Jews, the history of Israel and Palestine, and what many forces in this world and this history have led us to this new, ancient, and terrible crisis. I am a Jew and I have never felt so Jewish as I have since October 7. Which is to say, I feel called upon, and out, as a Jew. I have over my lifetime gradually "unjewished" myself without noticing it, with only vague and uncomfortable ways of addressing (privately) my conflicted feelings about Israel, without doing any serious work around it. I have been vaguely anti Zionist without thinking deeply about what that would mean in practice, what sort of actual solutions my moral sense of justice for Palestinians might translate to. And, when I’ve encountered antisemitic undercurrents in the otherwise progressive communities in which I’ve spent my life, I’ve let that antisemitism lie, or been weak in confronting it, because Israel, and because I’ve been afraid. I am still afraid. Now, my social feeds are a maelstrom of disinformation, rage, moral certitude from "either side". Now, everything rises up in a terrible conflict in my own heart.
Islamophobia is on the rise. Suppression of the right to speak the truth of what one feels and sees is on the rise. Antisemitism is and has been on the rise; in these recent weeks I see it in my streams — not in the language against the state of Israel’s actions (anti Zionism is not, by itself, antisemitism)—but that the language and the very code of antisemitism itself has shown itself anew and plain. I am a Jew, I feel this antisemitism piercingly and I fear it. This fear creates a new shape for the state of Israel in my mind that I am trying to understand by thinking & feeling deeply and reading & learning widely. And my fear, and my anger, is like every other person on this planet’s anger and fear when faced with hatred, accusation, dehumanization for an incontrovertible fact of one’s person.
I am thinking about what I need to do to try to ensure that in my own heart not one human being can ever be thought of as monster2 or animal3 but only as a human being whose needs and rights, and whose actions, monstrous or otherwise, are judged on a scale of human morality.
Where I live no bombs, no rockets, are raining down. I have the luxury, and the responsibility, to think carefully and cautiously about what I think I know is right or true. I want to be careful, so very careful, with the language I choose to use, the symbols I choose to share. I read and look carefully, I listen, I diversify my sources of information. When I think I know what’s right I know I’ll do well to take a second, third, fourth look at what I think I know. I look five times at any meme or byte of information, especially when it seems to suit my ever-shifting framework. I share none.
When in these recent weeks I have seen myself pointing a finger of blame at others (individuals, groups, nation-states) for their violence, their ignorance, their racism, I have been working to turn that finger of accusation around— sometimes even literally, physically! — and point it back to my own heart. Examine and vanquish the violence in your own heart, I tell myself. It’s been a painful time. I have fear, grief, and violence in my heart. I’m human, after all. Here’s what I say to myself: be kind to yourself, be as kind as you can to every soul who crosses your path, try to avoid unkind speech or acts, do not argue on the internet, be willing to see what you don’t already see, to listen to what you haven’t yet been able to hear. When you point the finger of accusation at others, be willing to turn it back.
once more, your friend,
Suzanne
*see you the week after next (or the week after, or the week after that)
frequently used to describe Jews, and lately, Israelis
frequently used to dehumanize, and lately, by Netanyahu to dehumanize Palestinians