40's Postal Project One: Lisa Pasold & Bremner Duthie

Dec 15th 2010. I return home from invigilating exams. It is snowing again in Mulhouse. My new apartment is warm, though, and hummmms emptily. Far from you, Lisa & Brem, my friends, and your wonderful energy, I sit down in my kitchen and begin to select random words from the London Review of Books. Then I clip out tiny images of insects from a reproduced book cover. I stop to look around the house at all the scraps of other magazines, letters, cards. I find the envelope, such a colorful, bright, flowery envelope, from one of my birthday cards on my desk piled high with stories and papers waiting to be read and graded. I am foregoing such things tonight to make this little something for you.

With the enveloppe and my scattered pile of words, a glue stick and some other scraps I have collected, I transform my little Bristol card for you, hoping that this will bring into your house a little blue bright sky. I label the bird human, I pick words that attract me, not thinking of phrases or syntax. The language is in a sky, floating, just as it will soar your way tomorrow morning.

I have my terrible cheap camera, and in a million and one attempts I end up with a few photos to stick here. I slip the work with the collage(s)--because I ended up making a mini collage on the other side of the Bristol card, too--into an enveloppe adressed to you, in hopes of protecting the little words. I would not want any language to fall off en route, for syllables to be lost on the road, left to their own devices!

It is late now, and I am still thinking of you. I hope that there it is snowing, too. Crystalline, soft snow. Whispering to you as you sleep--for it is very very late now--and I hope you dream of lotus flowers, carmine, of green tropical places seen across and beyond a snowy desert. I hope that this little card, waiting to go out to the mail, in my personal mail outbox, will bring you joy.

Pictured above: Full collage (at top of blog post) then back of collage, detail of back of collage mini collage, and then the collage in its enveloppe in my entryway waiting to be taken outside and sent to Brem & Lisa.

Pictured below: details from 40's Postal Project 1, then another version of the full collage: