Love Letter

An endless pile of paper will invariably proffer love letters, even if they are not strictly pieces of paramour literature. Sometimes they wear a disguise, like love addressed to a Xerox machine, or love pushed through a Xerox machine, or some covert romance wrapped up in the promotion of a furniture removal business, or a thick Lanvin card stock sprayed with a little Arpège (because if she wants the moon, give her Arpège). A stack of papers and letters — such a deep hunger that we feed with our time.

And then we found ourselves at an epistolary concert, R. Kelly on a tour he called Love Letter. It could have been Atlanta or St. Louis; we weren’t properly introduced to our location, as we literally found  ourselves there, while losing the trail that led to or away from this moment. Anyway, the experience of that moment has since been usurped by the videos of the concert that we look at everyday on a laptop that shares the space between us. Most of this footage was taken from the inconstant support of a human hand above the audience at a stadium built for sport and used for the auxiliary purpose of R’n’B spectacles then sent into our screen-space, the flat theatre of our washed-out memories. Occasionally, the camera was placed on a stable support, so the image doesn’t bounce; with these videos we are relieved, gratefully, of the seasickness of bobbing optics.

Two women in front of us seemed to have been twins – as they registered our features, perhaps they felt disappointed; evidently their resemblance to each other was not a unique kind of duplication. There we were. (Where?) We felt sorry but couldn’t translate it into words that they would take in the spirit in which the »sorry« was intended. From then on, they circumvented us and sipped with wet lips on their buckets of Mountain Dew.

We digest letters, yet it’s more than reading. Or at least it’s something different. Everything about the page must be imbibed rather than understood. Where some love letters pulse, R. Kelly’s love letter (in the skin of a concert) throbbed; and where letters are typically addressed to an individual, R. Kelly’s letter evades an object (too drunk on subject) and may be tapped into freely by anyone who wants to receive his words. With all this dripping emotion built up around an absent plot, the LCD screens behind him turned into elaborations of what Flaubert had made motions towards 143 years ago by hovering over the absences and precipices played out by Frédéric Moreau. The screens occupied by R.’s lips and the subtlety of his mouth’s slight gestures transformed into a scene of two moist slugs examining each other from above and below. The aroma of Mountain Dew was perfect and disgusting; we would have thanked the twins for bringing this olfactory quality to the concert, but then again it was doubtful that we could have made our message understood.

EDWARD and OTTO PFAFF are brothers. For the past 35 years, give or take, they have spent their working hours sifting through a variety of printed material. Mounds of paper – sometimes material sent to them via the post without a return address – mounds and mounds of paper, in fact. Otto just stares and Edward occasionally shakes his head in wonderment asking, »How have we arrived at this profession?« But they’re both certain that their work is worthwhile and at the end of each day they pat each other on the back knowing it’s been a productive day.