The second letter of the '76 Heidi Walker season arrived about a week later. The address is still wrong. I assume I got it faster than the last one, since obviously the PO had figured out my change of address status. The envelope contains a charming warning to read when time and patience permit.
I tore the pages out of the envelope at warp speed, I'm sure. She starts out apologizing for not having written in so long. (Not the experience I was having at my end.) Then, since she's listening to the Barber of Seville, she raves about the opera, the singing, the playing, the staging, in counterpoint with her stories about working with big photocopying machinery in a closet. She then embarks on a seafaring tale worthy of the early Melville. It includes a story within a story. The internal one is written out in an entirely different hand writing that is also consistent, easy to read, and lovely. We could make a font of it nowadays and call it Heidi sans serif. Within the story, she includes a Chinese poem in translation. The story is the tale of a traveler, and the poem a traveler's prayer. So it is a letter about travels that includes a story about a traveler, which quotes a poem about the materials of ocean travel and the danger to travelers. At last, in the last two pages, the voyage is at an end in that unstuck time, and she's struggling at a school in California. She describes this semester as a huge mistake. She needed time to process what she'd learned in her travels. I can bet that she's going to process this right before my eyes. It is indeed in need of patience, and unless I want to write a book within this book, I can only observe that I am not even referenced in this further outpouring. In fact, at the end, she asks me to write back so that she knows she's not writing a book without an audience. (A common problem.)
I must have blown the gig as far as responding went, because the next thing she sends is a birthday card in late March. She now has my correct address. It's a lovely card. Her note references a Boston Nest expression (or so our little band of pseudo pranksters - or philosopher jesters - came to be called by us) about all good things being blueberries. The blueberry in this little card is the lovely poem. If I were Nobokov, I'd fake it for you, but I ain't and I can't.
Heidi returns full force a week later with good news about the little musical group she's in. But before we can get to that, we have to remark about the envelope. It seems as though the stickum was insufficient, because Heidi uses masking tape to seal it shut. She writes on the tape something on the order of 'here we go a masking tape tra la, tra la, so stick you little molecules tra la tra la.' (I'm paraphrasing.) Apparently, we learn from the text, I sent a gift of temple music that was hitting the spot at the Walkers. She sends the address of the harpsichordist, in the event I want to contribute a work to the musicales. I do. She tries inverting the zen koan about the monk and the maiden, with its punch line about putting her down on the other side of the river. She means that though I'm gone, I'm not forgotten. So I learn, from the other end of a correspondence, that I'd been back to DC for a short visit in '76. That must be why I remember the voicing of that man's harpsichord. She also says she's going to California, but coming to Boston first. As Heidi would say,
"Yea!"
In the following letter, 4-24-1976, there is much poetry. In fact, it's all poetry, or poetry shaped confessional. There's a bit that catches my eye as I race down the pages. It's my name in a circle with an arrow pointing across the page at a pencil bit. She writes, in pencil (I paraphrase):
"Before the altar of commitment I rebel.
You learn my secrets
But cannot have my heart.
My secrets are not so valuable."
The way she puts this basic idea is so much more beautiful. I only wish I felt comfortable quoting her. Such voyeur I, She beckons and I hasten to avoid compliance.
In pen, she warns that the 'you' is not 'I,' that is, me.
The pages are huge: art paper. There are many drawings. I am lucky to own this stuff. She's gone on to great things.
Less than a week later, another outpouring of Heidi creativity on green paper arrives at 70 the Fenway. The envelope is covered with jokes about physics (gamma rays in the water). The first few green pages tell of a session of target practice. Taken altogether with the poetry and drawings, reading this now makes my knees buckle. This is the result of an ache for this woman that screams back out over intervening years with as much force as it ever had, but with fresh awareness and understanding. The utter sexiness of this polyglot pistol packin' mama is beyond the ability of any superman (übermensch) to suppress. Quick, hand me that kryptonite candy bar!
The green paper gives way to the newsprint and I'm worthy of a fresh salutation, doubled with passion. OK, Botkin. We're getting somewhere at last. I'm 'dear dear' Cal, because she's finally gotten a letter from me. It's full of who knows what really. Going by her response, it's full of drawings of Bambi meets Godzilla. Guess who was Bambi, and who Godzilla? Also, I gather, there was a card with some score of something or other. She writes the five lines and fills them with a parody of my style. It's amazing how well she picks up on Nest lingo from my hints. Perhaps I was explicit. It's as though she has a contact high. She's right in there pitching with her blueberries and her stomp button. The page is alive with cartoon figures and I reap what I sow ten times over. She has me in delighted stitches. Sew and sow.
And then she's on to dancing, getting sweaty, doing dances, taking chances. She'd learned a jig from her Mom in the green pages, and now she takes the audition and draws cartoons on the ride home. She warns the road not to reach up into her (!) and closes the page with "melting dreams that touch me" (you - whoever). The thing is, I can never tell with this wickedly creative woman what is poetic license and what is out and out reaching out. There is no telling even now. She encloses silk she spun. Does it get more romantic than this? She says, at the end of the breathless page that she's coming to Boston in May. (O, Süsser Mai!) She won't stay long, but she'll want to see me ('certainly' - certainment!) and that she'll stay with Linda Litman (oh, my, God!) and that I should get off my ass and write to Linda (I haven't since I bled all over her, literally). And then, just when she's made me realize that Ms. Litman still gives a shit, she drops the atomic bomb. I cannot help but quote this innocuous but famous passage. "Part of it (the visit) will include figuring out details of my moving there in the Fall."
Oh Christ, get me some ammonia inhalants!
Then follows a peculiar coda which I, in the chair into which I'd surely sunk, would have scarcely been able to read with the vapor swimming before my eyes. An odd request for a (metaphorical) massage, and a stern rebuke for having mentioned that "Mara said 'hello.'" She, getting back to the particle theory theme that opened the epistle, "doesn't know me from 'atom.'" (Oh god, will I live through the next few seconds?) "Ah. But she knows me from your words." It has got to be a deep trope of the sci-fi legion that a world where muses collide and exchange hellos is not an happy world. The dragon that I have called up is whipping me but good. And yet, there's more. Much more.
