Meghan Forbes

Last autumn, a dear friend sent me a postcard from a trip abroad. On the front of the card was a reproduction of an Otto Dix painting, a portrait of the journalist Sylvia von Harden. In the painting, von Harden—with cigarette tucked between lean fingers and a flute of alcohol set before her—leans back in a chair that is not keeping up with the times. Its ornate and inutile curlicues seem to me embarrassingly gauche in interwar Berlin, especially in the presence of its occupant: all long lines and sharp angles, the perfect circle of a monocle perched upon one eye complimented by the red and black squares on a straight line dress. Von Harden, with her short, cropped hair and serious expression, appears to be wrapped up in a conversation that is decidedly not about the weather. I was pretty pleased that on seeing this picture on a postcard, my friend thought of me.

I set the image on my windowsill in the bedroom I kept at the time, with the portrait facing into my room. Inside, I looked upon it often, and from outside, by habit leaving each morning I’d gaze up at the back, a white rectangle with circular stamp in dark relief.

I can’t actually say what was written there, though I remember liking it very much upon receipt. Moving again this past May, I picked up the postcard to pack it and made a somewhat frightful discovery: there was no legible text left on the back of von Harden, just a faded trace of the letterforms that once made a message there. The belligerent Texas sun had wiped my friend’s words away. I wrote her a letter to tell her this and offer something of an apology, and she responded (by email) to say that she was alright with this “solar erasure,” found comfort even in the “occasional cosmic correction.” I loved these new words she gave to make meaning of what had happened, and admired her easy acceptance. My loving, but nonetheless careless, placement and the sunrays’ steady shine were not for her a violent intervention on her writing, but a friendly collaboration.

And this feels right, for after all, writing and then sending a letter is at once an act of authorship and a letting go, a willingness to submit to history and the chance inherent in that.

The Magic and Risk of
a Handwritten Letter

September 7, 2017 By Meghan Forbes