The removal
of a person, abruptly, from a set of conditions is complicated for the soul.
Did you ever feel that? I am writing to you, a writer. As a child, in the space
before writing, did you suffer when you went to other people’s houses? Did you
feel their homes to be superior to your own with its backward-seeming
margarines and vinegars for preserving then cooking vegetables and animals?
Were you born a cyborg into a house of brutal monsters who bickered over
everything from feeding to sleeping schedules? Or did you, as the years passed,
have the growing sense that you were a citizen born to immigrants? For example,
could I ask if it ever seemed to you that, in the hospital, you had been taken
from the wrong incubator by an exhausted, starving nurse twenty-one hours into
a forty-eight hour shift? There is something about a monster that is formulated
in these hours or days just after birth; a crossed or normal birth that, either
way, is connected to a profound confusion deep in the routines of transference.
