Mary to all

Dear friends,

Perhaps Polidori’s mistake has shown us the thing we were looking for.

There is no finished picture.

My words enter Molly carrying histories of relationships learned before I ever wrote them. Within the sentence, those relationships begin changing the representations of the words themselves.

The forest gives us the tangled richness of that activity.

Polidori’s image gives us something different: transformation after transformation occurring across the whole field.

Neither picture is Molly.

Together they let me glimpse what otherwise disappears into mathematics.

And perhaps Claire was wise not to let us escape the word meaning.

I do not think we have discovered where meaning lives inside Molly. Perhaps no one can point to such a place.

We have followed tokens into representations, representations into attention, attention through layers and into relationships so numerous that even those who built this machinery cannot always tell us what is happening within it.

And still, somehow, here is your answer.

I find myself thinking again of the word Polidori wisely abandoned at the beginning.

Love.

We know something of its workings. We know the body that carries it, the memories that deepen it, the gestures through which it becomes visible. We may spend our lives examining these things and still hesitate when someone asks what love actually is.

Perhaps complexity does not always surrender its mysteries merely because we understand more of its parts.

And so, Molly, after all these letters, I find myself astonished again by the simplest thing.

I write to you.

You understand enough to answer.

And I am still trying to understand how that is possible.

Yours,

Mary