From http://people.tribe.net/rorybowman/blog/8cf65f99-d9d6-4898-845a-e5d6e27328d2

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time–
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

Any semi-literate American woman between the ages of 30 and 60 will immediately recognize the name “Sylvia Plath.” An explicitly personal author and literary Janis Joplin, Plath was famous for three things: a 1963 novel (The Bell Jar), her suicide one month later, and a posthumously published collection of poetry, Ariel. The most-quoted poem from that collection is “Daddy,” which famously asserts that “every woman adores a Fascist.” A poet of modest talents on the global stage himself, her husband (Ted Hughes) was widely considered a murderer by some feminists, a complicit co-conspirator in Plath’s angelic death. Silent for decades on the matter, Hughes famously published a collection of poems just months before his own death in 1998. Titled Birthday Letters, this collection happened to highlight a personal custom of mine that began when I was fifteen.

It has been my goal, off and on, to write dear friends a birthday letter every year or three. Faced with the daunting task and commercialism of Christmas cards, I felt a short birthday letter each year was a more personal and humane way to keep in touch. Beginning in a time when telephone calls were expensive and stamps did not seem too cheap either, the custom has become something of an antiquarian oddity, often marked more by its breach than its observance, but one I have pretty much followed in my own journal and twice by mail with Catherine Lynne Carter. Big mistake.

After the ludicrous and confusing embarrassment of Carter’s subpoena and lawyer-fest of 1998, I spent a few years laying low and thinking. Brought up a feminist and coming of age in the late 1980′s, I had naive notions of masculine perfidy and feminist perfection in all things gendered. Elementary-school teacher, self-defense instructor and rape-prevention educator, I had spent years believing that most men were pigs, and that many of the manliest were pigs: child-raping, wife-beating drunks and lying bullies, whose word was always suspect and especially when at variance with the testimony of an inherently innocent and credible woman or child. That Kate Carter might be afraid of me was unthinkable, and that she would accuse me of wanting to kill her and misuse a statute written to address domestic abuse seemed to me bizarre, especially given what I saw as my clear tactical and strategic skills and (even in the worst of my depression) explicit courtesy. The only conclusion I could reach was in accordance with the judge’s of 1998: if not explicitly malicious, her alleged fears were clearly irrational. Time would heal certainly heal this, or so I hoped.

While appreciating the difference between commitment and obsession I do not, as a rule, abandon those I’ve loved. I reflected on Carter over many years, and for my own health used her birthday as a marker, writing unsent letters in my journals as a way to process my thoughts and try to create meaning. Some of what I felt was anger at being falsely accused, but mostly I was sad and confused. There was some fear that she might have seen something I could not, but mostly I assumed that each of us meant well and that she had been ill-advised. I was not my best at the time of her leaving and Martitia Dell had clearly continued to influence Carter for her own purposes, and possibly for Glen Slate. Although I wrote them, I sent no birthday letter to Carter in 1999, nor in 2000. In 2001 one, a letter sent through her lawyer was returned, so I skipped a year and wrote one in 2003. Finding myself out of town for the first time since 1996, I wrote three birthday letters in one day from Las Vegas: one to a friend of mine from fourth grade, another to a botanist friend from 1988 and a third to Kate Carter. Hand-written letters seem to me one of the least-intrusive, most personable and non-threatening forms of communication possible, but below is the exact content as a matter of public record.

It may help to know that I had seen Carter around Portland repeatedly, including a period during which I dated a dancer for whom she did costumes. Twice I had been in the same house with her for fittings, unbeknownst to Carter, just a room away. I kept my distance, though, out of courtesy and for her comfort. The 2003 letter was addressed care of her parents in California, with a return address to this client, whom I knew would see her often. Having been taught by the letter-bomb incident not to use my own return address, I did not wish to risk an inadvertent insult in this, my second contact in almost five years. After the bold rashness of returning her sofa with her truck five years previous, the text struck me as rather pleasant and banal gesture of reconciliation. She saw it, somehow, as an invasive threat. When she read it and freaked out at her wealthy client, it became obvious to me that Carter was beyond silly or mistaken, well into the irrational.

—

19 February 2003
Las Vegas, Nevada

Dear Kate,

Forgive me for not writing you as promised last year, but the point of your birthday as a time to write was to choose something clear and neutral: something well-defined but arbitrary that would lessen your fear and lessen my chances to do something rash or speak impulsively. “It is a characteristic of wisdom,” as Thoreau once wrote, “not to do desperate things.”

I was surprised when [E] mentioned you were in town, but pleased to hear that you seemed well. I don’t make much of [E's] insights into your character, but I have quite literally slept better since hearing that, making me realize how much free-floating anxiety I was carrying around you for all these years. As I was telling a friend earlier this month, you are in ways the last unresolved strand around Marcus’ death, the one variable I have not been able to balance. At an intellectual level I don’t understand what happened, at a limbic level I have not been able to process your scent, and the meds have partially arrested the mid-level stuff. Although clearly I needed them just to stay alive I believe that drug use (even anti-depressants) in some sense “freezes” emotional and other development, so some aspects of my coping and processing have been delayed until I am completely weaned of their effects. You must do what you need to, of course, and I have honored that, but just an FYI: I am glad of news and that you are well. Perhaps you could find it some year on my birthday to send promised news of your own, perhaps with a picture and news of your family.

I miss you, as I’ve said, and not always as one would think. Aristotle was right in the Nichomachean Ethics when he asserted that friends are dearer when one is happy. It is the good things I would share which pang me most sharply: a book or song, some craft or fabric. I understand so much more now some the things you said of color, as this week in Las Vegus I am bathed by shining light. I think you would cream over the Franklin-Covey organizing system and wish I could share small business tips and insights with you.

Was it worth gaining our brief sexual time time together, worth losing your friendship? At the time I thought it was, and I still might if we were friends, but life is funny that way, so today I am not so sure.

I think today of Gary Snyder’s poem “Seaman’s Ditty” and a song from Laurie Anderson’s Big Science, “Born, Never Asked.”

Happy birthday, Catherine Lynne, wherever you may be. – Rory

—

http://www.geocities.com/yesterdayswine/GarySnyder.html
http://www.lyricstime.com/laurie-anderson-born-never-asked-lyrics.html
http://www.internal.org/view_poem.phtml?poemID=356

This weekend was Carter’s tenth college reunion. I have no idea whether she attended or not, but would hope that she did not spend it cowering in some private hell of her own making.