“You are the city I live in; you are the name of the month and the day.”
Victor Shklovsky, a Russian poet living in exile in Berlin, fell in love with Alya. He wrote her numerous letters per day; the single constraint she imposed was that he must not write about love. He wrote about mourning, nationhood, exile, dreams, his wardrobe, history, banal activities but never about love. The predetermined constraint-- the forbidden subject of these letters-- is the very core that holds them together and binds them into a narrative. Even as the unspoken subject permeates each word, it is the absence of the said, the not-saying, that makes a cohesive statement. It is the purposeful avoidance that leads to directness.
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