A Manual Approach to Mourning

Extract

I'm Writing this Essay on a Green Hermes 3000 Manual Typewriter from the 1950s. A Painting Student Gave it to Me; He found it on the street.

I imagine telling Eve about this typewriter. She would have understood how a material instrument—ink-flecked platen, jade-pale space bar—can change syntax: to looms and to Victorian textures her sentences responded, and I recognize, in her prose's rhythms, the period-specific thrill of stretched syntax, and the renunciatory satisfaction of curtailing a clause before it can exercise its right to conclude.

Although, in a self-deprecatory moment, she claimed to disregard music, I often fantasized about inviting her to my apartment for an evening musicale. On my Steinway M piano, I'd play a harmonically indecisive piece from Proust's era—a Fauré impromptu. She'd forgive my technical deficiencies; she'd comment on the performance's abreactive ambition (she taught me the word abreactive), my attempt to neutralize shame by exulting in it, my finger labor a haptic game affiliated with her favored arts—masturbating, interpreting, containing, hugging, sitting, retreating.