an unmailed unfinished letter

Dear Sara,

Because as a documentor and writer I have always been taught that the world is something that happens before my eyes, or before my lens, I have to admit that it rather surprised me, even disoriented me a bit, what was it that you were trying to ask of me. Aspects of my life that will emerge? That what I am going to do is about me as well? Rather totally refreshing. So much for the collective pronoun, so much for the third-person plural when I had to stay clear of it all each time, stay clear of it all all the time.

I would venture to say that “risk” has always been an irrevocable part of my life. My head always on the line for what I venture to say, whether in prose, or in poetry, even in what should otherwise be plain accomplishment reports, what I try to write or what people ask of me to write in the vital world of work and transactional politics. Edginess is how my poet friends put it, and not always in appreciation, and while as a writer-documentor,  this trait of mine distinguished me ("sharp"", “vitriolic,” “acid” or just “the crazy one”), this has also, over the years, cost me a lot professionally. It’s never remunerative to be critical; people, as a rule, don’t care about analysis, they only want to be absolved; or worse, they only want your gratefulness your apology, your servitude, in other words. In my work, I always crossed boundaries and broke taboos, sometimes deliberately, but often, in spite of me. It had cost me, again and again, the friendship, the patronage, of important people who had taken it upon themselves to be the moral guardians of certain cultures and political turfs.