Dear Friend,

Do you remember reading Dracula? By Bram Stoker? I was just thinking about it recently, a castle alone in the wilderness, a maze where one gets stuck. Ahh gothic literature, am I right! Isn’t it so lonely? Surely Dracula is a bit like Frankenstein’s monster? I mean, he’s all alone isn’t he? He doesn’t have any significant other, only his dark evil thoughts and his lust for blood. Harker has no such issue, he has his Mina, and he’s so desperate to keep sending his long, dreary letters. Could you imagine being Mina and receiving a letter recording each and every moment of that man’s day, as if each one had significance in its place amongst all the other moments. I couldn’t attempt to note each moment out of pity for whoever happened to read it after me. Of course, it depends also on whether time stops disassociating, whether it goes back to seeming more linear.

I wonder why time would do that. Why would it lose its place, get jumbled within itself like a knot that keeps shifting uncomfortably? I’m sure there’s a medical reason for it, yet I’d rather not look into it.

Where are you now? I mean where are you living? It would be nice to see a familiar face again, plant myself back into reality. Not that I’m really detached. Only I did develop a habit of taking long walks just so I didn’t have to look through my window anymore; high up where I am, my window is effectively one way, and I’m not too fond of narrow perspectives anymore. At least on my walks I could stand straight, look around, maybe pet a dog if I was lucky.

I remember taking a walk not too long ago up a rocky hill near where I live and I paid close attention to the geology; rocks stacked next to each other vertically like books on a shelf, indentations like the cracks on the leather bindings, each rock probably telling some kind of story.

And completely stationary, practically unmoved for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The wind and light rain that would move them were functioning at the very moment I was there, a momentous occasion for the rock I presume.  I’ve been reading much more. Not the rocks of course, I’m no scientist, although observing change is curious, however slow and uneventful. That vertical geology reminded me of a line in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, or Notre Dame de Paris: ‘this will kill that… the book will kill the edifice’. Frollo was right, the novel has destroyed any need I once had for structure. Especially now Notre Dame is gone! It’s the final victory from the gothic writers: Hugo, Stoker, the Brontë’s, James. They have all dispatched of the edifice, made it redundant, and burnt it down just to make sure. I wouldn’t be surprised if a page of Jane Eyre was the kindling that brought down that goliath of a church. Isn’t that poetic?

Can anyone even remember the tired mason whose work has been so ruthlessly razed after seven hundred years? Writers somewhat usurped the spotlight. The intellectual setting of 18^th and 19^th century Paris welcomed artists of all calibres, so one might assume both architects and writers interacted, maybe even got along, conversed in cafes while curling long moustaches. Little did the architects know that the writers, like Chicago’s free-market, capitalist guild of the 20^th century, were rabid and ambitious, keen to rise higher than all others, monopolise all new information, shape the new world out of the previously dispatched parts.

Ha Ha… It’s funny to imagine that any of these egoists got along, especially not amongst their own peers! Such a conspiracy theory, although fun to create, has no foothold, despite my own desire to believe such drama. It’s funny to think about relationships like that. I guess that’s why we became such good friends, right? We aren’t so familiar with each other that we instinctively know everything about one another. We accept change, rather than being stationary and predictable.

But it’s the books. They seem stationary there on my shelf, but they’re always moving somewhere, allowing change. They change me, have changed me, in that I hate windows. I’d rather be outside, see things with the full breadth of my eyes. I’m sure you understand. Perspective must take precedence; the novel has done that for me. It means now I can even disregard the need to go outside; rather I can see the vertical lines of the rocks put on the page. I’m sure that’s why I’m writing this letter. As much as I want to see how you’re doing- and to actually see you- there’s a reason as to why Epistles is so big, why sermons are always obsessing over Paul. It’s even why Harker’s letters are so important. Mina, you, the Christians all need to apparently know moments recorded, change that has occurred. Newton understood this too in a different light: the only way humans have ever learned to go anywhere is to leave something behind.

So yes, this is an admission of my having dispatched certain things, things replaced by perspective. This is no reflection of security. I’m not sure of myself, which I think is still normal. I’ve only had to adapt to a situation which isn’t unique just… different. It’s fine. Just a bit lonely.

Anyway, we should make arrangements for, let’s say, next week? As soon as I remember where you live. And what the date is.

Charlie Perkins Gilman.

Tainton Niall

Tainton Niall is a student of English Literature and enjoys all things art and film.