Helen's Gifts

Extract

I'm struggling now, trying to write, to say anything, to follow the command “write it!” what i really need is an e-mail from Helen, telling me to sit down, to say what it is that I want to say and then to go about saying it. She would probably give me an ideogram, direct me to a page of Ernest Fennollosa's The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, then add how much she was looking forward to seeing the essay in print, on real paper, out there in the world. She would also, perhaps by way of closing, remind me that writing was a practice of making oneself vulnerable, and that wisdom wasn't going to come uninvited if you didn't let go of the need for some security.