Dear _______,

‘Each book is in a certain way a letter that wants to be received by you,’ claims Helene Cixous in her essay, ‘Writing Blind’. I think of this as a letter, destination unknown. In it, I address myself to you. But not to you. For, as John W. P. Phillips remarks in ‘The Dear (le tout cher)’, ‘the addressee at the present time – and therefore in principle at any time – cannot be identical with the one who reads it’. The address is exscribed in the text. It is, Phillips says, ‘a kind of potential that cannot be cancelled by an act of writing or reading’. Dissolving the division between an imaginary addressee and a real reader, there is always another addressee, beside, beyond or even in excess of the letter's reader. Moreover, for Phillips, ‘the structure and modalities of address are intimately related to the theme of touch’. Correspondence, after all, is a means of making contact or keeping in touch. And it is with this tact in mind that these letters hope to reach you.

In September 2013, I addressed the task in hand: to write about touch in John Berger's epistolary novel, From A to X. I had been struggling to grasp the matter for two years, at least. One night, not knowing how to go on with it, I listened to Cixous describe writing as like sending a message in a bottle: you are not sure who will get the letter, or if it will be received at all. Like a poem for Celan. And that's exactly it with this correspondence too. I hadn't been sure who I was writing to and now it was as if I sensed, at last, how I might begin to say it. So I set out writing these letters, destination unknown. When I have finished, if I finish, I will seal them in a bottle and throw them into the ocean. I write with the hope that these messages will reach you, and that you will read them in the spirit in which they are written.