An Epistemology of the Envelope

Using the retrospective form that is memoir, this creative essay explores the retro practice of letters-in-envelopes in the context of epistemology, especially interrogating how knowledge is situated in time and in gender. The topics that reverberate in the essay include instructions for selecting and addressing envelopes; Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Purloined Letter," with its interpretations by Derrida and Lacan; Heidegger's influential Being and Time, as well as his problematical life; the logical "paradox of the two envelopes"; and cross-dressing in the Civil War by women soldiers and perhaps by Confederate President Jefferson Davis. What binds this disparate material together is the narrator's struggle to accomplish a feminist knowing, in which what is in plain sight is not hidden, even while both preserving the past and relegating it to the indecipherable retro.