On building our own caskets and finding ways to accurately view our own places in this world
Dear Sarah,
I am looking at your letter from last week and thinking about the messy, human process of voting — and how heartening it is that it is this one-to-one form of interaction, and it takes time, and we don’t all always know what we’re doing in the process, but we can figure it out together, one-to-one. On voting day I felt a little nervous and then comforted by all the people who were there at my polling place to make it possible for all of us to vote. Nervous because they were so ready to help — think of all the other times in your life when you can use a little help and you find yourself left to your own devices. It felt meaningful in a different way this year, in a new place, and I was grateful to be able to access my polling place so easily, and more grateful for the insistent people all over the country who had to push harder to get out to vote, or wait longer, or to brave districts where others may have been actively trying to keep them away.
Speaking and thinking of messy human processes — i.e. the whole messy thing of being human that we pretend is so trim and clean and we can tuck it away behind our fresh clothes and our window treatments — I’ve been thinking a lot about craft projects, of doing things with my hands, away from my screens, giving my eyes just a bit of a break for once. I’ve been wanting to take some woodworking classes — woodworking is something I’ve done sporadically since I was in elementary school — and I’m feeling particularly ready for it lately. Minnesota is a good place for wood, there is a craft spirit here that I’m just starting to get to know. I found out about the Women’s Woodshop in town and I signed up to learn how to build and install a cabinet. I’m excited to learn how to make something practical and real, physical, that will occupy real space, change space by being present. There was an interview in Apartamento magazine a few issues back (issue 18) with the artist Kembra Pfahler that I think about regularly for a number of reasons, one of which is that she has “an obsession with empty bookshelves. I find them to be one of the most beautiful objects. It represents a new beginning.” I think about this a lot, the object or furniture just being there, being itself. I keep a lot of books and I put them on shelves, but the shelves just waiting and being are special. We had a time in our life in San Francisco when we had too many chairs — we’d picked up at the UC Berkeley salvage I think not one but two old wooden school-style chairs with built-in wraparound desk arms — and we had them just there in our small apartment living room, and I would point them a bit differently on different days, and eventually we passed them on to an enthusiastic new owner, whose personal quantity of chairs owned I know not.
As I was looking around for woodworking courses I came across the North House Folk School, based in Grand Marais, Minnesota, up on the wolf’s snout of Lake Superior. They are offering a course I can’t stop thinking about: building your own casket. It is so beautifully practical and the course description is witty and they suggest “above-ground applications of your resulting project” like a bookshelf, coffee table, storage container, or entertainment center. “Students will develop woodworking skills that will last a lifetime (and beyond).” I love this project and the only couple of reasons I’m not diving right in are that my current apartment is a bit small for my casket, and also that I’d prefer to be cremated, so a full-sized casket would be a bit much, though I suppose I could be sent off with some of my favorite miscellany to keep my dust company. Can you imagine that woodworking studio? Every move the recognition in real time that you’re counting minutes — days, months, years, if you’re lucky — toward your own project deadline. I think it’s likely you may find this a bit unsettling but it sounds at the very least like a peaceful kind of workshop to take, full of meditative moments, I am certain. P.S. The casket is box-shaped rather than vampire-coffin-shaped, so I really think it would blend nicely into one’s home decor.
For now, thinking outside the box, your friend,
Eva
November 15, 2018
Dear Eva,
I have this theory that what makes life so complicated is the necessity of using two lenses to understand it. And, of course, the impossibility of using both lenses at once.
In much of our daily lives, we use a macro lens. Everything in our own lives looks and feels bigger than it really is because we are as close as we can get to it. The growl in my empty belly feels significant. The worry about how to meet a work deadline can consume me.
But as you and I have discussed before, the details of my individual life are objectively meaningless in the grand scheme of things. To see this clearly, we have to zoom out, maybe all the way out until the Earth is a just pale blue dot.
None of this means that I can or should live my life solely with an astronomical view. I may not matter to the world, but I matter to my world. How then, can we hold both perspectives in our minds at once? I imagine a pair of bifocals that allow us to smoothly move from one lens to the other and back again. Maybe those bifocals are made of wisdom I don’t yet have.
Earlier this week, I stumbled upon the work of Giorgia Lupi, a designer who focuses on what she calls “data humanism.” She creates data visualizations that attempt to visually connect complex data to human stories, and the results feel mind-bending to me. It feels like she is single-handedly hacking together the bifocals we need to remind us that the massive datasets that are powering scientific and technological innovation are comprised of billions of rich, raw, contradictory human experiences.
Humans need stories in order to connect with one another. I wonder, though, why we have such trouble imagining those stories from a distance? We read a story about 50 people dying in the California wildfires, and the tears don’t flow until the author documents the suffering of a single family in detail. Is it a survival mechanism that we turn off our imaginations when we are zoomed out? Would it overwhelm us to recognize that the pale blue dot is teeming with billions of human stories that might bring us to our knees if we heard them? I wonder how much our politics, our businesses, and our policies might change if we could look at customer data / political polls / economic numbers and see that they reflected the lives and experiences of human beings.
On the flip side, I wonder what it would look like if we could calmly recognize the ways we are analyzed and treated in the aggregate. At the hospital, I am a unit to be processed in a large, complex system. At school, my 6 year old is a collection of his test scores that gets folded into school averages that affect funding decisions for the school and property values of the surrounding community. While we all want to and deserve to be treated as individuals, we are all also simply cogs in a series of larger and larger wheels. If we could stomach this reality more readily, I wonder what problems we might solve?
When I think about what this all means, it starts to feel like maybe some of the most important work in the world is the work that helps us see through both lenses. I’ll end this note pondering all of the many forms that work might take and the tools we have to do it.
Until next week!
Yours,
Sarah