ON WORKING IN SOLITUDE, SLEEPING THROUGH ART, AND THE FAILURE OF WORDS
January 24, 2019
Dear Sarah,
I have been scratching tiny notes onto the corner of the page where I’ve been planning to write this week’s letter, and now I am writing the letter itself, wrapping like a puzzle piece around my corner jottings. I was thinking about our project being a bit like a levee (or maybe the letters are the water held back by the levee?) and each week we work a new stone loose and let the water flow through. And if you looked along the surface of the levee you’d see all these different spots along the way where water is streaming through, and then collecting in a continuous flow.
I am thinking about your letter from last week and wondering about your/our/my relentless self-critics, and wondering why we treat ourselves this way, when we would be kind to others (and when others are kind to us)? Is there something in there about holding ourselves to different standards than the standards to which we hold others? What are the standards, and why? Maybe the standards are lower than we think, and so we can aim high but know there will be something to cushion us in between?
I felt a tingle when I read that you saw me as generous to myself. Is it true? Am I? I certainly wouldn’t always have thought so. I was fascinated to read this, as if you had told me I had appeared in a dream of yours — like there is another me that exists that is different from me because it is outside of me, and yet the same as me. I think this means you’ve further confirmed my existence.
I’ve got a few things spinning in my mind today. Last year at the San Francisco International Film Festival I went to a movie called ★ , a grand work by Johann Lurf made up of spliced-together film scenes of the night sky. I loved the way the film was described — Lurf’s film is a pandemonium of the most beautiful and the saddest dreams, a ballet of brightly lit gas clouds, a symphony of human fears and rescue fantasies — and I liked the film itself. Perhaps there was some double psychology at play — in movie theaters I need to try to be extra awake to counteract the soft pressures of a dark room — and since it was a film of dark skies all the way through, all signs pointed to my body wanting to sleep. But I pinched myself awake and raised my eyebrows to force my eyes wide open and took huge breaths.
I have also been thinking about Jeff Jackson, whose book Destroy All Monsters I’ve just started reading. His Instagram @deathofliterature is a delight and as he’s been promoting the book, he posted the other day about taping an episode of a PBS show called “Story in the Public Square.” Among other things he said they talked about “writing plays for sleeping audiences.” I haven’t seen or listened to this episode yet but this phrase has been turning over and over in my waking mind (and perhaps my sleeping mind as well). I’m also reminded of Sarah Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write (perhaps Jeff Jackson was thinking of it too?) and her writing on sleeping in the theater, and her thoughts on an experience designed for just that, beds in the theater and plays full of odd details meant to echo the theatergoers’ own dreams. Maybe I’m thinking about how we always assume we know so well what we want and when; we want to be entertained while we’re awake, of course. We’re predictable, and not, at the same time. I can dream on the phrase “writing plays for sleeping audiences.”
(I used to fall asleep everywhere, in undergraduate classes, in movie theaters, at performances. I once went alone to a performance of Handel’s Messiah at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor and I peacefully slept through much of it, shifting in my seat now and then to find a comfortable new orientation, and I woke and stood when we all joined in the Hallelujah Chorus, and then I slept some more. I think it was an issue with my diet! I’ve made changes in the last decade-plus and am now more often quite awake.)
The last person on my mind for this letter is Frances Gabe, the creator of the self-cleaning home, who passed away in 2017 at the age of 101. The whole home she invented sounded like a dream, and a masterful execution of both pure practicality and pure whimsy: The house, whose patent consisted of 68 individual inventions, also included a cupboard in which dirty dishes, set on mesh shelves, were washed and dried in situ. To deal with laundry — in many ways her masterstroke — Ms. Gabe designed a tightly sealed cabinet. Soiled clothing was placed inside on hangers, washed and dried there with jets of water and air, and then, still on hangers, pulled neatly by a chain into the clothes closet.
Among all these stories — the years-long production of the movie with the night sky as its subject, plays for sleeping audiences, the house designed to clean itself — I think I’m still stewing on last week’s letter and what it means for something (or someone?) to be useful, for something to be of use.
I’m thinking on all the reasons we should not only be kind to ourselves, but encouraging. I am glad Frances invented a self-cleaning house and that Johann made ★ . There is room for it all in our heads and it makes my days richer in all my waking and sleeping hours. Here’s to offering ourselves the space to pursue the creative freedom and tenacity that we are pleased to see in others!
Your friend,
Eva
Dear Eva,
I recently read a beautiful and heartbreaking obituary for a law school classmate, and I thought about the unfathomable task of trying to summarize a life in a thousand words. Even the most well-written obituaries remind us of the inevitability of words failing to fully capture lived experience. Even describing a single moment of a life adequately in words is impossible. And the more meaningful the moment, the more difficult it is to recount in writing, and therefore, the greater the gap between how it felt and how it reads. How cruel.
Yet writing down what swirls in our brains gives us something more lasting than presence. I like to think it creates a little form of immortality — some small way of enduring after our bodies are gone. But more importantly for me, it helps me make sense of things.
After moving back to Iowa 5 years ago, I gradually began writing again. In the process, I became mildly obsessed with the “how to write” genre of writing. Ann Patchett, Anne Lamott, Twyla Tharp, Abigail Thomas, Annie Dillard, so many others. I have been thinking recently just how much those books have taught me about how to be human.
There is the technique of using a “side door” to find your way into a topic rather than trying to take it head-on. This method seems to work pretty well for almost anything messy that involves humans — a hard conversation, a complicated problem. Or the concept of the “spine” of a piece of creative work. Finding and holding onto the essence of how to understand something is anchoring in so many things in life, whether it is the statement of who you are as a professional or your intention of how to be a friend. Or the method of thinking only about what you can fit in a 1-inch picture frame. Is there any more powerful tool in life than adjusting the lens we use to approach a problem or task? And of course, there is the sacredness of rituals. Ways to find patterns in time and etch structure into days seems to be the root of every writer’s life.
Anne Lamott says, “You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you.” She says this in reference to the one-inch picture frame idea, but I think it also applies to our need for ritual. Predictability in the short-term (what I will do tomorrow morning) helps bring the promise of possibility in the long-term (what might I create if I stick with this pattern of behavior?).
I think all of these ideas and techniques felt particularly useful to me as I learned how to work full-time from my empty home. We have talked before about how much scaffolding we have to build when working remotely, not just around the passage of time in the day but also about goal-setting and meaning-making in solitude. It strikes me this is probably much like the experience of being a writer. As I mentioned on our call this morning, it is also similar in many ways to retirement. Different in that there are some meetings and deadlines, of course, but the experience of facing an empty home and open schedule are the same.
I wonder sometimes if we have underestimated how much the mere physical presence of other human beings affects us. Much like when we first envisioned the internet, we tend to focus on the efficiencies and convenience when we contemplate long distance work but forget the human. None of this is to say that I do not savor working from home. The autonomy is a gift that I do not take for granted. But there are costs, maybe costs I do not even fully understand or appreciate. We are social beings, after all.
With that, I am off to bed in expectation of having to get up tomorrow morning, make myself presentable, and then spend a full day in a classroom full of other humans. Ask me at 5 PM tomorrow what I think about working from home, and I might tell a different story.
Yours,
Sarah