ON THE MAGIC OF ENCLOSED SPACES, THE FRAGILITY OF BODIES, AND THE RESONANCE OF SPECIFICITY
Thursday October 17 and Friday October 18 2019
Dear Sarah,
Yikes! It’s Friday afternoon and somehow both the day and the week have gotten away from me! Now I’m settling in with my notes and thoughts for you that have been riding quietly beside me all week.
This week I’ve been mulling on the organization of time as I settle into my new schedule and way of being in my days. The particular thing that’s been on my mind is how existence in a particular space adds to the nature of what that day is all about, and how it feels to have “spent” that time of the day. So far I’ve been continuing to spend my days at home — working in my office, reading in the living room — or walking or running errands in the neighborhood. In addition to the pleasant space of my home, I want to be spending my days in other pleasant spaces. I was reflecting on a trip to Dia:Beacon that I enjoyed while M and I were in New York and Connecticut. Dia:Beacon is located in a former Nabisco box-printing facility, a massive warehouse. It’s a huge, gorgeous space, so huge that at one point, exploring a basement-level exhibition, I assumed that when I climbed the stairs opposite where I entered that I would emerge roughly where I’d descended — but instead I found myself in another huge part of the museum I hadn’t expected, full of artwork I didn’t know was there! The spaces I most enjoyed had sprawling, golden, old wooden floors, with huge windows letting in light across vast rooms. I could spend all day in spaces like these, and emerge feeling like that is the living of life. There is something magical about being in large enclosed spaces that I am still thinking about, and will write more about and share with you sometime soon, I hope! My goal for the day-to-day is to relocate my mundane and transportable activities to interesting spaces where I can perform them just as well, like the Walker Art Museum or other spaces in town.
Something that’s been happening these last few weeks that I may not have mentioned is that I’ve had to have a spot cut out of my skin! This was not that alarming to me, a spotty person with fair skin and red hair — I had a basal cell carcinoma removed from my forehead more than a decade ago — and a sneaky spot on my wrist had recently gone from being old and familiar to being a little funky and out of the ordinary. I went to the dermatologist a few weeks ago and she removed the spot to examine it more closely. This left me with essentially a hole in my wrist, a breach in my solid skin-suit that was a little bit freaky to me and required my acquaintance with the full bandage selection at my neighborhood pharmacies. Then, after taking a look at my wrist-bit under a microscope, the dermatologist determined that while it was not cancerous, it was “atypical,” and so they needed to go back in and cut away more of my wrist. This happened this week, Wednesday morning. It was a little bit dramatic and gruesome while at the same time being neither of those things. The doctor numbed me with shots of lidocaine all around the spot and when I couldn’t feel anything they proceeded to snip away at me. This was a little bit disturbing, the snipping sound — I knew I was going to get stitches, and when I heard the snipping I asked, Oh, are you already putting in the stitches? But in fact they were just using a snippy tool (I would call it a scissors except I didn’t dare look at it to confirm this hunch while the snipping was actually taking place) to do the excision, this medical word for snipping away my wrist bits. Now I have a Frankenstein-y inch and a half or so of stitches in my right wrist and I’ve been asking my left hand to take on more responsibility in my life. It has willingly obliged and already I can feel my wrist healing up, but still, it’s very much on my mind, reminding me of the inherent squishiness and fragility of bodies every time I think I can utilize my opposable thumb the way I’ve always done. This makes me wonder how your nasal procedure has settled in. Will you not know the true results until the spring allergy season rolls around again? Long wait!
I’ve been thinking about your letter from last week and Simon and Jonah’s different dramatic stories. I wish sometimes that I / the collective “we” were better able to remember what it was like to be small and full of dramas (instead, now, we know what it is to be full-sized and dramatic). I chuckled about Simon and his feelings torn between the simultaneous desire for “dip egg” AND a scramble. I wonder at what moment in our lives do we come to understand that each egg we eat is likely not to be the last egg we eat — with future eggs on the horizon, there is an opportunity for a dip egg today and a scramble tomorrow! And I also hope Jonah has perhaps started to integrate the note flashcard game into his sense of practice instead of that of being tested. It is interesting to think about you and Jonah practicing piano together. I used to like to practice the cello in as solitary a manner as I could create. (The time I’m thinking of is of me at an older age than Jonah is now — I didn’t start to play or practice an instrument until fourth grade.) If anyone else was listening then it felt less like practice and more like a mini performance. I could feel the sense of my mother listening in the other room even if she didn’t say anything at all, I could feel it like a palpable force in the air, like she was sending out her own inaudible waves. The weird repetitiveness that practice required felt to me like it wanted lots of time and space to try again, and again, and again, to get into the flow of it without thinking about anyone else listening at all. It’s perhaps (certainly) different with a different instrument, different ages, different parents! I am rooting for Jonah from a distance!
With that I’ll wish you a happy weekend, and talk soon!
Your friend,
Eva
October 18, 2019
Dear Eva,
I have been sitting at my desk for a few minutes eyeing the myriad notes I jotted down throughout the week about things I might write about in my letter today. I was weighing whether to take the time to think through the thinnest of outlines of what I should cover, or whether to just open the document and start typing and see where my fingers take me. For better or worse, I have chosen the latter. That is one of the beauties of this particular writing project—either method can work for a ~500 word letter, so I vacillate between pre-planning and spontaneity depending on my mood and schedule.
Current mood: mildly cantankerous. Let us see if this free-flowing letter changes my mood like it did yours a couple of weeks ago!
--
Update: no. So far, I have written and deleted two different possible next paragraphs, which is only exacerbating my grumpiness, not erasing it.
It is now quite funny to me to imagine my future self rereading this particular letter. We have talked and maybe even written about how sometimes these letters are incredibly specific snapshots of a moment in time—capturing a fleeting mood, a passing sentiment. I like the idea that this letter captures the particular strange mindset I am in at this Friday happy hour.
You wrote last week about how the letters give us the space for a sustained conversation. I like that phrase. It goes a long way to expressing the sense of permanence that memorializing the letters online imparts. Nothing is permanent, of course. But the letters are certainly more lasting than a spoken conversation. I can go back to each of your letters, again and again, probably getting something slightly different from it each time I comb over the words anew. Our conversations over the years, on the other hand, have evaporated. Not into thin air, just into something that soaks into us like lotion on skin. I cannot remember the details of things we have covered in our many hours of talking over the few years we have known each other, but I keep something from them anyway. Maybe it has to do with the subtle difference between remembering and knowing? Whatever it is, I am so happy to have both the snapshot of specificity from our letters, and the blurry but sturdy foundation from our interactions. Together, it feels like they create a different kind of friendship.
Specificity in writing and other types of storytelling is something I have been thinking about this week. I have heard Krista Tippett say in several different interviews that the specific is more universal than the abstract. (She has some more poetic way of stating it that is currently escaping me.) This notion is in some sense counterintuitive. Why would something more specific to my personal experience be more likely to resonate with more people? But lately I have been thinking about how this actually makes perfect sense. We have talked time and again about how hard it is to see the big picture in your own life. The recurring themes are invisible, the takeaways are hidden. Of course, then, when someone writes about these things in the abstract, we have trouble seeing the connection they have to our own lives. We live our lives low to the ground. It is only when a storyteller embeds the universal within the ground cover of their own individual human experience that the application to our own lives starts to reveal itself.
Now that this slightly grumpy, disjointed letter is coming to a close, I can safely say I wish I would have chosen the pre-planning method of writing today! I will take solace in knowing there is always next week.
Until then,
Your friend,
Sarah