On the capitalism box, trying to connect all the dots, and traveling from point A to point B
January 31, 2019
Dear Eva,
I loved the smorgasbord of creative projects you wrote about last week. Each one scratching softly at some question or concept, giving us a fresh way to look at something, a new way to think about a particular fleck of dust in the atmosphere of ideas. It made me think about my tendency to want to connect all of the dots and create some way of understanding ALL THE THINGS, which is simply not possible. Life and this world are just too multi-faceted. There are too many layers to dig through. We turn up one layer and then we get enveloped by another.
This feels like it goes back to something I wrote about in my very first letter to you, about complementarity. “You can recognize a deep truth by the feature that its opposite is also a deep truth,” physicist Frank Wilczek said. This feels like simultaneously the most aggravating and glorious thing about this life! Just when I think I have something figured out, I find more nuance to explore, more mystery unearthed.
Perhaps this is another way in which Abigail Thomas’s side door idea comes into play. We can’t take things head-on; we need to find other, circuitous ways in. It is the only way to go deep.
I wonder if this has implications for the way we think about what it means to make money from artistic pursuits? I think about what we are doing with these letters — creating a long, slow drip of conversation and meaning-finding that winds this way and that as we go through one side door and then out another. Can you imagine what it would feel like to be forced to consider what people might pay you for when you choose what to write in that week’s letter? It would change everything. And yet this is exactly what people who write for a living must do!
I am fascinated by people who can simultaneously find meaningful side doors and find someone to pay them for it. It just doesn’t feel to me like the two frames fit together very well. One is almost by definition a meandering, unpredictable process, while the other requires predictability and steadiness to be a sustainable livelihood. There is so much more packed into this that I want to explore, but my hunch is that capitalism and creativity are not well-suited for each other. That may even be an understatement, but I’m not willing to make any more dramatic pronouncements just yet. Nor, I should add, am I willing to denounce capitalism. If anything, I think it may just be that we should not try to force creative pursuits into the capitalism box. Maybe we should be more content with the two being separate, just as we are with having human relationships [mostly] sit outside of that box as well? To be continued; this is something I am continuing to munch on as I go through business school and try to square what I learn with what [little] I know about human creativity.
One thing I have determined in all of this is that my own personal creative work can remain separate from my paid work. I mean this not just in the sense that I shouldn’t plan to find a way to make a living getting paid for my personal writing (duh), but in the sense that my paying job does not need to directly get at the questions of life / work / human behavior that you and I grapple with in our conversations and writing and that motivates so much of my personal thinking and writing. What a relief! I think I had convinced myself that if I just thought hard enough, I could find a professional path that brings all of it together somehow. But I’m increasingly convinced it is better if I think about these things as separate threads (job, writing, relationships, school), all of which feed back into my life’s work of trying to find small crumbles of wisdom as I cultivate deep relationships with the people I care about the most. My life’s work is not my job, will never be my job. And my job does not directly get at the mysteries of the universe, it never will. I need to take side doors for that anyway.
This new frame around things feels so freeing to me, like suddenly this impossible problem I have spent so much energy trying to solve is not answered, but erased. So, here’s to erasing more lingering problems with our entirely unfundable but completely delightful creative project!
Your friend,
Sarah
January 30, 2019
Dear Sarah,
Today was the coldest day of my life! I was mostly indoors, as I have been for the past couple of days, but I had to leave my apartment to run an errand in the afternoon. It’s been a while — forever, in fact — since I’ve been an adult driver with a car tasked with handling extremely cold temperatures, even though I grew up in Michigan. (Remind me to tell you sometime about my first car, a beloved old Volvo from a beloved colleague, and an Arizona-desert breakdown with my first-real-job-boss in the car.)
Today it reached lows of something like negative 28, with wind chills of negative 45. (Can a wind chill hurt a car? Or just our very delicate human skin and bodies?) I ventured out, the tiniest bit nervously, a likely inadequate extra scarf and gloves in the car just in case, and with my Google Maps queued up to take me across Minneapolis. I started thinking about time and maps and driving.
Sometimes if I am navigating I’ll look at the directions, get a time estimate for the trip, and follow along on the route without actually activating the play-by-play directions. The slightly odd thing about this is that as you move along your route, tiny car tracked in space and bounced back to the powerful tiny computer in your hand, the time to destination remains the same. You’re moving, visibly, in life and on the map, and time is passing, chipping minute by minute from the dashboard clock, but the time from point A to point B doesn’t change. I’ll sometimes worry that I am running late, forgetting that I am moving forward, feeling instead as if I’m running in place when I want to be covering ground. I’ll have this sense that the directions and the route and the time A to B are elements laid end to end, runners in a relay, rather than simultaneous happenings along the path.
All to say — sometimes you’re thinking about the thing and also doing the thing, without quite realizing it.
In the past year I’ve kept a daily notebook — inspired in part by all kinds of writers and diarists — Austin Kleon, Sarah Manguso, to name just two — and mine took on a particular flavor, a log of the day’s activities mostly in chronological order, and with some glimmers of story-spinning where I was feeling particularly moved or inspired by something, or if I saw something that I wanted to etch into my brain in some way. The act of seeing something in the course of a day — anything, a shaft of light across a ragtag piece of trash or a glorious dahlia (I think I only saw a dahlia for the first time last year? Where have I been all my life?) — seeing, remembering, making a little note and recreating the moment in that note — there’s something going on there about coding and stowing memories, putting them in a labeled file instead of strewing them about the overgrown garden or endless attic of the mind. I started the bulk of my entries last year with the word “wake.” It just felt right. But the daily act of getting it all down — it was a bit of a year in a whole lot of ways — reminded me that there was a lot going on, and that I was doing a lot every day, in constant motion even as I was also looking forward at the path ahead. Simultaneously on the journey and contemplating the journey. While contemplating the journey you can forget you’re already on it, in the middle of it, somewhere on the thread. It always feels like you’re just starting, somehow, and you are, even as you’re also middling and ending and continuing at every moment along the way. We are always on the path between point A and point B in the grandest possible sense. (Maybe we’re between point A and point triple-Z?)
I’m thinking on your letter from last week, and in that odd way that sometimes the light hits an object just so and you see something you weren’t expecting, what popped out for me was the strangeness of the fact that other people write our obituaries. Why don’t we write our own? An obituary marks a life, and also a possible final moment of being seen, being acknowledged as having existed, there with others. In a slightly parallel universe perhaps every obituary would be two: one written by the dead before they were so, and as they pictured themselves or wanted to be remembered, and one written by those who saw the person, knew them, perceived how they existed. I hope it’s not crass but I am delighted by the constraint of a thousand words, or any number of words — in no way can they say it all, but any amount of words can say a lot. How does one choose among the words? What stories to tell? Do you tell a story of a person by looking straight at them, or by going through one of the side doors you described last week — placing them within their many contexts, the aura around them, the people they loved and the actions they made? How far does the aura reach? We all want to know how to live, and the possibilities within how are infinite — examples everywhere you look, in every direction.
With you on the journey together!
Your friend,
Eva