ON DREAMS THAT HAUNT, WORRY THAT STRANGLES, AND OBJECTIVITY THAT IS INHUMAN
Thursday, February 21, 2019
Dear Sarah,
The weeks seem longer and longer lately, the time between our letters feeling like eons, so long I fear I must have forgotten to write you for weeks at a time, but in fact it has only been a week’s worth of days and I am on time, if feeling a bit harried. I have a recurring dream — I may have mentioned it in our letters or in conversation along the way — that I have forgotten to pay some very important bill, let fall by the wayside some financial commitment. The worry comes to me in my sleep, in the past has pushed me up out of bed to write notes of reminder to myself, whose content approximates “send some amount of money somewhere for something” — literally like that: the recipient, amount, and purpose unknown, even to my unconscious brain. As the dreams continue to recur, in some stretches of time more than others, when I am woken by them I say to myself, This mystery debt cannot be real and so successfully hidden from my daytime self that I would never acknowledge or be able to resolve it while awake — so it simply cannot be real, no matter how real it feels. Could I possibly have such a debt, forgotten during so many waking hours? What debt, what required payment, what outstanding obligation is my mind attempting to surface? I don’t know yet but am testing various hypotheses.
In a particular moment of tension this week I soothed myself by first listening to and singing along to John Cale’s Paris 1919, the song on the album of the same name. Who knows why particular songs break the surface of the mind at particular times. Then I watched Charles and Ray Eames’s short film Powers of Ten, in which we the viewers zoom out from the human scale to see ourselves at a distance, from outer space, then zoom back in, beyond and into the human scale and smaller to see our atoms buzzing around, as vast in relationship to each other as the outermost regions of space, if also beyond miniscule. When the film reaches the edges of outer space, before we turn and make our way back to Earth like the most impossible ball turning back in its arc, our narrator contemplates the breadth of space, dotted with less-than-pinpoints that include everything we know and everything we don’t, and says: This emptiness is normal. The richness of our own neighborhood is the exception. Pair that with my current listening and thinking on eschatology, the study of apocalypse (thank you, Alie Ward!) and existential risk, and thoughts on all that had to happen in the universe for life and consciousness to come into being. Think about everything we know of our own history — the history of humanity, history of our planet, history of our universe, knowledge of our bodies and what we are made of — and think on how we each choose to navigate our days in the space between a big-picture view and a microscopic view, with a human-sized view right there in the middle. We study space, we study DNA. We study insects and each other. We invent new ways of seeing, being, traveling. We compress time, making journeys that used to take days, weeks, years, in a matter of hours; we expand time, plumping up our lives that used to be more short and gnarly (as many on this Earth still are) and stretching them out by decades in which we see ourselves, our children, our children’s children move from childhood into adulthood. I am feeling full lately, full of the possibilities inherent in it all, and the vast happinesses and disappointments and confusions that seem to wait just beyond every turn of the body and mind.
In reading your letter last week I was thinking about Jonah and Simon and their unbridled joy and their complexities as small and growing humans. It is a joy to know you for so many reasons, one of which is that I am able to see you as a parent, a loving and protective and thoughtful parent. It is a delight to see you and the friends I have who are also parents take such good care of your children, shielding them from the world when they need to be shielded and showing them the world otherwise, and being there with them as they figure for themselves what it is to be human. The children, your children, who are able to be right where they are in any moment, present and not dwelling on what may come — this strikes me as the sweetest and best form of childhood, and the truest success as a parent: to create a world in which your children feel safe and protected, cared for as they encounter the difficulties and happinesses of life bit by bit. They don’t have to think even ten minutes into the future because you are thinking about those minutes for them, in the best way possible. When we are older, who is there to worry and plan for us? What happens if we are left to worry for ourselves? When we find we may not actually need to worry anymore — how do we break the habits of worry? I just looked up the origin and etymology of worry, as I am wont to do with words when I find myself circling an idea — and worry comes from the Old English wyrgan, ”strangle,” of West Germanic origin. In Middle English the original sense of the verb gave rise to the meaning “seize by the throat and tear.” How do we learn not to worry — to gently unclench the grip about our throats, and to breathe easier, knowing somehow that things will be all right? If I haven’t yet learned it fully, as a child or as an adult, I try to learn it now from you, and from the other parents I know — present, protecting, wise.
Your friend,
Eva
February 21, 2019
Dear Eva,
I have spent a lot of time this past week thinking about your last letter. I love all of your letters, but this one really struck me. I could see you thinking on the page, wrestling with my words, pondering how you live. As a result, it’s had me questioning my own words and trying to unpack what, if any, truth lies within my statement that it would be a shame to live our lives from a distance. I have no answers, just more thoughts swirling around that I will try to grab and pin down onto the screen.
First, I am thinking about what this notion of “living from a distance” really means. It might relate to where we focus our energy. I like to think about a series of human rings around my life. The inner ring is where my family and closest friends sit. Then there are rings with regular friends, friends that have fallen out of my life because of geography or circumstance, “friends” who are really just people I once knew, professional contacts, neighbors, acquaintances, strangers. Finally, there is a ring that encompasses humanity as an anonymized whole. Many of our history books are filled with stories of heroes who spent their lives prioritizing that far-out ring, pouring all of their time into improving the lives of people they never knew. Often, a biography of those people will reveal they neglected the humans in their inner ring, living at a distance from the people physically and emotionally closest to them. It is always interesting to me to think about how the people who invested in the humans closest to them are almost by definition the people we will never know of, unless we happened to be one of the people they loved. I like to think the rings aren’t mutually exclusive, but at a certain point, something has to give. I am fairly maniacal about trying to ensure that I tend first and foremost for my inner ring. It sounds a little crazy, but I keep a list of people who sit within it because I like to visually see the finite list of human beings who deserve the most of my attention and care. When I feel harried and stretched, it helps to be reminded of my human priorities, just like it does my work priorities.
In your letter last week, you talked about your identity as an observer, finding fresh perspectives on a view that can sometimes become stale with time. It seems undeniable that this can be valuable. Indeed, I’m sure it is one of the many things that makes you YOU — full of wisdom and grace as you put things in a new light and recognize that the bad is never as bad as it appears. (It’s interesting to me that you say gazing at where you sit in the grand scheme always makes you appreciate what you have. For me, sometimes the opposite occurs. I guess it depends on which way you look when you gaze around. There are always people who have it worse, but there are also always people who have it better.) I think, too, about how often you show such attention to little beauties around you, like your recent discovery of dahlias. So you’re an observer, yes, but you’re observing from all the views, from far up in the cerebral clouds to just inches from the ground beneath your feet.
I do not think it is the act of watching a life that was troubling me. I think it was the objectivity that might come with too much distance and detachment. This seem like an odd thing to say. Surely, objectivity is - objectively! - a good thing much of the time, particularly when it comes to viewing our own circumstances and experiences. But we can’t be wholly objective about our lives, or we wouldn’t be living anymore. Objectively, my stiff back this morning doesn’t matter, my friend’s bathroom remodel is inconsequential, my son’s tears this morning when he struggled to get his boots on are wholly insignificant. I looked up the definition of “objective,” and it means not being influenced by personal feelings or opinions. But having feelings and opinions are what it means to be human. Without them, there could be no connection between us. Then what would life be?
It occurs to me as I close this letter that it is entirely possible this whole notion of mine about not wanting to live from a distance is really just about me sometimes feeling the need to scream — THIS IS NOT OKAY, PEOPLE! I have felt that way quite a bit lately, about many things in my life. The happy talk, the pleasantries, the way people rationalize away their anger and pain, the way they rationalize their moral compromises. Objectively, it may be true that “it’s not as bad as it seems.” But if it feels bad, and if we know it could be better, doesn’t this count for something?
Yours in feeling and friendship,
Sarah