ON THE COMFORT OF PREDICTABLE FICTION AND THE TYRANNY AND LURE OF THE LITERAL
Friday May 3, 2019
Dear Sarah,
I am looking back at my notes from your letter last week, and thinking about the process I go through when I am posting, which involves me looking at our letters side-by-side, reading them over, picking out key words and phrases from each, and seeing how they come together into the letter title and subtitle. It's probably essentially the same process you go through, too! I find it very enjoyable! It's like sitting down with a hot cup of tea and easing into a good book. As I settle in to look for similarities and differences in our writings, it's the moment when I've said my letter is done, and (in those weeks when I'm posting) you've said your letter is done, and so the letter isn't getting written anymore — I don't let myself edit it substantially once I've finished and once I'm going to open up your letter. Instead, a different part of my brain kicks in and I am simply reading and enjoying our two letters together, and plucking out the interesting bits and seeing what kind of picture they form together.
One of my notes to myself from last week was detectives / Agatha Christie. I was a big Agatha Christie fan as a youth — I would say I am still a fan, though I don't often read her these days. Her books come in handy in particular when I'm seeking a bit of comfort. This could seem odd, in theory — someone is always getting murdered, someone has disappeared, and a detective of some flavor must be brought in to solve the problem, uncover the mystery, and tell the tale to all present. There are a few different detectives: Miss Marple, the kindly older lady who flies under the radar by seeming to dodder around a bit, and Hercule Poirot, the petite Belgian detective with a curling mustache. My favorites were Tommy and Tuppence, a detective duo who, after the Great War, looking for work and adventure, get into the business of detecting. They have complementary skills and they work together and rescue each other. These books are fun and comforting in their predictability — something goes wrong, and the detectives prowl around gathering information and observing the spheres in which the murdered individuals ran, until the clues start to come together into a story that makes sense, at which point the detectives round up everyone of any importance and recap what really happened from start to finish. I thought about this as I read about your anecdotes and the feeling you had that they all went together, even if you weren't quite sure how. I don't know if we'll get to a stage where we've rounded up all the clues, per se, but I feel like our letters are getting the clues down on the page and collected in one place, and they'll be here for us to keep puzzling over as time passes.
I'm also thinking about kids, and family, and the odd feeling that even if you know people all of your life (or theirs), you still only know them from the outside — what you can observe of them, and what they share of themselves, both knowingly and unknowingly. There are so many things that can't be known to us about each other, and about others! I was going to write that it would take forever to know these things, but it is simply impossible. It takes a lifetime or more to understand oneself, and that's barely scratching the surface. The stacks of Agatha Christie books I amassed at the weekend flea markets had a familiar ring over time — fits of passion, impatient desires for inheritances and other stacks of money, betrayals, secrets revealed to the wrong people — but they offered the sense that if you just paid close enough attention and put the puzzle together correctly, some true story would reveal itself, often in the nick of time. What will our nick of time be? What will be our big reveal? No murders please, but if we find ourselves on a hunt together for a big stack of money, let's do our best to come by it honestly.
Until next week,
Your friend,
Eva
May 3, 2019
Dear Eva,
In recent letters, you and I have both been bandying about this notion of the study of words and how to string them together in ways that convey meaning from one human to another. (Sidenote: “bandy” is a word I have only ever used verbally, so I went down a short rabbit hole looking it up to determine whether it was really appropriate here. A new written word for the repertoire!) This framework - words as a medium, just like paint or clay - is one I have been embracing since we first discussed it. It helps me move away from the concept of writing as simple an idea-delivery mechanism, where anything that seems to get in the way of moving that idea smoothly in a vessel of words feels like a failure. When I think about writing as an exploration of putting words to ideas, seeing what forms - suddenly even the most grueling writer’s block feels like it just says something interesting about the inadequacy of words as tiny envelopes for what swirls in our minds.
All of this has got me thinking about the lure of the literal. As you so often do, I am turning to the dictionary here. Literal: “adhering to fact or to the ordinary construction or primary meaning of a term or expression,” or “characterized by a concern mainly with facts.” Given the insufficiency of words and the difficulty of putting them together in ways that begin to describe some of the messier and more meaningful human experiences, I wonder how often we resort to literal understandings of things, simply so we can conceptualize them into words as needed?
This came up for me recently when, on the way home from our annual trek to Krispy Kreme Donuts on Easter morning, Jonah declared to me in the car that he thinks the Easter Bunny is a “fib.” I asked him what he thought fib meant, and he said it meant a lie. I then launched into a long, rambling attempt to describe the wide, blurry space between fact and lie, the very real importance of stuff that lives within our imaginations, like Batman or Frog and Toad, trying - and failing - to put into words the value of that which we cannot see. Jonah was not convinced.
Is this a scenario where our ways of being in the world are steered one way simply because of the inadequacy of words?
I spent a very long portion of my life priding myself as a rational, critical thinker. I still do. But I have also come around to seeing I was often too literal in my thinking. If I could not explain or describe or rationalize it, it was not real or valuable. The tyranny of the literal. I have been trying to unlearn this in recent years, trying to remember there are plenty of things in life (maybe all of the most meaningful things?) that are too big for words and that the best we can do is keep hacking away at the task, experimenting with new ways to use words to roll the giant snowball down the hill from me to you, sometimes getting it right but often failing, hoping at best that some tiny drop of snow from the ball will land just so on your cheek, sparking some different-but-similar-in-spirit idea of your own.
No matter how this particular letter/snowball lands, I am very much looking forward to seeing you in person next week across the ocean! We will share some pasteis de nata and observe how differently our words feel and flow when we are face to face. Safe travels to Lisbon, my friend.
Yours,
Sarah