ON PINNING MEMORIES LIKE BUTTERFLIES AND WEAVING FUTURES WITH OUR WORDS
Friday June 14 2019
Dear Sarah,
Yesterday I was thinking about what I would write in my letter to you this week, and my mind was quiet — except for a song that had been running through my head all day. In that strange way that a song can weave its way through your thoughts completely one day and be gone the next, I just now had to look up the song again to stimulate my memory as to how it actually sounds — it’s not in my head this morning, and it’s as if it never was. It was “Howling At The Moon” by the Ramones, and the line playing over and over in my head was the Robin Hood-ian “I want to steal from the rich and / Give to the poor.” Just on a loop all day in my head! Thanks, Ramones. Sha-la-la-la.
The mind is always drawing up these bits of memory to carry us through things (or perhaps to hold us in place until something is resolved?), to make us pay attention, to remind us what we care about. There was a summer two years ago when I was traveling to Michigan to take care of some very stressful family business related to my father’s health, and I kept notes on the songs that were running through my head during that week or so, but there was one song I couldn’t name or recall after it slipped out of my head. (I’m now trying to find the list of songs I thought I documented, but it’s not in the usual places where I keep my various digital texts, and I can’t put my fingertips on it. Did I write it on a scrap of paper and file it away somewhere? I do recall from that summer that The Go Go’s “Head Over Heels” was on a regular loop (“looks like / the whole world’s out of sync”).)
I’m thinking about your letter from last week and your tinge of worry about these letters and the things we’ve said in them over the last 36+ weeks. I haven’t yet read the New York Times story you shared about parents failing their children by sharing their kids’ lives online — but I’m thinking back on the ideas we’ve mulled on in relation to your children and how they think and act and how they are changing. I can’t say if these things constitute a betrayal — there is that difference here between talking about something and putting it in writing: we’ve documented these details that would perhaps have been fleeting or forgotten otherwise, and by documenting them we make them somehow larger and seemingly permanent. But there’s a lot more going on in your life and your kids’ lives and in my life than we put into these letters… I imagine some future person could, in theory, haunt your kids by perusing our conversations letter by letter to pluck out the most incriminating tales of belief in the Easter Bunny. Again, I haven’t read the article yet! I’m certain we’re all sharing too much, and there’s definitely something that feels a bit wrong about the ways in which we are constantly documenting children, capturing every moment they live to share with family, friends, and distant acquaintances. (I once happened upon a family conducting an impromptu photo shoot with their child. He had been capering joyously through a pile of fallen leaves, clutching them in his hands and throwing them up into the air, and his parents said Ooooo do that again! and he was compelled to pick up the leaves again and throw them into the air in a facsimile of the spontaneous joy he’d felt.)
Somehow my sense is that even though these words are a bit more permanent, they also require reading, and wading through all the other things we’ve talked about — so perhaps the nuggets specifically tied to your children will fly a bit below the radar? Or will require a diligent (Pearson-haunting) archivist to gather and extract, in which case — more power to that future archivist revealing the sweet mythologies in which young children believe. Perhaps, like the earworms above, some of these stories are particularly meaningful in the moments they happen, and then they pass into a forgotten place where their significance can hardly be fathomed. If that’s the case — I’m glad we’re documenting some of the moments that would otherwise disappear. We’re capturing them and looking at them up close, collecting and presenting them as an entomologist would a case of pinned butterflies. Someone might read these letters in the future and scratch her head over all of it, or maybe the things she’ll draw out will be nothing we thought to pay any further attention to at all. That said — I’m very interested in the idea of turning these letters into a physical book, and possibly taking them offline when the year is done. Let’s think on it!
Your friend,
Eva
June 14, 2019
Dear Eva,
I love all of your letters, but for some reason, last week’s letter really touched me. I think I texted you after I read it to say that it made me want to cry, but not out of sadness. It felt poignant, like I could feel the emotions bubbling beneath the surface of the words. I am fairly sure that is a mark of brilliant writing — when you can feel emotion, even when you don’t read it on the page.
That got me thinking back to something we have tossed about in previous letters: anger. We have talked about how often we smooth over the edges of anger, softening it to make ourselves more palatable and relatable. I continue to think there is a way in which truth and relationships are in tension with one another. There are things we just do not say to other humans because it would risk the relationship. But as I thought about your letter, it occurred to me maybe there is a way in which strong emotions feel like the absence of nuance, and if that is true, maybe strong emotion can actually be farther from the real truth sometimes. That’s not exactly right. Feelings we feel are real, and therefore truthful, regardless of their objective merit. But anger often implies one-sided blame, a sense of being wronged in some way. This is where us humans get tripped up, I think. We take a strong emotion, and we assume it is intended to be the full story. The real truth, of course, is that we can be wronged and righteously angry, and also have wronged. And that there are likely a million other factors in the mix. Nuance lives there, it is just around the edges rather than within our emotional words.
You wrote in your letter last week about invisible work. It also made me think about invisible progress. In a podcast interview with Alicia Garza recently, Chris Hayes talked about how social change can be similar to opening a jar. Unlike painting a room, he said, you can’t see your progress as you go. Then all of a sudden, your work pays off, and the lid that is stuck finally comes open. When I heard that, I thought of you, and the invisible progress you have made and are making with your writing and finding your voice. (Maybe not so invisible in these public letters! But I imagine for every word on a page, there are hundreds of small ways in which you have cleared space in your brain and home, formed new ways of thinking about your creative practice, new ways of understanding who you are and how you will be.)
It will probably never cease to amaze me in this life the way that being able to see or articulate something is everything. It makes me wistful to imagine all of the beautiful lives that have been lived that we never heard about because the person living them didn’t know how or maybe didn’t even try to put their experiences into written words. Or the futures that ended up being more conventional than they might have been simply because the person imagining that future was only able to envision what they had already known and seen. The stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell others about ourselves, they hold so much power over the ways our stories end up actually playing out. This thought both terrifies and excites me. I guess it shows how much rests with us.
May we be ever imaginative with our own stories!
Until next week,
Sarah