ON TACKLING THE BLANK PAGE, WATCHING OTHER PEOPLE WATCH MOVIES, AND A DISPATCH FROM THE BELLY OF THE BEAST
Friday June 28 2019
Dear Sarah,
This is the third time I’ve started my letter to you this week!
First I started it on Wednesday night: Dear Sarah, I’m going to see you tomorrow and Friday, the day of our next post! We’ve been in each others’ company on letter-writing and -posting days before, though this time is a little bit different as I’ll be at your home (in the belly of the beast! Or, This is where the magic happens!) Then I got sleepy and dozed off on the couch.
I started it again yesterday, on Thursday, having arrived in Des Moines: Dear Sarah, I started a letter to you a few nights ago, the other night (yesterday? tonight?) and got just a few lines in before sleep beckoned and I dozed off on the couch. Now I’m here in Des Moines for a visit and some co-working with you — in the belly of the beast! (I was still enjoying this phrase last night and didn’t want to leave it behind.) I drove through torrential rains to get here — three out of four hours between Minneapolis and Des Moines drowned, to the point that I decided not to stop at all along the way, because who wants to get out of the car in that? The rain was sometimes simply hard rain, sometimes huge drops slapping sharply against the glass, sometimes the double-rain of actual weather plus the secondary spray of semi trucks driving past, each kicking up a micro-gale in the act of passing.
And here we are, Friday late-morning-early-afternoon, with these nested letters waiting to be returned to.
I’m looking back at your letter from last week and thinking about one of the things you mentioned, that Jericho Brown said that people stop talking to him on planes when he tells them he is a poet. I wonder at the idea that people would steer clear of the big questions, find ways to avoid them, but of course we all do it, and I do it too, sometimes, no matter how much I try to look at all the questions head-on. You said it well — ”I can look at these questions and hold my gaze.”
I was combing through my memories to see if I detected any past plane rides that may have featured missed conversations with poets. I suppose I generally try not to talk to people on planes anyway, so who knows how many poets I’ve missed the opportunity to chat with — but I would be pleased to find a poet seated next to me. How would I know them? Would they be jotting in a small notebook? Looking dreamily into space? Folding their airline napkin into soft origami shapes? Drinking from too many small liquor bottles early in the day? I occasionally jot in a notebook on planes, and I often stare dreamily into space in these moments. I sometimes find that I like to watch other people watching movies on airplanes more than I like to watch movies myself. Or, rather, I like to watch the movies that other people are watching, since if I can see their screen I cannot see them, as we all face forward. There is something about seeing snippets of different movies on different screens, soundless except for the rush of wind and rumble of the plane pushing on through the air, the screens so small, no matter how large the story it may contain. Even though we all choose from a pre-selected array of movies, you can have a sense that you know someone slightly more than you knew them before, after witnessing the movie that they are watching — did they choose a nature documentary, or the film about a man stranded in arctic weather, having to bury in the icy landscape the woman with whom he was climbing after something goes awry (sorry if this is a spoiler?), or something animated, or something sexy, or something humorous.
This is both an illusion and not an illusion, as the movie watched may tell you something about the person, but it may also be telling you something different than what you think you are being told (watching a movie on recommendation from a friend and disliking it? Performing cinematic research while flying?). It’s a single data point for which you have little context — but it is a data point nonetheless, small and lonely up there at 35,000 feet. Perhaps what I mean by all this is that even if we aren’t talking to the poets on the plane, dredging up the big questions and working together to find answers between point A and point B, we’re working through the big questions on our own time, bit by bit?
I'll leave that question in the air, and talk to you soon (and in person, now!)!
Until next week!
Your friend,
Eva
June 28, 2019
Dear Eva,
It is late Friday afternoon, and we have just wrapped up a fun little face-to-face work session with you visiting my home. What a treat!
I am now wading into this letter without a map, just a few scribbled handwritten notes I jotted down earlier this week. I always get a bit nervous about entering into any sort of writing without a plan of where I’ll go. Where will it lead? Will my brain gravitate toward familiar lines of thinking that we have explored together before? Will I tie myself up in knots on my meandering journey through my mind? WE SHALL SEE!
You wrote last week about imagination and curiosity, how the two work together, how they are different. It got me thinking about how so many more things are dependent on imagination as a child. Young kids don’t have enough experience out in the world to know what possibilities are out there, so they create them with their minds. They don’t have a choice. Watching my own kids, I see how they sometimes stumble upon real phenomena as they are putting together ideas independently. I think I mentioned recently how Jonah has developed elaborate lemonade stand plans — an unusual product mix including loaves of homemade sourdough bread, multiple locations in popular parks and tennis courts around town, profit margins made on goods sourced from our favorite local coffee shop. It is fun to watch him get at these ideas using his own imagination and reasoning, pulling bits from things he has learned and putting them together with bits he imagines.
Maybe as we learn more about the world, we start to become less reliant on our imaginations. We don’t need them as much (as you say, imaginations seem to fall into a pleasure space somehow as we age), so maybe, after awhile, we can let the imaginative part of ourselves slip away if we’re not careful, and we start thinking the only way to know something is to see, hear, or read it out in the world.
I guess maybe what I’m saying is — it seems like imagination and curiosity are (or at least should be) tied together, like you can’t really have one without the other, and at different times and in different contexts, one might be bearing more of the weight but both are always present.
I am thinking about how all of this ties back to our stories of self. Several years ago, I took an impromptu trip to Paris after my friend Anne (who is now your friend, too!) texted me from Spain in a panic because her travel companion had hurt her ankle and left their vacation early. I remember very vividly a conversation we had during one of the long walks we took through the city that weekend after I arrived, in which I declared, “I am not creative.” Anne was confused and tried to challenge me, but I was convinced. I am no good at the blank page, terrible at pulling a new idea out of thin air. Therefore, I thought, there must be something deficient about my imagination.
I am still not at my best when faced with a blank page. My ideas flow best when I’m confronting ideas that already exist in the world — reading a book, listening to a podcast, engaging in a conversation. I learn something (curiosity), and then I think about what that something connects to, new places it might lead (imagination). Maybe I am just a human whose imagination needs more of the source material that results from curiosity in order to run? Either way, I am happy to report I no longer say or think that I am not creative! My story of self has morphed the past few years in ways that are more objectively accurate — and perhaps more imaginative, not in the sense of being created from thin air, but in the sense of being more self-defined, less limited to lazy archetypes like “lawyer,” drawn from a more expansive pool of tidbits of self and combined into a more original collage.
Thank you to you, my dear friend and creative co-conspirator, for being such a delightfully original human who has given me so many new ways to see the world and this life. All the more source material to help me tackle the blank page!
Until next week,
Sarah