ON WRITING THROUGH AN IDEA, REGRETTING A FLEETING THOUGHT, AND CHANGING THE SOUP IN WHICH WE SIT
Thursday January 9 2020
Dear Sarah,
This week I was having a bit of the feeling that you had a couple of weeks ago — an impulse to retract or edit or maybe just apologize for parts of my letter of last week. I felt a wave of regret this week as I thought about it, primarily because I was thinking about how I dove right in on quoting a particular part of a book I was just starting to peruse — Centering — and I had no real sense as to whether it was a fair portion to quote from the book, to somehow represent the book. I felt aghast at my inclination to flip to a page and quote it to you as an excerpt, even if it resonated with me. It felt impulsive, somehow, and I tend not to think of myself as particularly impulsive; rather, I consider myself a fairly measured, balanced person, with a measured, balanced approach to thought. But on the other hand, the purpose of these letters isn’t to present comprehensive book reports to each other. I drew out what I saw according to my mood, and my habit of flipping to random sections in a book to see if the language and ideas at different spots captures my attention. (If a book has caught me with a few spots selected at random, I’m willing to read it in its entirety!) So this week I ask you to please consider last week’s thoughts on Centered to be a slightly un-centered introduction to the text. It was (and continues to be) interesting to me. Here I commit to reading the whole book and reporting back at that time or along the way the things that resonate with me. As I’ve been perusing it more fully, I think there may be many such points! And, of course, now that I re-read my letter from last week, I find that my regret at my memory of what I’d written was overblown, as I had contextualized the fact that I was casually paging through a new-to-me book. Onward, in any case!
I’ve been re-reading your letter of last week and thinking about the sweet sense of feeling otherworldly, which was a beautiful way of describing a feeling, and if I may, I’ll join you in saying that I’ve been feeling a bit otherworldly myself. I know what you mean about feeling a bit detached from the world, feeling that the things about which you’ve been angsty in the past feel inconsequential. I like your analogy of the gradual shedding of unwanted coats (in part because it really creates a visual — if one was wearing any more than one coat, or perhaps two, depending, it would be too many coats. Although one could own lots of coats for different occasions. I wonder if you imagine shedding coats from your body as if you were wearing a grand stack of layers like the Princess and the Pea rendered in coats, with you as the pea in the middle, or if you’re thinking about cleaning out your closet and discarding the coats you never wear, coats that are perhaps appropriate for fleeting moments or occasions? Or perhaps in the end a little bit of both? It’s nice to take off layers when you’re wearing too many and it’s nice to clean out your closet!).
I was reminded of my favorite snippet of science writing, one that I return to again and again (perhaps I’ve even shared it with you along the way) — from How Does a Caterpillar Turn into a Butterfly? via Scientific American online, by Ferris Jabr, posted in August 2012 —
First, the caterpillar digests itself, releasing enzymes to dissolve all of its tissues. If you were to cut open a cocoon or chrysalis at just the right time, caterpillar soup would ooze out. But the contents of the pupa are not entirely an amorphous mess. Certain highly organized groups of cells known as imaginal discs survive the digestive process. Before hatching, when a caterpillar is still developing inside its egg, it grows an imaginal disc for each of the adult body parts it will need as a mature butterfly or moth—discs for its eyes, for its wings, its legs and so on. In some species, these imaginal discs remain dormant throughout the caterpillar's life; in other species, the discs begin to take the shape of adult body parts even before the caterpillar forms a chrysalis or cocoon. Some caterpillars walk around with tiny rudimentary wings tucked inside their bodies, though you would never know it by looking at them.
This paragraph captivates me every time I read it; it is full of words and ideas I want to digest and perhaps swim about in, being digested myself! The concept of imaginal discs — highly organized groups of cells; an imaginal disc for each of the adult body parts the caterpillar will need as a mature butterfly or moth. There is something here I am always turning over in my mind.
In some species, these imaginal discs remain dormant throughout the caterpillar’s life.
Some caterpillars walk around with tiny, rudimentary wings tucked inside their bodies, though you would never know it by looking at them.
A caterpillar could have wings inside of its body that never manifested as wings, that it would never use to fly. A caterpillar could have wings inside of its body and you would not be able to see them. A single caterpillar on this earth could fail to catch the attention of either of us, and it could have invisible interior wings that it would never show and never use to fly. Does a butterfly know whether it is flying or not flying? Does a caterpillar know whether it would like to fly? Does a butterfly remember the time when it was not able to fly? Does it know that something changed?
I know the feeling of questioning your own serenity, scouring the brain for a worry, waiting for a shoe to drop somewhere. The thing that brought the caterpillar to mind is that there are some transformations that only go one way: a butterfly is not going back to being a caterpillar. That transformation is irreversible. There are feelings that will come and go, and somehow these feelings are separate from some permanent yet evolving sense of self. In our letters, everything we write about becomes something that is behind me, in a way — the process of writing, of thinking through an idea or feeling, the process of writing through an idea or feeling — I find myself literally through the idea in some sense. We come back to certain ideas again and again but I think we’re finding new things to think on within the container or possibility of an idea. I worry sometimes that I’m somehow typing the same words to you from week to week, again and again, and yet when I search back in our letters I find different words and ideas. I am the same me from week to week but my words are different, are different parts of me at different moments in time. When we create our weekly headers as we post our letters online, each week I think we will have used a key word before, and occasionally we have, but more often than not a word that seems to sum up an integral experience of the letters hasn’t yet been featured as a leading idea. We are new even though we are the same, and even though we are not the same as we were when we began.
Perhaps this was some of my worry about my casual reference to Centering — will it change, will I change, will my feelings about it change, before I’ve had a chance to read it all? I will give myself the benefit of the doubt, listen to my fleeting judgments as I listen to my well-thought-out ones. Perhaps I won’t give them all equal weight, but it is important to listen. What caught my attention and held it is worth following.
Until next week,
Yours,
Eva
January 10, 2020
Dear Eva,
I am thinking back to my otherworldly self last week and noticing I appear to be back with two feet on the ground, for better or worse. Routines have shifted back into gear and with that, a return to normalcy. A return to sickness, unfortunately, as well. The kids’ colds made their way to me, and now Bill—marching through the family without emotion, just like you imagined in a long-ago letter the way Death would come. At times this week when I have felt particularly physically crummy, it struck me just how being sick shrinks the radius of our cares. So much drops out of sight. A nap becomes far more critical than progress on a meaningful project. In a strange way, maybe this is a good reminder of the utter importance of our bodies. How often we take them for granted, just assume that all will be buzzing along inside of us without incident, so that we can attend to plans and obligations far beyond our own bodies.
Today I am physically feeling much better, and I am taking care to notice the luxury. Thank you, body, for carrying me along! I hope you, Eva, are feeling well today as well. (Is that a sign of old age when one starts to appreciate good health? So be it, if it is!)
I continue to ponder the ways in which context changes ideas / artifacts / people. Last week I wrote about how these letters are ever-shifting with time and other changing factors. This week I am seeing how far this idea stretches, perhaps across it all. The same facts and circumstances and ideas and things completely change meaning when set in a different soup. Mindless cable news shows become an important historical archive. Ephemera become collectibles. Hate mail becomes art. Could it be that everything is fluid in nature? What we think is might be something very different tomorrow, or a decade from now. That goes for just about anything—to-dos, burdens, plans, objects, songs, phrases, moods.
What happens if we experiment with seeing the different shapes and meanings of all of the things around us? What if we keep plopping them into new contexts, looking at them from different angles, giving them a little shake to see what else might be revealed? Frankly, this sounds a little destabilizing. But it also seems more accurate. My reality is just a snapshot from a vast collection of angles, and I am retaking those snapshots every moment, consciously or unconsciously changing the angles on all the things. You are doing the same. We all are, and nobody’s angles are identical. And here we humans are, acting surprised when we do not all see eye to eye about how to run the world, let alone about how to decide on dinner plans!
I love your words last week about the future and the present, and your commitment to focus attention on things you want to attend to, and not waiting for the ideal moment that may never appear. I have very much been trying to do my own version of this as well. Today I realized that I am more or less doing with my days exactly what I would do if it was my last year alive. What a gift! I know it cannot remain this way, but I am firmly committed to cherish it while it lasts.
My same self, same home, feels quite different from yesterday, when the weather was sunny and nearly 60 degrees to today, when school was dismissed early for the full-blown winter snowstorm blowing furiously outside my window right now. The soup is ever-changing! May yours be warm and cozy tonight.
Your friend,
Sarah