On contexts spoken, unspoken, and removed, raw cookie dough, and a plucky pizzicato tone
January 16, 2020 // January 17, 2020
Dear Eva,
I just reread your letter before sitting down to write you, and I will admit to again having a wee chuckle at the thought of you regretting the “impulsivity” of quoting a book you have not yet read in its entirety. If this is your version of lacking restraint, I dare say you are doing pretty darn good at this life!
I am thinking about you writing that you think of yourselves as a measured and balanced person (about which I agree!), and that your letter somehow felt like a departure from that (about which I disagree!), and then thinking about how much of life revolves around this push and pull from within ourselves. We want, and we resist. We feel, and we rationalize. Much of our self-regulation is positive (for example, I want a big bowl of raw chocolate chip cookie dough at this moment, but I shall resist the temptation to march to the kitchen and whip it up), but I wonder when self-control morphs into another unwanted coat? To go back to that metaphor for a moment, you asked last week whether I was visualizing shedding unnecessary coats from my closet or from my body. I am quite sure it feels more like the latter. I say that because I have the feeling of less weight holding me down, like my little princess-and-the-pea-self has dug myself out from underneath the pile. And like anyone who removes layers, I am left feeling the air on my skin, without much protection from the elements, but comfortable.
I love what you wrote last week about one-way transformation. A metamorphosis does not reverse. I worry sometimes about whether I will or have found myself in a loop, either one large loop or maybe an array of little loops. As you know I am systematically rereading our letters, starting from the beginning. As I make my way through them, I find myself bracing for the moment I find my words repeating. If and when that time comes (I am only three months in so far), I fear that it will feel like evidence that I am not writing through ideas but around and back in again, that the transformation is not irreversible, after all. This topic tugs at many things we have discussed over the years—the nature of memory, pre-worrying, changing and, at once, same selves. Maybe what it touches on most squarely for me is vulnerability. These letters are a record of a self moving through time, displaying the fragility of anything resembling certainty about a life and the choices made and being made. That can leave me feeling a bit like I am here in the bone-chilling cold without a coat, so maybe those extra layers are not always unwelcome! But it also feels like further proof that the nature of everything is malleable, that things (including selves) just look different when held up to different lights and at different angles.
One thing that fascinates me as I reread our stack of letters is to know the unwritten backdrop of life events atop which they sit. Occasionally we will make references to things going on in our lives in a given week, but for the most part, the letters are without plots. I wonder what it is like to read them without the context that we have about the events that have informed and influenced our words? I suppose I would / will find out if I reread them ten years from now when the details of our shared life experiences fade from my mind’s eye. But right now, when I reread past letters, I can recall the mostly unspoken context of life that informed our words, at least the major bits. And there really has been so much drama, so much that has changed, even while much has remained the same. It intrigues me to think about how the letters decouple our interior selves from our physical selves, how they extract and record a thread of what goes on within our minds, with little corresponding record of what goes on within our homes. The removal of context—how does it change the nature of our words, the meaning of our ideas?
You said recently that you do not feel compelled to reread the letters right now, not without some idea in mind for what you might be looking to compile or create out of the stack. This makes perfect sense, and it got me wondering exactly what I am looking for as I go back through the letters. I know I am partially searching for an answer to the unanswerable question people often ask when I mention the project—what are the letters about? I may also be looking for evidence of the transformation we both feel we have made / are making during the course of this correspondence but cannot really articulate. I have toyed with an idea for a map that charts our movement from one set of themes to other themes, a visual that shows the trajectory of ideas. I wonder if this is too linear and clean though. It is much more likely that my review of our letters will reveal loops and recurring ideas. Some ideas we work through and some we must work back through, again and again, like waves beating the shore.
With that, I will close this letter as I sit on a couch just a few feet from you. You are here in the flesh visiting from Minnesota during a cozy winter snowstorm. The plot thickens! A friendship of ideas, but also of fellowship! I am so grateful for both.
Yours,
Sarah
Friday January 17 2020
Dear Sarah,
I'm here in your house! I drove south four hours from Minneapolis yesterday. I packed up a couple nights' worth of items and set off into the bold cold, ahead of the snowstorm that we're seeing today in Des Moines and that will roll into the Twin Cities shortly as well, if not already. I packed up my computer, my note pages, my pencils, and was an hour into my drive before I realized I'd left that tidily packed bag with my computer in my office right where I'd packed it. Now I am typing my letter to you on my tiny computer, which I don't mind at all, and perhaps it'll point me toward a more succinct letter today, as my letters have been unfurling out longer and longer as the weeks have gone by. Typing documents on my phone is a process that occupies a different mental channel than the words that flow out when I'm padding full-handed across a keyboard. Perhaps this will be a brief, plucky letter, like a song rendered in pizzicato, the round plucking of a stringed instrument instead of longer, smoother bowed notes. I already feel that perhaps my sentences are shorter, as if I am texting you this letter. So be it! We've had our share of robust text conversations!
I meant to write my letter before I headed down this week, and I didn't do that, and now I'm here and we've been talking about lots of things that we might regularly hash out in written words. What does that leave for the page this week? It's a pleasure to spend time together in person, so perhaps this week's letter is like a delicate screen or a warm blanket pulled around our in-person conversations, like the fluffy snow falling outside, layering the streets. Cozy, I say!
I've been enjoying thinking about your letter of last week, how context changes ideas / artifacts / people, how perhaps more things are fluid than they are static. Perhaps context is what is fluid? Perhaps the things just are, and it is the shifting context that lets us see the same things in different ways? This may be just what you are saying. You said 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?
I am thinking about how context can be a thing, how a different context perhaps says less about the thing in the context, and more about the context itself. A stone in the dark might appear to have limited characteristics, yet once it is brought into the light, what was there all along becomes more apparent. The stone is the same. (Is it the same if it is relocated?) Different contexts perhaps show us how to know the same thing differently? Are we saying the same thing?
You wrote What we think is might be something very different tomorrow, or a decade from now. Maybe the thing does not change, but we change around it. Maybe we are less good at recognizing things for what they are when we first see them?
In the spirit of assembling this letter from the bits and pieces of our time together, and in the pizzicato format of a composition formed by poking out words on my screen with my thumbs and pointer finger, a few collected notes from the hours surrounding this letter:
An evening of performances
A celebration of eggs
Snow that clung to our eyebrows and eyelashes
The impending and perpetual joys of pizza
Snow drifts, stuck cars, and industry-leading clearance
Cherry spritzes and cheesy sandwiches
Laughing at slips on the slippery driveway followed by karmically slipping oneself
On that note, I'm going to tie up this page and use my voice to talk with you in person!
Talk soon, talk now!
Your friend,
Eva