ON HELPFUL AMNESIA, UNHELPFUL LOGIC, AND KNOWING WHEN IT IS TIME
Thursday January 23 2020
Dear Sarah,
I’m back at home and on my laptop this week, and I’m focused on this letter to you as a primary mode of communication and idea exchange! Last week I had the luxury of seeing you and talking with you in person in addition to our shared letters — but I had a bit more difficulty figuring out what exactly to put into my letter when we were exchanging words in real time! This week my thoughts have perhaps been a bit more bottled up, and are ready to pour all at once onto the page to you, so here goes!
I’ve been thinking this week and in the new year more generally about the delight of getting things onto the page, and then letting them age. I’ve been reading Lydia Davis’s newly collected Essays One, and am starting to dip into The 3 A.M. Epiphany by Brian Kiteley (to which Davis pointed me) — both of which encourage the practice of simply getting your writing down on the page and then letting it sit a bit.
Here is Davis, in an essay titled Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits: (7, p236) Another way to see your work freshly is to leave it alone and come back to it after time has passed. I will quite often begin a piece of writing, even hastily, getting a few lines or sentences down, with a title, and then leave it and work on other things, and sometimes I leave it for so long — weeks or months — that when I see the title again I wonder what it is, and even when I read it I don’t recognize it, having completely forgotten it existed.
And I’m going to be so bold (even after my recent anxiety!) as to quote from an early passage in Kiteley’s book, regarding Helpful amnesia: (p13) Write as many of these exercises as you can and keep them, organizing them carefully, naming the files and folders in ways you’ll be able to recognize months and years later. … You should think of your writing as a collection of fragments. Journals and notebooks are important for this, too, but a separate book for stray ideas is invaluable. What do you do with these exercises once you’ve written five or ten or twenty-three of them? You should keep them, let them sit and age (fiction, like some wine, gets better — or seems better — the further away from it you get — or you see what you should do with these snippets of a scene), reread the exercises occasionally, and build up enough of them so some of the ones you read genuinely surprise you (“I don’t remember having written that,” you’ll say — the ideal reaction to one’s own writing).
This has me thinking of the similarities and differences between the writing I do in a work capacity, i.e. work that pays me money as a direct investment of my time, and the writing I do that I consider personal, ongoing work. With work-related writing, I have come to employ some of the same tactics — getting a bundle of words down sooner rather than later in order to be able to return to my draft and to revise with fresh eyes and see what is missing. But with work-related writing I also operate from the sense that I’ll work on a project nearish to the time it is due or needed, and that I’ll write and revise within a smaller time frame, and then the “piece,” whatever it may be (a grant, a brief article, etc) will be done — it won’t need to be revised further. I might reuse parts of it to address future writing needs, but the specific project at hand is effectively done within a short time frame. The difference I feel with my own writing is that I can enjoy the same kind of process — brain dumps, research, revision — but the arc of time doesn’t have any particular restraints. I use a notes app in which I’ve now been keeping notes for at least the past five years; when I start something new I might both jot down the bundle of current words floating through my mind, and rustle up something I may have made note of a year or more ago. I think the process of finding my way around to moments of doneness just takes as much time as it takes, and I’m currently enjoying writing in time frames that are the opposite of what a work-related deadline might look like. I’m working generally toward finishing a few pieces that I can send out and feel good about, in addition to putting to the page some things that might take longer to come to fruition. But other than the fact that my life won’t go on forever (hopefully it’ll go on for at least another few handfuls of good years, if I’m lucky!) I don’t have any specific time constraints. As long as I am working on things every day, which I am doing and enjoying, then I think this is what it looks like to make progress.
It makes me think about watercoloring, which we talked about the other day while I was visiting. When you’re working with watercolor you work in layers, let a particular application of color dry so it can set, and then you return to apply a new layer, in the same color or a different color. But in theory you don’t have just one watercolor going — waiting for the paper and paint to dry, checking the clock. Ideally you’d have a few watercolors going in any given stretch of time, so that while one is damp you can set it aside and look at another that is dry, keeping a few things in rotation and building them up bit by bit until eventually one and then another is something that you might recognize as complete.
This comes around to your letter from last week, too — you referenced how I don’t yet feel compelled to reread our letters, not without some idea of what I might be looking to compile or create out of the stack. I think I’m letting them age just a bit! If the letters are like one long thread, in a sense, full of loops and knots, we’re still tugging on one end of the thread together as we continue to write letters to each other. We’re not done! Perhaps I’ll be ready to look back at the letters more thoroughly at some future moment, whether we’ve ended the letter exchange or not? (It pains me a bit to write even the idea of it ending!) Hard to know what will feel like the right moment, but I think I’ll know it when I see it! I have already found myself surprised when I sporadically reread some of the things we’ve gotten down on the page. So maybe there are no rules about when to look back — just that the time that elapses is somehow long enough, whatever length that may be!
As usual, this letter has reached (and perhaps surpassed) the length that it should be (ah, back in front of my laptop screen!), so I bid you a written adieu, until next week!
Your friend,
Eva
January 24, 2020
Dear Eva,
One week ago you were here in our home! It was such a treat for all of us. Bill and I were talking after you left about how easily you folded into the rhythms of our home while you were here. We even developed rituals—red wool blanket for Eva as the grownups settle around the TV after kid bedtime, heavy furry blanket for Sarah. Simon has been lamenting your departure since you drove off. (“Eva is the greatest girl.”) I will ruin the surprise since I do not foresee us being able to pull this one off anytime soon, but he has been suggesting we drive to Minnesota to surprise you with a drawing he plans to make you. Needless to say, I am so thankful that you made the trek, and you are welcome in our home anytime!
Being in your company for a few days made me think about what a different thing it is to be together—talking, eating, going for walks, watching movies, playing Sorry—versus writing letters to each other. They seem to cover different portions of a self and a mind, one no more or less real or valuable than the other. I alluded to this at the tail end of last week’s letter, but it feels like it is worth emphasizing what a rare gift it is to be able to share both types of friendship with a single human.
For some reason as I contemplated my letter this week, I found myself thinking—do I have something new to say? Something that is worth preserving in RogShinch digital space? And what the heck does that even mean?! It makes me think of something I heard Lynda Barry say on Debbie Millman’s podcast recently. She said she once had an art teacher that changed her life with one simple sentence. Lynda Barry had been fretting over whether something she had drawn was good, and the teacher said, “That’s none of your business.” Whatever we make and say and create is no longer ours once it is out in the world; it is ready to take new shapes and meanings in different contexts viewed by different people. So whatever I have to say today in this letter, it is not my business to judge its merits!
As you know, I have been dabbling in drawing recently and doing some reading about visual perception and drawing techniques. It has given me so many new things to ponder. One particular bit I read recently was describing the ways in which our brains become impenetrable over time, as the rules we have for understanding the world become entrenched. In the book I am reading, we did an exercise where we placed two identical objects in different places in the room. One slipper near me, one slipper about ten feet away. Then we draw the two slippers. Next, we fold up a piece of paper into a tube so that the diameter of the circle exactly covers the width of the object near us. Then, without adjusting the diameter, we look through the paper tube at the farther object and see just how much smaller it appears, inevitably far smaller than what we have drawn on our page. We know that objects remain the same size no matter how far they move from us. Over time, this means we often literally cannot see how small they appear in our field of vision in order to draw them realistically. This fascinates me. We cannot even truly see what we are seeing! Where else do our rigid brains block us from what is right before us? On this Friday evening, my weary mind cannot tell whether this is another example of how context changes meaning / truth, or whether this is something different entirely. But I know there is a lot to learn from this awareness that logic can operate like a veil over our eyes.
We just got home from a high school concert where teenagers sang Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and original compositions on the piano and danced on stage like their lives depended on it. There were about 8 students that performed solos. Some of them were done really well and some of them were not, but all of it was beautiful to me. It is only as an adult that I can fully appreciate what it takes for a young kid to stand on stage alone and sing a Sam Smith song. I wanted to (and did!) stand up and cheer at the end. It was a wonderful exclamation point to the week.
With that, I will wrap this note so that I can finally read your timely letter (Showoff! Sending it on Thursday!). I hope you have a fabulous weekend at your HOME! We will miss you at ours.
Your friend,
Sarah