ON HOSTILE GESTURES, WHAT WE COUNT AS REWARDABLE TASKS, AND LIGHTENING THE COGNITIVE LOAD
Thursday October 15 and Friday October 16 2020
Dear Sarah,
It’s Tuesday and I’m making notes for my letter to you in hopes of sending it your way a bit early this week. (Spoiler alert: now it’s Friday morning and I’m still working on my letter!)
I am about to reread your letter of last week; I had a fleeting thought the other day about something I wanted to discuss further, sparked by your letter, and made the assumption that what sparked the thought the first time around would do so again — we’ll see if I’m correct. Ideas don’t always sprout in precisely the same way or place they might have come before.
I am flattered and intrigued by your reaction to my letter in week 105! I will look forward to hearing more about your response. I thought it was a good letter, but like other things (I’m recalling Lynda Barry’s words yet again) it can be impossible to accurately self-judge one’s own work, or to see it the way someone else will see it. This is a mystery! I could see enough to write that letter, but not quite “enough” to see exactly what you saw in it, or to acknowledge it in the way you did. Maybe all the threads came together at once for you — in week 106 you reflected on writing about writing — perhaps my letter in the week prior was both conveying some idea and at the same time “writing about the writing” of it? I’m not trying to give myself kudos; once the letter is outside me on the page, in some ways it is just as new to me as it is to you, an artifact of my thought process and note-taking and the arranging and rearranging of puzzle pieces on the page. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m pleased that the letters stay put from week to week, and allow the possibility for both of us to reread and revisit each others’ words and our own.
You reflected last week on how it’s possible to take in certain ideas and then, over time, they are digested out of your brain as if they were never there. This probably speaks to how much of our thinking patterns are based on habits and heuristics. Heuristics is not a word in my vocabulary, and you’ve used it a couple of times in our letters (ok, search proof: one, two, and three times) and I have to look it up every time! But I don’t think I’ve digested it until now. Heuristic: adj, enabling a person to discover or learn something for themselves, e.g. “a hands-on or interactive heuristic approach to learning” (example presented by the internet via Oxford Languages). Wikipedia tells me more: any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, short-term goal or approximation. The dictionary adds a bit more: the word is formed irregularly from the Greek heuriskein, “find.” I don’t know if the dots truly connect up in just this way, but heuriskein called out to me with “skein,” a length of thread or yarn, loosely coiled and knotted, or a tangled or complicated arrangement, state, or situation, or, apparently (another new word-usage!) a flock of wild geese or swans in flight, typically in a V-shaped formation. Skein is from Middle English, a shortening of the Old French escaigne, of unknown origin. Could the Middle English (or the Old French) have traveled to Greece? Though I’m not sure if a sort of finding the thread, as I am trying to do here, gets precisely at the concept of heuristics, which seems to be a bit less about the thread over time and more about the moment. Wikipedia told me further: Heuristics can be mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a decision. I think holding and carrying the thread forward in a meaningful way might increase, rather than easing, the cognitive load of making a decision. Easing the load sounds like finding shortcuts to make quick decisions so you can keep moving. Somehow it feels appropriate that this word, heuristics, is not in my vocabulary, because I have felt that I dislike making decisions, and even once I make them (impossible to get away from it) I can find myself worrying that I’ve chosen or decided incorrectly. My cognitive load stays heavy! I’ve got habits, and I’ll take heuristics, too, please!
On my fleeting thought introduced at the head of this letter — I remembered! Sparked by my words and your reference regarding there are different forms of doing, which are not all equivalent — I often think about how there are many things in the day I wish I didn’t have to do, the laborious little things of life that simply require regular doing; or I wish that doing these things added up to some way of getting credit. While I suppose regular tooth-brushing, say, can get you a passing compliment at the dentist’s office, in general there are lots of things that annoyingly must be done but rarely, if ever, “count.” (Laundry, I’m looking at you!) It all takes energy and we don’t acknowledge a lot of that energy to each other out in the world.
Last week you also spoke of capitalism and what counts as meaningful progress, and I am thinking about what we count as acknowledgeable, rewardable tasks: tasks that earn money, that translate into money. Is capitalism itself a heuristic? An action is not valuable if it isn’t making money, if it isn’t paid.
I’ve made a note to myself about a book I have on my shelf and have not yet read, which I presume will touch on homemaking, the disregard for women’s time and effort every day and always. Now I’ve pulled it down off the shelf: Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle by Silvia Federici. In 1972 Federici was one of the cofounders of the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the Wages For Housework campaign internationally. I am intrigued just as I was when I bought this book (years ago now, as I recall buying it in person at Green Apple Books in San Francisco) and it may now be time to read it!
Another word puzzle has found its way to completion this week! I send my good wishes to you for a weekend of relaxation away from the nitty-gritty things that occupy you during the week! Looking forward to reading your words!
Until soon,
Eva
October 16, 2020
Dear Eva,
Hello on this Friday evening! I am remembering your text this morning announcing that it is SNOWING where you are. Minnesota does not mess around! It was brisk here today, but the sun was shining and mighty autumn was holding its own. I have started to feel glimmers of looking forward to a cozy winter, but I am not quite ready to turn that corner just yet. I need a bit more time to steel myself—and prepare, with some extra resilient winter apparel and maybe an outdoor heater—for the pandemic winter ahead. I am confident we will get through it and can probably even make it fun if we try.
On this particularly Friday movie night, I am up in my office typing with a belly full of pizza while the boys watch The Neverending Story (Bill’s nostalgia pick for the week). The kids assured me that they didn’t care whether I watched the movie, only whether they did, so I decided to opt out and fully focus on this letter rather than sneaking it in on my phone between movie scenes. Their bluntness—and their straightforward disinterest in my presence in that context—has me thinking back to your observation last week that my kids seem to be comfortable both with my (and their) desire for closeness and, at times, with my need for distance. I will say it is something that has just developed out of necessity. I do, in fact, need an above-average amount of solitude and independence, even from those I love the most. I think Bill probably does, too. But now I am wondering whether this also serves as a kind of lesson for them about relationships with those we love? This week after a quick jaunt around the block together during one of his short school breaks, Jonah abruptly said, “Thank you for all of your help, Mom.” I asked what he meant, and he replied that he just meant that I generally helped him a lot, with everything. It was completely out of the blue and left me reeling a bit. I think of all the kids I have been around who took their parents’ presence and support (particularly from their mothers) as inevitable, unremarkable aspects of life. Heck, I think about how I think I was one of those kids at his age! And somehow, this 8 year old has enough perspective and awareness not to take it for granted. Is it because I am not always there?
Speaking of not always being there, I am particularly in and out these past few weeks with this new role I have taken on at work. With a board meeting presentation late this afternoon, this has been an especially high-pressure week, and I am eyeing your letter about your self-established pace with a bit of envy. It is funny though, because while I can recognize that my current pace is not sustainable—phone calls all work day beginning at 7 am every day, then thinking and writing after the kids go to bed—I also feel a bit exhilarated by it all. It is enjoyable to use my brain, to put in work on a thing, to feel valued. And yet, I can feel myself crashing as I finally let down from the week while I write this letter tonight. Like your experience last Friday, my work calls today left me amped up and it takes awhile to come down from it.
Being on this busier pace lately has me thinking about how little real control we have over the pace of others, even professionally. In a work setting, we essentially have to offer either a sense of purpose (in whatever shape that may take) or money in order to get people to subscribe to the pace we set. Rationally speaking, assuming most of us have activities outside of work that are more meaningful to us, we really should just do the minimum it would take to continue to be paid. But this is so often not how it works, which is really quite remarkable when you think about it. Capitalism strikes again! Or maybe this isn’t capitalism as much as it is human nature? Whatever it is, I’m mystified by it, even while it works its magic upon me and I do far more than is asked or required of me.
I just looked back at the notes I had written down in my notebook earlier this week in anticipation of writing you. I see a random note-to-self—Go back to Sarah Kendzior interview—interspersed within my notes. This is a reference to that interview I read and have been talking about for weeks now, which was so good that I want to reread it and grab excerpts from it in order to fully absorb its wisdom. For some reason, I want to do this before I actually share it with you, and perhaps with others. This has me thinking about all of the tiny (or not tiny) obligations we give ourselves, not to mention all of the obligations others give us—in the form of emails, letters, postcards. Even me sharing that article with you (if I ever get to it!); will that just be me imposing some vague obligation on you? I hope not! I remember a law school professor of mine who would go on long rants about his theory of gifts, and how he considered them to be hostile gestures because they required a reciprocal response. In other words, gifts imposed an obligation. I guess in some ways we are all imposing obligations on one another all the time, attempting to set the pace for each other. But at the end of the day, as I have learned as a parent of a stubborn child who will sometimes simply refuse to do what we ask/demand, there is really nothing we can do to make each other do what we want. This may be yet another beauty of these letters—reciprocal, equal gifts/obligations to one another each week.
With that, I will bring this non-hostile gesture of a letter/gift to a close. Perfect timing because I hear the movie ending downstairs. I hope the rest of your week was a good one, and I look forward to reading your letter, which has been waiting in my inbox very patiently all day.
Cheers to your first wintry weekend!
Until soon,
Sarah