ON NOURISHING THE HUNGER TO BE SEEN, WRINGING OUT THE RAG, AND THE DIFFERENT FORMS OF DOING
Friday October 2 2020
Dear Sarah,
Today is my two-year anniversary of arriving in Minnesota! Two years can, apparently, pass in a way that feels swift. I think I felt this past year differently than my first year here — in the first year everything was new and I was just riding the wave; in the second year as happenings and seasonal experiences started to recur I found I could see and enjoy them more thoroughly. I think I enjoyed this summer more than I enjoyed last summer, for example! Lots of reasons that could be so, this year, but I definitely felt like this summer had more of a presence for me; I felt like it was long and fruitful.
I am appreciative of the opportunity this week to take on a fresh wrangle with your instinct to complete! Last week as I read your letter I immediately started taking notes for the letter I would write you this week. I was delighted by your response to the fact that I had had a book in my shopping cart for five years. Ha! You said, ...what amazes me is that you seem to genuinely feel no stress about these open loops. I think you are right! I think that things have their moments, and sometimes you can’t see or hear something in a meaningful way until you are ready for it. I can take in information, or appear to, but something may not sink in until later; an idea or fact or thought can lie dormant until sparked or triggered by some other thought, moment, activity. The trigger can even be the simple fact of aging, the passage of time, an accumulation of new possible nodes of connection; like a circuit, adding new points, the end eventually coiling back around to the beginning, closing the circuit, lighting the bulb, a warm glow of new understanding in one’s mind. It’s possible that I won’t return to many if not most of the things I’ve bookmarked physically and digitally, but have I stored away some portion of the essence of these things? I am comfortable with learning or acquiring some piece of information that feels resonant, and then applying it, or re-reading or engaging with it, at some future moment when a couple more links suggest the closing of a loop, the turning of a few points into a line and a line into a loop. I loved your identification of these open loops. The things I’ve bookmarked digitally are perhaps less reliably returned to, but my books are always at my fingertips, my bookshelves like an ocean’s surface, dotted thick with icebergs.
I still say not everything needs to be finished! Books will be there when the moment comes calling. I found myself wanting to parse out the important things (necessary to finish) from the less-important, and not to conflate the two. For example, I love to read, but that’s not in my personal category of doing a thing and putting a frame around it. There are different forms of doing, which are not all equivalent. So, that’s a filter of sorts — I’m not always concerned with finishing entertainment or perhaps even education (e.g. articles and books) (though when does one mark an education holistically complete?) We’ve also discussed the problem of always learning and never turning that knowledge back out into the world; an “incomplete” education shouldn’t mean that one never does do something and put a frame around it!
I’m enjoying reading the new Beowulf translation by Maria Dahvana Headley before bed these last couple of nights, and am looking forward to reading more of it. Sometimes I don’t want things to end! Finishing means ending! If there’s a good thing I’m enjoying, why hasten its conclusion? No one these days is asking me what I got done this day, this week, this month, this year. It is only a question for me to ask myself, and to answer in whatever way I choose!
I was also mulling on your words on the importance of whether we keep stretching. I thought of this as the importance of regularly challenging some small or large belief or gut response, and seeing what comes out the other side. I have for a while been carrying on a dialogue with myself about the pro-choice—pro-life divide. It’s a big topic, and I have some more writing to do myself before I write much more here. I know that part of what will move my internal dialogue forward is getting it out on paper, and I’m starting that, and there’s more yet to write into and through!
You wondered about the capacity for growth and stretching when staying in the same place. Yes, you are there in the same place with the same people; they are the same, in a way, but they are also always changing. Even if you stayed in your home every day and never interacted with the outside world, you would still eventually end up with angsty teens in your house, with no change required except the passage of time. Every day is somehow new, even if it is the same (I first wrote this sentence as every day is somehow the same, even if it is new — I suppose the inversion was today’s take on my notes from the other day!) And even when we are in the same place, we interact with books and writings, standing in for people and their ideas and experiences. I think the capacity for stretching is still there, even if the stretches feel small or unnoticeable. (Tiny muscles are still muscles!)
I was thinking this week about a review in Bookforum by Max Read of a book by Richard Seymour called The Twittering Machine. It’s a book I’m not sure I’ll ever get around to reading (ha!) but the review was instructive. I was compelled:
“The Twittering Machine is powered by an insight at once obvious and underexplored: we have, in the world of the social industry, become ‘scripturient — possessed by a violent desire to write, incessantly.’ Our addiction to social media is, at its core, a compulsion to write. Through our comments, updates, DMs, and searches, we are volunteers in a great ‘collective writing experiment.’ Those of us who don’t peck out status updates on our keyboards are not exempt. We participate too, ‘behind our backs as it were,’ creating hidden (written) records of where we clicked, where we hovered, how far we scrolled, so that even reading, within the framework of the Twittering Machine, becomes a kind of writing.”
I understand this hunger to write; for some, social media becomes the opportunity to see oneself in “print,” or at least in type. Here in our letters you and I can satisfy the hunger to write and to have that writing become communication with another human in a meaningful way; we can be marginally public, but more importantly, we are seen by each other. The hunger to write is, in some part, a hunger to be seen. The letters are our discovery — if we can call letter-writing a discovery! — of a way to nourish the hunger in a positive and generative way, instead of in a negative, critical, fragmented fashion. I’m thinking about the difference between fragments and threads; the difference between spiky shards of glass, say, and threads whose ends can be gathered or tucked or tied or woven into new sentences and ideas. Shards are harder to work with!
I’ve tied the threads of my notes together for you this week as best as I can, and now I think I’m ready to head out into the Friday evening sunset! I hope you are enjoying a crisp early autumn bike ride and that you have a pleasant and peaceful weekend ahead! Looking forward to talking soon and reading your words sooner!
Your friend,
Eva
October 2, 2020
Dear Eva,
How are you on this Friday evening? I am writing from my living room, where I sit with my laptop while the rest of the family is in the TV room watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Yes, my ambition to write this letter before the final hours was a failed one this week. I’ll admit there is some part of me that is relishing this sneaky alone time tonight. When I got home from the Friday happy hour bike ride and emerged from a steamy shower to quell the chills (it’s definitely fall in these parts!), I soon realized that both of my children had begun following me around, chattering about this or that while I tried to get dressed and blowdry my hair. Now certainly there is nothing wrong with kids wanting to be near their mothers! But hoo, sometimes the in-your-face-ness is hard for me, particularly in the moments when I am transitioning from a non-parenting setting to a parenting one. It is as if my body and mind need some interstitial (you used this word in our conversation this week, and it fits perfectly here so thank you for bubbling it up to the fore) space before I gear up for a mode of being needed, talked to, peppered with questions, asked for a snack. I think this may be one of the perils of having been essentially an only child in my youth—my tolerance for noise, distractions, and other external stimulation is startlingly low. Sometimes, like tonight, even the sounds of a television that I am not watching can cause me something close to physical stress. In case anyone needed convincing, this is proof I was not destined for preschool teaching like other members of my family!
As I settle into letter-writing mode, I am trying to take stock of how I feel right now, how this week has felt. It goes without saying these days that the week has felt long, but this particular week also felt heavy, like invisible forces were weighing me down like I was a water-drenched rag.
The world generally is heavy right now, of course, so it is entirely possible my current mood is the right mood. Ever since the election four years ago, I have tried to focus on the micro. Rather than contemplate how helpless I am to make macro change, I have tried to do what small things I can. One of those things was joining a volunteer program in early 2017 where we were matched with a refugee family just after their arrival in the United States. I am sure I have told you about this many times in the past; it has been such a positive experience as we developed an ongoing relationship with the family with whom we were paired. But over the past year things have entirely unraveled for this family, and they are now facing incomprehensible struggles that we are incapable of easing. Feeling helpless in this situation is painful. And I suppose it is a reminder that there are just as many dimensions to individual human problems as there are to macro policy problems. My instinct is always to want to solve, figure out, fix—but this is probably the wrong frame for the whole shebang, micro and macro. There is no solving.
Somehow on this particular Friday, which ends a weighty week, I am feeling like it is fitting to end it there. A brief and slightly gloomy letter. But fear not, I am certain the weekend will give me a good squeeze to wring out the water and lighten my load. I will say it was delightful to have not one but two chats with you this past week, and I look forward to another week of double Eva ahead!
Yours,
Sarah