ON THE PERVERSION OF IDEAS, PLAYING DEAD, AND THE WORLD AS NOT YOUR OYSTER
Friday November 20 2020
Dear Sarah!
It’s been a long week, perhaps one of the longest weeks of my life, and still it has only been one week since the last letter I wrote you! A lot has transpired in this past busy week. It’s after 8PM on Friday and while I don’t think I’ll pull the hello and goodbye! card we’ve alluded to between ourselves — that we might each have something like a free pass so that some week we might just bow in and bow out — I may not wax at length here tonight as I have in some other letters!
I felt convinced that I had made some notes about what I would put in my letter to you this week, and I just shuffled through a stack of papers where I did not find said notes. I think that I did write notes but I think I did not use my hand to apply them to a piece of paper with a pencil. I think I typed up these notes elsewhere! I just searched in my documents to see if I’d started a week 112 letter and I turned one up, and guess what: it is this very letter that I’m typing to you right now. So, I’m finding my way to my notes as I go.
This week I left a note for myself: Sometimes if you think about doing things, you think you can hardly do anything, but if you just settle in to do something you find you can do it. It was the kind of week where if you had told me this week was right around the bend, I would have said, nope, I cannot and will not do that week, I’m just going to stay in bed from now until whenever it’s safe to come out. But instead I just somehow trudged and rolled through each day, the demands of each day, and at the end of each day I went to sleep and tried to replenish my stores so I could wake up the next day and give it another go. If you know precisely what’s coming, and the volume of things that the day will include, it can seem like too much. But every day is the same real length for each of us and somehow most of us make it through, whether we cram the day full to the brim with work and activities and who knows what else, or whether we while away the hours under a blanket or looking out the window.
I echoed myself on the day that followed that first note above, with a slightly different twist: There are things you would never make it through if you knew they were coming. You just move through them because you have to, because they are happening in the moment, and lying down on the ground and playing dead is not an option (but oh, if it were). There is a word for this quality of playing dead, thanatosis, also known as death-feigning. Unfortunately I think death-feigning might only work when your threat is directly in front of you. If something is coming to hurt you and you play dead, you may be able to escape the real possibility of death. But if, say, I am receiving a phone call I don’t want to answer, I cannot play dead, I am just ignoring a phone call; the person might just leave me a message and assume, reasonably, that I will return their call. If I never return their call, have I effectively played dead? No, I have just abrogated a responsibility, my part of a set of expectations I share with my fellow humans.
These feelings paired this week with more thoughts about finishing, as opposed to an ongoingness, to use Sarah Manguso’s word. I thought to myself about the ongoingness of work. I used to be frustrated when I thought I was done with a project and then there were revisions, there was input and feedback from others, there was more to do. But what else would I be doing besides more work? Finish one project and another project waits around the corner. I could work on one document again and again, write and rewrite one story. Call it many stories. We take volume to have a certain kind of meaning, even if the same ground is being tread and retread. I think we’ve likely both read writers or heard of writers who are described as only ever telling the same story over and over, again and again, under new banners. Are many similar stories better than one story that gets the job done? In our society we generally say yes to this question.
This week my father had covid, in fact still has covid, and when I learned this was the case I had to entertain the possibility of his death, not just eventually, as death will come to us all, but soon, and perhaps very soon, soon enough that I should be ready for it now, put plans in place for what comes next.
Thinking again about the impossibility of finishing — you think something is done, and then someone wants to do something different; there is no done, only a pause, a temporary finish until the next revision, until something degrades and needs to be changed, remade. There can, of course, be a permanent done, the end of things, with death, but while there was much that happened this week there was thankfully no death, and the week has ended, and I’m ready to fall asleep, let my cells regenerate, and to wake again tomorrow to give it all another go. Will I stay under the covers extra long tomorrow morning? I think yes!
I’m looking back at your letter from last week and while what I’ve written thus far is not precisely a response to your words, I think as I reread your words that in fact it is a response. All the things that take work — each day is full of these things. You mentioned someone you know who said they are not very reflective and they just like to do; I wonder if their reflection is somehow built into their doing? Or perhaps reflection can exist on a subliminal level. In order to do things you generally need to have some way of doing them, and in order to have a way of doing things you have to have done enough things to have made choices about how you will do things. Even if you don’t reflect on these things independently before each act of doing, the reflection is there, an accumulation of learning and experience, habit and expertise. You can only go on autopilot if you’ve flown the plane many times before!
I’m ready to sign off and to cozy up with your words this evening! I hope you are settling in for a peaceful weekend and I’m looking forward to reading and hearing your words soon!
Until then!
Yours,
Eva
November 20, 2020
Dear Eva,
Lately I have been pondering why I find mask-wearing to really be quite pleasant. I have mentioned before how it solves my lifelong dilemma of feeling naked without lipstick on my pale lips, but there is more to it than that. There is also a way in which it feels just plain comforting to me. The best way I can describe it is that it kind of feels like the difference between wearing a beach wrap and just walking around with bare legs in my swimsuit. I feel less exposed. How mysterious! I have since googled this to learn that I am not alone in this. There are many of us out there that find some physical ease in wearing a mask. I guess to me it somehow feels a bit freeing, like I can let down some concern for how I appear that I didn’t even realize I had until I didn’t have it anymore. There is a certain freedom in masks for me, an irony I find quite delightful in contrast to the “wearing a mask is an impingement on my personal freedom” way of seeing things.
This is not a perfect parallel, but it has me thinking about other situations where ideas are perverted into their opposite form, like the “intolerance” of hate that conservatives have successfully turned into conventional wisdom about the liberal way of being. At long last, it seems I have finally wandered my way back to a topic I promised to write about weeks ago—cancel culture! This is a subject that ever confounds and frustrates me. I despise how bigotry has been turned into a sympathetic and unfairly maligned cause. And while of course I acknowledge that “canceling” can be taken too far, it seems a bit too easy to blame the evil woke-ness among us. I never actually bothered to read “The Letter,” but I absorbed enough of the debate in its aftermath to think the hand-wringing is futile. It seems to me that the squeezing out of nuance from debate, the quick judgments, the binary thinking is all just inevitable when you are doing anything with humans at scale. The difference now is that everyone in public life experiences these forces from all directions, all the time, rather than just when they open the gossip magazines. It is certainly enough to make me leery of ever having a public life, of any variety or magnitude. I appreciate the public-ness of these letters, which as you say “seems to guarantee some kind of reality.” But I have trouble imagining ever wanting anything much more public than this. I realize while writing this that it could be interpreted as a way of saying that I am reticent to speak because of fear of being canceled. That is definitely not what I am meaning to say! I am just overwhelmed by the thought of trying to deal with too many human beings, too many personalities, perspectives, moods. Humans are hard!
Case in point: this week on our bike ride, my friend was talking about the ongoing drama in the HOA of her condo building. People locked out, people hiring contractors with covid-19 and letting them in the building, people demanding compensation for water damage, and the aftermath from same. Governance of humans in any form at any scale is difficult. Is it any wonder democracy is so tricky?
I just want a small, private life. It is only in recent years that I have fully recognized this as an affirmative desire rather than something that just was, and I am now actively trying to carve smaller spaces in which to sit, in which to situate my identity and life. The smallness of my ambition (in diameter but not in depth!) is something that has been comforting in these weird pandemic times where things have felt so bleak at the humanity-is-doomed level. I have come to think about the potential for my life and for my children’s lives with a more compact sense of what is possible. The world is not my oyster, and that is okay. But the world is my oyster in many ways, just at a smaller scale. I can be who I want to be, live the way I want to live. I can even cover my face while I do it! Let freedom ring!!
I hope you have had a good wrapup to your week and that your dad is feeling better every day. I am sorry for this tardy Friday night letter, but I have a feeling you may be typing away as we speak as well! I look forward to reading your words whenever they hit my screen.
Have a wonderful weekend, my friend!
Yours,
Sarah