ON PEERING INTO NEW DISTANCES, THE ART OF DREAMING, AND A TIPPED-OVER SENSE OF PLACE
Friday December 18 2020
Dear Sarah,
This week when we talked I mentioned that my sense of our letters these days is that we have reached a new plateau, or maybe not a plateau, but a new height — I think that we have folded back on ourselves again and again, not in a repetitive way but in a responsive way that both excavates and builds on top of the excavation. (Am I describing a more stable version of something like a Jenga tower? Does it ruin the idea to mention Jenga?) So perhaps now we’ve reached a new height from which to both view our excavations and to see new things — we are peering into new distances from new heights! What do you think about that?
I’m thinking about your letter of last week and your desire to be an artist. I like when you come back around to a feeling you had before! Then I get to think again about how I feel about the thing, think about how I answered your thought before, and think about how I am different now, how I feel different, how I might respond differently. You reminded me that I like to argue that you already are an artist. I might argue the same point in a different way — [ thinking about you wanting somehow to be something other than what you are, or what you think you are — I certainly understand the blocks to being an artist, I almost can’t fathom that there are people who naturally find their way to making art, but I suppose it is like finding your way to anything ] — When I read your words I wondered, what’s stopping you? Or, how would being an artist be different from what you’re doing now? Not in the obvious way that lawyering is not precisely art making (maybe there is a way in which lawyering is art making of a sort?) but — what do you actually want when you say you want to be an artist? A different way of spending your day? Permission to make things? To somehow escape the current moment into a different moment that would not have led you to your current challenges (but would surely have manifested other challenges)? Something to say at (now-virtual) dinner parties? More artists in your friend group?
Is it helpful to think about being an artist as another kind of job in this world? Is job the right word? An occupation, a profession, a trade, a pursuit, a pastime, a diversion, a vocation, a calling? We humans made up all these words to describe the ways we might spend our time, might bring a sense of purpose to our hours. We all try to find some activity to which we may be suited; some may never find it; some may never find much of a living in the work to which they are suited. You wrote last week of peeling away an invisible film — lately I am less sure that it matters what one does to make money (as long as one is not harming others or breaking the law) — maybe it only matters how you feel about it, how you fit it into your life? What does your artist dream life look like?
I mentioned some weeks ago a book I’m reading, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) by Andy Warhol himself. There is a part where he talks about the ultimate perfection of empty space; about space and the rooms (internal and external) in which we live:
Space is all one space and thought is all one thought, but my mind divides its spaces into spaces into spaces and thoughts into thoughts into thoughts. Like a large condominium. Occasionally I think about the one Space and the one Thought, but usually I don’t. Usually I think about my condominium. … Your mind makes spaces into spaces. It’s a lot of hard work. A lot of hard spaces. As you get older you get more spaces, and more compartments. And more things to put in the compartments. To be really rich, I believe, is to have one space. One big empty space. I really believe in empty spaces, although, as an artist, I make a lot of junk. Empty space is never-wasted space. Wasted space is any space that has art in it.
There’s more to this line of thought — it might turn into a regular point of reference for me, like John McPhee’s Draft No. 4 — but part of what I read into it is the desire for pure potential. You can’t make a wrong move if you don’t make a move at all, if the space is empty. You can make as many moves as you want, and make as much as you want (I see you, Andy), but still the elusive empty space, the pure potential, is somehow desirable above the made thing. I can agree with this. And it’s still possible to want the empty space even as you make lots of things — we can have it both ways! We can make stuff and want emptiness, have emptiness and want objects.
I find myself thinking again about Sarah Manguso’s finding of “the notes for a book a woman had been working on for thirty years: sixteen pages” — and for some reason I think of those sixteen pages of notes, a story in brief, maybe the loosest shape of a story, a scratch on the surface of potential. It can be nice to live in the place of potential on the horizon — or to find a way to return to that feeling of potential. Maybe that is the thing. It’s ok to do the first thing (and the second thing, and the third thing, and so on) and to see it turn out badly or medium-well, because to start a new thing is always to set up a fresh scenario of potential. It is always possible to regain the spirit of potential in some small way. (I wonder if an older version of me will disagree with this optimistic sentiment. We’ll see!)
I agree that you should stop dreaming and do! If there’s something you want to do… just do it! Unless you are a dream artist, and your art involves dreaming of what you could be doing? But even then you might want to figure out how to get your art into the physical world in some form. You said maybe part of the invisible film that was peeled off of me these past few months relates to this clarity and also this courage about knowing that whatever I manage to create will not be good but it will be enough. I have no idea if it will be good and I don’t think that matters! Good is a judgment for others who exist outside the making. Sometimes bad is good and good is bad.
I have lately been enjoying a particular aspect of aging: I can see and remember things I did ten or fifteen years ago, things I did as part of my adult life, and they genuinely feel like distant activities, things I did in a past. Sometimes the past feels like it was a moment ago, and sometimes it feels like it lives where it belongs, those many years ago. There is something interesting in feeling the expanse of oneself over time and seeing how the world can change even in a brief period, a blip in time on the pale blue dot.
I am excited about your grey hairs. One of mine has been showing itself as well, though I can’t tell if I get grey from the roots in the way you were describing. Sometimes I will notice that a single hair of mine is grey or pale in parts and still a bit reddish in other parts. Sometimes I will find a completely grey hair. I’ve had these hairs since I was in elementary school — I had an odd experience in second or third grade where a lunch monitor, an adult guarding the kids on the playground at lunchtime, saw a grey or pale hair on the crown of my head and plucked it right out, announcing its presence. A strange thing for an adult to do, which left me with no particular feeling I can recall except that adults are weird. Pale hairs fit into the mix when you’re a redhead, that’s just how it goes! They look shimmery for now. In any case, our bodies remind us that it’s time to be the artists we want to be if we’re trying to sneak it in before our deadline!
What do you want to make? Is it a dot on a piece of paper? Can you get some nice paper and put a dot on it and call it art? What will count? What will make you say to yourself that you are an artist? Will it be selling a piece of art? Making enough art that you could say you made art for a month or a year or a decade? I’m asking these questions partly because I don’t know the answer either! How will you know when you get there? You might make some art and still not yet feel like an artist. Does that mean you’re not an artist? Is being an artist about feeling like an artist, or about making art and being judged by someone else to be an artist? Maybe if we can answer these questions we’ll both be artists.
Is this letter an artwork? It’s certainly a long one! I’ll close it there and wish you well as you launch into your grand holiday! Next Friday shall be Christmas Day! Looking forward to sliding into 2021 soon, with you and our letters by my side!
Your friend,
Eva
P.S. You referenced Jerry Maguire. It has been so long since I’ve seen that movie — all I remember is show me the money! Which may be telling?
December 18, 2020
Dear Eva,
It is 4:30 PM and the sun is low in the sky on this Friday almost-evening. I am feeling strangely melancholy as the workweek/work-year winds to an end before the holiday break. I guess I thought I would instead be feeling bliss right about now, so I’m a little perplexed. But there has been a lot of change in my work life these past few months, and it seems to be bubbling up to the fore. It can be easy to romanticize change but I think—almost no matter what—that change requires emotional and cognitive labor that we tend to overlook. (I’m using “we” here to share the blame with the rest of humanity.) And there is a special kind of shift in the ground when you experience change while staying in the same literal and figurative place, like everything is moving around you. Anyway, I think I just need a big ole pause, and a pause is what I shall get over the next two weeks!
Your letter last week was a real treat—Gnomio! Clam sauce! Red cheeks from active thought! I loved all of it. Your brooch idea—I’m not embarrassed, I’m just thinking really hard—still brings me joy every time I think of it. A few weeks ago I listened to a business-y podcast about dealing with shyness in the workplace. The main nugget I got from it was this idea that things like flushing, or even fumbling over words—however it is that anxiety manifests—are not actually the problem. The only problem is if you feel shame about them, or try to control or avoid them. I know your red cheeks are decidedly not a signal of shyness or embarrassment (your brooch told me so!), but the principle applies here in your embrace or at least nonchalance about this tendency of yours (which, I might add, must be far more noticeable to you than it is to the outside world as things always are). Put another way, you clearly don’t need to listen to that podcast because you have already mastered this process of self-acceptance! Unlike yours truly.
The other day I had an epiphany about one of my other quirks. I realized that I have spent my entire life with the compass turned one notch to the right in my head. I am not sure exactly how to explain this because I know how odd it sounds, but somehow in my brain, north—the direction of my parents’ house, for example—is pointing toward 3 o’clock, east is at 6 o’clock, and so on. I should add that this problem did not occur when I lived in New York or San Francisco somehow, but in this city I have lived the bulk of my life, I have a tipped-over sense of place. I tried to describe this to Bill in the car the day that I realized it, and he could not comprehend it. Jonah, meanwhile, piped in from the backseat, “Oh, you just mean the map in your head looks wrong.” So either he has inherited my faulty spatial intelligence or kids are just more open-minded to other ways of being. Or both.
In any case, this has me thinking back to a prior conversation we have had going in our letters, about going on auto-pilot and whether some reflection is built into our doing no matter what. The fact that it took me 40 years to realize the map in my head was sideways in my hometown seems like proof that the latter must not always be true. As I think I have mentioned before, I’m fairly certain my capacity for inputs is unusually low. When I am paying attention to something, I am not paying attention to everything else. This means I miss a lot of things, like the eye colors of people I love. That one (for which I am notorious) strikes me as evidence of a phenomenon I have noticed where we can know something or recognize something without a sliver of doubt, but then if asked to recite it back or describe the details, we fall flat. When Jonah was learning to tie his shoes, I realized the task of verbally explaining how to tie shoelaces was shockingly difficult, even though I can, of course, do this task with my eyes closed. Same for naming the keys on a keyboard, or trying to name the keys to a song you can play with muscle memory. Brains are mysterious! How can we know but not know?
It is now 8:30 PM, the kids are in bed (aka playing loudly together in their bedroom), my belly is full of homemade pizza, and my mood has shifted. I have firmly down-shifted into relaxation mode, and I am ready for some eggnog and an episode of Treme (This decade-old HBO show about post-Katrina New Orleans has captured my heart these past few pandemic months. I’m not sure if it is the special allure of scenes full of live music, good food, and communion, or if it would have hooked me whenever we watched it, but I think I am going to be truly devastated when we finish the series, probably in the next couple of weeks if I am not careful.)
You sent me your letter early in the day, so thank you for patiently waiting until I got my act together tonight. I am anxious to read your words and hear what’s on your pre-holiday mind.
With love,
Sarah