ON CONCISE STORIES AND WINDING LETTERS, AND THINKING ABOUT HOW TO BE BEFORE DEATH COMES
Thursday February 27 and Friday February 28 2020
Dear Sarah,
This week I wrote a note to myself: All life is, is priorities.
Last week after reading your letter I too was thinking about ambivalence, like ambi • valence, thinking about the idea of being ambidextrous, able to use both hands comfortably and equally, no focus on one over the other, no heavy weight to be borne by left or right alone. Ambi- : a prefix occurring in loanwords from Latin, meaning “both” (ambiguous) and “around” (ambient).
Recalling valence from my high school chemistry days; some way in which atoms are attracted to each other. Valence: the combining power of an element, especially as measured by the number of hydrogen atoms it can displace or combine with. Also: relating to or denoting electrons involved in or available for chemical bond formation. Also, in linguistics: the number of grammatical elements with which a particular word, especially a verb, combines in a sentence. The possibility of many possibilities; the combining power.
You were using ambivalence to describe our rational human condition, and a kind of agonizing limbo state between perfect knowing and imperfect doing. You chose the word to describe the feeling you were having or way you were thinking about things, and somehow I felt compelled to tweak at that, to say ambivalence isn't bad, maybe it has a silver lining. Maybe everything has some kind of silver lining, but sometimes the silver lining is not the thing. There are infinite possibilities not just in what we do but in how we feel about what we do, how others feel about and react to what we do. And yet we don't experience a series of infinite possibilities - we make choices, or see some paths and miss others. Somehow ambivalence feels like it could be a way to flexibly move through it all, a kind of non-strategy strategy, though that can't quite be the case. The word has a real meaning that is different than the possible sum of its parts - even though I think I can dissect it, bend it to my will, make it better, when it just is, and it is what you meant it to be.
This week I mentioned to you that I was working on a zine for-about Jason, and this morning I completed it. It's printed, it's stacked, with two photos tucked inside each front cover: a photo of Jason walking ahead of me under a multicolored umbrella, and a picture of a stamp we both really liked, a stamp about ping pong, showing the path of the ping pong ball between two players as many back-and-forth dotted-line arcs. The zine might not be the absolute perfect thing, but it is a good thing, I made it how I meant it, it came out well, and I put it together this week in the midst of work busyness that I would never in hindsight say was more important. I am still working through my feelings about what I should have done - what I think I should have done more of - in the months before Jason's passing. It's of course of little import now - he's gone - but in some way I am trying to reconcile myself to how to think freshly about the fact that everyone is going to pass away, sometime, and to think about how I want to be in those situations. And eventually the situation will be me, will be each of us. Death made more sense before it started actually happening to the people close to me. Now it feels more crumbly, as you described last week, even though perhaps death is the least crumbly thing of all. It's simply going to happen, and then everyone who is not dead is left to think about it. The crumbliness comes in the thinking, as usual.
I mentioned when we talked this week that I've been enjoying the print publication of a comics journalism and nonfiction site called The Nib. The issue was all about animals and our complicated relationship with animals - the ways we eat (some but not others of) them even as we sympathize with them, the ways we endanger them and protect them, the ways we treat them like pets when they aren't, and the ways we love them when they are. It is a very good publication, and I read every single page. It soothed me to read something that wasn't only words, had colors, told stories in ways that pushed beyond black and white letters on a page. I used to look forward to reading the newspaper comics every Sunday, would find and peel them out of the paper straightaway (especially as a youth, and even as an adult). As a child I made myself read every single comic, even the ones I didn't care for, like the one about a prince. (Was it Lancelot? Was it King Arthur?) It was like I thought that my comics diet couldn't only be my favorites, it had to be my lesser favorites too, had to include some trials or obligations, my vegetables among my sweets. As an adult I read The New York Times daily briefing (though my interest has waned this year) and work my way through a few news stories before clicking on the Best of Late Night recap of the comedy news shows. Comics are apparently one of my favorite ways to take in information. I think you have to be smart to be funny (in the stand-up realm) and you have to have a concise thought or a creative way of thinking to create an interesting comic or visual story. I'm drawn to concise stories and the brevity required for humor even as (perhaps because) I can lose myself in words and their infinite possibilities. Maybe I will plan to get my news exclusively from The Nib for the rest of the year!
I am feeling cozy thinking about your impending Friday Movie Night, and I look forward to reading your words this week, whether they are long or short or concise or winding! Happy leap weekend, my friend! What will you do with the year's extra day?
Yours,
Eva
February 28, 2020
Dear Eva,
TGIF! It’s a wonder I don’t start every letter that way, but somehow the sentiment is speaking loudly to me this week. We have almost no plans this weekend, save for the plans we have every weekend—movie night, pancakes (the custardy lemon baked kind and the buttermilk kind grilled in bacon fat, some dolloped with chocolate chips, for all of the varied tastes in our small family; leave no pancake preference behind!), driveway basketball and dog walks in the unusually spring-like weather. Top it off with my birthday-gifted Saturday morning freedom to read and write, and it sounds like perfection to me.
As I pondered what to write in my letter earlier in the week, I spent a lot of time thinking about Mary Oliver’s slim book about the craft of writing poetry, A Poetry Handbook, which I just finished. It got me thinking about the difference between a poem and a letter like this. Every word in a poem takes care, requires intentionality. The sounds of the words matter, the spacing, the lines. You have to know exactly what it is you are trying to convey. In contrast, these letters dribble out of me in a flowy stream of consciousness, rambling from here to there as my mind flits about. My first instinct was to feel self-conscious about this difference, to feel a teensy bit of shame for the lazy ease with which I write you each week. But then I imagined what it would mean to communicate with a friend in poem only!
It really gets to the delightful oddity of this writing project, which lives in the squishy space between public and private. A friend recently wrote me saying he had tried to read some of these letters and that he stopped because he felt like he was “eavesdropping on a personal conversation.” And in a way, of course, he was / is. These letters are both a display of, and an engagement in, a hearty, fluid friendship. They are also a display of, and an engagement in, each of our interior lives. While I am certain we both are ever-aware of the public nature of this project, nothing we write is strictly for the public. It is a rare mode. What does it mean to have what is essentially a private, personal dialogue in a public space? We are uncovering the meaning / value / effect over time, but I don’t think we can truly and fully know while we are in it. And in any case, it may be none of our business, as our dear friend [in spirit] Lynda Barry would say.
I have been thinking more about something I asked you about awhile ago, in one of my college-dorm-room-style musings—what is a person? Are we a collection of all of our past moments, or are we who we are being in the present moment (which is, of course, influenced by all of our past moments)? This feels so important to know because it has so many implications for how we should live, and what the meaning of a life is after it is over. On a walk with my dad the other day, he was surprised to know that I thought so often about death. His actuarial mind couldn’t grok that I would be considering something statistically unlikely to occur for quite some time. But I explained to him that it is not so much about fearing an imminent death (except when it is), but much more about how the knowledge of my inevitable eventual death puts so much weight on the question of how to live the days I have. Dad replied that he long ago gave up on the idea that he would ever have an impact on the world and that he just tries to enjoy his small life. Fascinating to me, how he interpreted my search for meaning as a search for world-changing impact! I have not yet deciphered what exactly a person is or how to measure a life, but I am certain that a small life can be brimming with meaning, even when it has no impact on the wider world. I thought about this last night when I was snuggled under the Star Wars quilt with Jonah while he read out loud to me, plodding slowly but determinedly through a book that is just above his reading level. I was doing little more than listening, occasionally helping with a word he didn’t know, but the half hour we spend cuddled together every other night in this way (Bill and I alternate who reads with who) constitutes a sort of presence that must hold some meaning that will endure after I am gone, must form a part of who I am. It must be so because I feel it, not because I know it.
That’s just the sort of thing from which a poem might be born. For now, this unpolished letter will have to do.
From one friend to another,
TGIF!
Sarah