MAKING SAMENESS LESS SAME, HONKING FOR BONNIE'S BIRTHDAY, AND BEING OBSTINATE
Wednesday April 8 and Friday April 10 2020
Dear Sarah,
You started your letter last week thinking on the way things lately have been quite lovely when viewed in a certain way. I’d agree — in this moment where nothing truly awful has touched us (yet?) and the weather is coming around, our home feels like a quiet, safe place, where M and I have what we need, and we have each other. I think my emotions across the span of who-knows-how-long will cover all the possible peaks and valleys over time, but this week I found that I felt a bit more settled, perhaps simply relaxing into the becoming-normal oddity of spending all my time at home.
I had been thinking recently that I’m not interested in virtual events, the events that organizations all over the country and likely the world are putting on, exhibitions and readings and talks and other kinds of things. I thought I’m not interested in acting like I’m doing something different than being at my house when I’m clearly just at my house! Sometimes I want to be obstinate. No! I won’t do anything in any other way than the way I know I like it. And the way I like it is being out in the world, with other people, in rooms and seated in chairs next to each other. And I’m tired of spending so much time in front of my various screens.
This week I went to a virtual author event hosted by Green Apple Books in San Francisco, with the author Bonnie Tsui, around her new book Why We Swim. She was in conversation with Daniel Handler and Andrew Sean Greer. It was fun, in fact, and I found there was satisfaction in not just “going” to an “event” like I might usually have wanted to go to, but also in listening to people talk who weren’t related to me, or even in my friend circle — I hadn’t thought about it specifically, but part of what we’ve lost in not going to anything and not spending time out and about in the world is the essence of people-watching, of seeing what other people are doing and, if they speak, hearing a little bit about what they are thinking about.
I wonder if, when this is all over, will we find ourselves chattier with the people whose paths we cross out in the world? Will we continue to wait in the various spaces where we wait, with our eyes glued to our cell phones, all of us in a row or in a room looking at our personal screens? Or will we find we’re ready for small talk, glad of a human face in front of our own face again, glad to be removed from the narrowing experience of the screen after spending so many weeks with only our screens as bridges to the faces we want to see in real life?
I also went to an event today at lunchtime, a talk put on by the Brooklyn Rail with artists Mark Dion (whose work I am somewhat familiar with, and who was the draw for me to this event) and a painter named Alexis Rockman. It was different, a bit more like being at an actual talk, because everyone was there on the video array — close to 250 people “attended” the event — most with video on, interestingly, which I found infinitely more distracting than just being in a space with a room full of people. Hundreds of faces and their living backgrounds to look at! Names to examine in case there just might be anyone I knew! They dove right into the talk and I realized how hard it can be to listen to and actually hear and understand what someone is saying if you are using your eyes to look at anything other than the origin of the voice.
When I listen to public radio these days — rarely, but I was in the car on an errand this week — the only news is about the virus, and that’s largely what’s happening in other news outlets too, and in my email, and on and on. It makes sense and yet it is exhausting and impossible to truly comprehend such news, that touches everyone the whole world round, all day. If we were able to be people-watching right now, maybe we’d just be catching snippets of others’ conversations like every conversation I’ve had lately, how are you feeling, have you been able to get out to shop, do you have what you need, how is your family, what is going to happen next, what is going to change, what could possibly remain the same, how long will this go on. When M and I are out walking in the neighborhood I catch some of those snippets here and there, the success or lack thereof regarding an online grocery shopping experience, a sound of worry or did you hear.... I did hear a woman speaking with a man the other day about a home renovation project, which is not technically virus-related. Though in our pandemic context perhaps this is the next tier of things we are doing if we’re able — spending more time at home, taking on home projects, etcetera.
Your midweek birthday car parade for your brother-in-law sounded like the perfect pandemic birthday celebration! The other day while M and I were out running in the neighborhood we saw a sign on a lawn that said HONK FOR BONNIE’S BIRTHDAY! We couldn’t honk as we were on foot but we clapped and cheered as we ran by. I suppose that in some ways you could think of it as less celebratory than a regular birthday party, but in other ways it’s more so — even M and I could participate in Bonnie’s birthday, whereas typically we would not have been invited (I presume!). The car parade sounds just as novel!
It’s Friday evening and M and I just enjoyed bowls of delicious pork noodle soup with ginger and toasted garlic, courtesy of Alison Roman and NYT Cooking. I am ready to settle into my birthday weekend, riding high already on the lovely birthday package you sent! I can’t wait to relax with these books in my hands and drawings by my side. It was a special treat to get a letter from you in the package — almost a surprise to see a real live letter on paper that had traveled in the mail! Now I will close this virtual letter to you, and wish you a happy and healthy weekend!
Until soon,
Yours,
Eva
P.S. I found myself wanting to reply to your letter of last week line by line — both of the podcasts you mentioned sound very good (Sarah Manguso and “nothing time” — I must hear how the students variously handled it!) and I savored your thoughts on presence. I’ve taken it in and I will stew on it some more, and will say more another time! Goodnight, friend!
April 10, 2020
Dear Eva,
It is your birthday weekend! Where will you go to celebrate? May I suggest perhaps peering out of a little-noticed window in your home? Or drinking tea on a rug near a fireplace if such a thing is possible in your house? (I’ve never seen it!) We must get creative these days, finding ways to make sameness less same.
Right now it is just after 9 PM on Friday evening. I had one week (last week) of timely letter-writing, and now it seems I am back to my last-minute ways. This was not part of my plan, but here we are. We broke up the sameness in our household tonight by pausing our movie to roast marshmallows in the fire pit. I am relishing the campfire scent emanating from my sweater while I sit here at my desk, though it is mixed with the strong smell of perfume, a remnant of an incident earlier in the day where Simon sprayed some of my old perfume all over himself, including in his left eye. Adventures in homeschool! (Note: this was also not part of the plan, but there we were.)
I loved your thought in last week’s letter that perhaps children will emerge from this time with a bit less reliance upon the rules and systems we set for them in traditional school (and later, in workplaces). I have enjoyed watching our kids improvise their way through much of the days, buoyed by the small bit of structure we provide to give the day a bit of a predictable pattern. This week they got the idea to “make a world,” so for hours upon hours over the course of several days, they have been gradually drawing ships, rivers, buildings, and animals on pages spread all over the floor and designed to eventually be intricately taped together. When all is said and done, it may get so big there won’t be a space for the fully constructed, sprawling world to go on our walls. But it is a delightful and entirely self-directed project, and it has me thinking (again) about how much it matters to simply decide something is a thing / to believe in a thing and follow it through. This goes for things we construct for ourselves like this, or for things we construct for others, like the one hour I spend each morning at 8 where I lead the kids through our “hello song,” talk about the date and day of the week, and the rest of our admittedly paltry “learning time.” I believe—I dare say I know—that when I act like these tiny rituals matter every morning, when I hold to them, the kids feel a tad more grounded on these groundless days.
It feels weird to recognize this, and even weirder to start to recognize that it’s precisely this sort of belief in modes and behaviors that forms the basis of how societies function. Laws only have power if enough of us believe in them. Governments only have power if enough of us believe in them. Corporations only control their employees if enough of us opt to do what the corporation wants us to do. Trends are only trends if enough of us decide to fall in line with them. This is weird, is it not? Or rather, what is weird is that we act like these things in our worlds—the systems, structures, norms—are somehow as natural or predetermined as biology.
My mom likes to tell the story about how I once came home from elementary school and told her I had a realization that day. “People are popular and cool just because they say they are.” Yes, that is exactly the sort of thing an uncool kid would say. I never did / never will figure out how to self-declare coolness, but I am trying to use the practice of self-declaring something and making it so in my writing practice. For the past few months, I have been chipping away at an amorphous project. From one view, I have done nothing more than handwritten 50+ pages of scattered thoughts. From another view, I have a solid start to a thing—because I say so. That we all can “make a world”—what a beautiful thought!
I wish you an especially happy weekend, and I will send more birthday wishes when the day comes. For now, please enjoy the tail end of this Friday evening and forgive my tardy letter!
Yours,
Sarah