ON LOOKING INTO BEADY LITTLE IDEA-EYES, AND MAKING DIFFERENT CONTAINERS FOR THE SAME INGREDIENTS
Thursday May 7 and Friday May 8 2020
Dear Sarah,
It is Thursday night and I feel cozy. I just listened to my space and realized that beneath the sound of the radio, which I can hear playing from the kitchen, it is quiet. So I just got up and turned off the radio, and now I am in a completely quiet zone. The windows of my home are well-sealed and when they are closed (it’s a cool day today) it is very quiet inside. That peaceful end-of-the-week feeling approaches!
I made all manner of notes to myself after I read your letter of last week, even as I read your letter. I thought about lists and progress and goals as I read, and I had a moment again (I have the sense that I’ve written about this before, though I couldn’t locate the exact letter!) where I was amazed and delighted to think about the ways in which we are different from each other. For one, we appear to think about lists differently! And I think we have different relationships with the concept of finished. Sometimes I think I could not care less about finishing things. This is evident in many projects I take on, or think about taking on (see: the whittle I began years ago that rests unfinished on my desk, a stela, an obelisk). Contrast that with the way you just might eat more Frosted Mini-Wheats to have the satisfaction of finishing the box!
I’m wondering right now what is the minimum amount of anything — work, attention— you can apply to something and perhaps still consider it finished. Maybe it’s also in how you look at the parts of the process, what parts make up a whole. Individual parts of a process can be finished without the whole being finished. I was reflecting the other day about how I love getting supplies for a project, any kind of project — I like making lists, I like researching what things I might need and where or how I can get them, I like gathering supplies, organizing tools and materials. Sometimes my interest in a project stops there! And yet you might at least say that I finished rounding up the supplies. Resourcing is an interesting part of the process to me. Could it be that I’ve developed a habit of resourcing? It’s my line of work! I like to pass the baton after I’ve gathered the resources; someone else can be the closer, the finisher.
At the same time, I think perhaps I have a short attention span for projects. Time put in on materials acquisition can feel like the project, and then I’m done for a while. I was just realizing that I’m enjoying cooking more these days in part because of our new ritual of shopping every couple of weeks, getting things we will need to stock the pantry and fridge, and then cooking on different days with the materials already in place. The idea is less, what do I need to get in order to make a meal? and instead, we have these things we bought, what can we combine them into? We’ve shopped such that we can make a number of our standards — soups, vegetables, stews, sauces, salads, and such — and then the ingredients are at hand. That part of the project is already done. Maybe I have a hard time with multi-stage projects that also need to happen in a short period of time? I need a longer time to spread out multi-stage projects, so I can think about something else, and the project can cure in between! I’ve been applying this same approach to my writing, professionally and personally — baking in a longer period of time to work on a project (not necessarily more time) so that I can pop in on it, make a few moves, pop out again, and return later after my brain has digested what I wrote or what I was thinking about in the writing. (I am reminded of an episode of This American Life that I’ve never actually listened to, but I’ve been told about, wherein a hot dog factory moves locations and finds that the hot dogs made in the new factory taste different than they used to in the old factory, and after close scrutiny the hot-dog makers find that (spoilers!) the way the hot dogs moved around the plant and through different spaces and room temperatures affected the way the dogs themselves tasted. Maybe I’ll listen to this episode someday! The point being, even parts of the process that you might not recognize as parts of the process, are parts of the process!)
I use lists as tools for getting things out of my head, as well as for to-dos. Sometimes I check things off, sometimes I don’t. It doesn’t particularly bother me either way. I think I have changed, because I think I used to like crossing something off the list more than I do now. Now, I am pleased to put something on a list and to externalize thinking about it, clear the cobwebs from another corner in my head, make space for ideas to spring around like gas molecules in an enclosed container. I saw something online a while ago that I just purchased for myself: risograph grid-printed pads of paper, in a pink tone with a blue grid. The pads of paper are called Second Brain: It’s a notepad for all the things that won’t fit in your single human brain. I like pink paper, I am on board with the idea that a pad of paper is like a brain outside of my body, a place to put the things that I am thinking that I either don’t want to actively think about anymore, or that I want to get out so I can think about them head-on, look them right in their beady little idea-eyes and get a good read on them. A list can be a relativity tool, an evaluation tool: what is actually important here? Ideas side by side inside one’s head can feel equivalently important. But something being on my mind or on my list doesn’t inherently mean it’s important. A list can be a place where ideas go to dry out a bit in the sun, to crisp up, to see which ones fade away and which retain a certain je ne sais quoi. I may be mixing my processes here, combining my thoughts about lists with my thoughts about just putting notes on paper. Still, I’ll leave items on a list un-crossed-off. I have a feeling this may be taboo for you. What do you do with an unfinished thing on your list? Is such a thing possible? Would you put something on a list that you might feasibly never accomplish? (Though: does putting something on a list, no matter how seemingly unfeasible, make it somehow possible?) Would you keep a list at hand that had one single uncompleted task, keep it until you had completed it? I haven’t received my Second Brains just yet (I ordered two Brains, having in the last year bought a very nice yellow notepad with a pleasing shape printed on it in a darker yellow, and as the pad thinned out, I looked online to acquire more and saw, sadly, that they had all sold out) but I am looking forward to putting my pencil to that paper, spilling my First Brain onto my Second Brain.
This letter is rambling on but I see one more thing in my notes I want to share before I finish, about finishing. I shared a photo with you some time ago of a piece from Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments — ”Death will reveal what you would otherwise have finished. Also what you never would have finished. I found the notes for a book a woman had been working on for thirty years: sixteen pages.” The first time I read this I felt horrified for the woman described here: she’d been working on something for thirty years, or telling people she’d been working on something, and in the end it was almost nothing, only sixteen pages. I felt horrified that maybe I would die (spoilers! I will), and that people would say things about me after I died that might horrify me if I were still living. But guess what? That dead woman does not care now what Sarah Manguso thinks of her sixteen pages, or that there are only sixteen pages in the first place. Perhaps she simply loved telling people she was working on something! That is some kind of storytelling in itself. We’re allowed to live in these ways. I suppose we could anticipate a short, or long, space of dreadful time before our deaths when we will perhaps wish we had done more. But then once we’re dead none of it will matter to us anymore. So, live your days like you want to live them! Lists or no lists, finished or unfinished!
I am delighted, as ever, about how our letters bring us together, let us reflect on each other, how we are similar, how we are different. And I see myself differently when I read about you — with whom I have much in common — in your writing, and I get to think about your ways of thinking and living and doing. We’re two different people! Happy end-of-week to you, and I hope your weekend is as full and pleasant as ever!
Until soon,
Your friend,
Eva
May 8, 2020
Dear Eva,
I am staring at a page and a half of notes I’ve jotted throughout the week in anticipation of writing this letter, along with some excerpts I pulled from your letter last week that I wanted to respond to. So many ideas swirling about, and I’m trying to figure out my way in and through them all. I waited overnight to see if a unifying thread to weave them all together would come to me in my sleep or in the shower, but alas, the epiphany has not come and the time to write is now. I’ll just take a step, and see where it leads!
(I’ll note that one of the aspects of this letter-writing endeavor that I particularly relish is just how experimental and unformed our thoughts and writing can be within our letters. I have come to think of our correspondence almost like a laboratory—both of us scientists, trying out new connections between ideas to see what sparks and what should be discarded, doing our own research and then sharing so we can test out some of the experiments the other one of us has tried. There was a time I considered this a separate space from other writing and thinking I was doing; as if I could not and should not tackle a topic here that I was planning to include in another project. Not so anymore. I now see that the lines between the letters, other projects I am working on, and other projects I may work on in the future, are permeable and perhaps even non-existent. They are all just different containers for the same non-rivalrous ingredients.)
I continue to chew on this notion of arbitrary goals and the connection back to story. After last week’s letter exchange, you noted over text message that there were some interesting contrasts in our letters. When I read our letters again yesterday though, I mainly see similarities. We are both marveling at the simplicity in our lives right now, both finding some beauty within those simple spaces. We are both recognizing how unnecessary so many of the “externally generated self-imposed obligations” (your words) are. One contrast, I suppose, is how reluctant I am to drop some of my silly/random goals, such as reading four books each month this year. I think part of that is about me wanting to make sure I follow some things through to the end, rather than just dabbling. But part of it (maybe most of it?) is about attaching myself to a story, because of course story is what goals and milestones are really about. We can tell ourselves a story of personal achievement based on progress made on goals we defined. Ultimately, the number of books read is a bit of an unimaginative story, but it is a well-accepted one regardless. See, for example, all of the blog posts and articles about books read at each year’s end. And in defense of these annual book tallies, scanning the titles of books someone read that year does, in fact, tell an interesting tale! It shows where their mind went, the intellectual journey they traveled during their reading time that year. I love looking back over my lists of books I read in years past. When I do, sometimes I can remember what times in my life felt like in ways I can’t quite drum up in my memory any other way. But I am going to try to resist my urge to feel satisfaction at the length of my booklist this upcoming December.
Along those lines, I am going to make an effort to be less lazy and reflexive about the stories I accept about life and the world more generally. I keep talking about Rebecca Solnit lately, but I continue to steep in her writing and interviews, and she continues to make an impression. As I make my way through her book Hope in the Dark, I am thinking about how much creativity and even rigor it takes to break from the conventional wisdom about anything. In that book, with mountains of historical evidence, she tells a different story about activism over the centuries and, in turn, a different story about what we should hope to achieve in the future. In other writing and speaking, she tells a different story about the human response to disaster, one far more rooted in reality than the destructive everyone-for-themselves story we see in film and television. The point is, the time travel I mentioned in last week’s letter (also known as thinking for ourselves) requires both imagination and work. To think for ourselves successfully, we cannot succumb to the easy explanations that pervade mainstream culture, with all of the cynicism and the arbitrary priorities that are embedded within them. Thinking for ourselves is hard! (And, I should note, technically impossible in any sort of comprehensive way, given all there is to know. Given that we are conversing here in a glass house, I want to state for the record that I am definitely not advocating for us to stop trusting experts!) Thinking afresh is intellectually more rigorous, but it can also be socially fraught. Choosing not to accept the stories of others about things like beauty or productivity can have significant social consequences. I wonder if this is why so many of history’s most famous artists and intellectuals were notoriously antisocial? Or maybe that is itself another lazy and incomplete story? Ack!
There is a way in which all of this makes words more important, and it frightens me a tad. Words can be so inadequate and so hard to come by! I am certain I have mentioned before about the academic research that says people care more about the narratives of their lives than they do about how they actually felt while experiencing their lives. It stuck with me, and I think about it constantly. The desires of our present selves are mismatched with the desires of our backward-looking selves. This is useful to remember, particularly at times when my present self wants to stay under a blanket all day eating chocolate. But it also means that our broader experience at life is ultimately dictated by the stories we craft. And, it is worth noting how much our backward-looking stories shape our present experience, so maybe the disconnect is not quite as strong as it might appear. Lately, Jonah has been devouring the family photobooks I made about the first five years of his life. (The next few are still on a to-do list.) It is striking to me to watch how much impact the old stories about our time in San Francisco when he was a baby are having on the way he thinks about himself. They are changing his sense of identity, right before our eyes. How remarkable! Storytelling is experience-shaping and likely, future-changing.
I hesitate to try to loop everything back together, but all of this harkens back to our previous letters about how reality is personal. Stories shape our realities, and the people we surround ourselves with and the people we listen to, tell us stories. It is through this patchwork that our worlds are formed, and then changed over time as we encounter new stories. This happens as we visit and/or live in new places, meet new people, have new experiences, get exposed to new ideas. But it is all tied back to story. I think this brings me to a place where I value more than ever my habit and ritual of thinking and writing, particularly in connection with these letters. We take in so much, from so many different sources—so often operating as consumers of and vessels for the stories of others. It is nourishing and, indeed, identity-shaping to spend some time coming up with our own stories as well.
I cannot wait to open your letter that waits in my inbox right now, my fellow coworker in the lab! What stories will you tell today? I look forward to reading and digesting! Every letter brightens my usually-already-bright Friday and gives me much to chew on over the weekend and into the next week. Thank you as always!
Your friend,
Sarah