ON NEVER KNOWING WHERE WE WILL GO OR WHO WE WILL AFFECT, AND APPLYING OUR TURTLE-LIKE HERMIT SELVES TO THE RESISTANCE
Thursday June 18 2020
Dear Sarah,
I’m writing my letter to you on a Thursday! I’ve just returned from a drive across town to drop off some objects I’d been holding for the woodshop, and it’s thunderstorming outside. No sun streaming through the window this evening, only water streaming out of the gutters. I love a cozy rainy day and evening, I love a summer rain.
In the last couple of days, I’ve been reading The Rape Kit’s Secret History by Pagan Kennedy in the New York Times. I found myself reading it in bits because it was hard to take in all at once, painful to think about how deeply embedded rape and the mistreatment of women are in our culture and world. It’s also painful to think about how often womens’ ideas make it out into the world as the ideas of men, picked up and claimed as such.
I’m thinking of your letter from last week and your reference to your very first letter in our exchange in which you were watching the Kavanaugh hearings. I didn’t watch the hearings but I am reading the transcript, I may watch a recording. I recall a meeting around that time, when we were still working for the same employer and gathered on a call with a number of our colleagues, that I said that I hadn’t been watching the hearings as a form of self-protection, an approach I often employ when things are particularly difficult or painful to deal with. I struggle with the need to bear witness on the one hand, and on the other, the desire to preserve my health, my sanity, the ability of my head to focus on a given day (but focus on what? I might ask myself now). I also struggle with a simmering anger and frustration that these stories represent a way things were and are; I am frustrated that people are like this, that society is like this. I’m frustrated by all the ways in which we seem to have the same conversations over and over. I am exhausted by the long history of white men grasping for power, taking power, controlling bodies in their quest for power, working together to maintain that power, to tell each other that these things they do are fine and good and the way things should be. As a white woman I am not absolved.
I’ve talked before about wanting to be a hermit and in some ways I am one (even though we’re all hermits these days): working from home, working across multiple organizations so no one company can claim me or my full allegiance, just being myself quietly, at a remove from what goes on, observing. I pulled up my letter to you from week 20 — recalling that I had written somewhere about being an observer — and while I’m simultaneously thinking about my letter from a couple of weeks ago in which I described my slow, turtle-like self, I am continuing to think about how to put these qualities of mine to work in a meaningful way.
I am also thinking about a friend who, a handful of years ago, committed to a year of reading only books by women of color. I am reflecting now on all the books on my bookshelves and thinking about what lives there, who makes it into print, who is writing and making art, and whose works I am buying. I’ve just renewed my Printed Matter membership and M and I are making more donations to community organizations in our wider neighborhood and the Twin Cities, and I’ve ordered books by Tressie McMillan Cottom (Thick, which you read many moons ago) and Roxane Gay and Danez Smith and Hanif Abdurraqib.
I’m also thinking, tangentially, about how I recently added my pronouns to my email signature, feeling the tiniest bit bold and nervous at first — I’m embarrassed that I could feel this way about taking a stand in even the most passive of ways — and then shortly thereafter it just felt normal. It felt like taking the tiniest step forward out of the shadows from which I prefer to observe, but once I’d sent that signature out on any number of emails and seen it there every day I didn’t feel nervous anymore and was glad I had taken that small step.
Some other experiences of this moment: I left my writing of this letter to go help warm up dinner, and to eat dinner, and to eat my last piece of a birthday pie I made for M last weekend. I have had and am having a glass of wine. It is still raining but the sun is showing itself in these last minutes of the day, and the sky is a golden greenish color (chartreuse?) and I wonder if a rainbow will appear directly over our house like one did a few weeks back. The air is off and rain smells are coming in the window. M is starting and running his motorcycle in the garage directly under my office and gasoline smells are coming in the window. I am gently scratching a mosquito bite while I think about a design project that I am working on.
Sometimes I feel like my letters to you aren’t exactly about communicating what I want to say, but rather following close behind a thread of thought as it unravels. I don’t always know precisely what I’m intending to get at but I can feel that there’s something there I want to say, something I’m thinking on that hasn’t quite made it into fully formed and formalized thoughts just yet. I’m glad to have you as a friend with whom I can think about these things, and who will join me in unraveling the knotty threads!
Until soon,
Your friend,
Eva
June 18, 2020
Dear Eva,
There seem to be endless new layers to these letters, and one layer I am relishing this week is the way in which writing to you gives me a reason to stop and consider how the week feels. And I will say, this week feels very different than last week. It’s Thursday, so I have no feeling of the clock ticking down to the deadline while I type. I am sure that must be part of it. But I am also just in a different mental space this week, and a different one from the week before. Now is the moment I need to describe exactly what mental space it is I am, and I can sense that will be difficult for me. I think maybe it’s a leisurely space, a quiet space. You have pointed out in past letters how moods that feel very dramatic, as if they must signal something significant, can sometimes be shaped by something as small as one too few morsels of food. Like the weather, tiny changes in pressure or other variations can have major effects, and like the weather, it is not formulaic. There is an exhilarating sense of possibility and unpredictability in this idea. (Noting that this forecasting analogy, like so many that have been imprinted in my brain in recent months, are a product of Rebecca Solnit’s. Like the letters, her wonders never cease!)
This week I don’t have much of an agenda for this letter, which I suppose matches my overall laidback vibe today. I did want to go back to something we wrote about many weeks ago, about my reading habits. I am sure you have been dying to hear how I am doing on my commitment to seeing reading more as an experience than as a goal. I shall not make you wait any longer! I can verify that I do, in fact, seem to be holding to this, at least until the very last chapters of a book and then the joy of crossing the finish line is just too tempting not to sprint. I dare say that reading has been more enjoyable since I started this mindset, and I’ve eliminated the pointless little itch that would come when I felt the “10 pages daily” to-do hanging over my head at the end of the evening. It is a very mysterious aspect of being human how we can so successfully turn our arbitrary self-imposed goals into real-life stress. The power and terror of the human psyche is something else.
I recently finished an exquisite novel—On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong—with language so sensory that it seemed to me I could feel the words on my skin, like little drips of warm water running down my bare arm. Even though I ran to the end when I got close, I felt an ache when it was over. It is the kind of fiction that shows that something doesn’t have to have happened to be true. Before I started the book, I heard Vuong interviewed by Krista Tippett. He talked about writing as a kind of fire escape—a retreat that can save you and maybe even others, but which is always hanging just outside of what makes up our daily lives. His 2014 essay on this idea will take your breath away, or at least it did mine. Again, this feels like it is full of exhilarating possibility and inspiration! That we may continue to look for ways to use words to express what is true, and what we perhaps cannot say.
Switching gears, I am thinking back to this evening with the kids. We spent some time doing camp-style relays, like seeing how quickly we could move an Oreo from forehead to mouth without our hands and putting cotton balls in a cup using only Vaseline and our noses. We also made a foosball table out of a shoebox. For the foosball players, we cut out faces from my college alumni magazine to glue to the clothespins hanging on the thin wooden poles poked through the box. I will say that I feel utterly delighted at the sight of these random faces on our kitchen table. These 10 accomplished humans from around the world will never know of their presence in our family time here in the middle of Iowa, but here they are, their smiles and bright eyes facing one another in a cardboard box. We never know, do we, where we might end up? And I love the thought of us ending up in places that we can never even imagine and will never know. Here, too, more proof that something doesn’t have to have happened to be true.
We spoke earlier this week, and I believe we may speak again tomorrow. Double Eva, how lucky! I am hoping you are feeling a little less fragmented this week—maybe I can send some of my [temporary] chill your way. This weekend marks the summer solstice, which I am feeling compelled to celebrate with a ritual of some sort for the first time in my life. Why the heck not? The day will be long and hot, and we are lucky to be alive and well.
With love,
Sarah