ON THE LABELS WE LIVE UP TO, AND THE MENUS UPON WHICH WE DROOL
Thursday July 30 2020
Dear Sarah,
I’ve been drawing this week, thinking about a new project, savoring a not-too-busy time. I’ve been thinking about color, and about future design projects. For a while I didn’t necessarily want to call myself a designer — instead, passively, I’m “a person with some design skills.” Somehow I had the sense that to be a thing, to give oneself a label — a writer, a designer — one must be deeply experienced in every possible aspect of the thing. Instead of just saying, I design, and therefore I am a designer, one who designs. I think this ties back to my thoughts about what makes good writing or good design — to label oneself as a writer or a designer one should be good at those things. But there are writers and designers out there whose work is just all right, and they are still comfortable calling themselves writers and designers. Labels! There’s no need to live up to a label, only to live up to what we want to be doing with ourselves. I never want to oversell my skills and talents, and instead I tend to undersell them. I recently completed a design project (final product in my hot little hands just this week!) that has somehow supported me in relaxing this stringent sense I have of when I am allowed to call myself a designer. Instead, I am designing, I have designed. Producing a project and seeing it come to fruition in the world is a delight; what was an image on the computer screen, light beaming into my eyes, stacking infinitely in the array of files on my computer’s hard drive, is now transformed into ink on paper, something that can be held in the hand: the print ephemera I so treasure.
As I wrote this I thought about how even though our letters are “only” digital, light beaming into my eyes, they are still weighty and real. To me, this is one of the benefits and realities of our letters being “public” — to be public, even if only for a handful of other people, seems to guarantee some kind of reality. Something doesn’t have to reach millions of people in order to be real. It’s ground we’ve covered variously in other letters and it rears its head again here! On that note, I’ll note that we’re creeping toward week 100 of our letters, and shortly after that, week 104 — two years of letters just about eight weeks away now!
I reread your letter of last week and would like to state for the record that we do have cicadas around here (or locusts? Who is whom? I just looked up cicadas and locusts and it turns out locust is another word for grasshopper! Learning something new every day! We have both!) and I don’t mind them. I am a bit mystified and intrigued that insects can make such loud sounds. It’s an insect’s world, we’re just living in it! I might imagine the cicada sounds could be more prevalent in Iowa, as it seems like it may get hotter 250 miles due south of here, and hence is more summery, and by the transitive property the summer sounds of cicadas may be louder? A cicada sound just buzzed through as I was writing that. Before I knew that that sound was the sound of an insect, I assumed it was the sound of electricity, passing through power lines audibly on its way to light our bulbs, pipe in the radio, keep us cool. It’s almost more odd that there isn’t such a sound emitted by the delivery of electricity through power lines to all our millions of homes.
Last weekend I woke on Sunday morning and for the first time in many years was inspired to turn on network television to watch Sunday Morning, which was just coming on. Sunday Morning was a regular part of my weekend experience in my youth. This show featured a story about people in the US without running water — (almost) unbelievably, more than two million people in the US lack running water and basic indoor plumbing. There was also a feature about the murder hornets that I recall were buzzing about briefly (was it before the coronavirus really settled in?) and I mention it because a man donned a protective suit that came to mind the other day when we talked and you mentioned a joke about the need for a hazmat suit to conduct your visits these days. When you told this story I pictured you in the suit that one would wear when confronting murder hornets.
Yesterday as I read in bed at the close of the day, a fan gently blowing outside air across my body as I paged through the few remaining unread stories in my Joy Williams collection, I felt peaceful and in the moment, just enjoying reading, being in the bed and holding the book and looking at the pages and feeling like I didn’t need to be anywhere else, nothing else was calling me, the moment called for reading only. It’s hard to capture but it just felt calm and like the pace of time aligned perfectly with the way I was living the moment, like rings aligned so that some thin ray of light could shine through, a solstice of sorts. (We’re coming off a lot of Avatar, and the solstice came into play in those moments when everything needed to be in alignment: at the solstice the sun’s rays will travel through this passage and reflect off this stone just so, and then some new information will be revealed. Cosmic alignments clicking into place.)
Again it smells like gasoline in my office right now — M has stated that there is a bit of a “gasoline incident” going on in the garage with his old Triumph — and the day is drawing to a close. Your letter last week made me smile with tales of the squinnies and your contemplation of a bird bath installation. I say go for it! M and I recently had our sprinkler turned on our garden on a particularly hot day and looked out the back window to see many birds frolicking in the sprinkles, fluttering in the puddles and having a grand old time. It was satisfying and delightful! Get yourself a bird bath asap, before it becomes water-freezing-over season!
Until soon,
Your friend,
Eva
July 31, 2020
Dear Eva,
It is Friday around happy hour time, and I am indeed happy at this hour as I melt down into weekend mode. I am going to do my best to see this letter writing as the first bit of my weekend, rather than my last commitment of a workweek. It is hard though, knowing that writing these words is the only thing between me and piping hot pizza pie with a perfectly salty and crispy sourdough crust. We had a grazing (read: pitiful) lunch today, so I am particularly looking forward to our Friday night pizza dinner and array of goodies during Movie Night (will it be buttery stove-popped popcorn tonight, or an ice cream cookie sandwich, or both?!) Okay, things are getting dangerously close to drool-inducing levels, so I need to stop this train of thought. Speaking of which, did I ever tell you about the time I drooled on a Bob Evans menu in Ann Arbor? It was in the semi-early stages of dating Bill, and I was starving when we sat down for brunch. My eyes got wide as I read the menu and I blurted out, “Ohhh, buttermilk biscuits!” and a sizable dollop of drool fell from my mouth onto the laminated menu. I have more in common with our dog than I like to admit.
I think I want to start this letter by disagreeing with something you said in your letter last week: It seems that rarely do people need pure synthesis from others; instead, people are looking for stories. Actually, disagreement is the wrong word. Maybe I just want to explain that I may be one of the rare ones. I love a good story, of course, but I have had a lifelong affinity for the synthesis of others. For example, I used to spend a lot of time collecting quotations that resonated with me. More recently, I remember it felt like a revelation to discover Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments, a book of nothing other than tiny snippets about the what/how of being human. It is Manguso’s own self-described gravitation toward compression that inspired my comment about myself. Until I heard her say that in an interview, I don’t think I had fully comprehended the same tendency in myself. I think perhaps it is rooted in some mix of impatience and an undeniable (and maybe not too admirable) desire for a little help understanding this world and how to live. I like having heuristics in my back pocket.
I realize, though, that it is also important to stretch ideas back out. I am on an ongoing journey to get better at this—fleshing out my thinking, how I got from A to B. Similarly, I am working to better document experiences in life, even tracking what I did each day for work so I am not left only with that which I have compressed into my mind for easy retrieval. I am not sure if it is correct for me to frame my compressive tendencies as a dark side to my skills in distilling and synthesizing, but it seems like a reasonable explanation. Whatever the cause, it can certainly sometimes be a liability. I find myself envying the people who can just open their mouths or start typing and the ideas just spill out. Of course, just as often, I find myself impatient with those same people because it quickly becomes apparent that all of their words can be boiled down to a handful of ideas so why are they still talking?!
These letters are a good outlet for me to exercise my muscle for rambling showing what is in my brain, rather than waiting to produce only the final package that comes after research and pondering and sorting and editing. I wonder if there is some unconscious fear of showing how I actually think? I.e. lots of fits and starts, flitting about from here to there, redundancies. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if some of it stems from an overactive self-editor. I am no stranger to self-critique! Anyhoo, I fear that this will appear that I am being defensive, which is definitely not my intent! Your letter just sent me down a trail of examination of my own weirdness. I am also going to start a new club called “Compressors Unite,” but anyway.
On the topic of my writing project, despite my expression of renewed motivation (which still holds true), I have not picked it back up yet. And I would just like to pat myself on the ole’ back for it because it has taken a lot of vigilance to let myself truly put it away for awhile. A very wise friend once told me things take the time they take, and for the first time in my life, I feel like I am patiently and wholeheartedly putting that sentiment into practice. I am always learning from you, Eva!
With that project on the metaphorical—and literal, now that I think about it—shelf, my days feel extra long and luxurious. I think I underestimated how much cognitive bandwidth it was taking. It has been glorious to instead spend weekend quiet time on bike rides and making muffins and making some decisions about the months ahead. Heck, even cleaning the house on hands and knees has somehow felt strangely satisfying lately. I have realized that my previous inclination to want to outsource these kinds of chores now seems so misplaced. What was it that felt more important? Why aren’t the necessary aspects of life maintenance best viewed simply as part of being alive?
On that note, I am going to wind down this letter and go for a brief run before I engorge myself with pizza and watch Mulan. I hope you have had a truly pleasant week since we spoke. I look forward to reading the letter that awaits in my inbox!
Your friend,
Sarah