ON TIME OUTSIDE OF CAPITALISM, LECTURING IN OUR DREAMS, AND A WEEK WITH A LITTLE VARIETY
Saturday August 8 – Friday August 14 2020
Dear Sarah,
I’ve been keeping notes for this week’s letter since I reread yours last Saturday morning!
I’d like to begin with my own performance in the role of Captain Obvious (GLOL!): thinking back on flow and getting things onto the page, I wanted to say a little bit more (on top of last week’s lengthy letter!). I wanted to (perhaps) state the obvious by saying that letting things flow doesn’t inherently mean they are good, they just have to exist outside the body. If you regularly let your words or doodles or any creative acts flow, then you simply have more material to work with; you are cultivating the spirit of flow so that the words are always coming, and are there when you want them. Regularly opening the locks, keeping the ships moving. In contrast, there stands the mindset of not letting things flow on the regular, but hoping that when one finds time to sit down that a flow will begin (I’ll write that book when I retire!). The way to combat a blocked or corroded line, a sticky artery, words clinging to the inside of the head instead of spilling freely onto the page, is simply to put things on the page all the time. (Thinking of words and ideas that are the opposite of flow made me feel that I understood, finally, the concept of writer’s block — perhaps it’s more like a stopped-up, unused pipe full of gunk than a brick wall.) The initial goal is flow.
As I said in my dream to my classroom, what lands on the page might at first glance look like garbage, but there’s usually something in there, even just a hint of an idea. Best to keep the channels clear and cobweb-free, and let whatever may come flow out every day, and look back and edit the raw goo later!
Perhaps also following from that dream I shared last week, I found myself thinking today about some of the teachers who’ve shaped me in ways that turned out to be meaningful over time. My freshman year in college (or was it my sophomore year? I’m having memories of September 11th) a writing teacher helped me to understand the very thing I’m sharing back here, the idea that every piece of writing has something in it, some glimmer that wants a closer look, some diamond in the rough.
I’m thinking back on your Captain Obvious moment from last week — that parenting and cleaning and cooking and everything in the day is just time in your day, is life — and I’m thinking about a high school teacher who once said within earshot, If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. I think about this all the time, while writing and working as often as while dicing vegetables or scrubbing a bathroom. The converse suits as well, framed as a question, looking through the other end of the telescope at oneself: if it’s not worth doing well, why I am I doing it in the first place?
What bits of life are living, what bits of life are work? As you found, it’s a trick question: all bits of life are life! We’ve been conditioned to play our parts in answering the question, How do you spend the majority of your day participating in capitalism? I went to a reading this week put on by Green Apple Books featuring Shruti Swamy discussing her story collection A House Is a Body with Meng Jin. It was a very, very good conversation, full of deep thoughts and humor and gems, and at some point during the conversation Shruti was speaking about reading the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and thinking on her words about mushrooms and how there is a vast network of life happening under the ground, of which the mushrooms themselves are just the visible part. Shruti was talking about how we tend to think of the products of work, like the books published, as the mushrooms; they are the visible outcome but they are not the only thing; there is all the work happening below the surface. Everything is part of the work, everything is part of life, as you and Sarah Ruhl described in your letter last week. (The conversation with Shruti and Meng was fabulous and I was hoping to find a recording to share in case you wanted to watch — I don’t yet see it here but maybe it will appear soon? — and I recommend catching another conversation with Shruti while she’s on her virtual book tour if you can! I bought her book and am excited for it to arrive!)
I’m also thinking about your self-described tendency to hoard vacation time — in this world we say time is money. This made me think about unlimited vacation time policies, which sound in some ways like a trick — it is time that cannot be converted to money; it is just time. It is time living just outside of the time is money decree; perhaps it is time outside of capitalism? Unlimited vacation time is perhaps not the same kind of employee benefit as cash-equivalent vacation time — you lose the opportunity to choose your preference, time or money — but we could all use the time, and if it can’t be turned into money then I hope people are more likely to use it as time. Glad you took that half day! I hope there are more in your future!
I’m thinking about your pandemic moods and your feeling of lightness, and I know what you mean; I have been feeling generally peaceful. I feel like we live in another time, an invented time, in which the future is doubling back onto the past or vice versa, in which we have advanced communication technologies but we are largely physically confined to our homes and neighborhoods; we live locally (even as we can still buy products from around the world). We are well-resourced, the world at our fingertips — essentially only at our fingertips for the time being.
I feel like on the whole, for some stretch of time, the American “we” have been able to take for granted the ability to plan, to anticipate the future. We have lived with some level of predictability, some relative safety. I have personally felt like life has been relatively smooth for some time (hopefully not now a statement inviting more rockiness ahead). There have been hitches along the way but they haven’t completely derailed the train. (You may feel differently!) In an article in the new August 17 New Yorker, Peter Hessler reports on how China controlled the coronavirus. He described that many venders had been laid off from their jobs, and how even those people with stable work were experiencing reduced salaries. He noted ...people usually said they were fine, because they had savings. They also had low expectations with regard to stability. The Chinese middle class was still too new to feel complacent, which was one reason they put away so much cash. I think we’ve been complacent, have been using our money to keep leveling up (or appearing to level up) instead of saving for a rainy (pandemic) day (five months and counting). That’s not meant to be a statement blaming individuals’ preparation for or response to this crisis, but just to acknowledge that we’ve had the comfort of feeling comfortable. How will we feel in the years to come?
I am glad when Fridays arrive and it’s time to settle in with my letter to you as the week winds down, and to see what’s on your mind! It’s been a week over there, I take it — I’m curious to see what you’ll write! Will you be ready to write about cancel culture, or will you have cancelled the impulse? Per my letter of a couple of weeks ago — I’ll be curious to see if you ever feel like writing about cancel culture now! I find it to be a toss-up, once an idea has been saved for the future, whether it will in fact reappear! Perhaps it’ll shapeshift. We’ll see! Happy pizza Friday! Until soon,
Your friend,
Eva
August 13, 2020
Dear Eva,
During this pandemic time where most days and weeks look alike, this has been a week with a bit of variety! On Monday morning, after working for a few hours, Bill and I switched shifts. He headed up to his “office” (aka our bedroom, where he sits at the kid-sized desk from my childhood on an exercise ball because his legs are too long to fit under the desk if he sits on the desk chair). I headed outside to walk Simon in the wagon (he has recently decided he hates walks, so pulling him along like a prince is the only way to get him to participate). Jonah was riding his bike with the neighbor kids. Suddenly, we heard the faint sound of a tornado siren, though the sun was shining and there were people out and about all over the neighborhood. Amid Simon’s yammering, I had trouble definitively making out the sound and at first, I convinced myself it must be my imagination. But by the time we got back home, the siren had grown louder (and closer), and the sky got almost instantly dark.
I took Simon inside. Then I yelled up to Bill, “Should I move the car into the garage just in case a tree branch falls?” He said no, the garage is too full for both cars. Then I yelled up, “Should I go get Jonah?” Again, he said no, he’ll come in once the storm starts.
I ignored him. I ran across the street to get Jonah to come home, and then I gathered up a few toys and bikes from the yard to throw in the garage. By that point, I didn’t have time to deal with the car. As soon as we got inside, the wind picked up and the rain poured down. The three of us huddled near the window, watching as lightning flashed in all directions and branches fell from the trees as if someone was throwing them from the sky. Within minutes, our power flickered out, and a giant branch landed on our car in the driveway.
Lesson learned: do not ask someone for advice when you already know what to do! I have no one to blame but myself. (Though I will generously throw in a little blame to Bill, too.)
Once the storm ended, the skies cleared, and everyone emerged from their homes to survey the damage. We took a walk around the neighborhood as a family, even the little prince was willing to use his feet for this one! Across the street, a huge tree had landed smack in the middle of our neighbors’ newly remodeled home, going right through the roof. There were branches everyone, blocking roads, smashed atop cars (though I should note that our car emerged unscathed!). We spent the afternoon picking up and moving branches that Bill sawed into pieces small enough for little arms. Later in the day, we got word that my aunt and uncle got power back, so I scurried to their house with a couple sacks full of items from our fridge. Bill used our gas stove and the grill to cook up a delicious meal of smoked salmon and green beans from the garden, which we devoured at our picnic table. Jonah suggested we take the camping vibe a step further and roast marshmallows, so Bill ran out for s’mores fixings and I called my family over to sit by the fire pit and talk about the storm. After they left and we got the kids down to bed, Bill walked Marlowe, and I sat in the dark listening to This American Life while drinking a beer, feeling like I was living in the days when people huddled around a radio in the evenings. After a bit, Bill walked in the door muttering expletives—Marlowe had been sprayed by a skunk! The excitement continued! So we ended the evening with me holding a flashlight in the bathroom while Bill did his best to wash the skunk off the dog, and then we went to bed, forcing Marlowe to sleep downstairs.
And this was just Monday! All told, we went about 52 hours without power. What an adventure! I didn’t fully intend to use so much of this letter to recount our travails, but here we are. Every so often, these letters mark a moment in time. This feels like it warrants being one of them.
Now that I am back to normal pandemic life, I spent some time this evening rereading your letter from last week. I think you're right that there is something in my inclination to compress words and ideas that is about not taking up too much space. Indeed, as you say, we should let the mental (bodily) juices flow! I do not typically have a problem with doing that in conversation—there is something about the natural back and forth with another human that makes the thoughts unspool without much effort. When I get to the page or screen, something often hinders the flow. Unpacking ideas I can see in my mind’s eye becomes both physically and emotionally hard for me. It takes energy! I am telling you, I think perhaps I am really just a tad lazy.
Lately, and not just when we were without electricity, I am finding that I rarely sit down to write. Well, other than these letters and the myriad things I write for work. I find this intriguing because it is not just about not finding the time. I feel an absence of urgency to write, maybe even an absence of any motivation. I hope and assume it won’t last, but in any case, I am not judging or even trying to stir my quiescent writing brain. It just is.
One last thing I want to tell you is that we watched Crip Camp a few weeks ago, and I cannot think of a movie that felt more immediately life-altering to me in recent years. It is a documentary about a summer camp in the Catskills for kids with various physical and mental disabilities. The heyday of the camp was in the 1970s, and the movie follows many of the kids who frequented the camp and went on to become activists that were instrumental in pushing the American Disabilities Act into law. I thought about your reference to our rude bodies in last week’s letter, and how right you are that we all do so much to try to control our bodies and ultimately our bodies will not be controlled, whether now or someday in the future. Listening and watching these powerful activists overcome incredible bodily obstacles to demand their rights—quite literally their rights to fully participate in human life—was electrifying to me. We must use the bodies we have in order to live, and to live fully. And we must not wait for permission or advice, when we already know what is right.
With that, I’ll close this letter and mark the end of an eventful week. I am sorry we missed our usual phone conversation early this week; I feel anxious to know how you are doing and what you are thinking these days! I look forward to reading your words.
Until soon,
Your friend,
Sarah