ON PERFORMING A CONTROLLED EXPERIMENT, CAPTURING A FRIENDSHIP, AND HOW THE BEST TIME IS ALWAYS NOW
The recent and more distant days leading up to and including Friday August 28 2020
Dear Sarah,
I’ve been dilly-dallying on finishing my letter to you today! I’ve got plenty of notes from the last week and more, but today it’s hard to put it together in a final form and send it off. I was thinking about how to organize my thoughts on our weekly letters, and cultivating a dreamy pursuit of some sense of spaciousness. When you suggested we write about our experience of the letters as we reached our 100th letter (!) I agreed that that was a good idea, and then as the two-week period before number 100 started to close in on itself, with a possibly busy week ahead, I started to worry just a little bit. I thought, next week might be a busy one, better to reserve a spacious time for reflection, maybe we should think about pushing our reflection letter out a little further — but this was a pre-letters way of thinking! I am filled with glee when I think about all the weeks — 100! — in which we simply sat down and wrote to each other. We’ve written from home offices and hotel rooms and airports and airplanes and parked cars while waiting for nasal swabs! There was no pushing it off for a better time; the best time was always effectively now, as we found by setting ourselves a weekly deadline: it’s always somehow coming right up again.
When we post the letters online they become a collective archive we are building week by week; an intentional archive; a forward-looking archive. They are more than an ongoing conversation, even as they are also that — they are a document of thought processes unfolding between two people. They are a conversation designed to build over time, and to show how it is being built. They stand as a record of how people (us) form thoughts, ideas, ways of being — not in isolation but in the context of the world in which we live, and in the context of our friendship. We are performing a controlled experiment, ourselves the two variables, demonstrating how people are shaped over time by the other people in their lives. We are influenced by each other, and we are showcasing that. We are all influenced by the people in our orbits, but it is rarely documented over time in a continuous and visible way.
We’ve been exchanging weekly letters now for almost two years. Two years — I think of it as the time when you stop referring to a baby as X months old — at two years a baby is hitting its stride (perhaps not quite literally?) as a small human, changing less rapidly. I started to wonder, If we judged our age by months, even as adults, would we observe more change in ourselves? Or would frequent milestones become too commonplace? “458-month old lady does X.” If we counted our age in months it would take some energy to figure out how to compare one adult to another, to understand what might look typical for any 500-month-old, but perhaps that would be a good thing — it would become harder to compare, harder to look for milestones. Perhaps we would stop comparing as much and simply go about being ourselves.
I think you were precisely right in your letter of last week about the peace and the privacy of the pandemic, the fact that we have fewer social obligations and thus more autonomy, more freedom. I agree with your clear-eyed statement that every interaction with other humans brings some pressure to conform. I was thinking about the pandemic and social media; I imagine there are people who are using social media more than ever during the pandemic, but I find myself even less inclined to look or to participate. I imagine that if someone were used to orienting their self-worth by how they measured up against others in our pre-pandemic world, they might be unsettled in our post-pandemic world (even beyond the many reasons that one might feel unsettled) because it’s harder now to measure oneself against others, to see and be seen in the context of others. I am testing out the idea — carrying forward your test from last week — that we are more pressured by expectations when we are being compared to each other in person, watching ourselves being compared to others, simultaneously comparing ourselves to others. It’s exhausting thinking about it in order to write it out, but less exhausting than living it in person!
On a different note, I was reading an article by Amia Srinivasan about whales in a recent New Yorker, and thinking about first principles, how to get to the first questions that need to be asked and answered in order to solve the biggest problems, how (if?) humans can work our way back from the damages we have wrought, are wreaking on the earth; habits and systems formed many years ago and passed down through generations show their vast repercussions today. I paused to look up the concept of chickens coming home to roost, thinking about humanity’s actions over decades and centuries manifesting more clearly every day in dire consequences. We know plastic is being found in the oceans, and it is also being found inside whales’ bodies; plastic from, among other things, the packaging that lets us enjoy non-seasonal food year-round. In my home right now I have organic bell peppers that have traveled from the Netherlands (!) and Canada; in my yard I have a few hyper-local bell peppers coming along. If we dive in at just one thought point and carry the thread for a moment, I was thinking about how one is supposed to eat healthily, and where and how to shop to minimize packaging and the acquisition of food from far away, and then wondering how to use one’s own bags and packaging in the age of coronavirus. Even the things that seem good at first glance — the organic bell peppers, picking up fruit and veggies from a grocery store nearby — can be part of a big, broken system.
I’m thinking now about joining a CSA next year; I thought about joining this year, but I was too late — I’d been approaching it in a leisurely fashion, like I still lived in California, like I could join anytime and get fresh fruits and vegetables all year, but of course Minnesota is not California. Here you join for the farming season, late spring through early fall, and by the time I thought about it earlier this summer, farms were already sold out of shares for the season. So I’m getting on top of it for next year! I am already looking forward to the idea of a box of seasonal produce readied for me, so that I can figure out what to do with it — working within constraints! — rather than thinking up each week what I want to be eating, and buying groceries against those desires. This pairs well with the fact that I’m at the point in my pandemic experience where I don’t want to take care of anything — don’t want to do dishes, don’t want to do laundry, don’t want to make meals or think about them. All I want to do is eat food, and I am going to work on thinking harder about where my food comes from, and getting creative with seasonal things instead of trying to form the world to fit my desires. What grows around here throughout the year? I haven’t investigated every possible CSA opportunity just yet, but I have been delightedly scrolling through past pictures of the weekly boxes from the Brown Family Farm. M was not incorrect when he observed that I just like looking at the photographs — it’s true, I like photos of things grouped and shot from above — but I also like seeing certain vegetables fade away when their time is done, I like seeing the pint of blueberries appear midsummer, I like seeing the corn carry through the later summer, I like seeing the squash and the apples appear in the fall. The telling of time in fruits and veg!
Bringing this letter back to the letters — in my notes I wondered, is this project the individual letters, or the whole, the weekly commitment to one large process? Our letters are exposing a thought process, both showing the dots and connecting them. What public pages are typically for — what typically makes it onto a page — is some form of a finished product, the result of drafts and conversations and the picking apart of dense bits and the discarding of extra. Writing these letters to each other as the project unfolds in real time is showing the process — sharing the drafts, mentioning how we’ve talked and texted, admitting to the fact of process. If we someday find ourselves at something summarized, polished, synthesized, it will be because there was a process, and the process was not “documented” — the process is the thing itself. People sometimes talk about art, the product of art, as the artifact, the end result of a process — the thing that gets spit out the end of a Rube Goldberg machine — but the machine itself is also a work of art; the process is where the joy and pain and other emotions and trials of making live. To show the process as product is a triumph in itself.
That’s where I’ll close week 100! I’m looking forward to reading your words this evening, and I wish you the happiest of weekends!
Until soon, and on our way to two years, to be marked by week 104!
Your friend,
Eva
August 27, 2020,
August 28, 2020
Dear Eva,
This my 100th letter to you! That is a lot of letters (100 x 2 = 200; I can do math!), and a lot of weeks without ever breaking our Friday publication streak, despite sickness, holidays, derechos, travel, and other sundries of life. I have looked forward to writing this special letter to commemorate this milestone. (What is it about big round anniversary numbers that somehow feel more like achievements than the random odd numbers do? Is 100 letters really more exciting than 114 letters? I love all of our letter babies.)
This week during my dermatology procedure, I mentioned this project to my doctor, in response to his question about what I liked to do for fun. What are the letters about? he asked as he cut the skin cancer out of my face. That, at least to me, is a largely unanswerable question. What are these letters about, Eva? I feel the urge to flip through a bound book full of the letters, stopping here and there to see the terrain we have traveled these past two years in our correspondence. The letters are about making jingalov hats, and drooling on menus, and crying in coffee shops. They are about ideas. They are about life—mostly interior life but also a dash of news of the Eva/Sarah day. Describing what the letters are about seems almost like trying to explain what a friendship is about, which is to say, it is impossible.
I enjoy thinking back to our August conversations in 2018 when we first concocted this project. We didn’t know if it would work. What would we write about? (We didn’t know then, and we still don’t know after 100 letters.) We didn’t know if it would stick. Would we actually get our letters done and posted on our self-imposed weekly deadlines? Would we lose momentum?
There has been an unexpected joy in the act of committing to this project, to the simple act of diligently doing a thing week after week, and watching the letters pile up in the digital archive of rogshinch.com. Before we embarked on this epistolary adventure, I did not fully appreciate how different a weekly writing rhythm would feel if there is another human being waiting to read what I wrote, and my reward for completing my own writing was reading a letter written for me. I had tried weekly blogging commitments in the past, and they never stuck, no matter how bite-size I tried to make the obligation. It turns out that writing to everyone/no one is just not that compelling! This project has felt so much more meaningful from the beginning. In retrospect, I guess it seems silly to be surprised by that. Of course it is more meaningful to write for and to read the writing of a friend. But the notion of the internet as a place for one-to-many publication is so ingrained that it can be hard to remember that one reader who matters to you is far more significant than one thousand who don’t.
This brings me to the public nature of our letters, which is a topic I find endlessly fascinating. I think we have both written previously about the metaphor of having a conversation in a hidden corner of a public park or other public space. Anyone could theoretically pop in and listen for a bit (or read, if we want to move back from metaphor to reality). To those strangers, we are abstractions. I have come to think of that as my working definition for what it means to be doing something in public—the circumstance of being viewable, accessible, readable, hearable by people to whom you are just an abstraction. In most of life, there are many publics, rather than it being an on/off switch. I am technically in public when I walk the dog, but the chances of the entire world seeing me pick my nose on the walk (it’s just a hypothetical!) is slim to none. Digital space can mush up the publics since it is so easy to take something from one space and reproduce it in another. Suddenly, our publics can become just the public, or at least that risk is there. The beauty of rogshinch.com is that it recreates online a private sort of public that we so often have in the physical world but which is a rarity in digital spaces. This kind of public creates an opening for a kind of reflection and self-definition that is difficult to do in purely private relationships, or in the more typical one-to-many public spaces, which so often become about impression-management. Here, I write for you. But I also write for me. Here, I can learn, grow, stretch, and even cower when the day makes me feel small. And I can watch it happen, gradually over time, as you and I bob and weave around and over and through ideas.
You are the best kind of writing partner for this project. Unlike many in relationships, you always leave space, and that space feels coated with curiosity. That allows us both to avoid getting entrenched in patterns, to keep challenging each other to find ways we are different and the same, and ways that we can continue to evolve. I feel quite certain I have changed for the better over the course of these 100 letters.
Having done this—and continuing to do it—gives a different kind of realness and endurance to our friendship. Collectively, the letters embody our friendship in a way, not the whole of it, but a manifestation of it. It seems truly rare in life to have this kind of human to human connection be viewable in artifact form. We have captured something in writing, not in a single letter, but in all of the letters together.
Here’s to 100 more! Do I really mean that? I am not sure! But I am sure that I am so thankful we took the plunge 100 weeks ago. Thank you for going along on this adventure and commitment with me!
Your friend,
Sarah