ON THE STIRRING OF THE BEES IN THE CHEST, A STEADY STREAM OF SOMETHINGS, AND SPARKLY FIGMENTS OF PURE POTENTIAL
Friday October 15 2021
Dear Sarah,
As I mentioned when we talked on the phone, I had a very delightful long weekend away. (I am pining for the screened-in porch!) Now I’m feeling the return of the pressure of my work life. It may be that work itself is not pressuring me — I’m generating the pressure on myself, no one is really bothering me too much this week! — but I’m feeling the stirring of the bees inside my chest that come when I feel compelled to do anything that I’m not that interested in. For a long time I cared about how well I did my work and how well I was perceived in doing my work; I cared about being a valued member of a team, cared about being least likely to be discarded and thus most likely to establish some sustainable source of income for myself. Now I’ve hit a spot where, regarding the things I care little about, I find it harder and harder to dig up some semblance of caring, some adjacent sense of consideration for my appearance of solidity and reliability, that I could apply as an overlay to my work itself, making the work into a path toward achieving the appreciation I sought and needed. Now: can’t make myself care about the things I don’t care about! In one way this is a pleasing life stage to enter; I can feel that this will be an era in which creative projects will have fertile ground to thrive; but at the same time I am experiencing the dissonance of, as ever, needing to maintain some steady income (perhaps the need for steadiness can be debated, but income is necessary) while being utterly over the paths I’ve previously taken to bring in that income.
If I think of my letters to you as paintings I feel that this general tone and message must be the primer applied to most all of the canvases I’ve covered over these three years! I’m sure I’ve had some fine and promising work-related moments that have bubbled up in my letters to you, but the overriding feeling in my memory is that work sucks! Capitalism sucks! Clearly I’m coloring the past with my feelings in the present, but the letters will stand as a true representation of themselves, and I am free to presume at this time that each and every letter sings this same refrain!
I am excited about our conversation about doing some kind of 100-day challenge as the year kicks off. Perhaps it will stand in as an inexact substitute for our letter exchange? I am thinking a daily collage sounds very doable, or perhaps it simply needs only to be labeled as some kind of daily art. No need to make it overly restrictive!
I have been pondering whether I will continue writing some sort of weekly “letter,” more broadly some kind of weekly documentation, even after our letters to each other have concluded. What would this be? I like the weekly rhythm of writing to each other, writing about our moods and feelings and contexts in a given week; I like that documentation of our ongoing conversation with each other. If we are not conversing in the letters anymore, will I be inclined to continue the conversation with myself? I don’t know! I will miss all the different aspects of what this letter exchange is; are there any components we can individually carry on? Will it become self-serving to document the week as if I were writing to you, but without the actual act of sending you my letter and reading yours? It strikes me as wrong in some fashion to consider how I’ll continue this practice even as we don’t continue the letters themselves; yet I do continue to feel that it is time to wind down the letters. If our letters are somewhat like a relationship that we are preparing to end, I wonder if we will find that we miss this particular facet of our relationship, and if we’ll want to bring it back? What if I find myself writing open letters each week, and we stop the letter practice, and then we restart it, and then I send you the small or large sheaf of letters that I’ve written in the meantime? I don’t mean this to be cruel or teasing; I am just wondering how I will continue on in the absence of this practice I’ve come to look forward to, the exchange that has become such a rhythm in our lives. I could continue on in secret or I could tell you how I’m thinking about it, which is what I’m doing here!
Yesterday I was looking through the part of my google drive where documents have been shared with me and I found something from you that I appear to have missed, and never opened (!?) or perhaps haven’t opened since you last re-shared it with me: a draft of a found poem where you’ve woven together lines from our letters into something new. This is captivating! I wonder what it would be like to embark on a new stage of the letters in the new year — a weekly revisiting of some mix of the past letters to put together a piece of found poetry like this? I am not exactly sure I want to do this every week but I am considering the idea right now. I don’t know about you, but on Friday afternoons everything sounds like a particularly good idea to me, because the challenge of making anything real will fall to another day — I’m certainly not going to tackle all the big ideas by end of day Friday! I am overly ambitious with future-me’s time on Fridays because everything sounds possible on a Friday, everything sounds possible in the future. In the present these ideas can be enjoyed as ideas only, as sparkly figments of pure potential. In this moment all that is required of me is to feel interest, and I am feeling very interested! I love your found poem and I want to share in this particular mode of creation. Whether I really want to commit to a weekly process of found-poem generation I cannot say, but I am intrigued.
In other moods of the moment, I’m stewing over the concept of writing something lightly fictionalized about my family including the current situation in which I am managing my father’s care, a body of writing whose overarching tone will be along the lines of down with the patriarchy, no matter how intricately it is woven into our lives and states of being! I feel that my current mood in thinking about this is somehow a selfish one, which is itself bound into what I’m thinking about writing: women in our society are always supposed to be thinking of others (family, colleagues) and are made to feel selfish if we’re thinking of ourselves. So, my current mood is one of thinking about what I want, and pushing back against the idea that I am feeling or being selfish even though I am still worried that that’s what is happening. The Self! Women get to have selves and to focus on them, too! To be ourselves is not only the purview of the men in our world, no matter how long it’s been that way, and no matter how ingrained are those mindsets.
In sum, my prevailing mood on this Friday afternoon: burn it all down, salvage the remains of what I and we care about, and move on into our futures! Perhaps in another form, I am hearkening back to a line that cameo’d in your found poem: All we can do is gather a few bits in our skirts and keep rushing along. We will save what we can. Perhaps I will add, as we save what we can, that we save what we want!
Your panel presentation is going on at this very moment and I’m working on my letter instead of attending! I hope it is going well and I’m interested to catch the recap from you next time we talk.
We made it to Friday! Until soon, my friend!
Yours,
Eva
P.S. As I’ve been wrapped up in my moods and words today, I’ve forgotten to tackle a question you posed in your letter last week: Do you ever get asked a fairly nonchalant question and rather than just answering, you get lost in thinking about the exact right answer to the question? I think it’s possible this has happened to me, but I think I might be more inclined to state the first thing that pops into my mind, with a caveat to that effect. If someone is waiting for an answer I suppose I would be inclined to keep it moving rather than to get lost in my own thoughts. However, you are also at this moment reading the words of someone who has, at times, looked forward to the end of conversations so that I can return to my own solitary thoughts. Perhaps your focus on consistency and accuracy is some kind of lawyerly hangover!
October 15, 2021
Dear Eva,
You planted the listicle idea in my brain earlier today when we spoke, and I am running with it.
1. Today in an online workshop, I talked about this letter writing project and the implications it has had for the way I think about some core concepts in my work. (Did you end up joining to listen in? I hope not!) I also quoted several seemingly unrelated books and tied them all together in an attempt to describe my zigzagging path to a little clarity over the past few years. It was either great or completely random. Welcome to my brain, folks! Either way, it was fun, and I enjoyed the opportunity to reflect back on the past decade of my professional life without feeling too constrained about what I said.
2. The other day B found a single used contact lens on the doorknob of our bathroom. Those pesky little suckers are sticky!
3. I just looked back at your letter from last week and felt a pang of jealousy at the line “looking over my notes for this week.” I have no such notes this week. I forgoed morning writing for sleep all week and spent any evening energy I had in the tank for my teaching preparations. This means my slate is blank, a troubling proposition when facing a Friday night writing session after beers, cheese curds, and biking. My brain is perhaps not at its peak!
4. This week the boys had their second lockdown of the year at school. Unlike the first one, this one went on for more than an hour, while the police sought a man who was suspected to be armed in the neighborhood. The kids were nonchalant as they described the experience, even though for J it even meant huddling behind desks for a portion of the time. I suppose there is something very realistic about the close juxtaposition of the everyday and the unfathomable, but it is still jarring to feel it. The experience makes me want to reread Etgar Keret’s memoir about life in Israel.
5. It is strange to be in the middle of a gradual transition at work, mainly because it does not actually feel different yet. At least at this particular moment, I am relishing the feeling of not knowing what lies beyond, but knowing that things will be different.
6. It was a fun surprise to hear you may want to join me in my [insert number of days] project in the new year! I am motivated by the thought of creating a steady stream of somethings, however small. It feels generative to start the year with a solid batch of creating as I hunker down for the Winter. I have grown tired of hearing myself complain that I am not making the art (writing) that I want to make, so I am going to change the tune.
7. I am fascinated by your too-heavy work blanket, and anxious to observe how you navigate your next steps and beyond. I am captivated by the ways in which other thoughtful humans work though the question of how to spend their days. It can often be hard to see from the outside, either because so many people just do reflexively on whatever path they are on and/or because people do not often describe these uncertainties to each other. There is definitely a part of me that wants to start peppering you with questions to see if we can figure this out but I do not think that is currently what you need. (If it is, let me know and I am happy to brainstorm with you.) I will say that your career personality profiler results sounded right on point! Make that art, Eva!
8. I am confounded by your tendency to save all the things, and your VMM about your operating system made me chuckle. How to square this collecting habit with your desire to escape? Ever an enigma, you are! (says Yoda apparently)
9. I just went to the Archive of RogShinch and it has disappeared yet again. The letters are all still there, but they aren’t appear on the page that is supposed to list them all. This has happened before and it is remediable, but today it somehow feels like a sign. The site is starting to vanish, the project is ending, everything is ephemeral, you cannot save it all, Eva!
10. I am teasing.
It is time to post these puppies, and make myself a gin and tonic before collapsing on the couch! I am looking forward to a relaxing and fun weekend full of pumpkin picking, marathon watching (the Des Moines marathon is going right by our house on Sunday), birthday celebrating (sister), homemade pizza eating with friends, and a Monday away from the j-o-b. Let the weekend begin!
Hope yours is off to a good start at the art event tonight!
Yours,
Sarah