ON CHEWING DAILY BROKENNESS, PSYCHIC ACCOMPANImENT, AND THE TRIUMVIRATE OF DESIRE AND NECESSITY
Thursday February 8 and Friday February 9 2024
Dear Sarah,
Happy Friday! Here we are! We’re back in! A week has passed — suddenly a week feels short — it’s already been a week since our last (first) letter! I’m typing up my notes and reflections on your words, and catching a little wind in my sails as I see where they take me in the transmission from handwritten penciled page to finger-tapped typewritten words.
You spoke of recalling past habits and processes from our last turn with the letters (maybe this is a funny way to describe it, but there is inevitably now the “now” of the current letters and the “then” of the past letters) — you said “I remember often feeling surprised to see what would come out when the letter took shape, and pondering how different that shape might look had I sat down to write at a slightly different day/time in the week.”
This had me thinking about impermanent states, both in terms of how I’ve been living lately, in temporary spots for a period of weeks, and in terms of my own writing projects, which brought up for me echoes of thoughts about finishing, about final drafts (bit of an oxymoron, no?), final pieces, and the eternal possibility of change and revision.
The idea that a letter could come together differently at a different time of day or week — we make choices and sometimes we call things final because we must, because it is time to close it out or move on to something new — but in theory, we are also welcome to make changes; we can revisit and revamp and revise. I am reminded of a podcast I listened to with Tressie McMillan Cottom and Kiese Laymon discussing the act and concept of revision — to quote from the transcript of the show, with Tressie McMillan Cottom speaking, “In 2020, Kiese did something that shocked the publishing world. He bought back the rights to his first two books for about 10 times the price he was originally paid to write them. Looking back on “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America” and his novel, “Long Division,” Kiese realized there were parts of the books he wanted to change. So he made an investment in his own art that, from one angle, might have looked surprising. But it’s not so surprising when you consider the way Kiese approaches his entire life, as an act of revision.” The podcast was from November 2021 — funny that it comes back to me now, as if I am picking up the threads of our last letters right where we left off.
As I write these words, thinking about change, and finality, and revisions, and new beginnings, I think about how even the media I’ve consumed in the past few years has shifted. I think it’s gone in a good direction — but it seems strange to report here that I rarely read the news these days; I regularly read a handful of newsletters from writers and other shapers of the discourse happening today. I’m not reading in order to gather facts about what is happening in the world, though I do gather some shapes of what is happening through the writers I read; the events of the days are refracted through the lenses of their perspectives. The handful of folks whose newsletters and writing in my inbox I read regularly includes Elif Batuman, Daniel Lavery, the Astro Poets, River L Ramirez, Sarah Miller, Rusty Foster, Austin Kleon, and some others. I occasionally click into a New York Times story, often an accidental move following an attempt to expand a push alert, and I can’t say I’m reading once I’ve clicked through. I allow myself some limited interstitial time on twitter to keep an eye on the funny jokes of the day; I take approximately the same approach to instagram with an eye on friends and other interesting visual happenings.
I’ve recently been thinking about life as unfolding in chapters. A long stretch of my life seemed to unfold as a single chapter, even though many things have happened during the past twenty-plus years. More recently the chapters seem more brief and distinct; I feel myself moving through time in a different way, and particular places or phases of watching or reading that are not that distant seem somehow to be a part of finished chapters. I am trying to work with that sense of chapters, or we could also say movements, as in the musical usage of the word — the way that there can be multiple movements in a piece of music, typically four movements in a symphony or three in a concerto — and within the movements there can be recurring or reimagined themes, bits of familiar sound that are reworked and woven through the piece in new ways.
My reading habits have changed — my media consumption has changed — I haven’t watched much television in the past year, though I have gone to more movies in the theater than I typically used to. What am I trying to share with you here? The way I used to think about the news, or about the world, doesn’t seem to apply anymore. Perhaps it has become clearer to me that every system seems broken, so why would I follow along in minute detail, chewing on the daily brokenness as if shards of glass were an essential part of my diet? I’m not sure that being well-versed in the specifics of the brokenness prepares me for anything at all. I’d like to reimagine how I participate in the fixes, the change that I want to see happen — I think we each (you and I, and all of us in the world) have visions for how things could be better — and I’d like to bring some portion of my attention around to more clearly being a part of that process of making things better. It’s not fair to wait for someone else to make it better for me, even if that’s sometimes what I would like to happen while I stay tucked under the covers reading books.
I’m on a work sabbatical at the moment, planned for the next couple of months at least — and at the same time I am thinking about how I can help make things better. Not just in the old way — not just in an organizational way, writing fundraising grants for individual nonprofit groups here and there to help them keep existing within an economic system where their goals are generally not prioritized — but how can I help make things better in a systemic way?
I’m working on my own creative projects at the moment, and I’m also thinking about how I can best fulfill the triumvirate of desire and necessity that is making creative work, making enough money to live, and playing the role I can best play as a human to help make things better than when I got here.
I’ve written more in my notes for this letter to you and I’m not certain this is the most logical place to end for today, but the afternoon sun is lengthening and I’m reminding myself for next week to leave a bit more time for noodling and doodling with my ideas before it’s time to call my letter finished! I need waves of time and thought to bring anything through to something like a conclusion! But consider these themes introduced, and I’ll weave them in through future movements. Wishing you all the best for a lovely Friday evening and weekend, and looking forward to reading your words later today!
Until soon, yours!
Eva
February 7, 2024 and February 8, 2024
Dear Eva,
Your love letter to the letters last week was a blessing. It filled me with joy when I read it (and each time I have read it since!), but it did more than that. By so beautifully paying homage to the effects of the letters on our psyches and on our friendship, it is almost as if you were calling upon the letters to unleash their full powers once again. A bit like saying grace as we sit down to partake in this ritual once again. May we be thankful for this experience as long as it lasts, and may we be open to receiving all that it bestows!
Interestingly, as we begin this exchange anew, I have found myself stumbling in ways I do not recall from the past. Fretting over whether I have carved enough space in my days to give letter writing its due, questioning whether I will someday regret writing publicly about this or that, feeling a palpable bit of heartache upon seeing my letter in final form as I realize the gap between what was imagined in my mind’s eye and what is on the page. You had said writing letters again might be like riding a bike but so far it feels more like how I feel when I return to the piano: painstaking and clunky. (Although to be fair, I think I had a fair amount of similar woes when I restarted bike-riding when we moved to Iowa 10 years ago. It is possible that my relearning process is just a slow one across all dimensions.)
Inartful or not, I am so pleased to be here. Your description of the letters as creating and sustaining a kind of psychic connection between us feels so apt. In fact, it feels about as factual and indisputable as a statement about spirituality can be. Right now, I am here alone writing these words in my comfy office chair. But you are here as well. We are sharing space in the realm of ideas, albeit while situated on different parts of the earth and at different moments in time. Through our letters, we unlock a different layer of life.
In your letter, you pondered how long we will be here this time around. I can’t help but long for some substantial stretch of time so we can really sink down into this practice and let it steep again for a while. But I also feel mildly resistant to the idea of open-endedness. I think there is some self-protective urge within this hesitation — wanting the emotional anchor of knowing what to expect, whether that be four weeks or one year. There is so much in life we cannot rely upon. How will I feel tomorrow? How long do I have? It feels comforting to attach some certainty - however flimsy - around this commitment. In our first go at the letters, I remember you wondering if they would reach their natural end and we would just know when that time had come. I think I feel the same way now as I did about that back then. One of us may know, while the other may not. It seems unlikely that the ebbs and flows of two lives would align in such a way that the turn of a corner would simultaneously occur. As I am writing these words I am realizing how much this sounds like fear. Or rather, it is fear. Letter grief was hard! But I think there is also an element of knowing that there will be weeks, likely soon, when this practice will be tough because… life. Should I push through when that week comes?
In the meantime, I cannot wait to hear more of all you have to tell me! I am impressed to hear of your adventures at lighting the gas stovetop! That is precisely the sort of tiny terror that I have a lifelong history of avoiding, something made all the easier once I married someone who has a tendency to jump into such affairs without hesitation. I do think there is real value to walking through the fear and doing something like that anyway. Last summer I had the experience of taking a long bike ride in Chicago through throngs of people along the lake on the Fourth of July and then back through the streets in Rogers Park to the apartment where I was staying. I ride my bike regularly, but generally avoid road biking and certainly never in anything like Chicago traffic. I was terrified, and yet, to my surprise the experience was genuinely intoxicating. I can still conjure up the way it felt that day, sweat on my skin as I weaved around walkers, bikers, and scooters on the bike path and then squeezed between parked cars and lines of traffic on the streets. I felt wild, free, and powerful. Do you feel a taste of that as you make your way through Mexico City alone during this span of time? I can certainly imagine the profound loneliness that would come from the experience at the start. Maybe that makes the staying even sweeter as you found your way and settled into daily patterns. You are wild, free, and powerful, my friend!
Yesterday, as I was taking a walk with the dog during my workday, I had the sudden realization that you were there with me. Not literally, of course, but I had spent the 20 minutes thinking through bits from your letter and mulling what I would include in mine. Yet another type of psychic accompaniment enabled by the rekindling of the letters, and this one encompassing even more than what makes it onto the pages. As you wrote last week, we make choices about what to put into our letters. But even the anecdotes and musings that do not get selected play a part in our psychic channel! You will never know what all was in my brain as I conducted a week’s worth of letter preparation, but you were present in the process nonetheless.
This is a week where you and I have not communicated at all outside of the letters and a text or two immediately after publication. This brings a heightened sense of anticipation to reading your letter. Will you have answered any of the questions you posed in your letter about how long we might do this again? Has the texture of your time in Mexico City changed as you ready yourself for the arrival of your friend? I cannot wait to read what you choose to include in your letter, and I feel heartened to consider that maybe some unknowable-to-me aspect of myself was there with you when you made those choices.
However long it lasts, I will relish this correspondence. I feel so lucky that you want to read my thoughts in writing, and I thank you for it. I hope you have a wonderful time with your friend who joins you today!
Sending all of my best,
Yours,
Sarah