On communion and quiet time, having a little time, and music v. words
December 25, 2020
Dear Eva,
Merry Christmas! Just before typing these words, I was sitting alone at my dining table with my head on my hand, eyes closed, full warm cup of coffee steaming next to me. I am ready for a Christmas nap. And I just may follow through on that threat this year—because I can! In years without a raging global pandemic, post-morning snoozing is not really an option over the holidays. Long ago, my family turned a love of Christmas festivities into an annual stream of parties and activities stretching from December 23rd through until the 28th or so. This year, it is scaled back several notches, and I am finding that it just might be my favorite Christmas in my adult life so far. We are forgoing all of the larger parties this year, but we have still done a few core rituals with my parents and my sister’s family like hot cocoa and stories on Christmas Eve, baking day, and a Christmas morning gift exchange after fresh fruit and coffee cake. This year’s mix of communion and quiet time is far closer to my preferred balance. For the first time in maybe ever, I am at home on Christmas Day around the lunch hour, not to shower and scramble back to my parents’ house for a Thanksgiving redux meal, but to laze around in our Christmas jammies and sip coffee and revel in our new books and other sundries. Don’t mind if I do!
Right now, the three boys in my house are huddled around the TV playing a new video game on a new video game console. Was this a gift for Bill or for the kids, you ask? No comment. Regardless, I am welcoming the temporary solitude it is allowing me. I realized yesterday during another such glimmer of alone time that my favorite general state of being with loved ones is to be alone together—reading, writing, cooking, walking, watching movies—physically with each other, but often operating independently, in our own interior spaces. Of course, I love a good conversation, too.
These letters are a version of the inverse—we are together alone, physically separate but wrapped up in an ongoing dialogue. How neat! I was pleased with your assessment last week that we are peering into new distances from new heights in our Jenga [letter] tower. It very much does feel like we are building rather than retreading or circling, even when we travel across familiar ground in our correspondence. I am continually amused by my feeling that this steady richness in our letter-writing project is somehow surprising or notable. The letters bottle up some pieces of our entwined interior lives—of course they are a gift that never stops giving! At this point, the letters feel like an undercurrent in my life that is both separate from and wrapped up in other aspects of my life. I think this is always the case with a deep friendship but the existence of the letters gives it a visibility and resilience that feels novel. Putting our friendship into letters changes our friendship, or maybe it just gives it a more permanent, present shape in our lives. Whatever it is, these letters (and the fact of these letters) continue to fascinate me into week 117 of this project and beyond.
Last week you poked a little at my renewed dream of calling myself an artist. How would being an artist be different from what you’re doing now? you asked. I have a very concrete and specific answer. I will call myself an artist when I start following through on my ideas and putting a few literal and/or metaphorical frames around them. This week I had some time to go back through a bunch of old Google docs I have created in the past several years. They are full of little flashes of ideas never acted upon—the first three paragraphs of a “novel” I started in 2014, a pitch for the premise of a children’s book, more. Ideas are a necessary step, but they do not become art until you make something out of them. You wrote last week about the allure of the empty space that is our potential. Somehow at age 40, that particular type of allure has worn off and it feels more like an excuse or a recipe for regret. Instead, I guess I feel a slight urgency to do. So why don't I stop talking about it and just do already, you ask? New Years Resolution Season is upon us, so I will be getting to that soon, but please indulge my need to also point out that doing is easier said than done! Otherwise we would all be artists.
With that, I will wrap this Christmas letter and send it off to your inbox. I am imagining that you are playing games and drinking eggnog with your inlaws around a Christmas tree. Is this an accurate picture of your day? I hope so! Tell them all hello and happy holidays from us here in Iowa! Enjoy your time together!
Yours,
Sarah
Friday December 25 2020
Dear Sarah,
Merry Christmas!
Yesterday M and I drove just about twelve hours to get to Michigan for the holiday. It was a different kind of drive than we usually do; we try to leave early in the morning for these drives, usually getting in at our destination by six or seven in the evening. We thought we weren’t going to travel yesterday at all because of the bad weather the night before, ice on the roads, nine inches of snow and subzero temps, so we slept past our early departure hour and planned to stay home and give it a go the next day, which would have been today, Christmas Day. Instead, when Thursday morning dawned in full the sun was strong and we thought we might as well give the drive a go. We were glad to get going, but it made for a different kind of drive, starting four hours behind schedule, slow going out of the icy Twin Cities, only a little bit into our trip by the noon hour.
As we drove, our music mix turned up a song by Camper Van Beethoven, Seven Languages.
It was a song I got into during the summer —
And I would come to visit you, but I can’t find my car keys, and I can’t remember where you live
And if I had just a little time, I could speak seven languages, I could walk on water
It felt emblematic of the summer and the pandemic, and hearing it again in the winter — with all of us still in the pandemic, six months later —
The spirit of wanting time, and even when we suddenly had time, somehow still not having time in the way we wanted it — the impossibility of having time the way we want it; our sense always that future time will be able to contain more than our current time can contain —
It also feels like the sound of being on a journey — this summer, a journey in place; yesterday, a journey on the road; always, a journey through time —
It’s sort of impossible even now, just over twenty-four hours later, to capture the specific way I felt when I heard the song and felt this bodily memory of the summer — the song brought me back, but my body was here in December, in the winter cold, and things have changed, but not as much as we might have hoped they would have changed, and not as fast as we would have hoped —
Music, sound, captures something other than words can capture — resonates with points in the body, plucking the filaments that keep us strung together, whole.
And I would come to visit you, but I can't find my car keys, and I can't think of right words to say
Music, felt in the body, is different from words, words that must pool in the brain and emerge from the mouth or the hands —
I played this song for my love, but she said to me, “it has no meaning at all.”
I’m remembering when you shared John O’Donohue’s words some weeks ago — Music is what language would love to be if it could — and the words are true while also still not capturing what precisely music is, because what music is can only be captured in music and not words! I’ve done the thing in this letter that I referenced in my letter following yours — I’ve tried to capture the feeling of a song here on the page in words, and I hope you’ve been able to bear with me!
Last week I was fascinated to hear about the turn of the compass in your head, your orientation to the place where you live, your tipped-over sense of place. I think I have something similar going on with my orientation to the place where I grew up. I would emerge out the front door of my building and turn right to head toward elementary school and junior high (both to the right, then right again at the stoplight) and later on toward high school and downtown Royal Oak (right out the front door and onward up and up). I always understood the right turn to be the act of heading north — to go toward my daily destination seemed like it must be north. So the map of my town in my mind is oriented that way. But in reality to head toward school was to walk to the west, and then I would turn south when I got to Main or Washington to get to high school or to continue on toward downtown. My map of home is also one quarter-turn off, though I’m having a hard time understanding if our quarter-turns are in the same direction or in opposite directions. If I’m understanding your words correctly — you said in my brain, north—the direction of my parents’ house, for example—is pointing toward 3 o’clock, east is at 6 o’clock, and so on — I think we both understood what was truly west to be “up” or north, in a sense. Did your changed sense of orientation also have to do with where your school was in relation to your home?
I’ve been noodling around with this letter for a while over eggnog and I think it’s time to release my words to you! I hope you’ve had a very merry holiday and that you’re peaceful as you head into this final week of 2020! Until soon!
Your friend,
Eva