On friendship retreats, shipping ourselves, and stunning the bad guys
February 26, 2021
Dear Eva,
As our Ozarks adventure draws to a close, I am thinking about what it means to pour more time and energy into fewer humans as we have these past three weeks. It is not as if my normal life is spread over an expansive array of humans and activities, particularly during pandemic time. But this time away has narrowed my world ever farther. And because of the intensity radiating within this house of 8 people and two dogs, it has felt like nearly all of my non-work attention is centered here, like the other relationships and activities in my life are on pause. It gives me this ambient sense that I am slipping on other aspects of my life, that there are things I should be doing and am not. (To draw on your metaphor, I have many, many tabs open, but right now, I’m only focused on one!) I am comfortable knowing my deep dive into this particular slice of my life, with these particular human beings, to the neglect of other things I care about, is temporary. This experience is like a month-long writing retreat in the woods, just minus the writing. (And minus the reading; I naively packed three books, and I believe I may have read a grand total of two chapters during these last 21 days.)
Instead, I guess I should characterize it as a friendship retreat—like sleepaway camp for two families. It warms me to think about the imprint this will leave on all of us, including the littles. Every night at bedtime our friend here asks his 3 year old son who his best friend is, and he always says his 5 year old sister. This week, he added Jonah and Simon to that list. If we spent this much time with only a handful of other people permanently, day in and day out, I think it might become similar to spending too much time on a creative work—eventually, when you edit and rewrite and tinker too long, the story sours and becomes overwrought. But a good, sustained burst of time spent is valuable, like the immersive periods of creativity we have discussed in letters past. The way I see it, this experience has been a deliberate investment on relationships I care about deeply, a way of living out my priorities.
Here I am again, as ever, summing it up. This reminds me of something that someone told me recently, that I am “unusually obsessed with finding meaning in things.” This intrigues me! It surely is true, and I cannot imagine not looking for purpose in all that I do, not in some grand universal sense, just in the sense of wanting to know that I am spending my days/hours/minutes in ways that mean something to me.
It can be so fascinating to hear what others perceive of us. Not being in our heads necessarily means there is much they don’t know, but it also means there is much they can see without the fog of self-delusions, neuroses, and biases we all carry about ourselves. Way back in our letter adolescence (week 88!), you said something about me that I still think about regularly and that perhaps has changed my entire perspective on who/how I am, like that ah-ha click that comes with a perceptual shift when viewing an ambiguous image. I had described myself as malleable, my evidence being that I am deeply affected and interconnected with people around me. You pointed out that [m]alleability is one way to think about it, and you went on to say: I wonder if there are other ways to describe this quality of yours: you are perceptive, you find things in people to appreciate deeply, you want the people you know and love to know and love each other, because you see the good and interesting things in each of them. You described me as having a strong core of integrity with perhaps a more gooey (my word, I have candy on the brain) exterior.
What a generous and beautiful way of understanding who/how I am! Thank you for this gift. I can now recognize that while I rarely suffer from the failure of imagination that is overconfidence, I do very much know who I am and what I believe. And my so-called malleability is rooted in me wanting to listen to people’s stories, understand who they are and what they are thinking, to absorb some nuggets from them to learn more about myself and the world.
I am very much looking forward to finally catching up with you by phone next week after I return home. Your friendship is one of many things I feel I have neglected these past few weeks, and I am anxious to pick back up where we left off. Thank goodness we always have the steady drumbeat of our letters to keep us connected even during these busy patches. I am hoping that all is well with your father once again, and you are back to enjoying your wintry runs. On that note, I’m going to head out myself for a brief run up and down the hills outside. The weather finally turned here last weekend, and we have enjoyed several days of sunshine. Today it is gray again, but gray and 55 degrees is fine by me!
Wishing you a fun and relaxing weekend ahead, my friend.
Yours,
Sarah
Friday February 26 2021
Dear Sarah,
First of all: I, too, noticed that our website font changed! But now it seems back to normal? I thought it perhaps had something to do with all my new tech; I thought maybe my monitor (?) or my new phone (?) somehow weren’t properly showcasing our website’s highly advanced visuals. But maybe it was an error that had nothing to do with either of us, because we seem to be back in action with our usual fonts. Onward!
Last week you blinked twice and I am feeling the tiniest bit guilty for not officially sweeping in and airlifting you out! I hope you are doing all right, and that your letter waiting in my inbox is not just a series of vigorous blinks. I am very curious to read your letter this week, because after last week’s letter (and the weeks prior, even) I feel like you may have many stories to tell… how many of them may make their way into your letter this week, and how many will you decide are already in the past, not to be unearthed? I wonder what’s on your mind these days!
This week I really am starting to get out from under the pile of February, and I’m hopeful that I might have some quiet-ish weeks ahead. I have been spending time these last few days at the Printed Matter Virtual Art Book Fair, which has been quite enjoyable. They seem to have spent a lot of time and energy building out a solid online infrastructure to recreate the feeling of browsing all the booths one might see (and more!) at the typical book fair, the feel of happening upon publishers and artists and makers from across the US and around the world. I was just coveting some books from Estonia, though the shipping may be a bit prohibitive, but technically I would usually be shipping myself to one of these events in either New York or LA, so perhaps it’s not a big deal to ship something from Estonia? I’ve been enjoying the low-key no-pressure version of perusing books at a virtual booth, putting my digital fingers on all the books and gently raking my thumbs across their pages.
I went to a book fair conversation yesterday between Dayanita Singh and Anshika Varma (Anshika runs Offset Projects) and it has given me so much to think about. A few ideas still percolating in my mind: assembling maquettes of books in order to review a set of materials in book form, to see what you are working with, without precisely committing to the idea of the book in your hand as becoming a finished book; the idea of working through and beyond your raw materials, really thinking about how you want to interpret raw material rather than leaving it to someone else to interpret it for you (I’ve dreamt of leaving my archive to someone else to figure out, but this made me want to try to figure it out myself again!); and along those lines, the idea that you cede authorship when you hand over material for someone else to work with. Dayanita made a comparison: you can’t be a chef by putting out a bunch of veggies on the table, no matter how fresh and gorgeous they might be — though she noted that you might be able to get away with that once or twice as a conceptual project — you have to turn those veggies into something else. There was much more in the talk that I’m still steeping on, and it’s given me a lot of ideas for how to reinvigorate some nascent personal projects that I’ve had simmering on distant burners for ages now. Nice to think about moving those projects right to the front of the stove, just as I also spill out of my busy days into a bit more free time! (Bonus Dayanita Singh content: this documentation of a drawing session focused on designing a garment to house an exhibition. Now I am very curious about all these other drawing sessions that were part of the 2018 Carnegie International! The internet is rich with possibilities and projects and documentation of all kinds!)
I appreciated Simon’s woe last week about the fact that for his entire life he would never again go to that house where you had been staying. He probably speaks the truth. It can be hard to part with places when you know you’re not likely to return; it becomes a bit easier to bear when you’ve got some years under your belt and you’ve been to new place after new place and you know there will always be new places as well as old places to fill those spots in the soul that yearn for some of each. It’s also hard to leave a place without a proper goodbye! Hard to rush out in a flurry and leave your moments-in-progress behind. But something tells me he is probably feeling settled and happy in your new digs this week.
M and I started watching Star Trek: The Next Generation from the beginning this week, and it also sparked in me a desire to watch old episodes of MacGyver (which I only specify as old because in searching for MacGyver I learned that there is also a new MacGyver, in which I have no interest). Did you ever watch MacGyver? M is not very familiar with it and I feel like it was very much a part of my television experience growing up. I might see if we can watch a couple of episodes this weekend. My mother always liked MacGyver because he didn’t kill the bad guys, he just knocked them out or otherwise stunned them; I seem to recall he didn’t like doing even that. Those were different times in the world of action TV!
To address your question from a couple of weeks ago regarding the transition from Dry January into New-Regular February, I’d say I’ve generally been restricting my beverages to the wide weekend, which I am here defining as Thursday through Sunday — though I think I am not necessarily drinking every night of the weekend, and though this week I celebrated the meeting of a fairly strenuous deadline on Tuesday with red wine, and have since been enjoying red wine in the evenings this week. I suppose the rhythms will fluctuate a bit!
I hope you are cozy and settling into a relaxing weekend ahead! Looking forward to eventually catching up with you this coming week after a lengthy hiatus! Happy Friday, my friend!
Until soon,
Eva