On saturated days, encoding the private self, and charms in our pockets
February 23, 2024
Dear Eva,
I must confess – your spectacularly long letter last week has given me a subtle feeling of indebtedness. It makes me think of a delightful law professor I had who was obsessed with the behavioral dynamics of gift-giving and receiving. He would always say, “a gift is a hostile gesture,” because it created a social debt for the receiver. No, I do not consider your letter a hostile gesture! But I do feel the need to preemptively apologize for what is surely going to be an inadequate response to your lovely collection of words. This may even be an especially wee one. Compounding interest on these debts of mine!
There is very little that is more loathsome (and dull) than talking about being busy so I’ll spare you my excuses. But I will say that I am doing some pondering on how to break the cycle I am in, where my days feel saturated. It probably involves cinching the ole’ belt around Work TIme, making it feel squeezed even if that means it’s uncomfortable (in the form of not satisfying those vying for my attention). This letter writing time does exactly that, and for that I thank you. Here I am on a Friday, closing my work laptop and opening my personal one, and then letting my mind wander into a very different space. You are right; this go at the letters is not a Project. It is a practice, or maybe a conjuring.
Perhaps related, I wanted to tell you a little about my experience so far in poetry class. There has been one assignment so far, a short poem inspired by an object of our choosing. After powering my way through some serious blank page stuckness to start, I wholeheartedly enjoyed the process of poking around at words and experimenting with ways language could be used to evoke the unspoken. The work I submitted was raw dough, but I felt satisfied knowing I did a thing and flexed a muscle that I may never have used quite like that before.
Poems are mysterious to me. For so much of my life, they felt like a secret that others were keeping, one I did not understand or even really try to know. Over the past couple of years I have started to read and listen to more poetry, and I still feel outside of them. But I can now savor the exercise of rolling words around in my mouth even when the meaning feels inaccessible. And every once in a while, I stumble upon a poem that feels like magic because it holds some feeling within my body that I did not know was there until I read the words.
So far, each time I have spent some meaningful amount of time on the classwork, I finish feeling full. It nourishes. Such a contrast to the goodness I feel after some validation or sense of accomplishment at work, which evaporates almost immediately. Maybe work is the cotton candy of pursuits, and poetry is the dense, dynamite-like nutbar!
It is thrilling to know this option is available to me anytime. Add that to the now-overflowing bucket of activities I can always draw from and feel alive. As a young adult, I used to agonize about not knowing what I even wanted to do with my time. That kind of loneliness is completely absent in my life now.
Poems, letters – so many charms in my pocket that I can use to break my own everyday life trance.
The time in the day has come where I must exit my office! Little boy bellies are likely getting hungry, and I still plan to zip over to the gym before we partake in pizza night. I hope you are heading into a wonderful weekend, and I look forward to reading your words this evening as soon as I have a quiet moment.
Until soon,
Sarah
Thursday 2/22 and Friday February 23 2024
Dear Sarah,
Lately, while I’m on sabbatical and not yet pressed for money (though such a time will certainly come), I am pondering if there are ways to turn what I have written (thinking about my daily documents, which house a vast majority of the writing I do on a given day) into an income source. (It is Friday late afternoon and I wrote those words yesterday — and now somehow I want to wave my hand at my yesterday self — stop channeling the capitalist urge to monetize everything! — but I was being practical — is there some way to make money from what I am already doing, with little to no modification to my practices?) I am not doing it for the money but I will eventually need money. Lotto time?
Something is different with the letters this time around, wouldn’t you say? Not bad or good, simply different. I am going to try to put a finger on it. Each one of us has inevitably changed with the intervening years — you and I haven’t talked on the phone now in a few weeks — we’ve funneled our conversation onto the page, written, public — and interestingly, not to tease, I find that there are things I want, and perhaps need, to tell you that I cannot put on the page here — some of the most personal stories, actively unfolding, things happening in my life and in the lives of those people with whom I am intertwined. Perhaps these pages have more clearly allowed me to get in touch with all the things I have to say, some of which are immediately available for this form of sharing that is both intimate and public. I think there was a time when I was only saying or writing things that could potentially be delivered publicly. Even as I am not a celebrity or a person known to the world — I was saying and writing things at a distance from myself, things that could exist publicly without penetrating or disrupting my private self, my private shield. While there are things I cannot put in these letters in their most raw and immediate form, I would say those things to you, and I would also consider sharing them more publicly once I’ve run them through something like a filter, encoding them — this means that, here means there, this person is that person — the encoding that fictionalizes — fiction representing the real and the unreal all at once.
You and I have grown and changed — we are testing the letters in a new way — what are they for? — perhaps they have a different purpose now than they had for us then. When we know that they have a power, what kind of power are we each seeking to wield in our lives right now? I may be echoing some of my words from last week’s letter to you. I am seeking the power of intentionality, and the power of a shape, a structure, a container, a rhythm — the letters are all of these things. In my own writing projects I am ever searching for a container — I think the answer is that I am the container, and simultaneously that I must make my own container, as we made the container of the letters. The page is forever a container, and a chapter is a container, and the space between two book covers is a container, and the space between two hands is a container, and the space between two ears is a container, and the space between four eyes is a container, and the space between two bodies is a container.
I have felt and am feeling a great serenity during my sabbatical — it is a time to dream and to rest. The future awaits; perhaps work awaits; but as you once taught me in another context, it’s not time to think about that just yet.
I am re-reading your letter from last week and thinking about your shifting spirit on the concept of making an open-ended commitment with these letters — each of us has been feeling our way through what a commitment means to us. Sometimes we need more assurance and sometimes we need less. You said of your prior week’s letter, "I think that is maybe what I was getting at last week when I said knowing whether we were committed to this could help me stay motivated to push through when it became inconvenient." — and I thought about the possibility of us staying committed week by week, or daily — and you came to the same conclusion: "Maybe it is enough to just be committed to each letter, being here while I am here, fully open to whatever comes." There is something about committing on a shorter timescale that feels to me more expansive, in a way — I think because it feels more honest. It’s one thing to say we’re going to write to each other for X amount of weeks and then to stick to that no matter what we’re feeling along the way — it is a certain kind of commitment, to be sure — but it is another thing to write a letter each week, and to think about how it feels, and to think about whether we want to do it again next week, and to recommit with each action we take. I feel myself again using the letters as a proxy for how I am thinking about relationships these days!
An element from your letter last week that I cannot let go uncommented: the kids’ horror dentist game! This sounds amazing and I need to know more, though perhaps I can envision a number of possible versions of horror dentist just fine on my own. I think there are a fair number of people out there in the world who may be living Horror Dentist as a non-game in their life, and I am glad your kids and their friends are having fun with it. I hope no one yet has had a real horror dentist experience of their own!
I am also thinking about sweet S, feeling all his feelings and sharing them — in addition to the delightful experience of witnessing another person coming into the full complexity of their emotions, this feels to me like a testament (among many!) to the beautiful safe space you and B as parents have created for your children. I also found myself thinking again of S and the separate story of his experience of holding two contradictory feelings at once, a chapter in his life coming to a close — I am thinking about how the chapter is on its way to a close by virtue of two choices or feelings being on the table — even if S chose to stay exactly where he was, he would have already had the thoughts that had created a shift in how he was perceiving that experience. When we begin to imagine change, some part of us has already begun to take steps along that new path.
You mentioned at the close of your letter (I’m going to paraphrase your words here, so if it’s not quite what you felt you meant, know that I know that I may be taking liberties!) that when you see the itchy spirit of change emerging in yourself, you "sometimes see it as contemptible dissatisfaction." I am pondering your words and have also been pondering the concepts of satisfaction and dissatisfaction more generally — I won’t go deep here at this time — but I find myself pushing against any version of the "shoulds" — one should do X, one should be happy with what one has, one shouldn’t try to push further, one should be satisfied — I don’t buy it, and yet I want to think and write more about what purpose dissatisfaction serves, for me and perhaps for all of us. More to come!
I can’t wait to hear how your poetry class is going, perhaps in your letter or in your own spoken words soon enough! Much love to you and happy Friday!
Until soon, yours,
Eva