On reinventing ourselves for the fall, who tends to our wounds, and criss-crossing in our evolutions
May 10, 2024
Dear Eva,
I am especially looking forward to writing this letter because it is a chance to begin to work through all that has been swirling around in my brain since I opened up the Google document with the samples of your work. I said it before, but I’ll say it again – thank you so much for sharing it with me! I feel honored to be given the opportunity to read and spend time with it. And I am ever-grateful that it is happening now while you are still alive and well! (Your reaction to your friend’s “normal idea” that you just share your work now rather than waiting until you die made me laugh out loud. It is always a bit dismaying when someone points out something to us that is both obvious and wholly new to us.)
I have not yet had a chance to go back to the work after that first series of dips into it earlier this week. And yet I have found that I CANNOT STOP THINKING ABOUT IT. Even that night after reading and emailing you, my mind was popping all night. This is the mark of good art, my friend! There is a certain kind of life force in the writing, like it is pulsating and buzzing with raw aliveness. I have never seen anything like it. What came to mind is the image of skin layers, this work sitting as close to the bone as one can get. Your writing as hypodermis, not even technically skin but something that sits below the skin, connected to the muscle tissue. It was like being inside your experience and it was wonderfully disorienting to read.
There are so many things this raises for me. What does it mean to share that layer of yourself with someone? It makes me think of my father, who regularly marvels at couples who meet later in life. (He and my mom have known each other since birth.) How do you ever really know the person, he will say. Getting a glimpse into this layer of your psyche made me think about how you can never really know all of someone, can never really even know all of ourselves.
You wrote last week that you don’t necessarily see this writing as a thing. I do, but of course this is shaped by the fact that I was introduced to it as a thing. It is, in fact, a thing that has caused within me a multi-day experience of processing, and I am only just getting started on it. I can already see a novella within it – flashes of these excerpts full of almost frenetic energy and self-questioning and visceral feelings. I do not know the term for what this is in filmmaking but I kept thinking of it as the written equivalent to a brief choppy interlude where you see a series of vivid scenes that you do not understand but that stick on you like sap. In my mind’s eye, those scenes have audio that is almost music but not; something that hums. I can recall the vague memory of these types of scenes but I cannot quite place a movie or show where I have seen them. Maybe Memento? In any case, to preserve that effect, I think there is value in keeping some sense of the text chunks as they are – jumping from one thing to another, zigging and zagging without warning or cohesion just like a brain does (or at least as my brain does; that experience felt very familiar to me as I read it). I guess I just love the idea of writing that causes an experience like this does, and I would hate for that to be edited away.
I posed a question above that I want to circle back to: what does it mean to share that layer of yourself with someone? This is an unanswerable question, but one of the things it brought up for me is the way in which everything we choose to share about ourselves affects our relationships with other people. There are things we share with someone that make us closer. (Like you sharing this writing with me!) There are things we share with someone that push us a little farther apart. Same goes for the idea of sharing parts of ourselves with a wider circle, even the public. Everything we share has consequences, especially on our connections to other people.
This got me thinking about how we have so few examples in public life of people who are living deeply and who are opting for privacy. I suppose this is by definition. Most people are not living in public life unless their ambitions led them there in some way and/or they chose to share some aspect of their lives through art or otherwise. I am thankful that so many artists of all types choose to share themselves with the world. And yet I am also increasingly firm in my desire to keep things close to the vest. Is this a way in which we have criss-crossed in our evolutions? A decade ago I was writing blog posts on Medium that included photos and personal bits that I had not even shared with most of the people in my life that I love. These days, I find myself more cautious even about these letters, even as careful as I am about what I put in them. Meanwhile, you have gone from cutting and pasting final letter drafts so I can only see the final product to someone who says, I am not actually scared by the idea of sharing my writing more widely. This shall require further unpacking, but I’ll leave that for another day.
If plans had held, you would currently be sitting in my home! But alas, you are not. I am thankful we were able to quickly find another time in the near future for your visit. At this moment, I am feeling alright, but I woke up again today with a pounding sinus headache. I do think my body will thank me for deciding to take it easy this weekend, so thank YOU for your flexibility! I hope you have a great weekend despite the last-minute change in plans. I’ll be spending mine with some extra sleep and, I hope, some glorious laziness. (This brings to mind a book I want to read called Laziness Does Not Exist. Amen to that idea! Let me reframe my plans to glorious relaxation.)
Hope your buns are better!
Your friend,
Sarah
Friday May 10 2024
Dear Sarah!
I wrote some notes for this letter the other day — Tuesday? Wednesday? — and my mood today is much different (read: grumpier, or perhaps in your parlance, itchier) — but I am still going to start with those notes and see where the feelings take me!
Each time I move from city to city I have ideas as I prepare to depart that I think will be key to making the next leg of my journey successful. Maybe success in this context means pleasure in some way — what will be a thing I can do in the next new place that will feel fun and special; what is something I can look forward to. For some reason as I left San Francisco and prepared to come to Minneapolis, I felt certain that I needed a new pair of summer sneakers. I was briefly torn over whether I should acquire red sneakers or yellow sneakers — I think I decided on red, but didn’t make a purchase — and then I arrived in Minneapolis and sneakers have not been on my mind at all. But every moment of departure and transition offers the possibility of reinvention; the spark in those moments of preparation lights a little fire in my imagination about how I could be different in the next wave. Back-to-school vibes, or the summer exit equivalent — leaving school for the summer, preparing to reinvent oneself for next fall. Also, it’s not quite summer weather here in Minneapolis — it is [as I write this on either Tuesday or Wednesday of this week] more like San Francisco weather, a bit cool and breezy, damp today from an overnight rain.
Funny that in the span of two weeks I moved from planning to share my raw written material with you upon my death — to actually sharing it with you — and now your eyes have seen some of my words. It’s interesting to have shared some of those words with you. I have things right now to be writing — feelings and responses to various happenings in my life that I need to work through — and I realize that some ideas can only be spoken (first spoken?) on the page for me. There are things I want to say that I cannot bring myself to say in all their fullness to another person, and perhaps some things that never actually need to be said directly to a person, out loud, in conversation. When we have things to say, we often believe they must be said to the person whom they concern, if they concern a person, but I don’t believe that is actually always the case. The page can be an outlet for clearing one’s mind and perhaps determining what needs to make it into verbal conversation.
It’s Friday and I’m here in Minneapolis. I would have liked to be en route to see you today — and at the same time I am a little bit glad to have some quiet time. I had a strange Thursday. I had a dermatologist appointment that went fine but they did take a small biopsy — a bump with a freckle — now a divot in my left forearm of about a quarter inch in diameter. This feels routine for me; I expect the doctor to find something suspicious on my skin every time I visit. One time she removed a spot on my back that was impossible to reach on my own, so M had to help me treat it after my showers, coating it in a protective ointment and bandaging it for me. (What is a person supposed to do if they have a spot removed on their back and no one to help them tend to it? Perhaps we have to broaden our understanding of who we could ask to tend a wound on our back, or to tend our wounds more generally.) After the appointment and a walk to one of my favorite cafes for a Turkish bagel lunch, I caught two buses to make my way back to where I’m staying. On one bus, maybe the second, I bonked my knee so impossibly hard as I was getting into my seat that I felt like vomiting. Later in the day my knee was still sore and it hurt to walk down stairs. When I told my friend B about these two happenings, she said You got dinged up today! And in a way, it has been that kind of week. Dings here and there. Physical dings, spiritual dings, work-related dings.
In your letter last week you wrote about S and his level of exuberance and unwavering belief in the goodness of everything, and your ache about witnessing the ephemeral innocence of kids, your kids, getting older. You asked whether any of it resonates with me; it does! I wonder if there is something that is both about seeing it happening in front of you — and the way it might also be a subconscious reflection of one’s own childhood loss of innocence, the change that we each go through in transitioning from childhood to adulthood. We know we change — we know we are now adults — and then perhaps there is a particularly poignant and painful layer about seeing it play out right in front of us — it is happening to your kids but perhaps it is also like a replay of what once happened to you. Perhaps it’s somehow a new way of perceiving your own loss of innocence and inevitable mortality (spoilers!). Maybe it also gives you some new layers of connection with your own parents, who once saw you growing from a child into an adult. The passage of time is relentless! I’m glad that S has been brandishing his rib-cage six-pack to keep us all in our more youthful spirits!
Even though I’m not making my way down to the Moines today, I will still have access to a car for the weekend, and I am very excited. I might figure out a local-ish roadtrip or two. Duluth? We’ll see!
Happy Friday to you! I hope you’re feeling much better and getting ready for a relaxing and restorative weekend! See you soon and talk with you sooner!
Until soon, yours,
Eva