On capitalism asking again and again, what your remembering looks like, and the seven days that lay ahead
July 5, 2024
Dear Eva,
I should state right out of the gate that this letter is likely to be a lighter one. We are in Chicago staying with friends, and I got up early this morning to write to you before we head out for a day of festivities to celebrate the birthday of one of our friends’ kids. (Highlight: dumplings in Chinatown for lunch!) This brief Chicago time is the entryway into our week-long beach vacation. It is always a good time to be with friends, but I’ve still been juggling a few work obligations so I have not yet experienced the escape I am craving. I expect the security line’s worth of time at the airport tomorrow will do the trick because I plan to leave all work commitments behind.
When my alarm went off this morning I was relieved. I had been in the middle of a classic “can’t find my notes right before the speech” stress-dream, and it felt so real! I woke up just before it was my turn to go up on stage. Thinking about it now, nearly 90 minutes after my alarm went off, I can still feel the constriction in my neck and chest.
This makes me think about Embarrassment, a minor but lovable character in Inside Out 2. On our drive on Wednesday, we listened to a podcast episode featuring two psychologists who consulted on the film. They talked about the important purpose of each of the critical emotions (characters). Embarrassment, they said, helps us smooth our relationships with others. We feel embarrassed about our actions or words or feelings, and we often do something to make that feeling go away. Sometimes it means avoiding a situation, other times it means taking some measure, like making sure to prepare enough for a speech so you don’t need your notes.
The premise of the Inside Out movies, that our emotions are characters in our brains trying to work together to help us navigate life, is brilliant at helping kids all of us understand ourselves. I thought of the movie when thinking about your dark portal from last week, too. Discomfort is always telling us something. Sometimes it is signaling AFGO, a delightful acronym I recently heard for “another fucking growth opportunity.” But many times, it is signaling a boundary violation, especially when anger is present.
I wish I had a better understanding of that purpose for anger when I was younger. Anger has always been a mysterious and distressing emotion for me, one I have not been particularly adept at navigating over my life. I’m thinking back to a letter duo from this exchange, where you and I both were flooded with outrage from a shared experience. You wrote: Nice is nice but when is being nice a form of resignation, a constant smoothing over, covering up someone else’s rough edges, bending to accept someone’s actions again and again, and why?
Whoa. This makes it clear how Embarrassment might play a role here, causing us to soften interactions in ways that sometimes violate our own sense of integrity. No wonder Anger gets involved!
It feels like eons since we spoke on Monday. I hope the week has been all right, and that you got a little bit of summery goodness yesterday for the holiday in some way. The national tradition of blowing shit up to celebrate ‘Merica was in full effect here in Chicago. Why, I say, why? At least I am not an ER doctor and only have to endure the sensory effects and nothing more!
Next week, I’ll send a dispatch from the tail end of Vacation Land, just as you are getting ready to depart the Midwest. The seven days that lay ahead will have the same number of hours and minutes for both of us, but I imagine they are very likely to feel different to the two of us. The contrasting experience of time is bewildering.
Whatever pace it takes for you, I hope you are able to successfully accomplish the packing you aspire to do and that you can find some large pockets of time for yourself!
Sending love,
Sarah
Friday July 5 2024
Dear Sarah,
I’ve been thinking about your letter from last Friday all this week, and now it is Friday evening, and I’ve slightly ambushed myself by cracking open a canned cocktail-type-beverage — immediately feeling my brain start to soften around the edges such that only the gentle cooing of the scrollable internet felt within my capacity. But no! It is letter time and I am pulling out my notes! Stay with me, brain! We are tired but we are here and we have been looking forward to writing to you for days. Days!
I was struck in your letter by your thought that you have some version of aphantasia. I have been reflecting on my own mind and my ability to “see” in my mind. I have nothing to directly compare it with; though I can see many things inside my own mind I cannot see the inside of others’ minds in my mind —
I can see places, rooms; I can traverse familiar places inside my mind. Particularly given the amount of traveling and staying in other peoples’ homes I’ve done in the past year and a half — I can see myself in any of those spaces, see myself entering front doors, climbing stairs, checking mailboxes, tracing a path from any given front door to the kitchen to the refrigerator — real spaces exist clearly inside my head — the quality of the light at different times of day, the throw pillows and the furniture and the dog bed and the cupboard that opens on the wrong side and the clawfoot tub, two clawfoot tubs, in fact, and a third —
I can sometimes see pages of text in my mind, or remember information locationally, as in, I can remember certain facts based on where and how they fall on a page of information, can see where my eyes first saw the information on the page. This might have been more a part of my life during my school years, when I would have been reading textbooks and taking tests about what I’d read and learned. I feel that perhaps I’ve described this quality to you in a letter somewhere along the way; maybe, maybe not.
As I think about your brain and my brain — I am curious about the distinction between seeing something in my mind, and remembering it or knowing it in yours — it may be that remembering, for me, is a form of seeing — or, I wonder, what is my memory if I am not seeing the thing — am I pulling up images, or are they just there? To remember is to see — I can see images of my friend V (and another friend V, for that matter, and another, each of the Vs in my life presenting themselves to be seen) — and I can see you in your bike helmet and fluorescent bike top, and S with his science kit, and J and S playing in their LEAGUE championships, and Marlowe with his head on my knee. To remember, for me, is to see an experience replayed. This form of remembering can become a little confusing when photographs enter into the mix — I have seen photographs of myself as a child that I remember clearly — but that does not mean I remember the instance in which the photo was taken, or what I was doing that prompted someone to make a photo record. What does your remembering look like? Even the question exposes my bias — your memories must look like something. I want to know more about how the knowing feels — are your memories like lists of facts about people, places, happenings? Perhaps the sounds of voices and other auditory inputs? Smell memories are different for me — I’m not sure if a smell conjures a visual for me or simply a sense of familiarity — memory as a familiarity. Perhaps this is the kind of space where our memories align — maybe my smell memories are related in a way to your knowing.
Could this possibly be a reason that you do not read much fiction? Some of the pleasure in reading fiction seems to me to be the process of forming pictures in one’s mind, pictures of characters, pictures of scenes. (You said in that letter, Why am I open to fictional stories on the screen but not on the page? Perhaps you like fiction on the screen because it comes populated with images??) (Sidenote: I am currently reading Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice for the first time, and while I have not seen the 2005 movie version starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, I have seen enough clips of the two of them from that movie that they have unfortunately populated my visual landscape as the characters I see when I read — I am trying to let them drift away a bit so that my mind can build new characters, but it is difficult once an actual face or set of faces clicks into place.) Although, on the topic of the pleasures of fiction — I think something has shifted for me in what I seek when I read fiction today. I think I am trying to meet people who I would want to know in real life in some way. The people might be the characters or they might be the writers of the fiction I read; I want to know the characters depicted on the page, I want to know the brain from which those characters emerged.
I had one other thing that stuck in my mind this past week, that I wanted to write to you about. I have been tracking my spending in a spreadsheet for the past almost-year, since mid-August. I keep the spreadsheet accessible via a little quick-access icon on my phone and I add to it on the go as I spend money. In that span of time, just about 11 months, I have just passed my 1,000th purchase. In this spreadsheet I log everything from bus tickets to rental cars to groceries to books and movies. I was thinking about your response to my email inbox — and the idea that you are drawn to Inbox Zero — perhaps every inbox is Inbox Zero when seen in the right light. I have been thinking about how contemporary technology and the nature of life today create time obligations or constraints that simply didn’t exist previously. Emails seem to demand responses. It can be so easy to send an email — the easiest thing to send off a message that seems to demand a response. If email didn’t exist — and it’s not that long ago, really, that it didn’t — you would simply not have to worry about email. That it exists now is, to me, for the most part an artificial demand on my time. Every company I’ve ever interacted with sends me a survey — How did we do? On the one hand, it sounds like good customer service to ask, to provide an opportunity and space for feedback in case it is needed or desired. But the volume of these kinds of communications — the idea of rating every purchase that I make, every experience, offering feedback — following my apples on Instagram — developing a relationship with every brand and product in my life — it is almost an embarrassing request at scale, this request of capitalism to stay close and tight in the loop. Capitalism asking again and again to go steady, to live together, its desire to absorb ever more of my time in a closed loop that feeds back into products, services, experiences. Thinking again about Mary Ruefle, who doesn’t use email. The way to have time is to be intentional about who and what receives my time. My time is a finite resource. Many things put off until the future may never get done, so I want to be wise about what I put there.
Perhaps I wanted to tie these ideas together — I track every purchase I make as part of an action that I perform for myself. In the spreadsheet that I described above, I track my spending, I manage my habits, I reflect my purchasing back to myself so I can decide if I need X thing or if I’ve already spent too much money in a given day or week and need to rein it in. I work (give time) in order to make money; when I spend money I am spending my time. The labor of tracking my spending is a tight feedback loop designed by me, for me. I have no desire to provide additional labor to any company, particularly one that is not paying me for my time. There are exceptions — I participated in a Kaiser research databank process years ago, where I submitted blood samples and filled out a series of surveys — this is interesting to me, this is part of a larger process that would seem to point back to a kind of humanitarian good.
This is a random place to end but I’ve been sipping my beverage again and it is now after 10PM Eastern! Time for me to crack open your letter that has been chilling in my inbox since quite early in this day! I hope you are arrived in your summer relaxation zone and I will see you momentarily on the page! Much love!
Until soon, yours,
Eva