On a single domino mysteriously placed, the image that you cannot see, and how the rocks do not know what they are making
Saturday, July 27, 2024
Dear Eva,
It’s Saturday again! I wonder if these two weeks of missed [arbitrary] deadlines signal that we are starting to wind down toward another hiatus of this project? That sounds like a leading question, but I do not yet have an inkling either way and ask it with genuine curiosity. I love these letters, and I also love the fact that having experienced one closure-turned-pause in the project has made the possibility of ending once again feel much lighter and low stakes. It feels similar in some ways to having experienced a major conflict in a relationship. Once you have made it through a significant disagreement or shared hurt with another human, there is a comfort that settles in because there is evidence that the connection is sturdy. The 2021 ending of the letters was not a conflict, but it was a divergence of expectations that involved uncertain and untethered terrain in our friendship. We made it through! And we made it through while being honest with each other, which was somewhat new for both of us.
This week I wrote down a page of notes early in the week in preparation for the letter, so I was on track for a timely one. Yet here I am, writing to you at 5 pm on a Saturday! I am not sure precisely how that happened, but I have a few clues. One is that it’s been a week of shuffling for me — first I drove B and his friends to western Iowa for RAGBRAI, then I drove J to sleepaway camp, then S and I managed two days together with minimal childcare and full-time work, and then I unexpectedly drove to get the bike riders after their ride was cut short for health reasons (everyone is fine). I could go on, but the point is that I have been scrambling to and fro and it’s getting to me. Last night, while I helped pick up a house-wide mess made during S’s Friday evening playdate, I started to get a little overwhelmed. When I get that way, every little thing starts to seem like a burden, whether it is a single domino mysteriously placed on the counter near the stash of vinyl records or the prospect of waking up early on a Saturday to drive back to sleepaway camp for pickup. Sometimes it all feels like a lot. I have been mostly resisting the urge to purge physical clutter, which has often been my go-to balm in these moods. I did gather a couple of stacks of books I plan to re-home, but I have otherwise stuck to reorganizing this afternoon. I have also made lists. None of this is yet making me feel better. I can remove and reorganize but life will not feel more spacious until I stop adding in the new. This concept applies to consumption, of course, but it’s mostly just books where I am guilty of over-buying. Where I really need to tamp it down is on my commitments. The funny part is, most of those commitments are to myself. When I consider the main unaccomplished todos that are weighing on me lately, they are all things I assigned myself: a book to commemorate our Australia trip, letters for my niece and nephew to celebrate their going away to college, more. I know this is a letter exchange and not an advice column, but I feel myself wanting to just ask, what do I do about this, Eva?? Help!
In other news, last night, while meditating, I felt a tiny bump on the back of my head. I then looked down at my finger and, to my horror, I saw a tick on my fingertip. I immediately flung it across the room and called out to B to come see if the little fucker was indeed a tick, hoping it will all turn out to be a misunderstanding. I have never had a tick! I am very sorry to say that the internet confirmed that the bug was a tick and then B proceeded to find two red bumps on my scalp that are likely bites. What the actual fuck, Eva? I have not been anywhere this week except my home and my car, shuffling across the state. We are wondering if B is the culprit, maybe bringing it home in the camping gear? Needless to say, this was a real kick in the pants. I refuse to search for info online, lest I get caught up in a Lyme disease or other worst case scenario fever dream. So far, so good.
This is a random segue, but I just noticed that my notes say, “I read fiction!” (exclamation point included in the notebook) I never responded to your writing about my possible aphantasia a few weeks back where you speculated that it might be tied to my proclivity to nonfiction. I would guess that my experience reading and imagining fictional worlds is different than yours (and perhaps most of the human race), but my imagination is still active and fertile, it just doesn’t include imagery that I can actually see. But yet I know what it looks like! I don’t understand how that works but it is the same thing that happens when I think about someone or something I know. I can’t see it per se, but I know what it looks like. Anyway, the exclamatory phrase in my notebook was also just to happily report that I have actually been reading a lot of fiction over the past year. Right now, I’m on a loose fiction-then-nonfiction alternating pattern with the books I read. It definitely feels like more of an escape to read stories, and I’m reveling in that lately.
Another random anecdote is that over the past 24 hours, I have discovered and become obsessed with Chappell Roan’s song Pink Pony Club. Do you know this song? It makes me think of you in Los Angeles, though you’re on a stage at a clown workshop rather than dancing in high heels. The image (that I cannot see, ha!) makes me happy whenever I think of it!
I hope you made it to the movie you wanted to see last night and that your weekend is long and luxurious. We are going to be making and eating bibimbap tonight. I wish you could join us!
Looking forward to reading your words soon!
Yours,
Sarah
Sunday July 21 and Thursday July 25 2024
Dear Sarah,
It’s Thursday night and I’m returning to notes I wrote on Sunday immediately after reading your letter. Today I worked for a handful of hours and was indoors all day until the early evening, when I went out for a walk to get a slice of pizza and an ice cream cone. Couldn’t help but feel that I was living the dream! Dogs pulled at their leashes as they walked past the bench where I sat with my slice. I was A Person Of Interest. The evening here is dry and lovely. I am a little sugary-headed from the ice cream but this is the perfect mood to type up my notes from last weekend.
I'm thinking about your letter and what stories are ours to tell. I have a lot of thoughts, but first I’ll say that I’m taking this as a kind of thought exercise, rather than trying to argue against your child’s very valid request and your response to that request! It just sent me off on an interesting thought process.
I’m thinking about the way that things happen to us, are amalgamated or metabolized into our being. I say that the world passing through you is your story. Or perhaps it is all in the telling. I found myself wondering if your child ever tells stories of what you said or did — though I’m not pushing hard here because an adult-child dynamic is very different from an adult-adult dynamic. I wonder if the moment of overhearing you retelling something that they had said could have been, for your child, a sort of heightening of awareness of the fact that we each become characters in each others’ lives and stories. There is something about this truth that you don’t really realize until you do. I get a little buzz of excitement, alongside some measure of disbelief, if someone says to me, I was telling a friend about something you said — the thrill of not only knowing that I extend beyond myself, but being told by another person directly that I extend beyond myself. I cannot control in every moment how I am perceived or thought about. I can’t even control in the moment how I am perceived or thought about — I might think that by controlling my actions, I am controlling how I am perceived, but that is not exactly how things work. I imagine generally we don’t want to be gossipped about, or spoken about cruelly; we don’t want to be the butt of a joke. And some of this is about spirit — I can’t imagine you would ever tell a mean-spirited story or play your children for laughs among others (though I do believe there are parents out there who are doing this). I’m glad that your child could have this conversation with you — and I am also somehow resistant to the idea that every story or retelling needs to be screened for permission. (It might also be that I just like to be contrary!)
I’m pondering the value of privacy and the fears associated with the opposite, with being exposed, which I think is at least in part the fear of being misunderstood. I’m thinking about what we keep secret or private from each other. Do we do things so differently from each other, as humans? On some granular levels, yes, definitely; on some macro levels, no, not so much. Not that to be public is inherently better — I am somehow not sure that either privacy or publicness matter that much, or matter as much as I once thought they did. It doesn’t necessarily affect my day-to-day experience of life if someone thinks they know me, unless they were to come out against me in some meaningful way. The word blackballing is coming to mind, even though I don’t think there is any situation of which I’m currently a part from which I could logically be blackballed. But who knows what is to come! (I hope I am not drawing the blackball down upon myself. Look away!) I believe that I am always more than what someone knows of me. I might say I am wary of being judged on limited information, a sliver — a sliver is not the whole, but I cannot stop people from judging — and when I hear a sliver about someone else, I can recognize when it is a sliver, I can sense that there is more going on. A person telling a story or gossipping is also delivering information about themselves, delivering information about the reliability of the source. However, when all is said and done, I am essentially still a very private person, so my testing ground for this thought process may be falsely comfortable.
I have been thinking and rethinking how I feel about my hypodermis writing, and thinking on how to make it public, or to develop some slice of it into a more public form — it is an interesting challenge to think about putting it in print and letting it be out in the world in a perpetually accessible way. On the one hand I'm open and willing to share a lot — and on the other I'm trying to acknowledge my own sense of sometimes taking a leap without fully thinking through all the consequences. I do tend to do a lot of advance thinking about the actions I take (sometimes painfully so). But sometimes not enough! I’m also acknowledging for myself something in conjunction with how I hate finishing projects: sometimes I have a tendency to just release something before it's quite done, just in order to be done, to move on. I see it in how I have worked professionally over the years. I am often excited on the front end to start a project and to think creatively about where it might go; as the project drags on (read: takes on an actual shape and final direction that requires refining and finessing in order to become its best self) I want badly to toss it away from myself, be rid of it, call my time with it done, whether I am actually done or not. I can see the pattern behind me — deadlines where I sort of dumped everything that I had at that moment into any available container, and called it finished — and usually these things are still good enough — sometimes overly wordy, but that’s the price I pay for hating to finish (read: to edit). I am working on changing the pattern going forward, or at least acknowledging that it is my pattern, but it is still hard, when all I want is to never think about an old (read: current, but aging) project again, and to simply start the next new thing. With my own writing I want to give it its due at every stage of the process, not just the beginning. I’m not sure yet that those words are actually true for me, but I am going to see if I can make them true.
Thinking about the new projects you described in your letter, and following from my own thoughts above — I love the idea and the process of making something without having an idea of the final form it will take. I love your construction of open-ended documents for the kids and yourself, containers that you will fill. I love writing and making by accumulation — I am thinking of rock formations, built up over many years, falling or moving water shaping them into interesting forms — the rocks do not know what they are making, the water does not know what it is making, and our human eyes find variation and interest and beauty around every turn.
Lately, in my own work, I am slightly impatient with myself and my process, or I am eager to begin more clearly charting my way toward a final form. I want badly to remove myself from the world of work, of capitalism, of the need to monetize. I want to spend endless time with my writing without needing it to make money, but I would also like it if it could make money and thus free me from other forms of work. So few of us are free from the concerns of capitalism — and as you and I have spoken and written about along the way, the only way to be free from money concerns is to have money. Curses!
Unrelated to all of the above, I did a weird thing that I want to tell you about. On the piece of paper where I made these notes for my letter to you, I have taped a single thread of hair — a silver hair pinned under a lilac-colored piece of washi tape. The other day I ran my hand through my hair as I do from time to time. When I pulled my hand away, I was holding a single silver hair, one of the secrets my head of hair has been keeping for me. It felt a little different, its texture less smooth. I saved it, folded it into a loop, taped it to my page with a square centimeter of tape. Now I keep seeing it among my papers, and I am inclined to brush it away, and then I remember why it’s there. Its presence among my pages is my doing.
We’ve spoken outside of these letters but I want to make sure to note for the record: I am so thrilled for your new turn in your career, and your enviable slow-clap out the door! It is delicious to depart. I cannot wait to see where this new chapter takes you! Onward!
Until soon, yours,
Eva