On documenting the fragments, the working side of the imagination coin, and a solidarity with poets
June 21, 2019
Dear Eva,
Last week, you wrote about how our process in these letters of documenting a fragment of life here and a little nub of a thought there might help us hold onto bits that might otherwise evaporate. It’s very true. I have a folder online where I occasionally think to drop in notes about specific things the boys have said, or ways they are mispronouncing words at a given time. It’s that specificity that can so easily get lost with time, when things start to get more abstract in our memories, as if I am looking back at a distant horizon through a foggy window and the only thing I can make out is the bright sunshine.
Last night I had one of those little fragments of life that I want to document so it isn’t lost in the gloss. When Bill got home from work around quittin’ time (5:30) like he always does, I was prone on the couch while the boys “played pirate” upstairs with lightsabers and miscellaneous costume parts. I suggested we might go to a local winery for the family-friendly summer concert series on a whim — the weather was bizarrely divine, and we had no plans or groceries for dinner anyway. Bill and I waffled; it would be easier to scrounge for food at home rather than venturing out. (There would be bugs! crowds! allergens!) But when the boys came down and heard us discussing, Simon saved the day. He declared he wanted to go to the concert and play outside. We listened.
We were only there for about 90 minutes. We sat on a blanket in the grass, surrounded by hundreds of happy strangers listening to a popular local band play familiar cover songs. We ate pizza from a food truck, Simon jumped on me and toppled my beer all over me so it looked like I peed my pants, the boys ran around under the shade of big old trees, they ate drippy ice cream that left a soul patch of chocolate on each of their faces, they joined a cornhole game with older kids and ended up hitting a stranger in the line of fire with a beanbag. We walked to the car holding hands with the boys, summer filling our veins.
After we got home and got the boys down for sleep, I took a walk with the dog as the sun set. I thought about how alive I felt, how blissful our little family evening had been, and then, how precarious it all is. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? At a different point in my life, that kind of thinking might have soured the moment for me. I suppose it’s the kind of thinking that Jericho Brown says is the reason people stop talking to him on airplanes when he tells them he is a poet.
“Because people intuitively or instinctively, people know, ‘Oh, you’re dangerous. You’re hugely problematic. You’re asking yourself questions that I’ve been avoiding my whole life, and you think that’s a good time.’”
I am not a poet (though as you have assured me, it’s not too late). But I feel some mystical solidarity with poets, with anyone who asks questions the rest of humanity is doing everything to avoid.
What if today is it?
Am I living in a way that respects the fragility of all that we have?
Am I doing my part?
I may not [yet!] be a poet, but I can look at these questions and hold my gaze. That’s progress.
Your friend,
Sarah
Friday June 21 2019
Dear Sarah,
Happy Friday! And happy first day of summer! I’m looking at the notes I made for this week’s later, jotted while on a plane back to Minneapolis from Royal Oak, Michigan, where I spent the week checking in on family. I have notes and a window of time and I’m in a coffee shop to write before heading out on a celebratory belated birthday dinner for M, which will double as a solstice celebration on a Friday evening. I’m glad to be home, and mildly surprised that it felt like home when I got off the plane in Minneapolis.
I’ve been thinking about your most recent letter, and the power of imagination in envisioning that which hovers just beyond what we already know and have seen. It is both terrifying and exciting to think about how our stories of self, the stories we tell ourselves and others about ourselves, do make a difference in how those stories play out. It’s interesting to try to get my head around: I’m thinking about the difference between inventing a story about oneself completely, something perhaps improbable (though who is really to say what’s improbable?) and inventing a story just far enough away in the middle distance that it is just barely possible, something to reach for. I’m thinking also of the ways our stories swirl on like a cloud after we’re no longer speaking them — I tell a story of you to another person and your story has leapfrogged on beyond you.
I’m also thinking about imagination as another of the many muscles we’ve talked about building up over time — it can take a lot of small aggregated moments to imagine things differently. Or, maybe I mean that it takes many small aggregated moments not just to imagine something different, but to tip it over from imagination into reality. I suppose some people are born with well-tuned imaginations — perhaps we all are? — but then what happens? Some fair number of us use our imaginations every day in work and life. But I also have this ongoing sense of a “business before pleasure” mindset among many — with imagination somehow feeling like it falls into a pleasure space. Is this my lingering sense of what it means to have a Puritan work ethic? Is it capitalism? Imagination is so important and yet it can feel luxurious, like an extra, something we shave out of our lives and children’s lives in favor of what is known to move us ahead in certain ways — school and testable skills lead to more school, more tests, jobs that point to other jobs, careers, money, retirement.
A question running through my mind: what do you think about the relationship between imagination and curiosity? Are they the same? Is curiosity the working side of the imagination coin? Imagination sounds like something you have or don’t have — ”she’s got a great imagination” — I think of it a bit like a stand-in for the idea of talent. Curiosity also strikes me as something you have or don’t have — I’ve met people who I’ve found to be surprisingly incurious about the world and people around them — but being curious seems more like a way to be, a path to follow. To be curious is to have the whole world open up to you. Curiosity: a strong desire to know or learn something. Imagination: the faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses. Is the difference between what exists and what does not?
While imagination may carry with it this sense of being a yes-or-no — you’ve got it or you don’t — imagination will let you invent X — perhaps curiosity draws you along toward the things you can’t quite imagine (yet)? Where, then, does curiosity come from? I could follow this meta-path on and on. I’m feeling a bit speculative this week — I’ll keep thinking and come around next time perhaps with a solidified sense of what I’m getting at. Sometimes our letters feel like I’m padding around inside a great cave, feeling the walls and talking with you about what I find, so we can understand it together. Thank you for being a fellow explorer!
Until next week!
Yours,
Eva