On absence and presence, the properties of gases, and (the reunion of) broken parts
September 26, 2019
Dear Eva,
I have a strange sense of melancholy writing my letter tonight, and I am trying to put my finger on why. I think perhaps it relates to this being the first week where I fully felt your absence from the workplace we so recently shared. You were away, so this week we didn’t even talk or text the way we usually do. I think it is good to feel change, so I’m leaning into it. But I can’t say I like the feeling. And if I am honest, I am hopeful it will feel less change-y next week when you are back in Minneapolis and we can communicate in our usual rhythms. It’s quite funny really to think about how presence can be felt, even without actual presence. Somehow, through shared IM channels dotted with conversations we both popped in and out of, unspoken knowledge that we both had similar patterns to our days dictated by workplace norms, the fact of receiving and mulling some of the same emails and problems — all of it combined to create a feeling that we were somehow together, while a couple of hundred miles apart.
There is probably something to glean in this about how humans can form bonds across geography and through digital space, but for now, I am content to just feel a bit glum about it all. Woe is me!
I do not, however, feel glum about the fact that this week marks one full year of our letter exchange! A wee creative experiment that turned grand, even if only for us. Changing two lives with one’s writing is nothing to sneeze at. (Sidenote: what a truly odd expression! Is it even possible to direct a sneeze at something if you wanted to? It strikes me as quite an involuntary human action.)
Speaking of sneezing, last week you wrote that you had expected me to tell the tale of my nose in my letter. I am not exactly sure why it didn’t make it to the page last week. It was certainly an eventful incident — enduring a two hour procedure where a doctor used a long contraption with a balloon at the end to fracture the cartilage in my sinus cavities to open up space, all while I lay there completely awake and undrugged. The first few hours after it was over, as I lay on my bed trying not to move for fear of starting another bloody nose, I kept laughing whenever I thought about just how awful it had been. Who willingly opts to go through that completely unnatural and unnerving elective procedure? Answer: me. I am finding myself chuckling about it even now. But it is over; the torture ended the moment the procedure was over. Now we wait to see if it brings me relief, or if I just went through that fun little experiment for, well, fun. Either way, no harm, no foul. I can say that now because it is over!
I am so anxious to read your words tomorrow and then to chat on our regular Monday morning call. I want to hear about your adventures in New York and Connecticut, and see how you are feeling as you officially embark on this new writing journey. Does the open space feel as glorious as it sounds to me? I am so excited for you!
Cheers, my friend, to new creative endeavors and 52 weeks of this creative endeavor.
With love,
Sarah
Thursday September 26 and Friday September 27 2019
Dear Sarah,
Here it is! Week 52! I’ve been a little bit nervous this past week, thinking about what should go into LETTER 52! The last letter in this (first?) year of our year-long epistolary experiment! (Epistolary belongs to both of us, I say, in response to your letter of last week!) I don’t think there is any way in which Letter 52 is supposed to be anything different than any other week — it’s not an academic exercise we’re engaged in, this letter isn’t supposed to bear the weight of all the letters that came before — but you and I both know Week 52 is a BIG DEAL! You were tingling about Week 51 last week! I’ve been thinking this week about how I’ll end my letter. Toying with some options here: This is the last sentence of my Week 52 letter! I thought I had more options I was toying with, but my head won’t let me get ahead of the letter itself, we’re not at the end yet, so don’t pretend you know what the last sentences will look like! I’m here at the computer, midday on a Thursday, digesting some chocolate and drinking some tea, and I’m ready to poke around in this landscape of Week 52 and see what’s hiding around the nooks and crannies of my mind.
My first letter to you last year was penciled as I settled into my new apartment in Minneapolis, after relocating from San Francisco. It was a series of first scratches on what we planned to be a year-long project, and while there was no reason to think we wouldn’t have seen it through the year, it was of course not guaranteed. We were just starting out, and our weekly letters were a thing to do together.
Now we’re coming up on one year later, and the seasons are shifting. I spent the last week with M visiting friends and family in New York and Connecticut, where it was for the most part still warm and sunny, the last bits of summer hanging over the trees whose leaves were nevertheless turning from green to yellow, orange, red. We were listening to the Phenology (Fall/Seasons) episode of Ologies on one of our drives this past week, and learned that the colors (other than green) that you see in tree leaves are there all along, even when the tree is fully green and lush. The leaves have their yellows, oranges, reds, burgundies hidden behind the screen of green chlorophyll that they use to conduct photosynthesis over the green-tree seasons. Here I am pulling from the Wikipedia page for Autumn leaf color: When abundant in the leaf's cells, as during the growing season, the chlorophyll's green color dominates and masks out the colors of any other pigments that may be present in the leaf. Thus, the leaves of summer are characteristically green. This was not something I knew! It makes sense, as much as anything makes sense. Many of the mysteries of this world are explainable (even if they haven’t been yet)!
It’s been an interesting couple of weeks since leaving my job and stepping into freelancing and making more space for writing and thinking. It’s happening! We act sometimes like there is infinite time and space for all the things we want to do: add them to the long list, we’ll get to them when we get to them, when we have free time, when we retire. I had a number of moments in this past week as we traveled where I simply felt the peace of not having work ideas jockeying to crowd back into my brain as I pushed them away during a vacation, as I would otherwise have dammed them until they could come flooding back on a Thursday or a Monday. I was just living my days. Each day could have quiet time and space for some work or some daydreaming, writing notes, letting old thoughts flow back into my field of vision to mix with newer thoughts and happenings, and to see where the connections might be. I think it’s been a rich time already and I’m both excited and nervous to have given myself the space, which also means giving myself something new to do, to put together (and follow through on) my own vision for what it looks like to make something myself. It’s not about communicating a nonprofit mission, getting my head into the imaginary head of an organization so I can write like it. It’s not about having long meetings with colleagues where we sort out next steps. It’s not (yet!) about deadlines. It’s about just thinking with myself about what I’m doing, and doing it. It is interesting to give my thoughts room to fill space. I think about my high school chemistry classes and the property of gases: that they will fill, completely, the size and shape of the container they occupy. Give a gas a small container and it fits, at a higher pressure; give a gas a large container, and it fits, at a lower pressure, with room for the molecules to move freely. Not that gas molecules have any need or want to move freely in any sized space — they simply disperse in the space they occupy — but the visual is meaningful to me. There are metaphors hiding in the things we learn.
The other day — after we last talked, in fact — I was thinking about algebra because we’d talked about the idea of a person who worked fast and endlessly because they assumed they were the main and only one focused on their work, that in order to get all the things done they would have to move as fast as possible. In reality speed is one variable in that equation — add more people to the equation and no one has to move quite as fast to get the same amount of things done, or people could work at some speed less than 100% of the previous speed, for example, and still get more done by spreading the work across more people. I got lost in the idea of algebra actually having meaning in our day to day lives — junior high and high school students’ voices ringing in my ears: When are we going to use this in our REAL LIVES? and equations suddenly seemed like the core of so many things: how we find balance, how we make choices about what is weighted differently in the finite systems of our lives. I looked up algebra to learn a little more about its etymology and I was floored: Algebra is from the Arabic “al-jabr,” literally meaning “reunion of broken parts”; the word originally referred to the surgical procedure of setting broken or dislocated bones. This labeling of a part of mathematics, from a process of putting bones back together, making something broken whole. Another gem from the Wikipedia page: Algebra gives methods for writing formulas and solving equations that are much clearer and easier than the older method of writing everything out in words. Think of mathematical equations and imagine everything written out in words. That’s kind of what we’re doing here! What would we reduce this process to, in an algebraic sense?
52 weeks x 1 letter x 2 friends x 1 year = 104 letters
~250 words x 2 letters x 52 weeks = 26,000 words
13,000 words + 13,000 words = 1 year of idea-threads pulled and woven back and forth between us
250 words x (unknown sense of which words will inspire next letter and future conversation) = ∞
I am fascinated by your letter from last week and your thoughts about the weight of words. I am particularly focused on your words here: Small, breezy words to most; big, monumental words to a few (and sometimes just to ourselves). This is very possible, that words can mean something more to one person or group than another. Does this mean that in some cases the words themselves are not enough, that the ideas intended to be conveyed haven’t yet made it fully out of the writer’s head? If you read or write something and it means something different, deeper, to you than it does to me — does it mean simply that we each bring our full individual contexts to any reading, and that a piece of writing can either “stick” or connect up with that context, or not? I’m trying to find a parallel and my first thought is the way in which dogs can hear certain high-pitched sounds that humans cannot. The sound exists — even if, as humans, we can’t hear it, it doesn’t stop existing. I think I’m wondering how possible it is for any piece of writing to encompass its ideas and intentions, as well as the amount of context required to understand those ideas and intentions as the writer saw them. I suppose this is part of the whole writing process! How much do you want to transmit not only your ideas but your contexts to a reader, and how much do you trust that when they bring their contexts they will find themselves in what you have written?
My letter is getting extraordinarily long, which I think is perhaps not fair, somehow, but… I don’t want it to end, even though I want to read your letter, even though we will write again next week! Can we stretch time? If it is possible, perhaps we’ve done it through our letters (see Week 48).
What will you write to me this week? We’ll continue next week, yet still this week is special, like New Year’s Eve, as we tip from one year to another. New Letter Year’s Eve, it is! I’m posting our letters this week — what will I call this 52nd exchange? What resonances will exist between our letters, and which will I pluck out? Am I feeling pressured? No, I am feeling excited. We’ve done something big — we’ve written these letters together, we’ve lived 52 weeks, we’ve grown a year, we’ve changed a year. We made it! And on we go!
With love,
Until next week,
Your friend,
Eva