On witching-hour walks, weekly compositions, and joyful declarations
December 18, 2019
Dear Eva,
Almost right after posting our letters last week, I had the impulse to retract or edit or maybe just apologize for my letter, which I felt was a bit mushier than I prefer. Rather than indulging my impulse, I have looked at it, examined it from a few different angles. By Sunday, I decided the urge to make excuses for an imperfect letter was a little like making excuses for an imperfect self—that is, not something I want to do. Sometimes you get the best me and sometimes you don’t! Such is life / friendship.
This project of weekly letters has so many fascinating layers, one of which is how it combines the best of the practice of regular writing (learning what I think) with the best of the practice of consistent correspondence with a dear friend (a deep, sustained connection) with the best of the practice of thoughtful public performance (documented, semi-permanent self-definition). It strikes me as almost humorous how simple and obvious-seeming this transformational project is / was. Why aren’t more people starting a weekly letter correspondence in digital space? Can they not see how the cadence of rhythmic reflection and connection might enrich their lives? Should we be singing the praises of our epistolary adventure from the rooftops more loudly, perhaps at the volume at which my little Simon sings his Frozen songs?
Today, at the witching hour of about 2 PM when I have lately resorted to a second cup of coffee (a naughty new habit!), I decided to forego my previous plans of venturing to the gym and trade the treadmill for the sidewalk. I put the leash on Marlowe, and we headed out for a 45 minute jaunt in the crisp air. I remembered my experience a fortnight ago sans earbuds, so I struck out without my phone. I am so glad I did. My mind wandered as it does in zigs and zags (from existential pondering to a note to self to pack the Best Buy gift card for my brother-in-law), but by the end of the walk, I felt more centered than I had all day, maybe all week. I have been thinking so much about the ways in which our latest project of tracking and slightly summarizing the things we consume is changing me—making me aware of the ways in which I am cramming more down my throat, even while I can barely muster the ability to swallow, let alone chew. I have been settling more and more on the idea of media being like food, of our project as being a sort of brain food diary. Good god, all the empty calories I take in, with barely any awareness! My silent solo walk felt like real nourishment today. Maybe it is water in this metaphor? Calorie-free, but life-giving. Or maybe it is a version of intermittent fasting for the mind? Whatever it is, I’ll take it!
Related, but different, is the fact that I have noticed lately that I am subtly tormented by the reality that there are so many passing experiences and thoughts that evaporate before I can capture them in writing. They—you know, the writers—tell us how important it is to write things down as they come, little details in life, fleeting epiphanies. I am trying to be better about this lately. No, I am being better about this lately than I ever have been in my life. But of course I am not capturing everything. And naturally, I am focusing my attention on all that is missed, rather than all that is retained. I think this is just another, slightly perverse way of obsessing over more. We are not supposed to remember everything. (In fact, I once heard a This American Life story about life with a perfect memory, and it sounded dreadful.) For me at least, part of being truly present in a moment means just being, not always documenting / recording / scribbling notes. This means most of it will just wash over me, and this is how it must be.
Today on the walk, Marlowe and I passed a 60-something man walking two golden retrievers in the opposite direction. “Beautiful dogs,” I called out. The man looked at me, smiled, and cheerily said: “I’m good—the sun is shining!” Perhaps he assumed I would or did ask, “How are you?” Perhaps he just wanted to make a joyful declaration. Either way, it felt like the perfect bridge in my quiet, nourishing walk. It is one thing I will remember.
I hope you enjoy copious mugs of eggnog in Michigan! I wish I could see you there, but I will take solace in knowing we are ships passing in the Grand Ledge night this weekend. (And no, M, I am still not ready to give Grand Ledge credit for our friendship.)
Until next week (when I will be turning 40, hurray!),
Your friend,
Sarah
Friday December 20 2019
Dear Sarah,
I was talking to a friend this week who knew about our letter exchange, and she asked if it was still going, and I said it was. I described it as transformative, and she asked what made it transformative. I’ve used that word in describing it to another friend as well. The interesting thing about “transformative” is how much is bundled up inside that single word. It’s a tight little knot! And on both occasions when I used the word, I tried to unravel the knot in conversation. I don’t know if I conveyed it fully in my conversations (could I even?) but I’m going to try to chip away at it further here.
One of the qualities that has come to mind again and again sounds almost anticlimactic as I state it: composition. Our letters are compositions, have a sense of composition to them both in the overarching plan (a weekly exchange in which we take turns posting the letters as a unit of two after reviewing them both and plucking out some synergies or high points or eye-catching turns of phrase) and in the fact that we each compose our letter. It might seem that any letter is a composition, and perhaps it is, but our letters are different for me — they verge on becoming mini essays while they are also part of a longer dialogue (see week 2 (!) regarding monologues between friends). To compose a letter every week requires a certain kind of thought process and discipline and a muscle for threading together the week’s thoughts with reflections on the past week and the many past weeks prior. For me personally this has had a transformative effect. It’s possible that we might both call the letters transformative, and have entirely different reasons (as well as similar reasons) that they could be so. To compose something every week, and to share it with you and “the world,” means I’ve put my thoughts on paper in a way that makes sense, and that I’ve usually fairly swiftly brought something from start to finish — which can sometimes be a rarity in my creative life! So, to finish and release something every week, something that for me reaches the level of a composition, for the last year-plus, has in fact been transformative. That’s hardly the only part that’s been transformative — see week 60 and A writer and reader named Eva writes to be thoroughly read by a reader and writer named Sarah — but it’s what I’m thinking of at this moment.
On the topic of composition, I’ve been thinking of a particular piece of music that I love, Antonin Dvořák’s American Quartet. (Note: “Dvořák composed the quartet in 1893 during a summer vacation from his position as director (1892–1895) of the National Conservatory in New York City. He spent his vacation in the town of Spillville, Iowa, which was home to a Czech immigrant community.” As a Dvořák fan, I need to get to Spillville someday! Upon a bit of research, it would appear that you do not live very close to Spillville even though you and Spillville are both in Iowa. Hmm...)
As I think of these pieces I love, I think, how do these pieces come into being? As you know, I play the cello (a bit less frequently than I used to). I was-am a pretty good cellist and enjoyed performing pieces of music that existed, that someone else had written. M plays instruments too — he’ll jam on the guitar or keyboard — and in our earlier days when the cello was more an active part of my life he’d want to play together, to riff and to jam and perhaps hoped we would make things up together. I somehow cringed away from these moments at that time. Was it nervousness? Fear of making bad music? Making something up on the cello wasn’t exactly my jam.
To be a composer, you must know your notes, and your instruments, in such a close way that you can make them speak, not only receive and respond when they speak to you. You must know your notes and your instruments well enough, know the sounds they make, know that you can create something new from those sounds, draw dozens of threads together into something coherent, or at least intentionally complete in some way. While a composer has near-infinite flexibility in terms of using more instruments or fewer, in a full orchestral composition you’re working with the possibility of 20 instruments or section parts, give or take (violin, second violin, viola, cello, double bass, flute, piccolo, oboe, english horn, clarinet, bassoon, french horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, kettledrum, percussion, and other specialized instruments). Or, you have at your disposal 20 or so instruments, sound types, ways of creating notes — higher registers and lower, breathy and pointy, drawn out or plucked out, and much more — and every instrument, aside from what I might call its standard profile, is also capable of producing a range of non-standard sounds. All of these sound possibilities are yours to consider as an orchestral composer. They are your paint.
(I’ve just searched back in our letters, curious whether I’ve mentioned Dvořák’s American Quartet before, and it appears that I have not, though in May I was listening to his Symphony No. 9 and thinking about the importance of movement. I am a big Dvořák fan, and this week I felt the same way about movement — I get fidgety, anxious, irritable when I haven’t moved substantially in a period of time, and it’s harder to get moving regularly in the winter months. Yesterday morning, finding myself in the mood of stirring up old and unnecessary irritations seemingly to have something to get my blood pumping, I went out for a brisk two-and-a-quarter mile walk around Crystal Lake and found my mood much improved, and bounced through the rest of the day in high spirits.)
Of course if you have a knack for musical composition, and if you spend time learning the instruments and knowing their sounds and putting together some crummy compositions at first, eventually you may produce something that calls to be heard. I’m speaking here of orchestral compositions more than other types of musical compositions because they are familiar to me in terms of how they look on the page, but any kind of music is composed in some sense, whether together by people who are skilled in how their instruments work and sound, and how they sound together, and what makes an interesting series of sounds from beginning to end, or whether by a lone composer putting pieces together in their mind and on the page.
Perhaps the nugget of what is next for our letter journey lies in what has been transformative about this process for both of us — individually and together. I’ve thought that I wanted to export this experience in some sense for others, make it something that others can replicate — a pattern to follow for a fulfilling and transformative life experience. But that isn’t really how life works or how transformative experiences come about. Follow this set of instructions and you’ll enjoy a transformative experience!
I believe that writing is a particular path to knowledge of oneself and the world. In our letters to each other, we’re maintaining a thread (many threads!) over a long period of time. While we occasionally get into more everyday topics — perhaps all topics are everyday if we’re thinking about them every day? — our letters tend not to focus on introductory layers of conversation, on catching up. Thus the weekly letter is something different than the range of friendly communications I write in my life. You and I quickly get into the meat of things, and the meat of things is ongoing, we’re thinking and talking about it during the week and then we’re drawing it down onto the page every week.
I think we could call our letter exchange an artwork of a kind; without defining exactly what art is or could be, we’ve worked intentionally, crafted something each week, crafted conversation in collaboration with each other; we’ve pushed at the edges of what we think and why we think it, and beyond that we’ve pushed at the edges of what our larger society and culture seems to think or seems to urge us to think. We’ve made a space where we can see that it is meaningful to write, both for each of us individually and together. And we’ve shared it, even if others only dip in here and there. (I imagine this may often be the relationship of any artist to most individuals or communities who interact with their work: it would be difficult for most or many viewers of / participants with an artwork to engage with it on the level that the artist themselves has engaged in order to make the thing.) The act of composing has become meaningful for me — a container for an intention wrangled weekly from start to finish.
With that — I’m calling this letter finished, and am eager to reveal to my eyes your words that arrived in my life in a very timely fashion two (!) days ago!
Until next week!
Yours,
Eva