On feeling otherworldly, shedding unwanted coats, and living the simultaneous future and present
January 2, 2020, January 3, 2020
Dear Eva,
Over the past few days (which somehow feel like weeks, but only in the pleasant way of having felt and noticed the time as it passed), I have felt a bit otherwordly. I am not sure how to explain this, other than to say I do not exactly feel like I typically feel. This has particularly been the case when I am with my kids, which has been much of time these past two weeks of winter vacation. So how do I feel, you ask? Calm. Silly. Contemplative. Content. Detached from the outside world somehow, like suddenly things I have been very angsty about in the past feel utterly inconsequential. I think it might be that the gradual shedding of unwanted coats is picking up its pace. Maybe this is just 40? I’d be lying if I didn’t admit there is a tiny sliver of self that is searching for a reason to question it—frantically scouring the brain for a worry, pondering whether this type of serenity is what comes before a storm. Maybe it is. But there is nothing wrong right now, and for that I am thankful. I want to log these memories—sitting by the Christmas tree in our big cozy lounge chair with Jonah reading an introduction to philosophy for kids, overhearing the boys devising an elaborate pirate game that involved theater-worthy improv (“I don’t want to leave you behind, Jonah!!”), reading haiku poems with Jonah before bed and somehow getting to laughing so hard we had tears in our eyes, hearing Simon forlornly say, “I’m going to miss you,” when I tell him I am going out to walk the dog. I have no idea what 2020 holds, but I know the first two days of it have been quite lovely. What more can I ask for?
I have been thinking so much lately about what we are creating with these letters, and how the answer to what the letters are is not static. The letters change with time—reading letters from our first few months of the project already gives those words a different sheen. The letters also change when viewed as parts of a whole—reading a single letter feels different when you know the stack from which it came. I cannot think of a creative project I have undertaken in my life that has had this much significance to me, and it is thrilling to think about how that significance is only increasing with time. Someday, I imagine people who love us will be thankful to have this archive after we are gone. It is humbling to consider how our Thursday night / Friday morning musings in our respective google docs may someday be a record of a life, a friendship—in fact, maybe they already are. It is a tad morbid, but I think fairly often about how mundane things take on completely new shape after someone dies. (I am not saying these letters are mundane!) But I think about how even a daily to-do list feels different when I happen to look back on it after a few months. It is eerie to imagine how it would feel for someone to read it after I die. Seeing “letter to Eva” as number 4 on today’s list will land differently on the reader when I am no longer around to write more letters to you. Words change shape with context. I like that thought. It helps remind me that even flat words on a page may someday mean something more. We never know how our stories will end, or how they might go on even after we are no longer there to play a part. This kind of thinking gives me the shivers, but mostly in a good way.
You wrote last week about the fatigue that comes from slipping through multiple identities, all in a compressed span of time. This happens a lot when we see people we do not see very often, particularly those from earlier periods of life. This very much resonates, but I want to eventually get to a point where I can just be one version of myself, albeit a multi-layered, messy, complicated version. I think the aforementioned shedding gets to this notion—someone may have seen me as career-driven or The Baby or ___ , but I no longer feel the need to maintain those versions of myself for them.
I have mentioned to you before about my hope to one day call myself an artist. I know you like to say I already am, but I am not quite with you on that just yet. In the kids philosophy book I read with Jonah, it said Hegel believed art makes ideas that you can see and feel. This is about the clearest definition of art I have heard. I think most of my writing over the years has been more literal—articulating thoughts, arguments, analyses as coherently as I could. In this next phase of my life, I want to start exploring what it feels like to write in ways that make ideas that you can see and feel. Maybe by the end of 2020, I will call myself an artist. Now that is a new year’s resolution.
Happy new year, my dear friend!
Yours,
Sarah
Friday January 3 2020 (with notes and thoughts across the week)
Dear Sarah,
Here we are! Happy new year, happy new decade, to you and the world! See that glittery little 2020 in my date up above.
While I was in Michigan last week and visiting my mom, she’d set aside for me a number of books on ceramics and a box full of her ceramics tools. She has an associate’s degree in ceramics technology, which she earned when she went back to school while I was in elementary school and my sister was even younger. It feels difficult, meaningful, to accept someone’s tools even if they aren’t using them anymore — it was a little bit hard to take my mother’s tools, like she is closing a door on a part of her life. But she is giving them to me because I am interested in taking a ceramics class this year — in all my various classes I haven’t yet taken ceramics — and it is both special to have her tools, and nice to have a box of tools ready to go. And for her to pass them along to me is better than for them to sit collected and unused. I wonder what it will feel like to work with clay. I’ve imagined it. When I was younger and my mother was in school and then beyond, I recall a lump of clay often sitting near the kitchen sink, getting hydrated or rehydrated, ready to be worked with. I played with the clay a bit when I was younger and we would sometimes join her at the ceramics studio at Oakland Community College in Royal Oak, but I haven’t worked with it since having gotten a firmer hold on my aesthetic sensibilities as an adult.
My mother also gave me a book called Centering — in pottery, poetry, and the person, by Mary Caroline Richards. I was casually paging through it this week after returning home and was surprised and excited to find essences of the same spirit we’ve been turning over and sussing out in our letters. One part that jumped out to me was a poem expressing a lack of interest in organizations. A few excerpts from the poem that starts on page 45 of my copy, from Chapter 11, Centering as Transformation:
Poem
Organization is not interesting, why.
If I am the chairman and you are on my committee it is not very interesting.
Or if you are the leader and we are your group and stay so who isn’t bored.
Organization is all right while it is new until you thoroughly understand / what is expected of you and then what is expected of you / is soon no longer interesting.
…
But I don’t want to belong to an institution.
Organization is not interesting but sometimes necessary to get things done / if there is something that simply must get done and better done wrong / than not done at all, are there such things maybe.
Governments are well organized but the people in the governments / do they see it all so clearly, who makes the policy and is he well organized / with the right leadership and support or is he a house divided.
Organizations and institutions and government are not interesting to me / and perhaps that’s not important
But I see more and more people expecting from them whatever they are / benefits they would not expect from any of the men composing them, / I mean what rare bliss will organized humanity bestow that a man will / not give his brother.
...
That’s part of one particular poem. The book is from 1962. A different time, certainly — nearly 60 years ago! — but the words are resonating for me today, even though as I typed them in here I felt that it does appear that today there are things that, as a society and as a world population, we must address (e.g. climate change at the top of a longer list) and we’re going to need to be organized to do it. Are we going to need to put aside our interests — both in terms of what we are individually interested in, and our personal best interests — to save our current selves, our future selves, and the earth itself from decimation or extinction? Probably yes.
As I paged through Centering I was reflecting on my penchant for “bookmarking” things to come back to later — both in the digital sense and in the sense that real books in my life serve as bookmarks for themselves, wherein I am always paging through books and magazines and planning to return to them later, at some future moment when I am surely no longer coming across new things I want to read but am only reviewing all the things I previously intended to read someday. As I was reflecting on this habit I’ve developed with books, I wondered if it had blossomed from the way I interact with the web and the stories and articles I’m able to access there. There is such a dense wealth of stories and information to be consumed (we’ve talked about the more again and again in recent weeks!) and lots of it looks good, and yet when I come across things that pique my interest, it is often not quite the right time to sit down with a long article or story and commit my full attention to it. (What does this special time look like, and how will I know it when I see it?) And thus I’ve bookmarked many a story, article, or other resource over the last decade-plus, bookmarking it with some vague sense that I may return, or that it is a good example of something that I’ll want to have marked along the way. Now, I do turn up interesting things in my web bookmarks from time to time, but they’ve also aged a bit, and my bookmarks collection isn’t really the place I turn to when I’m looking for something to read (barring the occasional chewy list of book recommendations that comes out around the end of the year or so). There’s something a little bit satisfying about realizing that I’ll probably never look at most of those bookmarks again (though I’m hoping to “do” something with them in some sense...) — it’s another echo of the realization that time is finite and that just because lots of things exist, doesn’t mean I’m going to be able to consume them all.
I’m in the mood for 2020 because I think 2020 is both The Future and The Present. I’m ready for this year that says to me, The Future is now, instead of The Future is still out ahead, in The Future. This year I pledge to read things when they catch my attention (I’ve done it already this week: I started and finished a story by Kelly Link called The White Road (The Musicians of Bremen) in issue 28 of the journal A Public Space), and to focus my attention on more of the things I want to focus on, and fewer of the things that simply pull at me visibly and invisibly.
I’m re-reading your letter from last week and I’m glad to be thinking about my mom while you were thinking about your mom-ness! And I agree that it is a bit confounding that people get sad or embarrassed about aging, about entering new decades. Best to go in clear-eyed! I read an article in The New York Times today — She Is 96 and Does Not Fear Her Death. But Do Her Children? — that tracked a Times storytelling endeavor that has been unfolding since 2015, when they “began following six people age 85 and up, documenting their journeys through a stage of life that is often invisible. Four were still alive at the start of 2019.” I didn’t quite know what to make of a woman in the story who “did not accept that her mother would ever die.” Take a look at the article if you haven’t already, I think this person’s story might confound you a bit, too, though it may be a testament to just how much presence some people have in this world. This may seem like a gloomy-ish turn on the topic of mothers, but I just want to say: let’s keep our mothers in mind, and please enjoy momming while it’s happening! Every day is The Future!
Until next week!
Yours,
Eva