On the release of bodily fluids, contemplating distillation, and believing our voices have value
August 7, 2020
Dear Eva,
Pushing back on my stubborn inclination to hoard vacation time, I went ahead and took a half vacation day on this Friday afternoon. I feel quite pleased with this decision! Soon I’ll be heading out for a long bike ride and maybe an outdoor beer with a friend who turns 40 today. Sounds to me like the perfect start to a weekend!
I am keenly aware of my moods lately. As you observed awhile back, during the pandemic it is easier to notice our ups and downs because we have to look right at it, there are few distractions to steer the eye away from how we feel. Interestingly, I continue to find myself feeling light and even bubbly these past couple of weeks. This feels incongruous with the state of the world, so I find myself seesawing between short bursts of guilt for my good fortune. Guilt never helped anyone or anything, though, so I push that away. I do think it is important to recognize the privilege that allows me to live without financial or other stress during this time, and to appreciate it while I have it. I am continuing to look for small ways to contribute something back out to humanity, to leverage the stability I have to use it for some greater good. I can’t say that I yet feel like I am doing enough in that regard. We have been preparing email lists and copy to send out to friends and family to help our neighbor raise money for her campaign for the U.S. Senate, but otherwise, I can think of very little I have done recently to fulfill any sense of civic or social duty (save for sending money to people and organizations, which never feels like enough). I like to think—wait, no I know—I am helping to raise two kids who are growing into human-shaped balls of goodness to contribute to this world, so there is that. But I think I will always be wrestling with what is enough, what is the right amount of energy spent on what is near versus what is far. I am suspicious of anyone who doesn’t wrestle with that balance. Anyway, this is a complete digression from what I was intending to get at with this line of thought! This is the beauty and curse of letter-writing (and reading), you must bear with me while my mind wanders while it does.
What I was planning to say about my current mood peak is that I think it is at least partially rooted in something I alluded to in my last letter—that I seem to finally be able to view everything in a day as part of living, rather than seeing the maintenance-y bits as something outside of or separate from it. I am remembering a quotation I savored from 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write by Sarah Ruhl:
I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is also a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.
Similar to the way remote work makes it painfully obvious that work time is just time in your day, Pandemic Time (at least for me) has made it clear that parenting time and cleaning time and cooking time and all of it is also just time in your day. Which is to say, it is just life. I apologize if Captain Obvious over here is writing this letter, but you must forgive me for seeing this as a sort of mini-epiphany, at least to the extent that I can now finally feel it, rather than just think it.
I am full of joy hearing that you have become comfortable with calling yourself a writer and a designer, among other labels. To me, this has much to say about the power of just doing a thing. Holding your design project in your hands or viewing the 96-letter(!) archive of this website (soon to be 97) is concrete proof that those labels are fully appropriate. It also has much to say about the rigor we tend to apply to ourselves, which we often do not expect of others. I do wonder if this tendency, which I share, has something to do with how sturdy we feel or do not feel about the worth of our work? I think about Jia Tolentino delighting in her bad review in the London Review of Books and the capacity for vulnerability that requires. To give yourself the label of “writer” you must be ready to withstand people questioning that label, asking you to show them your evidence. To welcome critique of your writing, you must be prepared to withstand judgment, defend your ideas or at least defend the value of you expressing ideas at all. I like to think that you and I growing comfortable with these labels signifies a certain level of sturdiness, which perhaps we have developed over the course of writing these 97 letters. I may not defend the substance of ideas I wrote in any given letter (and in fact, I would feel better knowing I have evolved along the way), but I like to think I am more sturdy in my belief that my voice has value.
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I am now just back from my 20 mile bike ride. I had planned to come home and segue this letter into an analysis of so-called “cancel culture” but after writing and tinkering a bit, I have cut and pasted that paragraph into a google doc for a future day. Right now, I have salt on my skin and aches in my legs, and I am feeling ready to transition into Family Movie Night, rather than explore the nuances of accountability in the digital age. You can look forward to that in future letters! I’m sure you can’t wait.
Happy Friday, my friend! I look forward to reading your letter and talking to you again soon.
Yours,
Sarah
Friday August 7 2020
Dear Sarah,
For some reason I have spent too many minutes this morning looking obsessively at new sneakers in colors I don’t want, perusing the listings as though a desirable color will suddenly appear. I buy a certain sneaker style over and over, selecting a new color when my most recent pair has been mostly run into the ground, and there is a dearth of sneaker color happening right now! That drama aside, I have been thinking of your letter of last week as I’ve stewed on what I’ll put into this week’s letter of mine.
I have lately been finishing Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (though it is a slim volume, this has taken me a long while — I started reading it in 2014 or 2015, then put it down, then recently acquired the paperback, and still have taken a while to read it!). There are some ways in which I dislike it, but I am pondering whether my feeling is actually dislike, or a sense of its being too close for comfort — the sense that I, too, could publish something similar-ish (do I think this because of its ideas or just because it is short?). It’s less a dislike of her or the text and just a kind of nudge to myself to keep moving.
Yesterday before I went to bed I was jotting some notes for my letter and I was thinking about Manguso’s 300 Arguments and I noted that I like that it exists, that it has been published — but I’m not sure how much I care to return to it. I went on, I am reading in part to uncover new ways of putting words together, I’m looking for something more rich. The distillation of language (hers specifically?) doesn’t necessarily resonate the way a whiskey does — I’m not certain it’s more powerful for being distilled. I think my inclination also used to be to lean toward writing the takeaways, nuggets and distillations, things learned, the final pieces of various puzzles. I am thinking now that it’s possible that what I thought were distillations were rather abstracted ideas floating on top of the real thing I was hoping to communicate, words acting instead like a curtain or a mask, words attempting to describe something in code that I wasn’t ready to say more straightforwardly. So perhaps my aversion to distillation here is more of a realization that what I thought I was doing wasn’t actually an effective distillation? Now, however, distillation sometimes feels more stingy — why be stingy with words? So many good ones to put next to each other, build something grand. I’m not against brevity but I’m also looking for a certain amount of density. But if I were thinking about this in the realm of visual art and design, I love the bare look of a minimal drawing as well as I love more colorful or complicated, detailed things — maybe it depends on the mood and the moment. There’s no one single right way.
All that being said, after I jotted my notes to you I picked up 300 Arguments to read in bed and I liked it better than I remembered! Maybe Ongoingness was on a path toward 300 Arguments, as of course it must have been because one followed the other. I find myself inclined to spar with Manguso a bit as I’m reading her work, at least these shorter kinds of works — perhaps that is the perfect kind of outcome of a read!
I’m thinking also about my (current?) aversion to synthesis and about conversation. I’ve spent a fair amount of my life cultivating the skill of getting people to reveal bits of themselves, to tell me interesting stories. This initially became a habit so that I could avoid talking about myself with other people; a deflection. But now I still like to do it, even though I have become more comfortable talking about myself, because good questions can point you toward something you might actually want to hear someone ramble on about. I like the magical moments with people when I or someone asks a question that sparks a story that you can tell the questionee hadn’t thought about in advance, that wasn’t a part of their usual conversation repertoire, perhaps something they hadn’t thought about in an out-loud fashion before. That is conversation gold!
I was thinking earlier today about comics and drawing and thinking again about our friend Lynda Barry. I found an NPR interview with her from the fall, after her receipt of the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant award (not entirely related — did we talk about how Ocean Vuong received a Genius Grant last year, too? Exciting!) I want to copy in large chunks of the interview — and perhaps I shall — Barry was asked how she would characterize the impressive 4-year-old artists she’d seen and she said, Their drawings seem to come from the movement of their hands, rather than an intention. ... That's why I think that when kids [are] tested — to see if they're smart enough to go to some cool kindergarten or whatever — and they'll tell kids to do things like draw a circle, draw a triangle ... those ways of testing kids' aptitude are sort of false. And again, based on assumptions that people who quit drawing a long time ago make up about drawing.
I love that last sentence! She goes on to discuss those assumptions: That you know what you’re going to draw before you draw. … When I'm making a comic, the drawing itself has a huge part in what happens with the [story]. Say I'm drawing a character, and I think maybe they're surprised. And when I go to draw their eyebrow, maybe my pen slips a little and it points down instead of up. So now the character looks angry. But [with] that expression of anger on their face, the story takes a different tack that I didn't expect. I've really learned to follow that — to follow what my hand is doing.
My favorite part of the interview and what is sticking with me most this morning is this series of thoughts: One of the things you'll hear people say, when they tell me they wish they could draw, is, "I see it in my head, but I can't get it onto the page." And then I have to remind them that what they're seeing in their head is not a drawing. Drawing is something that has to come out of your body. And that horror they have is the same horror they might have if a bodily fluid was suddenly released, like suddenly they got a bloody nose or started drooling. It's that same shame about this thing that's out of their control that seems to be coming from them.
First, I was thinking about your drooling story from last week (might I in slight jest call it your drooling habit?) which I love! (And I don’t actually think you seemed ashamed of it, as you shouldn’t be!) Then I was just absorbed in the idea of bodily fluids and all the things about our bodies and selves that we try to control, hide, or pretend aren’t happening. If we are so logical and smart in our heads we should be able to control these rude bodies! But no, they sneak up on us and leak or drool or flow or spew or break or crumple. Better to let the flow flow and capture it in some form, channel it into some holding space or project or secret file or whatnot, better than trying to plug it up inside.
Sarah Manguso also strikes me as a kind of artist of the body; her words and the experiences she describes are often visceral or physical even as they are heady. Manguso has in her sphere the words that spill out — the 800,000-word diary — and in Ongoingness, as well as in 300 Arguments, presents the nuggets, the best-ofs, the synthesis. I suppose there isn’t any real harm or fault in choosing to present the nugget form of writing — I am fascinated by the concept and the document of the long diary that she kept for many years, a document talked about rather than shown or excerpted in Ongoingness. I have been keeping a daily writing journal of sorts in digital form as of this year and I am quite enjoying it; I don’t find it to be the burden that I think Manguso was feeling, though it also sounds like her diary documented her self and her days more diligently. My journal is not exactly a document of the days; it is more a daily place to put writing and to see what comes out.
Thinking about your letter of last week, and your gravitation toward compression, I wonder if you are actually thinking in this compressed way, or perhaps the compression is just what you are putting down on paper. Is this a form of not taking up too much space, somehow? You can only compress something that was once longer or more substantial; I think you have to have the longer series of thoughts in order to yield the compression. On your phrasing of stretching ideas back out — it brings me back around to thinking about the process of writing and learning through writing, writing through — writing can be, often is, different as it hits the page than it is in your mind’s eye. Having met these characters and feelings in myself, I am familiar with the overactive self-editor and with the unconscious fear of showing how you think. Let’s both take Lynda Barry to heart yet again and let the mental (bodily) fluids flow!
Speaking of comics, I have very much been enjoying Edith Zimmerman’s comics newsletter for a while now (her work turned up for me in an Ann Friedman newsletter, which I think I’ve largely stopped looking at in pandemic times, for whatever reason (news overload) — Ann introduced me to Edith and now I have not been reading Ann!) and I think you might enjoy them too. Maybe I’ve forwarded you one or some? While I have been typing this letter to you a new one arrived in my inbox about her experience with a Spirit Animals deck of cards that I also imagine could be fun for you and Jonah and Simon (and Bill! Why not!).
A cloud just opened up with a whoosh and released a quick, heavy splash of rain on my neighborhood, and then it was over. Faster than this letter, though just as much an outpouring! By the time I went to close the windows it was finished. This letter is lengthy but I think I may leave it so! I hope you have a lovely Friday evening and weekend! Are you long-weekending? I hope so!
Until soon,
Your friend,
Eva
P.S. I’m inclined now to tell you about a dream I had recently where I was presenting a lecture to a class of students, perhaps high-schoolers, and the lecture was very crisp and clear in my dream, it was like I was delivering it straight from my awake mind — I was talking about writing and how you just had to let everything out onto the page. In my dream I said it might look like garbage but there will be some sentence or word that will catch your eye and then you can run forward with that. In my dream there was a young woman in my class whose eyes changed with a sort of glow of recognition when I said that. Take it and run with it, dream girl!