On words that challenge and comfort, standing up for what is right and true, and the banality of parallel realities
February 6, 2020
Dear Eva,
I miss you! We have not had our regular conversations for awhile since you were traveling, and then I have been traveling since your return. I miss you even more because I am on a work trip where I starkly feel your absence. I hadn’t thought about it before departing because somehow it feels like years since you worked here, but this is the first one of these week-long staff meetings since you left our mutual employer. It is Thursday afternoon at about happy hour time, and I am nestled in the hotel restaurant with a salad, an IPA, and my laptop. I am consumed today by the absurd juxtaposition of the apocalyptic suffering in Wuhan where sick people are being quarantined in camps with the serene normalcy of the scene here in Austin. But parallel realities are nothing new in this world; in fact, they are banal. I wonder why, today, they feel almost unbearable? In any case, I am excited to send you a dispatch and even more excited to read your words tomorrow.
Last week you wrote about Jia Tolentino relishing a bad review of her book, Trick Mirror. This struck me as particularly delightful and refreshing. It is so true, as you wrote, that “both good reviews and bad reviews can be right.” But how rare for us to admit this, to own it, to feel it. This is, of course, the same when it comes to humans generally. We are good, we are bad, all at once, and over the course of time. It can all be overwhelming if you reflect on it too much. There are dials moving in all directions, all the time. I may be doing something kind on an interpersonal level for a colleague when I support their work, while at the same time doing something immoral on a more macro level professionally. I may take a paycheck from a business that makes the world a worse place, while that paycheck supports a family that I love. It seems to me that there are myriad ways to make sense of this tangle of paradoxes we wade in everyday. One way is to think pragmatically. If I take a different action, what consequences will result? But this can too easily dissolve into absolution. A single human being has very little capacity to make collective change, and this can easily become an excuse for inaction/action.
I am thinking about Mitt Romney today, and his decision to follow his conscience and vote to impeach the President. Today I listened to the episode of The Daily podcast that revolved around Romney and his decision, with interviews of him before he announced. It was riveting to hear someone openly navigate the challenge of maintaining personal ethics in the face of individual impotence to change an outcome, even as one of only 100 senators who sit at the epicenter of power in the United States. The idea of making a decision for yourself, that matters to you, that may not have an outcome that makes a difference to the world felt meaningful to me today.
Somehow, all of this leads me (again!) back to my reading about how to draw. When artists correctly perceive the true proportions between objects in space as they hit their eyes while also comprehending that the sizes of objects are constant, they are doing something all of us so eagerly strive to do but rarely are able. They are holding—fully and deeply—two opposing truths in their minds at once. This circles back to my very first letter to you in this long epistolary journey, about complementarity. Most of us can intellectually understand the contradictory truths that weave through our lives, but only a select few can see and reflect them back to the rest of us.
Sometimes I worry that thinking too much about complexity and contradiction could become a crutch if I let it. Back in November, I saw and captured a Twitter thread from a writer, David Roberts, about just this, and I recently found the screenshots of it on my phone. He wrote about how the people who love to talk about nuance and say “it’s not that simple” are displaying “a sort of vanity born not of sophistication but of fear—fear of descending from the academic clouds and battling it out on the ground, in the muck, where things are actually decided.” I want to savor this language. It is good to be reminded that even while standing up for what is right and true may not matter, standing up for what is right and true matters.
I hope you are having a good week, my friend. Cheers from Austin!
Yours,
Sarah
Friday February 7 2020
Dear Sarah,
This week has been exhausting, unsettling, unsettled. It was a week filled with a number of oddly tedious activities, some of which I did not mind, others whose tedium I wanted to push away with my open palm.
I feel tired this week; I think there are unseen forces pulling at my energies. My logical brain thinks it can think about and reason and thus understand the loss of a friend and what that means, and instead I think the loss is pulling at me in ways I cannot quite articulate. I thank you for your letter of last week, it means a lot to me. (I will have to read the Gail Caldwell memoir you shared.)
As this week has drawn to a close I found myself trying to think about how to describe how I feel, other than saying simply I am sad, which is not untrue. Then I remembered that I could also say I feel blue. (I must pull Maggie Nelson’s Bluets from the shelf at this time.) I have been thinking about how Jason was a part of so many people’s lives, and there are so many pieces of him, artifacts of his work and self out in the world, that it almost feels like his outline can still exist, a Jason-shaped space in the world — but even the most well-defined outline is not the same as an actual person continuing to exist, alive with us.
I looked up blue just to spend a little bit of time with the words around it. Blue: of a color intermediate between green and violet, as of the sky or sea on a sunny day. Blue: (of cats, foxes, or rabbits) having fur of a smoky grey color. Blue: (of a ski run) of the second lowest level of difficulty, as indicated by colored markers positioned along it. The internet as dictionary is perhaps not quite enough for me at this moment, though I have only drawn a few samples from blue as adjective. I will admit I have not technically thought of blue as an intermediate between green and violet. Blue helps make green, but seems so different.
Tuesday I had to take our car into the shop, and saw that I’d left in the back seat a book I recently picked up from the library. I left it back there while the car was attended to; I don’t imagine that Troy who works on our car has too much interest in the objects of our lives, but I left the book out, and a shoulder bag from Headlands featuring a screenprint of Powder the Cat, who used to inhabit one of the studio buildings and has since passed away. Sometimes I like to look at my objects or the scenes I occupy and in which I live, to try to look at the scenes as though they do not belong to me, as if they are unfamiliar, as if I am seeing them for the first time, and to think about what they say or mean from that point of view.
The book I’d recently checked out is by Anni Albers, On Designing. This week I flipped to the middle and read the essay titled One Aspect of Art Work, from 1944. In the parlance of today, this essay made me feel seen, made me see myself anew.
I have at this moment copied into my letter a number of paragraphs from the essay (it might be near half of the essay itself! Consider it almost but not quite a reprint!) and I have yet to work my way through this letter as a whole, and to decide whether I will keep all of the paragraphs in. Know that they were here in the draft! (I will tell you at the end what I have chosen to do.) When I read the words this week, even though they had a certain kind of challenge to them, they were also comforting. Comforting to find words that speak right to you when you want words to flow in right where you can hear them.
Our world goes to pieces; we have to rebuild our world. We investigate and worry and analyze and forget that the new comes about through exuberance and not through a defined deficiency. We have to find our strength rather than our weakness. ...
Intuition saves us examination.
We have to gather our constructive energies and concentrate on the little we know, the few remaining constants. But do we know how to build? Education meant to prepare us. But how much of education is concerned with doing and how much with recording? How much of it with productive speculation and how much with repeating? ... We neglect a training in experimenting and doing; we feel safer as spectators.
We collect rather than construct. (Here I felt seen!) ...
Too much of our education provides instead of prepares and thus loses its serving role and tends to become an end in itself. We are proud of knowledge and forget that facts only give reflected light. ...
Art work deals with the problem of a piece of art, but more, it teaches the process of all creating, the shaping out of the shapeless. We learn from it that no picture exists before it is done, no form before it is shaped. The conception of a work gives only its temper, not its consistency. Things take shape in material and in the process of working it, and no imagination is great enough to know before the works are done what they will be like.
In making a choice we develop a standpoint. How much of today’s confusion is brought about through not knowing where we stand, through the inability to relate experiences directly to us. In art work any experience is immediate. We have to apply what we absorb to our work of the moment. We cannot postpone the use of what we learn. Much of our education today prepares us for a later day, a day that never comes. Knowing for later is not knowing at all.
I am excited to hear more about how your drawing is feeling, and everything that you have been up to this past week. I found myself putting pencil to paper in some drawings this week, too, different forms than the letters and words that usually emerge from the tip of my lead. I also acquired some black ink (Black Magic) and am looking forward to spending some time with a brush. I have many brushes and rarely brush with them!
I shall close here for now. I’m leaving in all the quoted bits I copied over from Anni’s essay! Looking forward to reading your letter, which has been waiting patiently in my inbox unread since last night!
Much love,
Eva