On making mind and editing mind, “are there only men left in the race?,” and gathering a few bits in our skirts as we rush along
March 6, 2020
Dear Eva,
This is my 75th week in a row writing you a letter at the end of the workweek. The 75th week in a row I will be lucky enough to receive a letter from you. What rich texture this experiment in writing and friendship has given my life! On this Friday morning, as I start the day with a warm cup of coffee sitting at my desk, I am thankful to begin the delightful task of writing you, and to anticipate the ever more delightful treat of reading you later today.
There is so much to untangle and consider in each week’s letter exchange—the substance of what was said, the substance of what wasn’t said, the ways the process freezes a passing moment in written form, the ways the process fails to capture so much about those passing moments. We will never unpack it all, and this is such a good lesson. All we can do is gather a few bits in our skirts and keep rushing along. We will save what we can.
Last week you wrote about your lifelong interest in comics, appreciating the concision with which a comic writer can tell a story, make a point. I especially loved the anecdote about you forcing yourself to eat your comic vegetables, muddling through even the comics you did not really enjoy. It can be so hard to know when we need to hold our feet to the fire, and when we don’t, and I appreciated hearing that you, too, have sometimes made that call a bit strangely. (As someone who has been known to march in place at the end of the night next to my bed, trying to burn the remaining calories needed to meet a goal on her fitness tracker, lord knows I am not judging!) Comics, poems, drawings, visual essays, other creative forms—I have only recently begun to see these different modes of communication as options available to all of us. Somehow, these formats felt like something very different, something wholly unavailable. I am not currently trying my hand at any of them, but the knowledge that I could, that we all could, makes the entire endeavor of wrestling an idea or experience into expression feel much more wide open. Now, when I look down at a page in my notebook full of scattered ideas set into lifeless words, I don’t feel as deflated. Instead, I can see it as a first step in a process. I have begun to pour together ingredients, but there are still so many steps left to make something, and so many different shapes the final form might take. This notion holds so much promise.
I am surprised to find this note coming across so cheery-seeming, because I have been fairly glum this week on the whole. I have been trying to be better about turning away from my political hobbyism, so I can use that energy for something more fruitful, like local activism. But I failed this week, and I got very caught up in national politics again. Watching Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign fizzle and die has felt like a weight to carry—such a familiar, personal feeling of loss, with echoes of the 2016 election and the Kavanaugh hearings. I know it is wrong to pretend a single individual can solve a systems problem. One woman as the President of the United States would not erase the patriarchy. But Warren’s fall still tells us something, reinforces a centuries-old story about where women rank. I also just plain like Elizabeth Warren. The more I heard and watched her this past year, the more I found someone to admire, someone to trust, someone who takes that leap between knowing and doing with gusto, via plans and plans and plans.
Now that we are down to two candidates, I am grateful I have already voted. The remaining binary feels so wrapped up in knotty questions about when the perfect becomes the enemy of the good, and when incrementalism and pragmatism swallow themselves and become a furtherance of the status quo. These are lines that are not simple to draw, and I am happy to sit back and watch how the remaining voting public will draw them.
This morning my day began as it typically does, around 6:30 a.m., with a loud bang of the kids’ bedroom door against the wall as it is flung open and then the soft knocking of bare feet on the hardwood floor as the kids scurry down the hallway to jump into our bed and under the covers. It sounds cozy (and is!), but I should note that it is also marked by incessant chatter, usually from Jonah, who seems to wake up raring to go, picking up exactly where he must have left off in his thinking before falling asleep, usually immediately beginning a barrage of questions, without even a hello or good morning to smooth the transition. Today: Was Ulysses S. Grant a good leader? What was he famous for? Yesterday: If Elizabeth Warren won all the remaining states, could she still win? Are there only men left in the race? As someone who is slow to hatch when I emerge from slumber, this daily experience can be rattling. But in my better moments (usually after coffee and in a quiet house), I appreciate the exuberance for life and for the day.
I hope you have a wonderful weekend, my friend!
Yours,
Sarah
Sunday March 1 + Friday March 6 2020
Dear Sarah,
This week I shall start my letter with the incantation: TGIF! I feel like I haven’t stopped moving or working for the last six weeks or so. This weekend M and I don’t have anything planned, and we are staying in this state. Even if I have to pull together our tax info, at least we’ll be here for what is supposed to be a gorgeous weekend with temps approaching 60 degrees on Sunday. (aka second Saturday — my weather app this week has been reporting to me about the coming Saturday, then another Saturday, and then Monday. Not sure if this is a “new thing” that my technology is rolling out, but M and I have been delighted by the idea of two Saturdays, even if the second Saturday will still be followed by a Monday!)
I’m thinking about your letter from last week — (it's actually Sunday as I make this note so I'm thinking about your letter from Friday!) — It got me thinking about the difference between a poem and a letter like this. Every word in a poem takes care, requires intentionality. The sounds of the words matter, the spacing, the lines. You have to know exactly what it is you are trying to convey. In contrast, these letters dribble out of me in a flowy stream of consciousness, rambling from here to there as my mind flits about.
My analytical self and my occasional impulse to gently spar with you in our letters had me saying, I'm not sure you do need to know exactly what it is you're trying to convey! (In the writing of a poem, in the creation of any work of art.) I say this is the point of process: you don't need to know before, or perhaps even during, exactly what you're aiming to do. It’s a different kind of process from the logical realm of focused direct thinking and word-melding, staring straight at an idea and engaging or responding. I said when we talked this week that this feels to me like the difference between making mind and editing mind. Making mind doesn’t always have to know what it is trying to convey, except to know that it is in the mood of wanting to convey something, and making space for the something to emerge. Editing mind, analytical mind, is invited back into the process later on to help make sure your words eventually come to have a feeling of intentionality — I’d say the intentionality comes in the moment of scrapping words, keeping words, placing words, combining words. Again, I feel like I’m poking a bit at the specific way you phrased an idea, which is not my intention — but in case there is a wall between you and the making of poetry, I want instead to poke at that wall, poke a hole in it, break it down! I want to poke at the idea that a stream of consciousness lacks intention, or that a poem emerges from a plan. Anything can seem like it was created with a plan in mind — our letters, a poem; if it makes sense, if it looks like it fits together — but I argue that those things happen in revision, in looking at the evidence, drafts, scraps, and piecing them together in any number of ways, likely discarding a fair portion of what was written or created. (Still thinking about revision and helpful amnesia from Week 69!)
I don't think our letters are so different from poems, or that they have to be so different. Because we called them letters, because we address them to each other, are they inherently not poems? Does a poem have to look poem-y on a page? I think a poem can be lots of things, lots of things can be a poem. I am certain there are some who get more specific about this than I, but I vote for a bit more flexibility over less. I also like the concept of the lyric essay, which an issue-riddled wikipedia page describes as a contemporary creative nonfiction form which combines qualities of poetry, essay, memoir, and research writing, while also breaking the boundaries of the traditional five-paragraph essay. Maybe we are writing lyric essays here? I like the combination form.
I love books about writing, how to write, how to do. They can become a weakness of mine! As I read them I try always to remind myself that the amount of X currently in me is the perfect amount from which to develop any creative thing. There will, of course, be more research to be done, but the making process can spur that. I’ve got docs upon docs that have been tickling at my mind recently — one about eyes; thinking I’ve been doing about collections and puzzles — and I’ve got enough to work with. Now I just have to do the thing I can see in my mind’s eye! My mind’s eye is also a weakness of mine — sometimes I am satisfied to simply see things there. But then they stop with me. I liked your thought when we talked this week, that a public is at least one person whom you or I or we don’t know directly, someone who found this thing we made (or another thing we might make) for themselves and came to it with no prior knowledge. I like the idea that public doesn’t have to mean hundreds or thousands of people, doesn’t have to mean everyone we know buzzing about the thing we said or did. I think public starts to ring the celebrity bell in my head, and to try to think about how to achieve celebrity is a different proposition than how to be public. I don’t think we’re striving for celebrity here!
There is much more in your letter from last week that I want to get to! But on this Friday I’m going to close here and wish you a lovely evening and weekend! TGIF back at you!
Your friend,
Eva