On being slow like a snail, words like vitamins, and for whom we live and toil
May 28, 2020
Dear Eva,
I have spent much of the week thinking about ways that the two of us are different, including in the sense that in our letters, I seem to gravitate toward our similarities while you do the opposite. It fascinates me to know that you see our commonalities as known territory. I suppose you are right, maybe the traits and inclinations we share are obvious. We both happen to be married to men from the same high school class in small town Michigan for god’s sake! I guess I may actually be overly focused on the ways, at least on paper, that we are different—career paths, childhoods, educations, families, proficiency at woodworking. From that starting point, finding a similarity feels to me like uncovering a delightful surprise.
I very much admire your way of being. I hope that is not weird for me to say or for you to read! And it feels, at its essence, very different from my own. I have this sense that you are fundamentally sturdy. You used that word once to describe my father, and here I think I mean it slightly differently. You are sure-footed, seemingly deeply comfortable with who you are and how you are living. You have little need for other people in order to know yourself or your worth, or to help you determine how to spend your time. But yet you are not at all close-minded or resistant to new experiences or perspectives. This makes you, in my view, a rare bird. I think perhaps I run to this, like a virus seeking a host. I want to learn from this, be more like this. There is probably some very real sense in which I am absorbing your words like a vitamin each week, infusing my imagination with a new way to be.
My sense is that I am fundamentally more malleable, more easily shaped by those around me. I could say lots of mean things about that, but I’ll be generous to myself and point out that it isn’t all bad. This openness and fluidity lends me pretty easily to emotional intimacy, and I think there is a very elemental way in which I am reliant on other people not only for support, but for meaning. I have been thinking about how my creative tendencies in recent years prove this point. With these letters, with the small book I wrote for my kids, with the project I am working on for my niece, I have needed to specify a human I love for whom I was toiling. I am no dummy. I know much of my writing helps me work through my own shit. The process is beneficial. But I cannot commit myself and my time without more than that, at least not for a substantial length of time. I need to know who I am writing for, and it needs to be someone other than me. This mirrors how I think about life. I cannot just live for me, it does not feel like enough.
In my mind, this strangely ties back to the conversation about process and completion. It is possible, but more difficult, to see how a process has an impact and outcomes. And impact and outcomes are how I/we can measure whether what we are doing or how we are being is affecting others. I have written before about my need to always sum it up when I look to the past, just as I am always making plans when I look to the future. Am I always looking ahead or behind? I wonder if this stems from me always wanting reassurance about how I’m spending my time. Am I doing it right? Am I spending my precious time alive in the best/right way? This is always my question. Narratives about the past and plans for the future help give me clues. I think my yearning to finish/accomplish—what you called in your letter pursuit of the dots—is nothing more than me wanting more fodder to write the story perpetually unraveling in my brain, the story that tells me whether I am doing it right.
This has become quite the psychoanalysis! You started it.
I am writing this on Thursday night and feeling quite smug about it. I will savor the Friday that awaits me— without a letter writing obligation in its midst, but with the promise of reading a letter from you at the end of it. I hope your post-holiday week of many deadlines (and jingalov hats!) was a satisfying success and that you have a relaxing and reinvigorating weekend.
Your friend and very different human being,
Sarah
Friday May 29 2020
Dear Sarah,
My Friday is quiet, after a busy stretch of a few weeks or more. Sometimes on quiet days that land in the midst of busy days, I still feel like I should be in front of my computer, waiting here for something to happen, for someone to reach out to me, for the computer to tell me what I should be working on. It doesn’t know. It’s a lazy afternoon now with only my letter to you on my to-do list! A fine moment.
This week has been busy, then strange, then bad in many ways. I am thinking about George Floyd and what is happening right now in the Twin Cities, but I don’t know exactly what to write here. I am still processing. So I will leave it at that for the moment.
Maybe I will say that, on some reflection, I’ve found that over the years I’ve become used to stowing my immediate emotions, and focusing on simply getting through certain things. On the whole this would seem to have served me well — though who knows who I would be elsewise! — but I cannot say if it is an approach I recommend. My first impulse is that this approach has been a process of saying — I will think about this later, I will process this later. But maybe it has not been a conscious acknowledgment. There are ways I think I am slow — not in a disparaging way; like describing how a turtle or a snail is slow. Sometimes it just takes me a while to think about things, process, digest. Sometimes my versions of slow can still happen fairly quickly — I can get things done, spin the wheels and gears a bit faster, but sometimes it takes running through an idea again and again to understand why it sticks in my mind, why it means something to me. A friend once told me how her son kept wanting to talk of a certain experience — I can’t recall if it was a dream he’d had, or a real happening — but it felt like a natural process: one wants to keep talking (or writing) about a sticky thing until you have somehow captured it, or figured it out, or explored all its nooks and crannies. (I’m inclined to reference again the diamond story I mentioned a few weeks back, which I cannot put my hands on at this moment; the writer described having an audience among other people with a particular rough diamond, and how they were able to hold the diamond, and how the gem stayed warm in their hands as one rarely put it down without another reaching for it again; they kept it moving and warm in their palms, as they each turned it over and over again.) I’m stretching beyond the impulse of my thought — still processing — but the sentiment is the same. It takes a while to process.
I am thinking about your letter from last week and your thoughts on what writing is, and I am here on the thought-train with you. I wonder — I don’t know if writing is, or is only, a manifestation of what is inside us. I think it is a transformation of ourselves and the world and the people around us into language. None of us are made of language; we translate life into language. Writing can be a manifestation of what is inside us, as you described, and it can also be language filtered through us, words and ideas strung together in a way that is particular to each one of us. Writing can be a process of describing the worlds we see, outside and in our interiors, seen through the eyes of “I” or “us.” As you said, both the raw vomit draft and the polished one can be real versions of a person, but perhaps also neither is true. Any piece of writing is not exactly a version of a person. Also like you said — we attach so much significance to the snapshot in time that is the final artifact of any piece of writing — we look for evidence in what people write, look for evidence of the people that they are, but still, no single piece of writing or even a body of work is the person. It is always the collected work of a translator, turning what was not language into language, filtered through that person’s way of seeing, hearing, sensing, being. Perhaps some of us translate more vividly than others. I wonder if nothing anyone writes is crummy, it is just that there are things that are so well written, so well translated into language; and then there are things that have not reached that excellence of inspiration, composition, assembly, refinement. Maybe we could call those pre-excellences something other than crummy! What about clunky? A clunky car will still sometimes get you somewhere. Somehow I don’t want to apply the word crummy to anyone’s writing — it is all a part of a process of getting somewhere! I am perhaps being overly generous in this statement because I am sure I have read writing that I would call crummy, but I just don’t want you to think of your writing as crummy! Ever!
Separately, I had a thought about something you said in your letter of a few weeks ago, when you were thinking about your strange personal resistance to fiction. (Reiterating that phrase here perhaps to echo that it is strange! Though maybe it is not strange from your point of view, but you somehow felt that it would be acknowledged as strange between the two of us? I will jokingly say that I do find it strange! But we all have our preferences!) You continued, Why am I open to fictional stories on the screen but not on the page? I find myself thinking about how little I have actually been consuming on-screen lately and for a while, few movies or shows. Your statement didn’t inherently say anything about the volume of things seen, but I found myself thinking about how on the whole, I might prefer to enjoy my fictional stories on the page instead of the screen! I wonder if the things I enjoy on the screen are different than things I enjoy on the page? What makes me want to see something on the screen in the first place? I like screens for visual stimulation, and I want that visual stimulation to be dramatic — captivating real or invented landscapes, stunning scenes, something somehow beyond a pure human experience. I think I prefer character-driven stories on the page, where the scenes are fluid and expand and collapse in my mind in ways that are perhaps not impossible on the screen, but are a bit more challenging to create or capture. Once you are filming real people in real places some of that fluidity has to firm up into reality. Inside my head, as I read, the bounds of time and space are irrelevant.
The trees are full of chatty birds these days, I cannot recall if they were so chatty last summer. I can hardly recall anything of last summer, it seems. As this year’s flowers pop in our backyard, flowers planted by the woman who owned our home previously, I know I saw these same bulbs blooming last year, but this year they are fully a surprise again. I didn’t know (i.e. remember) we had bearded irises back here! Maybe my noggin is just fried.
I have had your letter lingering unopened in my inbox for hours, and now I am going to open it! Have a peaceful weekend, my friend, and I will read and talk with you soon!
Your friend,
Eva