July 17, 2022
Hi Theo,
I hope the summer has been treating you well; for me it's a season of change and displacement, qualities that feel relevant to our starting prompt of "water." Amongst all the fluctuation I've been working on a project that has given me a chance to write about Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson's work of land art. I thought that a winding pathway into a body of water might be a nice place to start our conversation.
I went out to see Spiral Jetty at the Great Salt Lake a few summers ago. Much of the purpose of the trip was to drive out to it (nothing like a good art pilgrimage) and I had what I thought was a decent understanding of it before visiting. It turned out though that I wasn't at all able to anticipate the effect of being there, of seeing the basalt rock gracefully curl away from the land and towards the water on such a grand scale, of being under a heavy sky on a windy day with birds flying low in V formation as I walked down the hill from the car, of mist shrouding the pink tinged water of the lake. It was otherworldly. The water level of the lake has drastically dropped in recent years due to climate change, leaving Spiral Jetty far from the water's current edge and different in its relational placement than when it was constructed in the 70s. But it was nonetheless a completely transporting experience. The jetty rose out of wet sand that was ridged with small pools, much like the sea's shore after the tide moves out. Walking it, with the pink hue from the organisms that live in the water and the shimmery haze that altered my perception of distance, it was very easy to feel enveloped, to feel submerged without swimming in the lake's water. I feel sometimes when under water like I'm far away from my own mind while simultaneously very much in it, and I think that is similar to my experience of Spiral Jetty. I was hyper aware of my presence in a very particular and beautiful spot and, in turn, in the much wider and very expansive world, so much so that I was lifted up and out of myself. The project that I'm working on, the one for which I've been writing about Spiral Jetty, starts with a contemplation of elation–and I think that pairing of feelings might be part of what elation is, being within myself and out of myself at the same time.
I'm looking forward to hearing what you are thinking about/looking at/working on/preoccupied with these days.
I loved your poem in WATER, "Love (the attempt)". There's so much sadness in it– we can try so hard to love and still get it wrong. But it also offers such beauty– the reminder that there's so much care and tenderness and kindness in the trying.
With anticipation,
Samara
Photo by Samara Skolnik
July 19, 2022
Dear Samara,
I love the idea of approaching art from a place of elation because so often we hear about art being the vehicle towards ecstasy, rather than the starting point. I love, too, the definition of elation as being within oneself and out of oneself. What a perfect way to describe the material reality of water, too. The river flows a river -- reaches the estuary -- empties into the sea -- becomes the sea. I think this may also be my definition of love, and the sea is just all the rivers, in love with each other.
Thanks also for your kind words about my poem! I loved yours, too -- especially that line "Sometimes I don't know what to say/to myself." Water has no language -- or is every language -- but what we say and how we say it has been heavy on my mind this summer.
I have been reading this book by Robert MacFarlane called Landmarks. It's about the disappearing indigenous words used to describe aspects of place in the British Isles. Each chapter ends with an encyclopedia of words -- for example, "smother" is a Cumbrian word for "foam on the edge of a river when it is in flood." Caitein is Gaelic for "the first slight ruffling of the water after a calm." What strikes me is the specificity -- not just any foam, but the foam that's born of a flood.
This is what I was thinking about, writing "Love (the attempt)." In the absence of such specific language, how do we make ourselves known to each other? We give each other presents. We leave each other. We return. I am guilty of googling "does my cat know I love him" and when I do, I think of crows fed by humans alighting on windowsills to drop thank-you presents of shiny, precious trash. I think of the ocean molding the water into a wave that leaves its home and comes back. How do we come back to ourselves? To each other?
xoxo
Theo
July 31, 2022
Hi Theo,
Moving, especially after many years in the same apartment, was quite the undertaking. I can't help but feel a flash of recognition regarding your reference to crows who leave gifts of beautiful trash for the humans who feed them. Objects can hold such meaning; I know that I am inclined towards imbuing them with symbolic weight, and the process of sorting through my belongings-- to keep, to not-- felt like taking a tour through the stages of my life so far. I recognize that because I've pared down previously, what I was looking through the last few days is a constructed narrative, one that proclaims: this is who I am. In one regard, I don't like that things are so important to me, but at this point, so many of my belongings are things I've inherited from now gone grandparents, small things from my childhood home, things friends have made. It's like a patchwork of visual history and meaning-- and I do love a patchwork. There's something so beautiful about traditional quilts, the way many disparate pieces, sometimes offcuts or castoffs, are brought together into a functioning useful whole. I particularly love quilts whose visual style evokes the shifting nature of memory. That's very much what I think of when I look at the Gee's Bend quilts, which were made by the descendants of enslaved people in an isolated part of southern Alabama with skills passed through generations and from scraps of old clothing, cornmeal sacks, and any other available materials. These remnants of daily life were pieced together to create lines that undulate and colors and patterns that morph mid-quilt. I find it so interesting that supposedly every time we take a memory out and look at it we alter it, so really what we have are memories of memories, as opposed to memories of the events themselves, and it is with these inadvertently manipulated recollections that we shape a sense of self. Ultimately we're just like the quilts: made of wavy wobbly stories that we piece artfully together into a whole. While my collected belongings are nowhere near as beautiful as the Gee's Bend quilts, in a way they are my own little patchwork, my own evocation of memory and story. It was a pleasure to look at and touch every single piece of it as I packed, but also an emotional experience.
You mentioned Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane. I love the idea of mapping place through language, as well as the cataloging of indigenous terminology connected to those places. I wonder if you've ever read the Scottish poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie, whose book Sightlines sounds like it exists in an adjacent arena. The essays in part consider places that once were sites of thriving human life but are no longer, such as the island of St. Kilda in the Hebrides, which was abandoned in the 1930s after thousands of years of human habitation, or a Neolithic henge site where she spent time working on an archeological dig as a teenager. She comes at them from a personal angle, letting her experiences of these lost places intersect with her own impressions and thoughts. It's haunting writing since it emphasizes how much will always be lost, no matter what we make or what words we use. But of course, years and years later there were objects to be touched, structures to stand in, and words to say about them. So despite the losses, some things remain, and, dare I hark back to my previous paragraph-- it is a pleasure to think about them, but emotional too.
You asked about how we make ourselves known to each other, and suggested that in part it is through language, in part through gifts (maybe material items, maybe the intangible?), in part through leaving and returning. I agree on all fronts, and I guess this past week or so has pointed to the idea that we utilize all of the above to know ourselves as well. And maybe part of that is knowing how we connect to others in the present, others from the past.
Samara
August 5, 2022
Samara,
In my 16 years in New York, I have moved 9 times. Like you, I've pared down, and like you, I often question my relationship to things, and like you, what remains are mostly artifacts of previous lives. Boxes of old letters; my father's wartime journals; a pair of earrings I bought with my mother on one of those rare, sunny days we totally understood each other. Every person I've ever been lives in these objects. Due to PTSD, my memory is faulty, so I rely heavily on sense to remember: mostly smell and touch. Every time I leave something behind, it means I've decided to touch it and smell it for the last time. It means I have decided to forget. Forgetting is a death. Forgetting makes room for further joy. Which is it? Both? Memory is a crucial, beautiful, painful thing, which I am reminded of when I look at these beautiful Gee's Bend quilts: how trauma can be an inheritance, and the survival of that can beget its own particular alchemy.
Lately I have been thinking about desire, and how for me, desire and loss are inextricably woven together. Without one, there is no other. How loss drives a desperate kind of desire that feels like reaching for magic we don't -- or can't -- know. Sometimes when I sift through my memory box, I find myself clutching old photos of my father in both hands, closing my eyes and wishing him back alive, the way I used to wish as a small child. And somehow, every time, I am amazed when it doesn't work. Not because I believe we can raise the dead -- but because the desire is so consuming, it takes over the self, and how could that not be more powerful than death? And yet, as you wrote in relation to Sightlines, loss is inevitable. How poignantly you put our revisitations of what we hold onto: the memory of a memory. Our memories recede like the shoreline. We are left with what we think happened, our desire for a recollection that stays.
In some way, I am always thinking about this poem, Palindrome by Liesl Muller. Do you feel like you live more for your past selves, or your future selves? All my life up to now, I realize I have been living for the selves I used to be: the child I was, or wasn't, depending on your view -- the teenage girl -- the gender-questioning twenty-something. I experience joy through them, as if to show them: look, look how it will be! As I get further from them, and settle more confidently into a non-binary identity and a life not characterized by survival alone, I begin to consider my future self. What will we do today that our future selves will want to remember? What will fall into our hands that they will want to hold fast? How do we build lives we want to relive, and relive, and relive, and how do we cope with the fact that we can't?
Yours,
theo
August 21, 2022
Hi Theo,
Thank you for such a beautiful letter and for sharing your thoughts about loss. I’m so sorry to hear about your father. I can’t imagine how difficult it is to lose a parent as a young child. My losses have taken a different shape and have come later in life – my grandparents played a central role in raising me and my sisters and they both passed in the last several years. So I do know that nothing comforts in the thick of grief, and that there is always a feeling of missing, even as time passes. Your description of looking at your father’s photograph and wanting to will him alive really spoke to that. Because I somehow always find myself turning to art to make sense of things, you also reminded me of a series of portraits done by the artist Gillian Wearing. She photographed herself posing as her family members in earlier stages of their lives by wearing specially made silicone masks and period appropriate clothing. Seeing her as her parents – as her youthful mother with a playful smile on her lips, as her father in a tux with dashingly mussed hair – is pretty arresting. I see that longing to resurrect that you wrote about, since she takes the most extreme approach: erasing herself for the sake of bringing them back. She brings to life romanticized versions of them though, and I was just about to write something about memory’s tendency towards such romantic thinking. But I’m not sure – maybe it’s longing that blurs and blunts everything, washes it all in sepia. Or possibly it’s some combination of the two: memory of what we long for.
I’ve been thinking so much about the question you asked - do I live more for my past or future self? I read a poem recently that for some reason keeps coming to mind as I mull this over. In “Ode on Luck” Barbara Hamby runs through details of her past, details that in the living seemed less than fortunate – the task of changing her little brother’s diaper when she was a child, a student screaming at her in class – but that in hindsight she regards as lucky. The lighthearted and almost flippant tone is I think what really gets me - all these downers are things she can just brush off and chalk up to “a scoop of raspberry-dishwater sorbet” in the chocolate milkshake of her life. She doesn't mention anything terribly traumatic, and of course it's much harder to put a cherry, as she says, on top of some experiences than others. But I guess the reason this poem seems relevant to your question is because assuming an attitude like hers towards the past might be a way of releasing myself from living for it, instead of for my future self, or present one. There was luck in the dirty diapers, the lack of plans she had as a teenager, the seemingly wasted hours spent on books and daydreams. And even for some of the harder things in my own past – family difficulties, heavy responsibilities, certain disappointments – I can look at them now and see that there is indeed luck in them. I’m embarking on a really exciting time, leaving Brooklyn for a year, living in places I've never before experienced, focusing on a writing project I’m really psyched about. I can recognize that some of the less than pleasant elements of the past have in one way or another made it so this year is happening as it is. Not to be too flippant myself, but I'd say my answer is: I'm feeling able to plop a cherry on top of the past; I look forward to drinking my milkshake in the future.
I really love literature that catalogs, that keeps track, that attempts or at least purports to record life as it is or was. Frank O’Hara comes to mind with his “I did this, I did that” poems, or the book Piece of Cake by Bernadette Mayer and Lewis Warsh. They were married when they wrote it, raising their first baby together in western Massachusetts. The book is made up of alternating entries for each day of August 1976, one written by Warsh, the next by Mayer. There’s so much mundanity in it, but I love the monumentalizing of the trivial that occurs when recording all the minor details and fleeting feelings of a day. What I found really interesting was that the project was put on a shelf for decades and forgotten about, Mayer and Warsh split up, moved on, had different partners and families and lives. When it was published in early 2020, I sat in a reverential audience at the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church and listened to Warsh read and speak about the surprise he’d felt when encountering it again, how fresh it made the experience of being a new parent and writer at the beginning of his career. I have a friend with whom I often text back and forth the words “nothing matters” – a reminder that we’re just tiny specks in space and time, et cetera et cetera, and therefore whatever is weighing on us at the moment is meaningless. And while I do benefit from that regular dose of nihilism, I also love Piece of Cake for taking the "nothingness" of every day and making it matter, because, when it comes down to it, I believe much of it does. You wrote about getting to a point of more comfort in your identity, about living with PTSD, about loss and change. It sounds like that all informs your attempt to, as you wrote, build a life that you would want to relive and relive and relive. I thought your last question was heartbreakingly poignant: how do we cope with the fact that even if we can shape such a life, we don't get to relive it? I can only think of Lewis Warsh as an old man reading back through the manuscript he pulled from his shelf, of being plunged back into August of 1976. He's lucky to get to do so, but we're lucky too that we can go along for the ride, that barring the ability to relive our own lives, we can experience others'. For me at least, I think there's a lot of comfort in that, and therefore meaning as well. And so I'll end with an excerpt from Warsh's August 5th entry:
"If I'm doing anything at this moment I'm thinking, I'm trying to remember. I'm listening to Mr. Hatch, the landlord, who's working in the apartment below ours; I'm not listening, it's just a case of not being able to prevent myself from hearing the noise he and his crew are making, hammering and drilling. I can't help being aware of what Bernadette and Marie are doing at the other end of the apartment. I'm not thinking about these things: this is where I am. I guess I'm also thinking about how the word "feeling" can mean either the way one feels physically or an emotional state, this is obvious, and today I'd have to say I feel terrific, the same as I did yesterday. My emotions, in other words (and as far as I know), are stable, while my physical feelings are preparing a kind of coup d'etat which my brain tells me I can prevent, if I'm lucky, by writing something, as if that were the answer to everything."
Maybe not the answer to everything-- but to something for sure. Thank you for sending that beautiful poem "Palindrome," I loved the way it too held up a handful of seemingly minor details as the stuff of great import.
Samara
August 24, 2022
Samara,
“The thick of grief” — it’s exactly that, isn’t it? And it’s true, even as time passes, the missing never stops. There is life before grief, then loss happens, and the grief rides your shoulders through the rest of your life. You never stop carrying it. You just get used it. Meanwhile, life continues. Joy remains within reach, which seems impossible, sometimes, especially when it’s happening. We carry that, too. I’m trying to learn how to hold my joy closer, to remember joy can follow me the same way sadness can. Is there any limit to what we can carry? I haven’t found any yet, and I hope not to.
You put it so eloquently, how “longing … blurs and blunts everything, washes it all in sepia” and I can’t stop looking at these Gillian Wearing portraits without that in my mind. How she is “erasing herself for the sake of bringing them back” — what a bittersweet idea: the willingness to disappear to resurrect the ones you love. How that disappearing means there is no you to reunite with them. How it brings us no closer to the thing we want. How sometimes we have to sustain on longing for a time, until —
Thank you so much for sharing Ode on Luck. I love the way this poem holds the past so lightly while giving it its due, as if even in its moments of ugliness and uncertainty, it need not feel so heavy. It sounds like you are entering a stage of generation and abundance, and I couldn’t be happier for you. I understand what you mean exactly, about how painful experiences can be impossible to extricate from the ones that propel us into the light. It reminds me of Antilamentation by Dorianne Laux. Sometimes I feel I am powered by regret, or the threat of it. Finding the luck in our pasts helps, as you say, release us from some of that. And I love how you put it. It’s a beautiful place to be: putting the cherry atop your past. I, too, look forward to drinking my milkshake in the future — chocolate, kerosene and all.
The practice you have with your friend, texting each other “nothing matters,” strikes me less as nihilistic, more as enlightened. It’s true — we are so small. Like Carl Sagan wrote in Cosmos, “we are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.” Nothing we do matters — except to us. Like you said: we decide what meaning to ascribe to the events of our lives and I agree with you: it all matters. I absolutely love the excerpt from Piece of Cake you included. What a lovely articulation of what it means to occupy the present, how so often it feels like a struggle between mind and body to stay where you are. No, maybe writing isn’t the answer to everything — but it’s where I turn, too, when I feel the present about to slip away from me. As if by writing it down I could cup it in my palms like a moth and keep it. As if that’s what makes it matter, and not simply the fact of it happening: that it’s happening.
I was actually lucky enough to have my father until I was 25. Twenty-five years of him: teaching me to soap up my hands and make a fist, draw it open slowly to blow enormous bubbles that drifted through the laundry room then disappeared with a wet pop; reading me the first poems I ever heard. Yet lately, what I think of most when I think of him is how when I peeked at one of his wartime journals, every entry began with a description of the cold that day, how sharp it was, and whether or not he received any mail. So much lives inside the trivial; so often it’s where we realize other people feel as whole and empty and full and broken as we do, that they too need the warmth and connection we seek so desperately for ourselves.
Theo x
August 30, 2022
Hi Theo,
You write the most beautiful images into existence — your description of your father teaching you to blow soap bubbles is really powerful. It's so interesting to me how we catalog memory in flashes like that, and some moments stick and others don't. There's a moment with my own dad that stands out in my stored memory that has a similar tender quality: my father, with his daughters gathered around, lifting a hurt bird into a shoe box. I know he must have been speaking, but the words have fallen away. It's so interesting to think about what's left; it's like an unfocused photograph, or a painting made in quick strokes that captures the way the three of us girls leaned in towards him to see — a knot with him at the center — and the way the bird was so gently held in his hands. A memory reduced, I guess, to the essential. Li-Young Lee has a few poems that for me really get at both the complexity of family dynamics and the slippery nature of memory, "Persimmons" being a favorite. I've read interviews where he spoke about his relationship with his dad as complicated, but this one doesn't address that so directly. Instead the complexity is in his relationship to his cultural inheritance, which is of course part of his relationship with his dad, but in their interactions we see only tenderness. His father is aging, and therefore losing, and the way Lee conveys the poignancy of what remains in memory — the ripe weight of persimmons in his palm — breaks my heart every time I read this poem. I saw in my grandmother, as she aged into her nineties, the way memory became further and further reduced, and while there was sadness in this for those of us who witnessed it happening there is also something somewhat comforting in the way the siphoning of her memory left recollections that were essential to her understanding of her life as a lucky one. She could always recall, without fail, walking past the delicatessen on the corner of her Brooklyn block at the age of fourteen and proclaiming that she would marry the boy behind the counter. She could always remember their reunion when he returned from war. She was a masterful storyteller, and she always told those stories the same way, in the same words, so much so that they are imprinted on my own memory. That scripted telling has always been really interesting to me: there was clearly interplay between the repetition of the memories in rote words and the centrality of them to her understanding of herself and her life. And in a way, it's almost as if learning those memories by heart, as the saying goes, kept them, and her understanding of herself, from slipping from her when the slipping began. In "Persimmons" it seems that the painting of the fruit plays a similar role as my grandmother's storytelling; they are ways we sear into our minds some of what is important to us. So- your father teaching you to blow bubbles, my father attempting to rescue a hurt bird: memories we've chosen to remember in the retelling, maybe memories that will stick.
You also wrote of your father keeping a wartime journal. I admire him for it, even if much of his focus was on the weather or letters received or not. It's not really an "even if" though. I think that's part of what makes me see keeping a journal as something to admire, the checking in on and capturing what would otherwise disappear. I'm grateful to have had the chance to send these letters back and forth with you— in a way they too are snapshots of the current moment, the thoughts and preoccupations that might otherwise have slipped away, but with the added benefit of conversation.
Samara
August 31, 2022
Dear Samara,
I can’t get past the image of you and your sisters as a knot with your father, bent over a broken thing: to together bear witness to a pain that defies articulation, that, like so much pain, or maybe all pain, has no real solution. The bravery, the tenderness of the hearts that try anyway. To speak of the essential: what could be more?
It seems, too, your grandmother had that same understanding of the way, as you so elegantly put it, memory reduces to the essential — that we can choose what is essential — for her, what was “essential to her understanding of her life as a lucky one.” As I live more and more, I feel more and more acutely how much I want to hold onto, how little I can, how this presents a choice. Nostalgia takes a million forms — sometimes I find myself escaping into nostalgia like it’s an enchanted forest where I could remain if I just figured out the right spell. Other times, I wonder if nostalgia is not much more than a function of this desire to have some control over the mind’s editing of one’s life — the way your grandmother held onto her love story always, perhaps knowing from the beginning that there was no going forward without it. In this way, maybe our memories become talismans that bring us back to ourselves when that journey home seems to stretch longer and more winding than we ever thought possible.
I don’t think we could close on a better poem than “Persimmons.” In particular, those lines “I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question/All gone, he answers.” How all this time, we have been wrestling with the idea of goneness, the heft of it, how to live with it. And, too, how to live with what doesn’t leave us: “scent of the hair of the one you love/the texture of persimmons,/in your palm, the ripe weight.” The ripe weight of your grandmother’s recollections, the bird in the box, the soap bubbles in my laundry room. My mother planted persimmons in our backyard when I was growing up. We never saw them — the local birds were so much faster than we were — but it was enough to know they were there, feeding someone on their sweetness. A kind of object permanence: where our loved ones stop seeing or forget, we see and remember.
x
Theo