The following are photos and a live writing transcript in response to Episode 1.4
So this is a letter with a lots of firsts in it.
It's the first time there's a direct discussion of the war. And it's the first time I've censored myself.
It's also the first time my phone rang in the middle of a life podcast. This is why we do r&d.
When I started working on this project, my mother asked me if I felt like it was an abuse of privacy to work with these letters as I am. It's a fair question. They're something of an archive, the people they concern are no longer living, but they are inherently private.
I replied that I felt I would know.
That sounds a bit ridiculous - know what? know how? - until you consider that my grandmother knew things that one shouldn't be able to. And so I suspect that if she didn't like what I was doing, she'd let me know.
In any case, the purpose behind this project isn't to trespass on anyone's privacy. It's a genuine attempt to learn, from my grandparents' generation, how the fuck they lived through such turmoil and separation.
In the autumn, I was having a lot of anxiety over the news. I've been in adrenaline-overdrive since the spring, when I was waiting for my permanent residency card (yay, immigration!) and then again in connection with my citizenship application. I was living alone, a lot, for the first time in a very long time. I was getting unproductively edgy, spending too much time listening to NPR podcasts and Radio 4.
My trials are far lesser.
It's moments like this, that I need this project. Because my grandparents were actually doing the war. Not just reading endless opinion columns in The Guardian (including the comments section), or political rants on Facebook. And they did not explode.
We can do this.
Perhaps my grandfather's set-up of "my pipe, a cool beer, a comfortable chair by the radio and you" is worth giving a shot.
Minus the pipe. Maybe I could have a bubble pipe, the kind children play with.
And the radio would need to play music. Not news.
A friend and collaborator asked me why I don't just read the letters. Another wondered how they might be more present in the installation. It's a good question. It's part of what I'm trying to answer by reading them here, now.
I call this piece 'a live puzzling out of complex matters', because I am trying to figure out this question I have - which is in some ways a set of specicific questions about my grandparents, but primarily - and this is really the important part to share with others - because I want to see if I can learn from them how to manage anxiety. How to be present. How to remember 'We have so much to live.’
So maybe that's what I've learned today about the curatorial principle. When I read for you and when I read just for me.
"Ok? Ok!”
It's interesting to hear my grandfather express worry in these letters. In my grandmother's which I've been reading since 2014, it feels like she always apologies when approaching him with any content that demanded his emotional labour. It is good to see that this is to a degree reciprocal, though he assumes her assent - "you do understand" - and tells her "well done" a lot. It could be that the dynamic of their relationship had changed and she writes similarly to him in this period.
I don't know. I don't have those letters. At least not with me.
I'm struck that his worries concern family. He never wavers in his inevitable return home. He doesn't worry about the war. It's like the weather. The rain has cleared, the damp is gone.
Russia will sooner or later declare war on Japan.
Goodnight, little wife.
(sometime I'm going to have to address this little wife thing...)
