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  • Writer's pictureBecka

Episode 2.3 - Every piece in its own little groove

Updated: Apr 1, 2020

What follows is a transcript and photos from a live blog in response to episode 3, series 2.


photo: Paul Wade


Here's a framing thought for today's session, from the brilliant Svetlana Alexievich.


(If you don't know her work, it's perfect for times like these. She tackles huge events in Russian and Soviet history via a chorus of voices that emerge from an intensive interview process. I read Second Hand Time a few years ago and am now reading The Unwomanly Face of War, in connection with this project.)


Anyway, back to that framing thought:


“I am writing a history of feelings…A history of the soul…Not the lives of heroes, but the history of small human beings, thrown out of ordinary life into the epic depths of an enormous event. Into great History.”

I love the coordination of purple stamp, smudge and date stamp in today's letter.

I wonder if it's intentional or coincidence.


Today, my mother joined me on the Zoom stream and the letter I selected is postmarked to her birthday. Of course it wasn't her birthday yet, since she was not yet born. But still. Intentional or coincidence?


I forgot to post the music - today we were listening to "Love Is a Many Splendoured Thing" - you can listen here.


This letter is written on a rather wonderful piece of paper. It makes a very satisfying noise when you fold and unfold it. It's sort of a "thwack" noise. It feels like a noise made by something stronger than paper. It has a rough edge.

I like the rough edge and I like the discolouration caused by the glue of the envelope.

This letter is on one hand full of events: she's been to two plays, one of which my grandfather was in. I can't remember what the play was, but I once found the programme at the bottom of one of his trunks of things. It was years ago, when my dad was still living. I hadn't known my grandfather enjoyed acting. I wonder if he would have pursued it past university, if life had not intervened.

It is a letter of action - she is knitting him amazing technicolor socks - and plans, for the weekend, for the future.

But going back to the Svetlana Alexievich quote I posted this morning, it's also a history of feelings.

These letters of my grandmother, most of them I am revisiting for the second time. I know I have read this one before, though not for years, because I remember the socks.


This time through I am also struck by how much emotional management she seems to be doing in this letter. She says she never knows "the pretty words to say at the time" but hopes he gets how much she liked the play.


She can't wait for him to see the socks, but wants his honest opinion. She doesn't seem to worry that she won't get it though, he will doubtless be "perfectly frank and open as you always are!"


She needs his help with something, but "don't go out of your way." There is a sense of not wanting go take up too much space with her requests, not wanting to need too much, or even the sense that perhaps what already is is too much. This question of too much is one I've thought of a lot. It is a feeling I recognise in myself.

I do not find myself to be too much. Not when I sit down to think about what this means.


I've been struck, before, reading these letters, how adult my grandparents seem. In this letter, my grandmother is 21 years old.


She writes, "I think the happiest day of my life will be when you and I have got our lives all settled and arranged so that things are running along smoothly, every piece in its own little groove - so perfectly that you'll be coming home every evening to supper, your work for the day completed and no awful night work glowering around. Utopia? Ummmmh!”


[Sidebar. I finally realised, just now, what that "ummmmh" is. I would write it as um hmm. It means yes.]


But back to this notion of things working.

Leaving aside the fact that this particular set of highly normative circumstances was never going to be my personal utopia, I think what's underneath this is the idea that our lives are somehow something we need to solve before beginning in earnest.


Like we need to sort out XYZ - education, career advancement, debt clearance, property ownership, whatever - and then (and only then) will we begin to live.

Life as Rubik's cube. As in, it exists to be solved and can't fully exist until it is.

But that is plainly rubbish, right?


The fact that it is plainly rubbish has not stopped me from subscribing to this school of thought for some time. Sometimes I have to actively remind myself it's rubbish.


What's happening to around so many of us now is as good a reminder as any, I suppose, how little control we have over things. And if we wait to gain that control, we'll be waiting for a very long time to start living.


When you add in how little we know about how long we've got to be going on with that, it seems logical that we should get to it sooner rather than later, regardless of our state of solved-ness.

It's so seductive though. This notion of the ideal self, the ideal circumstances, the sense we could ease whatever it is that pricks at the corners of our consciousness, smooth it down, silence it and then devote the entirety of ourselves to living, to loving, to being present. It's a lovely idea.


Even if it is also plainly rubbish.


It's beautiful in Prague today, if cold. We woke up to snow. On the 31st of March.

This is the view from my window. Threatening clouds are invisible from where I'm sitting.

See?


Till Friday evening then [or afternoon, in our case] - when you have a date with a certain hookey-playing young lady, all my love,

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