ON THROWING LIFE RAFTS TO EACH OTHER, THE SILENT TREATMENT, AND COMMUNING WITH THE UNIVERSE
Thursday June 5, Friday June 6 2025, and this week
Dear Sarah,
I have handwritten notes that I am going to type up to write my letter to you, but I am going to lead with the most current news, which is that I have been sick this week and guess what: it’s covid! I have never tested positive for covid in the past five years, which is not to say that I’ve never had it, just that I don’t think I’ve had it. I had a pretty wicked fever on Monday which made even my typically ice-cold feet hot and brought on some mildly delirious dreams, and since then I’ve been coughing and sneezing and having sinus symptoms. Today (Thursday) I picked up a few books from the public library (masked) and also picked up the free covid tests that they have on offer, and covid it is. This morning before I procured and took the test I felt like this was something different; somehow I felt uncanny. Sometimes when I have had colds or other sicknesses I have had a balloon-head effect where I feel disconnected from my body and my head feels floaty. But this morning I felt a kind of unreality. I was ordering some sunscreens (yes, plural) online and checking my address for delivery and something about my actual address made me feel unreal, or, on the other side of unreal, it felt clarifying. Yes, I live here in this apartment. Yes, I have a physical location in time and space. Yes, this number is where you can leave a package for me in the physical realm and I will be here to meet it. It felt uncanny to have a pinpoint location in time and space, even though my body is perpetually a pinpoint location in time and space. I do not know if anyone else has identified feelings of uncanniness as a covid symptom, but I’m adding it to the mix. I’ll also say that if this letter seems more than the usual amount of rambly, we can blame covid!
As I reread your letter of last week (ah, the welcome practice of rereading and taking notes as I prepare to respond!) I was reflecting on people using or chatting with AI. Writing from the comfortable, lucky, and perhaps unusual perspective these days of our letter exchange, I reflected on the time and energy it takes to get to a place of deep and-or sustained conversation with another human. Perhaps chatting with AI feels like communing with the universe. Human relationships are hard. And they can end.
My mind wandered over the little I really know of AI and the sense I have of how it is functioning in our world right now. I’m thinking about AI and the cognitive activities humans undertake, thinking about the future of human creativity. Humans synthesize information at a certain kind of pace; how does AI synthesize information, and at what pace? All I can assume is: fast. There are and could be cases where we want information to be synthesized faster than our human minds could do it. We already live in that world. You don’t have to explain everything to me, but I am curious if AI has been set to the task of solving the problems we haven’t solved yet. Is AI being used to cure cancer? This would seem to be an obvious good idea. If it is going beyond synthesizing existing information and doing some thinking of its own, fix cancer! Does it care about our human bodies?
But in other places where we’ve seen AI make an appearance, I was thinking about AI art. Why exactly would we (humans) want to see AI art? I’m reflecting on an understanding of art that presumes the product is the object of the creative process, that looking and owning is the object, rather than grappling with ideas, impulses, intuitive shifts over time. An artwork is, I believe, a document of a process. In capitalism, living within the scheme of the 40-hour workweek, looking and owning are ways to utilize limited free time. The increasingly limited generalized experience of making art, in school and beyond, means that creative practice is rarified rather than integrated into life. If we have a lot of people who aren’t themselves making art, making decisions about art, then we have a skewed perspective on what art is, and what makes it “good.” The idea of art needing to be “good” is based on market concepts: can I sell this, does anyone want to buy it, can I make a career out of it. In the cases where I have seen AI art, I feel like there is an idea that AI can make something elaborately “good,” differently or better than a human can.
Also thinking about AI and whether our letters have been swept up into the machine(s): What if we believe our writing, the writing of these letters, to be creating or supporting empathy, our own empathy or the potential empathy of any who read them — what if AI eats our letters, has already eaten them — and becomes marginally more empathetic — and other humans engaging with AI receive or participate in that empathy?
Problems with AI: the absorption and processing of human-generated thought on a machine-level scale, without permission from the humans whose thoughts and works are being absorbed into the mix; AI CEOs and etcetera getting rich off the resources of other people’s minds. When people have mined the earth for its resources the earth cannot complain, in the immediate moment. People advancing AI are treating humans like a resource to be mined — but people push back in the immediate moment. Miners are used to mining, extractors are used to extracting. In spirit, the people who have mined the earth are now mining their fellow humans, across time and space.
Toward the end of your letter you referenced Thoreau sucking the marrow out of life — we like this concept, on the human scale! — we suck the marrow out of life at a human pace; we fortify the soil of life and creativity in return. I thought of lentils and how they are good for you and good for the earth; they pull nitrogen from the atmosphere and make it available in the soil, which fertilizes the lentils and also nourishes the soil for the next crop. (I somehow felt sure I’d rhapsodized about lentils in a past letter to you, but I cannot seem to find the letter I’m imagining!)
Now I’m thinking about art appreciation. Is it fine to like absolutely anything at all? Is it important to have seen some fair amount of art in order to judge what is “good,” or what you like? Or — on a different angle — maybe we need different words for what artificial intelligence creates. Maybe we shouldn’t get to abbreviate it to AI, as I’ve been doing here, which makes it catchy. (Likely a losing battle, but what if it became e.g. a publication or style guide convention to refer to it only in full, as artificial intelligence.) Maybe we shouldn’t call the visual output that artificial intelligence makes “art.” Maybe we should call it other things. Draft: “Artificially generated visual content, synthesized from centuries of human creative contemplation and struggle superficially captured in images on the internet, elementally recombined and extracted following the written direction of a prompt.” The concept of “AI art” gives it way more credit and autonomy than it deserves.
Back to our letters! I enjoyed that in our first letters back last week, you quoted from our very first letter and I referenced our most recent. The restarting of the letters is a particular kind of restarting of a relationship, a facet of our relationship; yet the letter relationship does seem to stand on its own, even as it fortifies our human relationship with each other. We know each other; we have exchanged many words. To write letters is to form one-half of a conversation, solo. To write the first letter after time away is a kind of throwing of life rafts toward each other, which we will then examine and utilize to draw ourselves closer to each other. We can float into deeper water with our buoys, and with each other.
I’m glad you’re home with your people for the month of June! Just the idea of your intense recent work schedule fried my brain! Happy, happy summer to you! Looking forward to reading your words very soon.
Much love,
Eva
Sunday, June 8, 2025
Dear Eva,
I am taking full advantage of our relaxed schedule this letter round, typing my very first words on a Sunday morning. Our 2018 selves would be appalled. But we are older and wiser now, better grasping that the real key to commitment is flexibility, not rigidity. It has been pleasant this busy weekend to know that sometime, though it wasn’t clear when, I would get to spend an hour or two writing to you. I have discovered a little pocket of time in these quiet hours before we head to the Pride Parade, so the moment is now!
The week has been weird. Work-wise, I did the professional equivalent of searching for a single jigsaw puzzle piece for wayyy too long. Is this quandary one you can relate to? I think puzzling is an activity full of life lessons for me. One of the most salient is precisely the one I failed to remember this week – often the path forward is to stop scouring for a single piece (even if you know for sure it must be an easy one to spot, godammit!) and turn attention to a different part of the puzzle. When I do not follow this advice, like this week, I end up spending hours of futile time overthinking and leaving myself drained and with little progress to show for it. It was in this tapped-out state that I embarked upon what I previously said to B was “my favorite weekend of the year” because it was set to include two of our most beloved annual family traditions: the Greek Food Fair that you joined us for last year and Pride. We are also hosting a birthday dinner tonight for my mom; a festive coda to the most summery of weekends.
But the feeling summer in my body vibe has evaded me these past few days. At quitting time on Friday, I made the last-minute decision to go to a celebration of life for a childhood friend who recently passed. We hadn’t spoken in years, but there was something calling me there. So as B and the kids biked off to the food fair, I headed off to a church where hundreds of people were gathered to honor my old friend. I am thankful I went, but the experience was overwhelming in a multi-layered way. There was the expected aspect of pure, plain sadness about premature death, and wistful nostalgia seeing photos of the smiling teenager I spent so much time with long ago. But there was also something else. The huge room where we congregated radiated with a palpable and unwavering certainty; certainty about why he died, certainty about what happens next, certainty about the fate of everyone in that room. That certainty functioned as a kind of force field, one that I could not cross even if I tried. Although I could comprehend the words being spoken, it felt like the people on stage were speaking a language I could not understand. Sitting among hundreds of people, including many I had known since I was a kid, I have rarely felt like such an outsider.
The last time I had ever seen this person alive, he pretended he did not know me. We were sitting at a high school basketball game at our alma mater inches apart surrounded by mutual friends, and he acknowledged everyone around me in a way that left no doubt that I was being purposefully ignored. The experience was disorienting, as the silent treatment is no doubt intended to be! I do not know for sure what caused it, but I know that our divergent paths left us with little in common and this had manifested on social media in some unproductive ways over the years. If we had hit a particular breaking point along the way, it hadn’t sunk in as one to me. But my memory of Facebook days is blessedly hazy. In any case, the interaction felt like being slapped in the face by the gulf between our two middle-aged selves. At his memorial service I realized that many people there firmly believe that distance between us will be eternal. In their view, I will spend eternity in a very dark place. Hearing this expressed so clearly on Friday night caused me no pain or fear, just reinforced my alienation in that room.
Late that night and early into the next morning, I was wide awake while the rest of the beings in my house slept peacefully. The burst of grief and cognitive dissonance from the memorial had collided with my frenzied state of failed intellectual problem-solving in ways that produced a kind of combustion reaction. It did not literally manifest this way, but my experience of those hours was like a sweaty, dizzying, blurry race of thoughts. As I have learned to do, I wrote myself out of it. Holding a pen and moving my hand to write words on a page is the best way I know how to emerge from those spells. (If it wasn’t 3 am, moving my body in other ways would work, too.)
The scope of my certainty is tiny. As my counterproductive persistence at work this week makes evident, I yearn for answers as much as anyone.
–
It is now nearly 12 hours later. I just sat down on the couch after finishing the kitchen cleanup after our company left. Today was a wholly good day. We cheered and waved at the celebration of people loving who they love, being who they are. We had lunch with friends we hadn’t seen in too long. We made food with our hands, and then shared it with family. I feel summer again!
I also feel like I have narrowed down perhaps the only thing I am certain about, other than my love for my friends and family. It is less a thing, more an orientation toward the world: open, permeable, curious. I am certain about being uncertain!
I can’t wait to read your letter that has been sitting in my inbox for two days now! I apologize for my tardiness. I hope it’s been a wonderful weekend!
With love,
Sarah