The Intimate art of Living and Letter Writing
a letter to Mariam about Intimacy and how true connection might bring our authentic selves into being.
Excerpt from the Diary of Frida Kahlo
Sweet Mariam,
It’s been only two days since we decided to write this public letter to each other, and yet already I have a (characteristically excited and optimistic; hopefully not naive) feeling that this is a practice we might maintain for years if not decades to come!
The moment we landed upon this idea I was overwhelmed by how right it feels.
I have felt lately that I want to shed façades and find out who I would be if I felt nobody was watching, so naturally the idea of becoming a recluse seemed like an attractive one. To write, one must address an audience, even if it’s an imaginary one. How can I do that at a time when the jury of strangers in my head is the very thing I am trying to destroy?
Like many others, I have often found the private letters of other people fascinating. Like private journals, they show a person not in their public persona, not showing off their education or skill- but existing as a thinking, breathing, feeling entity.
It is in the diary of Frida Kahlo, not her public work, that I first found the coexisting rage and resilience that helped me begin to come to terms with disability, it is in the early letters of Simone de Beauvoir that I glimpsed not the authoritative philosophical voice of the Ethics of Ambiguity or The Second Sex, but the excited, giddy speculations of a curious person who desires nothing more than to better understand the world that she is so in love with.
What makes these documents so valuable, and so touching, is that they contain what we crave most of all in this age of face-saving and performance: Intimacy.
Upon searching the deinintions of intimacy one finds five common usages of the word: close familiarity, private and relaxed atmosphere, sex, the sharing of secret or personal information, and deep knowledge of a subject.
Intimacy as opposed to being a stranger, intimacy as opposed to lies and performance, intimacy as opposed to frigidity.
When I think of intimacy what comes to mind, as an image, is closeness. A tight closeness, the letter clutched to the heart, the slipping into another’s being, so close as to become almost one, close enough for the lines to be blurred. A closeness not to one’s exterior but to the beating heart, the blood vessels, the epicentre of atrocities.
This winter, in Spain, I befriended a couple, Eli and Holly, who had the most incredible knack for cutting to the inside of a human I have ever experienced. On our last encounter before I left, we got a pot of Mint tea and tried to differentiate between intimacy, romance, connection, and love.
“Romance” I said, “is an external thing, a performance. A beautiful performance, like a grand gesture or a wonderful date, something that brings magic into life, that transcends the ordinary. Intimacy is the opposite. It can’t be performed, it’s internal. You could be having the most banal evening in the world, everyone in their sweatpants, just watching tv together- but you feel so comfortable together, and that comfort makes it profound”.
When I think of the word intimacy, my mind jumps to words like interior, inside.
There is the exterior self which we know quite well, and then the interior one- the soul at the very centre of us. The exterior self is seen but the interior one(s) cannot be seen, can only be felt.
This means that not only are other people most frequently acquainted with our exterior selves, but we, too, know her better than we know the women hidden deep down, because as a whole I fear we are a lot better at seeing than feeling.
Perhaps we could call that hidden being the intimate self.
And if we did, then maybe intimacy is the word for those moments when, in a dazzling moment of human brilliance and magic, we share her with another.
And another thought-
What would it mean for our exterior and intimate selves to live in harmony?
As two sides, two experiences, of the same essential existence?
My interior and exterior selves are in a perpetual power struggle.
Oh, how I am trying to let that intimate self sing out! How I am trying to listen when she speaks to me, how I am letting her speak as me, how I am trying to speak as her!
It’s a HUMUNGOUS effort. We are not trained for authenticity, we are trained for some side of perpetual battle of social graces.
The etymology of intimacy is giving me more to bite into than the dictionary defniteions.
What is intimate is the closeness between my innermost nature and yours, who I am innately, rather than performatively.
Letter from Virginia Woolfe to Vita Sackville-West
Months ago, dear Mariam, you tried to convince me to start a public newsletter.
The idea had been rattling around my mind for a while but I resisted for the same reason that I have been uploading videos to my youtube channel less frequently, that I am re-approaching the third draft of my novel with a sense of frustration, and that generally I have come to something of a creative crisis:
The more I share of myself, the less clearly I can hear the sounds of my intimate voice.
Writing, filmmaking, even songwriting, are the ways in which I am able to engage with the world and life in an intimate way, in a way that is magical and sacred and meaningful.
I do not know what I think, how I feel, indeed who I am, without writing about it.
Illness has taken me away from the world at times but writing and filmmaking and dreaming and poeticising has inserted me right back at the centre of it.
These practices draw my intimate self all the way up to the surface of my skin so that she can feel every kiss, every song, even breeze. This has been the only way I can make sense of a life with this disease, has meant that I feel sometimes even more alive than I might have been had I never gotten sick at all.
But the more I share that writing, or the more I write with the idea in the back of my mind that I might share it, my intimate self disappears, and the author becomes the shell, the performer, the exterior life.
The more I project myself into the world, the further I feel from it.
But writing to you does not have that deadening effect.
We started our friendship through long emails, then long videos sent back and forth, voice notes, texts. I have written you letters by hand and sent them across the Atlantic ocean. We have never had the opportunity to perform our social selves for one another, we have had the time to let our sentences breathe and form parpgraphs, essays, before the other replies. Perhaps it was that format, as well as our kindred spirits, that has set the tone of our friendship as one of the utmost intimacy, as if you never met the exterior me at all, as if when you rang the doorbell only Intimate Me was home, and she invited you into her living room, and there you stayed forever.
Which brings me back to letter writing.
When women (and I use the term loosely here) write letters, they do not have to conform to the House Style of a newspaper or academic institution. Intuition and what ifs are just as frequently cited as ‘credible citations’- any theorising or storytelling is littered with declarations of love and descriptions of aftermoons and other details of the wonderous everyday th
What is beautiful about reading the letters of strangers is the telling of story through dialogue rather than narrative. It is not memoir, not journal entries. It is flights of imagination and philosophising interwoven with small talk interwoven with accounts of life.
I like the idea that the conversation, drawn out, detailed, conducted in paragraphs- is so attached to life.
We are so plagued by the idea that our lives must be viewed as though through a narrative arc- but is it a linear narrative or a circular one, is it a hero’s journey or merely vignettes?
Since we started writing to one another last September I have been able to look beyond my assumption that life was a story that I alone was telling the world (or that the world, perhaps, was telling me).
What if life is a dialogue?
What if our intimate selves thrive in dialogue?
What if love and intimacy can draw out of us a way of living that is far too fragile and ineffable to maintain alone?
My partner Megan is currently doing an art project about domestic cooking as a huge piece of cultural, and artistic history, which has been undervalued because it happened in the home rather than churches or galleries, because it was the purview of women, and because, essentially, it is intimate, and most people seem to have accepted the idea that art most be performance.
I think a lot about what it means to reclaim the domestic, the “girly”, the feminine, the soft.
Journals, letters sealed with a kiss, embroidery, labours of love. What if they are not just overlooked, but examples of an even purer form of creativity- one that is unselfconcious, one that knows no ego, one that is intimate.
When I was in Spain last month I played games.
I bought a waistcoat and a hat and I befriended strangers and talked to them about love.
Entirely for my own benefit I changed my name, I named my intimate self, or whatever intimate self kept showing up, and I played as her- I walked as her, admired the scenes on the streets, tasted coffee with her tongue (her taste buds are so much brighter!) felt love for what was before me on that Spanish afternoon and all that awaited me at home (her heart was so much bigger!).
The detachment that my Spanish winter allowed me from what felt to me like “real life”, it gave me a freedom to wear my intimate self wherever I went, allowed me a childlike giddy joy at being alive, and a fearlessness about what it brought to me.
There are times or places when, cut off from the circus, we see a pathway to wholeness, to connecting the dots between all of the roles we play. I want to create a bridge from those hidden places to the everyday, I want to bring her home, I want to retire my shapeshifting days and be whole.
You and I have made it a project of late to consider what it means to live with vulnerability- I think it has something to do with the abolition of boundaries between interior and exterior selves. This does not mean that I would live out life as a perpetual journal entry- I would not forgo the sparkly moments, the parties and camp and humour. I just crave a sense of continuity within myself- I crave to be alive at all times, I crave to never ever feel that I am attending an afternoon of my life in which several of my favourite selves are not invited.
And I want what I have always wanted- to bring the girl who appears when real life feels far away home, to be so forceful and uncompromising in my existence that I do not change shapes to fit the room.
I want to exist, dear friend, a tangible taste of a person, not merely a thousand almost-persons.
Perhaps every young person- or every person on earth- feels like this.
Perhaps nobody does and I sound odd, but I know that step one between breathing into life from all the way down in my belly is not caring how I seem as long as I know that I am being true to how I am.
My hope is that the human trajectory starts with feeling this way and then expands- that the impulse to become a more vivid and fearless and intimate human actually leads to the becoming of that person.
What I know for sure is that you catalyse that becoming in me.
I cannot explain how excited I am to add this other dimension to our kinship!
I cannot wait for these letters and essays to accompany us through summers and winters, to accompany you as you move to New York City and attend Columbia University, to accompany me as I sail into this year and learn with you, from the wisdom you share with me from inside and outside the classroom.
I could not write a newsletter because I was too afraid to have another opportunity to perform for the world, to use the very tool I use to find myself- writing- to lose myself instead.
But to write to you, sweet friend, is to ensure that I show up.
It is to place this writing squarely on the emotional plane where I meet you, a plane that is radical in its softness, in its truth.
It is to risk the inner self being glimpsed at by the outer world, and in doing so perhaps chip away at the divisions that make me a woman divided from herself.
It is, I hope, to learn to write not just with intelligence or softness or indulgence or clarity- but with intimacy.
It is to speak as my favourite self of all-
The intimus voice.
The soft, sincere- the sentimental.
Your friend.
With Love,
Feargha