#26 When In Doubt, Obsess
Reflections on a good hyperfocus
In 2019, Jenny and Rose started writing to each other about creativity, sobriety, and relationships. This year, we’re inviting you to pull up a chair and join our (very human, always AI-free) correspondence.
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Welcome back from camping! I loved your photos. I agree wholeheartedly with your conclusion in your last letter, the mundane does not have to be a “diminished palette of life choices.” It’s simply wonder in disguise. While I am certainly a fan of new experiences, I share your instincts: wonder is everywhere, especially in the familiar.
You asked what made young Rose tick. Do you know that line from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” I have measured out my life with coffee spoons?
I have measured out my life in obsessions. I almost always have one: a subject I must know everything about, a biography I need to examine from all angles, a method I am mandated to perfect.
My first obsession was penguins. As a child, I read penguin books under the covers, diligently mapped the breeds to their geographies, and happily corrected any adult who mistook a king penguin for an emperor. Next, it was the Titanic, then horses, then World War II. Later, it was Catholicism, then commercial alcohol distillation methods and cocktails (we know how that ended).
In the 2010s, I channeled this tendency into the 1800s. Instead of sculpting Titanic models, I hunted down archival sources in newspaper databases. For several years, I fixated on the archives of one specific author, Clara Erskine Clement Waters, an 1800s art historian. Where her online biography was (and is) sparse, the papers she left behind told a different story. She wrote about women’s rights, published a highly praised novel that’s now difficult to find, hosted esoteric religious figures, and negotiated book deals with force. I admired her, although I wasn’t sure I liked her, and I had no clue why I was obsessed with her. She had been dead for over a hundred years. Nevertheless, I slogged through grant applications so I could travel to archives to transcribe her drafts and correspondences. I wanted to see every piece of paper she left behind.
I had, for example, spent months searching for information about her daughter, who had died a young woman. I sent a check to a county office and asked for their records. The envelope arrived weeks later. I opened it on my way home, smoking a cigarette in the hot summer air, walking without looking ahead, anxious and optimistic. Maybe my sources were wrong. Maybe her daughter had lived a long and happy life. Maybe there had been no sorrow for her mother. I pulled the single official record from the envelope and read the neat cursive. Name: Hope Waters. Mother’s name: Clara E. Clement Waters. Date of death: November 2, 1899. Cause of death, primary: anemia. Cause of death, secondary: exhaustion. Age: 24. At my desk, I filed the death certificate above her mother’s letters. Neat. Tidy. Then I sat on the stoop outside my apartment, overwhelmed with a grief that was mine and not mine at all.
I was once asked why I was obsessed with this author and her biography. The question seemed irrelevant. The subjection of an obsession is both the whole point and not the point. A line from Rosie Sprinks’ phenomenal Substack post, “A Project Will Save You," comes to mind:
That impulse to go to the garage and just start something is what differentiates us humans from machines. We need to feel we are making our way through the world, not just existing in it. We need to feel a sense of autonomy and progress that orientates us in time and space.
The hunt for knowledge feels like power. As the poet Jimmy Baca so eloquently put it, amid the wilderness life becomes when mature, I can recover one more paper from someone’s archive. I can file a birth certificate in the first folder and a death certificate in the last. I can believe — in a wild and reckless way — that a whole life can be organized and recovered.
What have you been obsessed with recently?
P.S. I am also obsessed with T’s seltzer airplanes. If he needs more seltzer cans, let me know.