- Tina Rowley
- Posts
- Weekly Zephyr #131 and done: The Lightness
Weekly Zephyr #131 and done: The Lightness
Goodbye to the WZ
What is it called when you’re saying goodbye but nobody’s going anywhere?
Socially, you’d call that awkward. Is this a social situation? Are we being social in this newsletter? Ah, bless, that’s the question of someone who doesn’t go out much.
The Weekly Zephyr was born in the late spring of 2017 and it’s been going, with long breaks, ever since. A zephyr doesn’t blow and blow and blow and never stop, see. The WZ would waft in for a few months and then go limp for a while. Blow, disappear, blow, disappear, according to my rising and falling levels of energy and inspiration.
I’ve had a gentle mission from the outset with this thing. I created the WZ after I asked my community what kind of work they might like to see from me, what would make them happy, and among the responses was a private message from a friend who said, “I think you should start a TinyLetter.”
Ding! That felt perfect.
The Trump administration was a few months old when I started the WZ and nearly everybody I knew was feeling raw. I thought maybe I could make a space like a funny little party. A shoes-off, caftan-wearing, summer feeling. Cushions on the floor, hors d’oeuvres, anything goes. Not a party for something. I didn’t want the letter to be about anything. I wanted us all to hang out and experience pleasure and lightness, the end. The Weekly Zephyr would attempt to be a lightness delivery system. That’s where the title came from.
That got harder over time.
This morning, knowing I was going to write the last WZ but not knowing what I was going to say, I had the great luck of discovering an Italo Calvino book I didn’t know about, a posthumously published series of lectures he’d planned to give at Harvard called Six Memos for the Next Millennium. I’ve only read a sample on my library app and I have the rest of the book on hold but so far: whoosh
What timing.
His first memo/lecture is called “Lightness”.
A couple of excerpts:
When I began my career, the duty of every young writer, the categorical imperative, was to represent our times. Full of good intentions, I tried to become one with the ruthless energy that, collectively and individually, was driving the events of our century. I tried to find some harmony between the bustling spectacle of the world, by turns dramatic and grotesque, and the picaresque, adventurous inner rhythm that spurred me to write. I soon realized that the gap between the realities of my life that were supposed to be my raw materials and the sharp, darting nimbleness that I wanted to animate my writing was becoming harder and harder for me to bridge. Perhaps I was only then becoming aware of the heaviness, the inertia, the opacity of the world—qualities that quickly adhere to writing if one doesn’t find a way to give them the slip.
I sometimes felt that the whole world was turning to stone: a slow petrifaction, more advanced in some people and places than others, but from which no aspect of life was spared. It was as if no one could escape Medusa’s inexorable gaze.
And this:
In order to cut off Medusa’s head without being turned to stone, Perseus supports himself on the lightest of stuff—wind and clouds—and turns his gaze toward that which can be revealed to him only indirectly, by an image caught in a mirror.
…
When the human realm feels doomed to heaviness, I feel the need to fly like Perseus into some other space. I am not talking about escaping[*] into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I feel the need to change my approach, to look at the world from a different angle, with different logic, different methods of knowing and proving.
I was knocked over to see my Zephyr mission located so precisely and perfectly. I didn’t know what I was trying to do here in the Zephyr exactly, but I’ve been sniffing at something, trying to drag a crayon around with my paw for some purpose. And here comes the ghost of Calvino, so kind, giving me this present. “Were you trying to do this?” Omg. Yes. Worse, but yes. Way more crudely but yes. I wanted us to find a way to look at things that created an ergonomic feeling of lightness.
[*] Sometimes I wanted us to escape. That’s true. We did do some purposeful escaping in the WZ. You can’t blame us.
Here’s the thing: lightness was a tall order when the Zephyr began and that order has gotten taller and taller over these last few years. Is it denser here on Earth? Has our actual atmosphere changed? Is gravity pulling on us harder? In any case, I don’t want to be part of a lightness delivery system right now. If anything, I’m climbing onto the receiving end of whoever’s doing that. Lightness is still fantastic. Somebody more floaty can go ahead and handle distribution, though.
This doesn’t mean I want to stop talking to you. I want to remove obstacles to talking to you, in fact. The subtle psychic obligation to create a feeling of lift has turned into an obstacle so I’m peeling that obligation off, and that means peeling “The Weekly Zephyr” off.
I still want to keep you company and vice versa. You keep me company, too, here. I would feel weird and lonely if this whole newsletter fell into the sea.
Here’s what I know about what we’re doing in this space next:
We’re letting gravity do its thing and seeing what’s actually down here instead of trying to make things okay, better, doable, fun. (I’m not the enemy of fun all of a sudden. But I’m not its servant, either. I’ll freelance for fun when the mood strikes me.)
We’re not putting on so many disguises to try and look cool/normal in what we think the world is. (We means me.)
We’re operating with an awareness of death and saying whatever feels the realest before we don’t get to say things any more. (We means we. There’s a comment section that you are always maximally invited into.)
Confiding will be part of it, which is a specific, pressure-relieving thing to do
I’m going to talk about some things I haven’t talked so much about before because they didn’t seem like they might be of general interest. To hell with the general interest. Pleasing fewer people less of the time, does that sound good? Let’s try it.
I don’t have a for-sure title yet.
Stay loose, readers. Look alive.