Making Light

Hello from Minneapolis

I was having a real Charlie Brown moment taking out the trash the other day. I’d been wanting to update this newsletter for a few weeks now, but I couldn’t figure out what to say nor how to say it. I like to write funny stuff, stuff to make people feel good, and nothing happening in my beloved city was funny or felt like anything but agony.

So there I was, a bag of trash in one hand, compost in the other (city-run, y’all!), forlorn as the slate gray sky, ruminating as I clomped to the alley in untied winter boots about the fact that, my God, look around, this was hardly the time for making light.

Minneapolitans spelled SOS with candles and lanterns on Lake Bde Mka Ska Saturday. Pic courtesy Jeff Schad for the Minnesota Star Tribune.

But then I heard those two words in a new way, the way we do sometimes when extraordinary circumstances catalyze us into new modes of thinking. Making light. A cliche that’s been around for hundreds of years implying a trivialization of serious matters. But, my God, look at those words again. Making light. Isn’t that what so many of us want to do, what so many of us are doing every day? People making — as in, creating — light with their mutual aid and protest signs and peaceful observing and commuting and dispatching and impossibly quick wit in vetted Signal chats? People doing these things in light of an unprecedented federal paramilitary occupation in our beloved city?

Do you know who these mutual aid supplies are from? Pregnant and postpartum moms. If there were any justice they would all get Congressional Medals of Honor.

A few days after Renee Good was murdered, I spoke at a 200-member book club of retired teachers, school secretaries, and other women who had spent their careers in helping professions. The topic of my talk, which I had composed well before ICE rolled in, was “Turning Grief to Champagne.” It was about how art and only art, at least the art I love and try to make, can alchemize even the blackest of human impulses into something effervescent, joyful, hilarious and warm. The anecdote I was supposed to start with was a bit from Noel Coward’s biography: that he composed his arguably most famous and funniest play, Blithe Spirit, in six weeks at a patron’s country estate after fleeing London during the Blitz, and midway through his stay his own apartment was bombed and destroyed.

The candle we light nightly for Alex Pretti and Renee Good. “What do we tell our neighbors with this?” I ask my toddler. To which she replies, “We love you.”

I did not want to give this talk. I did not want to go to this book club. The only reason I did was because they had asked me nine months in advance, and also I’ve never liked disappointing my teachers. So I went, feeling in crisis — being, in fact, in crisis, as we all were and remain here in Minnesota — and do you know what happened?

The talk worked. Not because of me, but because of the artists I quoted and called up and conjured. Coward, Nuar Alsadir, Christopher Bayes. They reminded us, collectively, that goodness and playfulness and friendship and joy and warmth and laughter are everywhere, and the fact that their converses are also everywhere does not diminish their ubiquity or their power. We laughed a lot. We cried too, and in the blink of an eye we also raised $700 for mutual aid. One of the retired teachers, Julie, offered to be my five-month-old baby’s bonus grandma. Because I am not a fool, or I am only in the truest sense, I accepted.

My two-year-old napping at a singing protest. Paid agitators, indeed!

When we make light, the real way, we’re not trivializing. We’re transforming ugliness into beauty, cowardice to courage, greed into generosity, violence into peace, scarcity into abundance, and fear into love. I know because I have the privilege of witnessing this transformation every day. Boxes of diapers. Commuters honking horns. Neighbors escorting employees to their cars come nightfall. Restaurants only accepting donations and school parents on patrol in safety vests they purchased themselves, on scheduled shifts they organized themselves. I wish I could tell you how beautiful it is, I wish I could convey it properly with the crudeness of this language, but I can’t. But I do want you to know that it’s here. Beauty, I mean. Light being made everywhere.

Sending strength, solidarity, and love from Minneapolis,

Sally

P.s. This video made me laugh. Also this one. Also this in McSweeney’s.

P.p.s. Impact over attention, forever and ever and ever.