MY BRILLIANT FRIEND

Artist's Date #45: Lena Moses-Schmitt's True Mistakes reading

Every time I go out these days, I'm reminded about how little I go out anymore; after kids, after covid, after moving to a new city, and then through all of that, developing chronic pain. So the real after is hating my body, and then after that hating getting dressed, and so I started wearing only jeans and a T-shirt or something that helped me feel more invisible.

It's not fun going out at night when you feel invisible. So, logically, I just stopped going out.

I tried going out again to enjoy my friend's reading - my brilliant friend Lena, who wrote a poetry book called True Mistakes. I don’t remember what I wore. It’s not important. I do, I remember. It was the nice pants and the uncomfortable top.

In Lena’s poetry, she talks about the past as if it were friendly, and she treats her mind as if it were a companion. She’s alive with a brilliant mind, tracking what this mind thinks about when in bad conditions, good conditions, and all the conditions of life. When asked by the host what poetry can do for us in this time of total decline, Lena said (and I paraphrase with words that describe how I remember her answer feeling when she said it) that poetry is outside of all the systems that are harming us, which makes it a balm. I loved this answer.

Lena is a person whose brilliance unfolds the more you know her. Is this always the case with people? I feel like it's not.

More recently, Lena sent out a hand-drawn edition of her newsletter, and I was blown away by it. There were writing and pictures, and the pictures were drawings of all these gorgeous wrought-iron pieces found in Brooklyn architecture. The writing mused about things including AI, and even though I am more of a tech idealist, I found her position convincing. What if I replaced all these past hours spent on AI chatting about this or that with some drawings? Surely whatever I'd been worried about would have been transmuted by now. I have another brilliant friend, Melissa, with whom I also often disagree. She has said of AI that it's fine to say no. I like this position,

I think Lena's brilliance is also that when you want to get better yourself, she makes space for that immediately. Lena is someone who wants all artists to get bigger. She can hold space for that. Secretly, (ok not anymore) I think that’s what writing does for her and has done for me and can do for everyone.

One time Lena and I were both at the Ruby, a women and non-binary writers’ space in SF that is also a refuge, and I remember I had just sent out a first newsletter to a little group of writers there. We’d just done The Artist’s Way together, and most of our discussions were about how The Artist’s Way was a ridiculous text that was unaware of its own privilege and asked us to bypass so many things that made writing important, but we still agreed to do it together. I was sitting in the little window seat upstairs in the attic and was waiting for Friday's community lunch, and Lena came upstairs and looked back and said she got the newsletter and she loved it! It was so generous. She's always generous.

The owner of the shop, who had the reading, said as much about Lena. In her intro to the two writers, she said that she mentioned to Lena that she was thinking about opening a brick-and-mortar feminist book shop, and Lena gushed: Oh, you should totally do that. And you know what, this person did. In her telling of it, it was the gushing that helped. Lena, my brilliant friend, does not withhold. This seems so unusual these days, for someone to be forthcoming with emotions.

If it seems like this is a story about getting you to read poetry, it might be! But also, once Lena and I had drinks where she said she was thinking about moving to New York before she moved to New York, and we tried to talk about all kinds of important things before we landed on Love is Blind. I felt like I could have talked a thousand hours with Lena about Love is Blind. We had exactly the opposite ideas of many things in these episodes, and yet we weren't at odds. Do you have real friends like that? I think I can count the number I have on one hand. Lena. One.

In the Q and A portion, I asked a question because I had to, and I said that both writers who read had this way of moving their attention from granular to overarching, and wanted to know how they learned to do that. Both writers answered, of course, that they learned it through reading other writers. That's always the answer to any question you ask any writer. Reading is what makes you a writer. Never forget that's the truth. But also, I wanted such a specific answer; I wanted to know how to do it myself. You know what about your brilliant friend? They have their own way towards brilliance, and it is all theirs. People get to have secrets, you can't be mad about that.

Some books on friendships: I don't know any! I think Elena Ferrante's books do a thing about women and the impossibility of friendships between us, based on the unknowingness of womanhood and the cultural myths. Where in novels are women real friends?

Who was your first friend (Abby Coven), and what did you do together (we dressed up as twins, her sometimes in a blue shirt and purple shorts, and me in a purple shirt and blue shorts, but that counted)? We picked snap peas in her garden and went upstairs to her attic room in her triangular house. She had dark hair and a small body, and we fit well together. If we talked about things, I don't remember. It was more how we liked being in the same space, trying to match, seeing our differences, and pushing the peas out of the pods and eating them in the sunshine. I needed sunscreen, and she never did. I think it would be fair to say that she was more beautiful, but without ever needing to compare herself to me, either. She held her own space.