This series is a compilation of 12 autobiographical-fiction letters between two sisters, inspired by the reading of Swann’s Way — In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (which is also considered to be a semi-autobiographical work). Each letter is illustrated and illuminated by artwork from ZO’s Blue Expo, blending the visual and the linguistic, to open the mind.
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This webpage will contain Parts IV — VI of the Letters. Link here for the beginning Parts I — III.
IV.
Sister, Me again!
Journey Together – In Search of Lost Time
“…it seemed to me that I myself was what the book was talking about…”
(Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. Translation by Lydia Davis)
By
Catie Jarvis & Bonnie Jarvis
Art by Paweł Grajnert — ZO Magazine Touch of Blue Expo Finalist
Art: Nicola Lynch Morrin
“and all is Blue for a Time”
Sister, me again,
Proust is sweeping me away. He writes with no hint of a storyline; he just seems to write… life. And then suddenly he will interject these philosophies, paragraphs that jump out of the page as if meant for only my eyes, only my mind.
“In me, too, many things have been destroyed that I thought were bound to last forever” (Pg 37).
I’m finding a lot of change in such a stagnant place. In myself. I’m lying in bed with beautiful things right now. I have Proust and your printed letters on my lap. It’s a sunny day outside that I can only observe from the small slit of a window behind me. But we make our own beauty in here. There’s an energy that exists between us as people, that I was vaguely aware of before this place, but it is stronger here, more prevalent because in here we need it, we need each other.
You asked me if I can imagine a time before regrets and failure, unkindness and loss and honestly, yes. Yes, I can… but it’s not a time before, it’s now. Proust says:
For even if we have the sensation of being always surrounded by our own soul, it is not as though by a motionless prison: rather, we are in some sense borne along with it in a perpetual leap to go beyond it, to reach the outside, with a sort of discouragement as we hear around us always that same resonance, which is not an echo from outside but the resounding of an internal vibration (pg. 88).
I think the capacity for regret, failure, unkindness, and loss always lived inside of us, it never didn’t exist. I think because of that it is possible to find, also within us, the capacity to exist autonomously from it. It’s so easy to find gratitude when deprived of the things we think we need. It’s hard to regret when you’re grateful to be where you are. It’s easy to be grateful for where you are when you know things can always get worse, when you’ve experienced the worst things.
Art: Delaney Accomando
“Equity”
I’m glad I never became monstrous to you. I was too distorted to become monstrous to myself. I think that’s what makes us so important to each other; no matter how much we change separately from one another we have always known the base of each other, in a way that no one else has or will ever be able to. When we see each other, we recognize ourselves as we were before, and even if we won’t ever be as we were before again, it’s a comfort to be reminded it was real and know someone else knows it too. “The souls of those we have lost are held captive…effectively lost to us until the day which for many never comes, when we happen to pass close… come into possession of the object that is their prison” (pg. 44). I know he’s speaking of death but the more I believe that we are transient beings made of more than just matter, the more I believe we are self-imprisoned.
It’s Father’s Day, I can’t help but think of Daddy and his own self-imprisonment. I often wonder if he found freedom in death or if he only traded one captivity for another? I told you of my friend a few years ago who contacted me, unknowingly, on the anniversary of Daddy’s death to ask if anyone had ever died in our house? He said that the new owners had a “haunting” going on, and it killed me to think it was Daddy stuck there waiting for us to come home. But I wonder if maybe, once we are all together again, he will know it and won’t have to wait any longer.
Every night before I go to sleep, I remind myself of three things I am grateful for. Sometimes they are small and silly, sometimes they are the big ones. Every day I try and find something beautiful. You and Sky should do it with me too, and then we can tell each other all the beautiful things that the world has shared with us.
Love you always and always will,
B.
V.
SISTER,
By Catie Jarvis & Bonnie Jarvis
Art: Blue Expo 2nd Place Collage Winner — “Dolabela Engineer” © Guilherme Bergamini
Blue Expo Black & White & Blue 1st Place Winner
Art: Delaney Accomando “DA Mirror”
By page 48, I’ve come to understand my first real thing about Proust. That everything he’s written so far is a meditation on the blooming of memory. All that can be lost and found within our complex beings.
That one on page 37 got me as well. “… and new ones have formed that have given birth to new sorrows and joys which I could not have foreseen then, just as the old ones have become difficult for me to understand.”
It’s maybe been years since I’ve thought on those sorrows of childhood. Isn’t that strange?
I think that’s the thing about Proust. Through the details of his childhood in Combray, he makes me remember my own, and then makes me think about what memory is, how illusive, how brilliant, how out of our control. “The past is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach, in some material object… It depends on chance whether we encounter this object before we die, or do not encounter it.” Lines like that blow me away as well!
And as if this book is my object of memory, I remember.
I remember being the child like Proust reading in the garden, reading anywhere, with the world of the book mixing with the world outside, and how it was always the book that held the most importance, taught me of a world full of emotion and trials that I was not yet apart of.
I remember childhood nights, lying on that twin bed in my first small room, with the tree outside that I’d imagined I’d jump to and hide in if I ever needed to escape for some strange or unforeseen reason that I would contemplate, and make up, fire, intruder, alien invasion.
Blue Expo 3rd Place Fantasy Winner | “Ghost Turtle” by Phil Coffel
But, in that bed, I could never have imagined the sorrows I have now, that is for sure, could not have imagined that the things of childhood that riled me up so, the way adults talked down to me, the emphasis on tests and scores in our education system, religion, death, the general competitive nature of human beings, would fade into the background as the weight of great losses and other important matters of life: where to live and who to love and when to have a child – took their place.
Of course, I thought of you too on Father’s Day, how you are the only one who knows our particular father, his particular love, struggles, and the particular sorrow of his loss. I’m grateful that you know this. I guess death still gets to me. One worry from childhood that does not fade into the background. I think if Daddy were to be haunting our old house, he’d be doing the sort of haunting where he made sure that all the windows were shut at night in the rain and that the engine had been lifted on the boat resting at dock, that sort of thing. But I do like your ideas about us being back together again, Mommy, you and I, and how it might bring him a peace he has been longing for. How it might finally set him free of the burdens he so heavily carried. Even if only in our minds, where it is my belief he lives most firmly.
The ego dies hard.
So, we remember.
We read.
We write.
Love always,
C.
VI.
DEAR B.,
By Catie Jarvis & Bonnie Jarvis
Sheryl A. Noday — “Temple of Dreams”
I’ve started looking at the world in a Proustian way, searching for beauty. The details, long lingering phrases, minutia that can so easily go overlooked. The way a hummingbird lingers over a pink cacti flower in my garden, or the sunlight dancing on the pool in glistening geometry.
Proust writes so elegantly, slowly, a pace we no longer allow. To see the world this way, even a little, brings peace. Gratitude.
I will do the gratitude exercise with Sky, as you suggested. We will go in her tent before bed and think of three things we are grateful for. Imagine, if she could begin her life doing this, each night before bed. I feel that would be a gift of perspective. I hope it will be. A replacement for what others call prayer.
Proust makes me think of Sky’s budding mind and how much I’m responsible for its malleability and configuration. How she will come to contemplate this world. The conclusions she will draw, and redraw, throughout her life.
Julien Jmmanuel — “Emerge”
You know, sister, your appreciation for the world brings me solace. You’ve always been such a positive person. “It’s easy to be grateful for where you are when you know things can always get worse, when you’ve experienced worse things.” That’s me, quoting you. I only hope that Sky can come to such perspective without so much strife.
I want to ask you about this passage on page 45, where Proust sees that, “Clearly, the truth I am seeking is not in the drink, but in me.” Where he discusses the taste of the tea and the cake.
I wanted to know if this could perfectly describe addiction, the high you seek (similar or different from the high daddy sought?), and how that first time it was in search of some truth, that you almost found, but didn’t quite, and so had to keep repeating, only to see that each time, less and less truth came.
“The drink has awoken it in me, but does not know this truth, and can do no more than repeat indefinitely, with less and less force, this same testimony, which I do not know how to interpret and which I want at least to be able to ask of it again and find again, intact…”
I want to ask you, also, if you have found some strength in being on your own that you can carry with you? Like I found the year I lived alone in Venice Beach.
It took me 32 years to see that I did not need anyone and that, perhaps, I was even my best self when alone. I try to hold that information still, to carry it with me, though with a husband and young child, I am not often alone. I know that this phase too will pass, and someday I may be once again.
Isabella Suell — “Blue Boy”
P. and I went away to Ojai this weekend, our first trip without Sky.
It was nice to feel the focus shift back to myself, away from her. I missed her, but I still felt whole. That was a relief.
A child, like a partner or a drug, can be another dependency. Reading by the pool all weekend with no toddler to interrupt, I was able to make some leeway, finally, on this book. I’m nearly done with Combray, though I’m sure you’re much further. Slow down!
Jesse Skupa — Blue Expo 2nd Place Winner Pop Color
Nearing the end of this section, it’s nice how much of the writing is about youth and summer. And reading. And how much youth and summer and reading are the bond that holds us together. And always will.
On page 87, Proust couldn’t more clearly summarize my lifelong love affair with reading.
“… how he (the author) provokes in us within one hour all possible happiness’s and all possible unhappiness’s just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know and the most intense of which would never be revealed to use because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them…”
Love you,
C.
Catie Jarvis is an author, English and Creative Writing Professor, yoga instructor, competitive gymnastics coach, surfer, wife, and mom. She grew up on a lake in northern New Jersey and now lives in Los Angeles. The Peacock Room is her first novel. Stop by catiejarvis.com, Instagram @30inLA
Bonnie Jarvis is a competitive horse trainer by profession and a writer, singer, and artist at heart. If she’s not riding a horse, then she’s probably reading a science fiction book, painting, playing flag football, or rescuing a kitten somewhere in Los Angeles.
As you will note, the closing of each letter is signed either “B” for Bonnie, or “C” for Catie.
