Image credit: Wall hanging stitched in gratitude
part 6 of a series
The fabled thread
So many things happen; many smaller than a sparrow’s fall.
It is a long rain in rain country where the
flow falls steadily all day and all night long
and the next day keeps on falling in an air
half air, half water, and a world half gone
to dissolution, fluid and almost formless
in the rain of small occurrences. So many things happen
at a single time, it seems an idleness
to note them all, or try to note them all,
for who could note them, smaller than a sparrow’s fall.
–William Bronk, “The Rain of Small Occurrences”
There was a time when you realized you did not need to complete every book started. That books were not sacramental objects (which was something like your pubescent understanding), but were written by mere mortals, of varying skill and intelligence, some to be abandoned without completion. For you, the first hint came in a biography of Benjamin Disraeli, wherein the author suggested his take was only his take, others having different perspectives. Which pissed off your fourteen-year-old self good and proper. I’m reading to learn, not to have your fucking opinion. Actually, that was in a time before you dropped F bombs. But that bomb captures your shock, a stunning blow (but not fatal).
Welcome to planet maturia.
The coup de grâce happened to be The World According to Garp, which you completed—then tossed out the window of your third-story hovel, Newtonian mechanics dispatching both the book and your immature understanding of the world and its ways.
Left undispatched was your tiresome dutifulness.
Which, when a certain friend asked if you had heard of the Kalam Cosmological Argument (unbelievably stupid), led you to William Lane Craig, thence to his defense of genocide (Divine Command Theory and all that), thence to his quoting of Nietzsche and his suggestion that your first option (in lieu of submission) was suicide, thence to other Apologists, also hawking Nietzsche and accusing you of inauthenticity, thence to reading more of and about Nietzsche than any mortal valuing sanity should, thence to one esteemed Apologist quoting another esteemed Apologist making ludicrous claims. Factually ludicrous claims. All in aid of bolstering their many accusations against your existence as you live it.
The last you encountered in the circus line, nose to tail, being C. S. Lewis. Whom you found a genuine disappointment, as you had had some affection for the Irishman (Chronicles and all that), having mistaken him for an Englishman. You actually thought he had actual thoughts worth taking seriously. And what you found was Christian apology dressed in translucent Eastern silks. Your naïve intellectual engagement became (uncomfortably) something akin to shooting at lifeboats. All by yourself (so what possible harm?), but still. All of which led you to a conclusion, with some (but lessening) regret: His facility at writing betrays a facility of thought. A grief observed.
Even more disappointing was the feedback that you heard (and encouraged) from Christian types. As you ever, in dutifulness, want to know, “What might I be missing? What might I have gotten wrong?” In sum, nothing. Evangelicals, with rare exceptions (fewer than three, in your experience), are not interested in a search for what can be known but in marshalling … evidence that justifies their verdict. Which includes hell for you, perhaps softened into annihilationism by the nicer among them, deeming murder more palatable than torture. There you find yourself in some measure of agreement.
You have to admit that you have been tempted to return hate for hate—their hate, in an Orwellian twist, construed as love. And if you can muster some honesty, you were something more than tempted. But no, your better angel (i.e., the sober one) argued, indifference is sufficient. And, after some internal debate, Fine.
If they need to dress up like Bilbo Baggins, decorate their quarters like Bag End, write poetry for those barricaded in enchanted madrases, fine, if that’s whats needed to muddle through. If they pretend to reject formal religion, imagine themselves as liberal martyrs, while making their living on and in that orthodox formalism, fine again. Or as missionaries in mongrel lands, so scarred by their chesty missions, that they find themselves pretending to reject organized religion and feeding themselves communion, fine yet again.
Affirm genocide affirmers as “good guys” who wouldn’t harm a fly, and would never actually want you to commit suicide… Harm their gay or trans children … That’s harder. As is the whole Christian nationalist thing, which…. Sigh. But, you have a new principle: indifference, as there is no conversation to be had with them, nothing to be done—and who would you be to do it? Fine, fine, fine.
And you have known (and know—would that you didn’t … mostly) all of these sorts. More’s the pity. Rinse and repeat. Indifference.
Because why? Maybe that’s the only way they can find meaning, denying yours, you think, mustering some sympathy. Maybe their way of finding meaning is by telling you that you, with your stupid butterfly hobby, cannot have a meaningful life (or “genuinely flourish”) short of adopting their ideology. Which, hilariously and tragically, doesn’t cash out. I mean, it might for them, but only them. But in many cases you’ve witnessed, not even for them.
Followed by, Maybe it’s time to throw dutifulness out the window.
“Meaning” is the American evangelical Christian’s mad scramble. And bayonet. Meaning with their capital M. You must be concerned about our concern, ‘Meaning’, or despair or (better) death. Which would be better than what they have in store for you.
But it’s not like that for the most of humanity, with much harder mad scrambles (both now and forever), finding meaning in lower-case ways. Like surviving. Like finding a way to take their kids safely to school, often enough with bombs falling (and, often enough, paid for by these United States); or like the kids, shoeless, scrounging on toxic scrap heaps to find something of pathetic value to be sold at some market to buy a bit of food. No diversion for persistent need—which isn’t all that different from meaning, when you get down to it.
And then the likes of you, the relatively rich sort. Some of the above, but not much (as your life is much easier), with the added luxury of finding time, from time to time, to collect butterflies. Some diversion, if possible, from the tedium that consumer luxury entails, without persistent need. Lucky you.
Hence finding yourself the target of Rich Apologists in an Age of Hunger. Of course. Fine. Follow the money. That shit sells! Follow the Meaning, even as they have the wrong definition.
A couple of weird things.
First, you don’t hate people of faith like Christianists hate you. You have no problem with Mary in her garden, with her instantiation of the Virgin, struggling through her working-class life, all manner of trouble in that (one of her sons died of a heroin overdose). You have no problem with that 18-year-old Indian woman who, with her inevitably horrible husband, finds meaning in the instantiation of Kali, six-armed, one holding a severed head (likely her husband, who’s earned that desired fate the old fashioned way).
You have nothing but admiration for Mustafa Salem, your line manager in an earlier life, who, once a colonel in the Egyptian air force during the Six Day War, kept a prayer rug in his office (five times a day, facing east)—in the most prominent Jewish hospital in the Union—and helped you enormously as you were coal-mining your way through school, sorting shifts to accommodate your needs for money and sleep (the former more important than the latter). Never asking what you believed, who you might worship. A genuinely moral man. And, you were too young and needy to know to thank him. Which you now hate yourself for. Rightly. (Among other things.)
Were you honest (slim chance), you might notice that you tend to hold your birth tribe to a higher standard than others. Which could be considered intellectually suspect…. Leading to an irony, just dawning on you: Genuine indifference might require dutifulness. So there’s that.
Second, there’s something to be said for what perhaps the most ludicrous sentence ever penned asserted:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
A string of lies, in need of affirming, as that’s what you and your society are stuck with. You find yourself needing to be fine with that (and something less than indifferent). Except, you might re-cast it, in a way so sunken-chested as to be never remembered. Maybe something like:
OK. Moment.… We don’t find many (any?) truths to be self-evident. In fact, most things that we know can only be stated, if we’re honest, as provisional, given our current state of knowledge, which will inevitably change as we learn more. And not all the learning might be to our liking.
But that doesn’t mean we’ve learned nothing, however provisional. That doesn’t mean we don’t have a cultural history that suggests some ways of living are better (for us) than others, for the sorts of lives we would like to live. What we believe we’ve learned, through our cultural history, is that it’s better that all humans should be treated with equal dignity, as a baseline—as if they were endowed with some dignity, preposterous as that is in so far as we know. It’s possible to have preposterous ideals. It might even be best.
That maybe trade is a better recipe for peace than prayer. That maybe the best we can do is to assert that everyone should be able to have the opportunity to make themselves as safe-and-warm-and-dry as possible, given unequal endowments, understanding some will have more of that than others, as that is the way of the predatory world we find ourselves in. And, maybe we should feel some obligation to give a hand up to those less lucky in favors (however defined, as that will change) than ourselves.
We’re willing to pay the universe a compliment it may not deserve. We’ll take that risk.
Here’s a story: There’s a woman, British—English, Welsh, Scottish? no idea—who earned a degree in chemistry. Thence to some sort of science consulting, thence to being a hot-shot investment banker in London. Which, after success upon success, she found dry. And brittle. Which, for some reason, led her to stitching. Like, literally, sticking threaded needles through cloth for some ungainly reason. Her name is as odd as her trajectory: Eppie.
And, she found that in some way grounding. Which, weird. It was settling for her, somehow, in her frenetic life. Well you don’t, not being a stitcher, know how that might work, but a part of you wishes you did. Maybe butterflies, but you have to kill them first. So….
Eppie decided to make a business of her new hobby. Weirder still, she had only been stitching for 18 months, knew only two stitches, and didn’t know the difference between needlework and embroidery. Largely ignorant of stitching but not a dope (unlike the subjects of this series), she did a lot of planning, as she was building a business with the goal of earning a living and a saner life, nothing grander. Her target market was … herself, and others she guessed were like her. People needing a little repose from hectic lives, with hands so busy that phones had to be ignored. Just a bit of a break.
So was born The Fabled Thread.
And she managed to make a go of it. But making a go of it was not enough for Eppie, so she tried to create a virtual space where stitchers could meet and learn and support each other in an immersive, if distributed, way—or something like that (you’re unclear as to details). She recruited some of her customers—not friends, paying customers—to help her create what you would call a proof of concept. And … it was a huge failure; an exhausting, dispiriting one. For Eppie.
But not for the stitchers whom she had recruited to fly the plane into the mountain. Somehow, they didn’t see it a failure. Instead, the experience brought them into contact with someone in whom they recognized genuinely admirable characteristics. And so, as the project was being mothballed, the recruits took to their needles to stitch a wall hanging, one panel each, enumerating what can only be called the virtues they had observed: honesty, courage, joy, enthusiasm, steadfastness, industriousness, humility, collegiality, wholeheartedness, strength, integrity.
None of the recruits had met Eppie in person, nor she them, nor they each other. They lived on different continents. They probably had different beliefs; who would know, as no one asked? Until the day came when a very few of the recruits were able to travel to meet Eppie and present the wall hanging to her, a token of the gratitude they felt. Accompanied by a card that read, “There are no strangers here; only friends you haven’t met.”
Eppie had set out to make a business. She found a purpose.
What, you wonder, could be more trivial than sewing? And then, What more meaningful?