update from sparkleup

writing/3/unknown-things/iyov/reverse/younes.md

@@ -2,11 +2,27 @@ I was young, once, and dumb.
 
 Which is not to say that I'm not, now, of course. I certainly feel it sometimes. Even the young bit: Madison is, what, eight now? Not many eight year olds are smart. I still fumble. I still seem to create those humiliating moments that stick in the memory and make me wince whenever they come up, though they've changed in tenor over the years.
 
-But I was young and dumb and desperately trying to figure out what the hell was going on with my identity, this awkward pile of senses and sensations that were causing so much friction in my life. "Identity is psychopathological," my first psychologist said. "You only feel it when there's friction."[^younes-interpolations] I'm not totally sure that I agree --- trans joy is as much a thing as trans pain --- but, as a statement, it's true enough, most of the time. Something about the way my life was built such that the smallest things, coarse as sandpaper, would brush up against something integral, and scrape away at its surface, leaving tracks colored cherry.
+But I was young and dumb and desperately trying to figure out what the hell was going on with my identity, this awkward pile of senses and sensations that were causing so much friction in my life. 
 
-It's strange to think back to those early discussions with him, too. That insight hit at such a strange time in my life. It came up in a discussion about my stresses around work. I think I said something like, "I've wrapped up my need to be productive as part of my identity." I had been talking about the burnout I felt looming on the horizon
+An aside: "Identity is psychopathological," my first psychologist said. "You only feel it when there's friction."[^younes-interpolation1] I'm not totally sure that I agree --- trans joy is as much a thing as trans pain --- but, as a statement, it's true enough, most of the time. Something about the way my life was built such that the smallest things, coarse as sandpaper, would brush up against something integral, and scrape away at its surface, leaving tracks colored cherry.
 
-[^younes-interpolations]: It is important to reckon with two interpolations within the text that appear to be later additions, and it would be nice to address these before coming to the text that they interrupt.
+It's strange to think back to those early discussions with him, too. That insight hit at such a strange time in my life. It came up in a discussion about my stresses around work. I think I said something like, "I've wrapped up my need to be productive as part of my identity." I had been talking about the burnout I felt looming on the horizon. I had been expecting some discussion of how to tackle the concept of burnout (something I struggle with bad enough that I quit my job in tech to focus on an MFA), but instead, I had that simple phrase thrown at me, and I was left scrabbling after truths.
+
+That wasn't the only bit of identity I was feeling acutely either, after all, was it? I'd felt that before, back when I first came out as --- at the time --- gay. I felt it with work and how it was grating at me. I'd felt the way it ground up against me, skinning my elbows and knees, a sort of road rash of the self.
+
+But now I was feeling it in some new, far stranger way, though I couldn't put my finger on just how, exactly. I was feeling *something*, but heaven knows what. Something deeper, far more integral.
+
+There must be some way of debriding that scuffed and stripped self-stuff, I thought, so that what you're left with is some purer version of yourself, something all the more whole for what was there now being gone. There must be some way to pare that cruft away. There had to be, right? If one was to live happily, there had to be.
+
+An aside: Years later, one job and one house and one more dog and one more self later, I called him to ask if he would be willing to write a WPATH letter for me so that I could start HRT, and he said, "I don't think I can. I don't know enough about it, and you don't want to know how I feel about it."[^younes-interpolation2]
+
+I never talked to him again.
+
+All the same, I was young, I was dumb, and I was flaking away at the edges of that more fundamental identity. I was making use of the space I had to explore in clumsy, 
+
+An aside: ((furry as a queer space))
+
+[^younes-interpolation1]: It is important to reckon with two interpolations within the text that appear to be later additions, and it would be nice to address these before coming to the text that they interrupt.
 
     The first interpolation is that of a poem that comprises the entirety of chapter 28. The poem takes the form of a Hymn to Wisdom that Alter describes as "a fine poem in its own right, but one that expresses a pious view of wisdom as fear of the Lord that could scarcely be that of Job." \parencite[458]{alter}
 
@@ -25,3 +41,17 @@ It's strange to think back to those early discussions with him, too. That insigh
     Both of these interpolations seem to be taking the raw feelings of the authors of Job and Ecclesiastes and trying to soften them, shaving off all those coarse edges. In Job we have a man striving to be heard by God Himself, and in Ecclesiastes, we have a teacher who is bordering on nihilism,[^younes-choice] yet both of these editors are trying to fit these texts into the context of a tradition that, while it does include (and even encourage) the capacity to call God to account and to feel that certain sense of nihilism, would still appreciate a somewhat more positive view within its scripture.
     
 [^younes-choice]: And though even this discussion of interpolations may feel like an interpolation itself, here is where it ceases being such: One possible outcome of Job's travails is that *he* becomes Qohelet. Can one imagine going through the experiences that Job went through and not coming away with at least a little bit of that nihilism? Your family dies. Your livelihood is stripped away. YOu sit in the bit of ashes with lesions all over your body, and then God comes down in his whirlwind and fixes it all for you. You look back on all of your piety, you look back on all of your wealth, and suddenly yes, it is all a chasing after the wind.
+
+[^younes-interpolation2]: The second of these interpolations is the Elihu's[^younes-elihuintro] speech --- and, indeed, the entire character of Elihu, who is never mentioned outside his own chapters --- in chapters 32--37. Alter holds a particularly dim view of Elihu, stating, "At this point, in the original text, the Lord would have spoken out from the whirlwind, but a lapse in judgment by an ancient editor postponed that brilliant consummation for six chapters in which the tedious Elihu is allowed to hold forth." \parencite[460]{alter} Few seem convinced that the character and his speeches are from the original text. The NOAB, notably bearish on the whole Bible, agrees that this may indeed be the case, though it does so with a sigh and a tone of resignation, adding, "In any case, the Elihu speeches are part of the book we now have", \parencite[767]{noab} with Greenstein echoing that sigh: "Even if, as most scholars think today, the Elihu chapters were added belatedly, they form part of the biblical book." \parencite[22]{greenstein}
+
+[^younes-shuffling]: The editors of the NOAB offer additional insight, that Elihu's speeches may have simply been shuffled out of order (a problem elsewhere in the text) and that his speeches may have originally come after the final of Job's three friends' speeches after chapter 27. This both lends credence to the Hymn to Wisdom in chapter 28 being the conclusion of his own speech and ensures that God replies to Job immediately after *his* final speech rather than after Elihu's, which would better fit the structure of the book. There is no reason it cannot be both, of course; the two additions could have been both interpolations and inserted out of order through some mix-up or whim in an early editor's haste.
+
+    Indeed, Greenstein suggests that this goes even deeper: that much of the text from chapter 24 through chapter 28 may be jumbled due to this process of interpolation. This would include the Elihu interpretation around the Hymn to Wisdom."I would explain this phenomenon by observing that toward the end of chapter 24 is a later insertion and that a roll of papyrus pages would have had to have been taken apart in order to insert the Elihu discourses, which include, I am convinced, chapter 28." \parencite[28]{greenstein} In the connection of the Hymn to Wisdom to Elihu, he is of one mind with the NOAB; indeed, in his reordered translation of the Book of Job, the Hymn is placed at the end of Elihu's speeches. He, however, disagrees with the potential interpolation of Elihu before Job's final speech, saying, "The motive for inserting Elihu into this point in the dialogues, just preceding the deity's speeches (chapters 38--41), is apparent. The divine discourses dwell on God's power and majesty, not on his justice or concern for humanity---which are the elements Job has been seeking."
+    
+    All this to say that Elihu presents a departure from the rest of the book.
+    
+[^younes-elihuintro]: Job and his friends have three rounds of arguments, which shall be covered soon, and then, beginning in chapter 32, Elihu is introduced out of nowhere. "So these three men ceased to answer Job, because he was righteous in his own eyes."[^younes-eyes] (Job 32:1, NRSV)
+
+[^younes-eyes]: It is interesting to note the differences in tradition, here. Alter has "because he was right in his own eyes" but offers no note as to why, which is a little disappointing. JPS ("for he considered himself right" (Job 32:1, JPS)) and Greenstein ("since in his own eyes he was right and just" (Job 32:1, Greenstein)) agree. All three of these are Jewish sources.
+
+  Christian sources, however, all lean on righteous, while the HCSB, NIV, and KJV having identical wording for that phrase. This colors the meaning, does it not? Alter, JPS, and Greenstein describe Elihu as being angry because he is declaring himself more right than God, whereas the Christian sources all interpret the text as Job justifying himself *rather than* God. Interestingly, the 2001 translation of the Septuagint has Elihu upset that Job is "declaring himself righteous before God" (Job 32:2, Septuagint 2001\nocite{septuagint}), a sense of uncolored plainness that is missing from the other translations. In this case, Elihu is seemingly upset at Job for being upset.