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<article class="content">
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<blockquote>
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<p>Job puts forward a note of interrogation; God answers with a note of exclamation. Instead of proving to Job that it is an explicable world, He insists that it is a much stranger world than Job ever thought it was.</p>
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<p>Job puts forward a note of interrogation; God answers with a note of exclamation.<sup id="fnref:intro-approaches"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:intro-approaches">1</a></sup> Instead of proving to Job that it is an explicable world, He insists that it is a much stranger world than Job ever thought it was.</p>
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<p>\parencite{intro-to-job}</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>I’ve heard said that “forgiveness is releasing the hope for a better past” \parencite{wakefield} but it’s more complicated than that, isn’t it? That quote itself is more complicated than that:</p>
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<p>I’ve heard said that “forgiveness is releasing the hope for a better past,” \parencite{wakefield} but it’s more complicated than that, isn’t it? That quote itself is more complicated than that:</p>
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<div class="verse">There are ways around being the go-to person
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even for ourselves
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even when the answer is clear
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clear like the holy water Gentiles would drink
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before they realized
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forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past</div>
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<p>Primed as we are to take text out of context, wrap our own needs around it, and pretend that it is in all ways applicable to all situations (for did I not already ramble about mistaking accidental, individual symbols for universal ones?), it’s so easy to misremember that the better past we hope for is just some dream, some thing we cling to long after the us that lived that past has died.</p>
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<p>Primed as we are to take text out of context, wrap our own needs around it, and pretend that it is in all ways applicable to all situations (for did I not already ramble about mistaking accidental, individual symbols for universal ones?),<sup id="fnref:intro-symbols"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:intro-symbols">2</a></sup> it’s so easy to misremember that the better past we hope for is just some dream, some thing we cling to long after the us that lived that past has died.</p>
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<p>Who knows if I was the go-to person, the punching bag for my Elihu, the object of her simple angers? Who knows if they remember me? She cut contact, without telling me, without telling me why, and who knows if she even knows the reason?</p>
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<p>Who cares, other then me?</p>
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<p>All stories are perforce interpolations within real events.</p>
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<p>The story of identity, the story of coming to terms with existing in some particular way, is as a much an interpolation into the whole of us as anything. I am trans, yes, but that is not the story; that is the identity. I am who I am specifically because I did what I did, I learned what I learned, I changed how I changed. No amount of academic language will change that, no overanalysis of this or that will make me be anything else.</p>
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<p>“If Matthew died on September 6th, 2012,” I asked myself some years ago, “Was Madison born then?”</p>
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<p>That date, September 6th, had nothing in particular to do with gender. The answer was no, after all. Madison was born some two intercalary years later. Matthew’s death had nothing to do with gender — he died when his friend died, when Margaras hit that barricade at fifty miles an hour.</p>
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<p>That date, September 6th, had nothing in particular to do with gender. The answer was no, after all. Madison was born some two intercalary<sup id="fnref:intro-intercalary"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:intro-intercalary">4</a></sup> years later. Matthew’s death had nothing to do with gender — he died when his friend died, when Margaras hit that barricade at fifty miles an hour.</p>
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<p>Matthew died and then I don’t remember what happened. I suppose there was a few years of fumbling around, poking and prodding at various parts of his body in the hopes that something could be salvaged. The hair, maybe? Or the softness of skin? Perhaps he could simply be recycled into something new, the same lump of clay molded and remolded into something new until some fresher breath of life was breathed into it.</p>
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<p>If Matthew died in 2012 and Madison wasn’t born until a few years later, if I don’t remember those in-between years, then I keep questioning whether or not I actually existed then. I suppose 2013 involved dealing with the tic, and I guess we moved in 2014, but both of those stand-out events feel as though they happened to someone else, someone not Madison.</p>
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<p>If Matthew died in 2012, why was I not born then?</p>
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@ -37,7 +37,31 @@ forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past</div>
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<p>He’d been sick for months. He’d contracted something terminal, been infected with some terrible, memetic illness earlier that year. Words had been whispered, implications, innuendo, little hints in growing silence and distance. These drilled their way into him, teased out an immune response in the form of defensiveness, then left a husk behind.</p>
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<p>Some long winter followed. He had died and crumpled to the ground. He mouldered a while before decomposing into the soil. He lay dormant beneath the earth, waiting for a thaw. Madison began to grow during that false spring that hits at the beginning of March, those two weeks of warm weather that convince you that winter must be over, it must have passed and it was time to air out the house, to wash your jackets and hang them up for the year. We always forget about the second winter, but false spring is enough for the buds to peek out.</p>
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<p>Stories are as bound to time as we are, and all we can do is steal back a bit of that memory through however many words. All we can do with these memories pinned in place is regard them from a second level of distance and make guesses. All I can do now is make guesses as to the meaning of however many conversations — those very real words lost to the whims of technology — that lead to the slow and not always but often painful death of who I was.</p>
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<div class="footnote">
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<hr />
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<ol>
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<li id="fn:intro-approaches">
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<p>The Book of Job, out of all of the books in the Hebrew bible, is buried deepest under layers of guesses. Even in the Christian bible, the only book that comes close is Revelation. Perhaps it is the dire nature by which both approach the world. Job takes a look at the world, heaves a weary sigh, and says, “I suppose this is it. This is the lot we have been given in life.” While Revelation looks at the world and growls deep in its throat, a sound coming from the belly, and says, “This must not be it. This cannot be the way in which the world works.”</p>
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<p>Or perhaps it is the way in which they view death. While Job looks on death almost fondly, REvelation reiterates the Christian sentiment than death has been defeated using the genre of apolcalypse (that is, a revealing, a pulling back of the curtain). The world that was is no more, and as there is everlasting life beyond it, it is worth considering only in that context and otherwise only worth discarding. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:intro-approaches" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
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</li>
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<li id="fn:intro-symbols">
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<p>The framing for The Book of Job takes the form of a fable, a set of universal symbols designed to instruct as well as entertain. The structure is as follows: </p>
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<p>Job is a prosperous and pious man living in the merry old land of Uz. He is wealthy in livestock and in family, with his 7,000 sheep, his 3,000 camels, his cattle and she-asses, his slaves and his ten children. His seven sons love and respect each other, and he loves them all in turn (though he does seem a tad suspicious of their piety, making sacrifices in their names on their appointed days).</p>
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<p>God, holding court with the sons of God, greets the Adversary<sup id="fnref:intro-adversary"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:intro-adversary">3</a></sup> and asks where they have been. They respond that they have been roaming the Earth, to which God replies, “Have you paid heed to My servant Job, for there is none like him on earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and shuns evil?” (Job 1:8, Alter)</p>
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<p>And here is where we first run into trouble, for now is when the Adversary, the Accuser, shoots back, “Does Job fear God for nothing? Have You not hedged him about and his household and all that he has all around? The work of his hands You have blessed, and his flocks have spread over the land. And yet, reach out Your hand, pray, and strike all he has. Will he not curse You to Your face?”</p>
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<p>And God does it. He does it! He gives Job up to the Adversary, and of course, all that Job has, all that he’s gained and all of his offspring, are destroyed. Cattle and she-asses? Felled by the Sabeans. Camels? Stolen by the Chaldaeans. Sheep? Burnt up by none other than the fire of God Himself. His men are dead. His sons and daughters are dead, crushed beneath the walls of a house torn by a sudden wind.</p>
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<p>Job, pious as he is, does not curse God. He tears his clothes, bows down, and blesses Him.</p>
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<p>Once more, God says to the Adversary that there is none more pious than Job, and once more the Adversary jeers, “Skin for skin! A man will give all he has for his own life. Yet, reach out, pray, Your hand and strike his bone and his flesh. Will he not curse You to Your face?” (Job 2:5, Alter)</p>
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<p>Yet again, God gives Job up to the Adversary — “Only preserve his life” — who strikes Job with a rash from head to toe, leaving him to sit among the ashes and scrape at his flesh. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:intro-symbols" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
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</li>
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<li id="fn:intro-adversary">
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<p>This is the translation of the phrase in Hebrew, <em>ha-satan</em>. Alter notes that it wasn’t until much more recently that this was refigured as specifically Satan: “The word satan is a person, thing, or set of circumstances that constitutes an obstacle or frustrates one’s purposes.” \parencite[466]{alter} The Jewish Publication Society concurs. (Job 1:6, JPS) It is a job title more than it is identity. In fact, the transition from the Adversary to Satan himself is fraught. The specifically academic New Oxford Annotated Bible (NOAB) retains the New Revised Standard Version translation as Satan qua Satan, but acknowledges in translation footnotes each time the term <em>ha-satan</em> shows up that this is “Or the Accuser; Heb. <em>ha-satan</em>”. \parencite[736]{noab} <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:intro-adversary" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p>
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</li>
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<li id="fn:intro-intercalary">
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<p>Between the <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:intro-intercalary" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text">↩</a></p>
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</li>
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</ol>
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</div>
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</article>
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<footer>
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<p>Page generated on 2023-03-12</p>
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