The Choice of Job
There is a point of least faith. This is the minimum amount of faith required to simply get by in the world. The word ‘faith’, here, is specifically left lowercase: faith in God, perhaps, but faith that the world will get better? Faith that the next breath will come, that you and the world in which you exist are compossible? However terrifying this large a concept may be, as True Name would have it:
But what does it mean to believe in something like [the irreversibility of time]? Or the sanctity of life or love or art? Or God, for that matter? ‘Belief’ as a word is a stand-in for a concept so broad as to be to be intimidating or impossible. One may say as Blake did, “For everything that lives is holy”, but encompassing that within one’s mind is truly terrifying. \parencite[122]{mitzvot}
All of those things in which we have faith, whether it’s, as True Name says above, the sanctity of life or love or art, or perhaps God, circle around the unknown. The are perhaps too hot to touch directly, so we define them apophatically. We circle around them along with these simple words — life, love, art, God — and hope that we can divine their shape by the shadow of our passage. We circle and circle and circle, and our wandering steps wear down the earth beneath our feet until that which we explore is left on higher land. The elevation of unknown things is a constant and collective process.
The elevation of unknown things is the point at which something which is not tangible, is not spatio-temporal, is not real somehow becomes more important than the real. It’s the point at which we are overcome by the numinous and can’t help but focus on unknown things. They hover over our vision, a thin overlay, coloring everything we see.
Who knows how healthy this is.
It certainly doesn’t feel like it does much good when that unknown thing is scraping up against your identity, the worst sandpaper. It’s that psychopathological friction. It’s that slow silence that builds between you and your friend.
It was that period of exploration that was at once my point of least faith and one of my first elevations of the unknown things in life. I settled myself into Younes, into this view of myself that moved beyond the stolid masculinity that had to date defined who I was, and for that, I was torn down.
Had it simply been simply for the satisfaction of baser needs, as I put it before, would it have affected me so deeply? Had I simply been fetishizing an experience that I did not have, as Jill put it before, would it have kicked me down into this dark night of the identity? Had I just been in it to get laid — online, to be sure, and yet still — what would have happened in that point?
Guilt, perhaps. Guilt and shame.
Guilt for having done what I did, shame because that would be confirmation that I was a terrible person.
But that’s not what happened. What happened is that I was torn down to the point where I had to make the choice of Job: do I move forward with greater knowledge, with a sense of self made perhaps just that much more calloused by the bittersweet, with that much more protection against the wiles of life; or do I take a step back, settle into who I was, remain in fear and let resentment be my barrier against the unknown things.
After all of the poetry of the preceding chapters, we once more settle back into the world of the legend.
And here, it is tempting to dismiss the rest. Job continues on, does he not? He gets new kids. He gets twice as much as he had before. His life is rebuilt, and Blake depicts his life as glowing, beyond mere pleasance. \parencite[plate 1]{blake}
This is only part of the image, though. He and his family play harps and lyres and winds. One of his sons sings. Even as the sun and moon shine behind them all, even as his new flocks lay in peace before them, even as they stand before the trunk of what must be one of his crops and yet may well be the world tree, or perhaps the tree of knowledge of good and evil (this is Blake we are talking about, one can never be too careful), Job and his wife live on but not unchanged. Where Job’s wife reads and prays in piety in the first plate, in the last, her countenance is sad, concerned, touched by worry. Whereas Job in the first plate has a smooth face, innocence in his pores, in the last, his forehead is wrinkled, his eyes more tired, his mien more open to the worries of the world. \parencite[plate 21]{blake}
The Job of the fable appears largely unchanged, simply happy to live out the rest of his days, and it is tempting to dismiss this as just how fables work, but, as Mitchell puts it, “Blake, who with all his gnostic eccentricities is the only interpreter to understand that the theme of this book is spiritual transformation, makes a clear distinction between the worlds of the prologue and of the epilogue.” \parencite[xxix]{mitchell} The instruments hang, untouched, on the tree behind the family in the first plate, while they play them actively in the last. They “look up to heaven with drowsy piety” in the first, while in the last they look knowingly ahead, out into the world.
But Job is, as ever, an upright and honest man. He’s just also a man who has had a spiritual revelation on a scale that we — we who do not have the unnamable answering our please from within the whirlwind — cannot possibly know. “A man who hungers and thirsts after justice is not satisfied with a menu,” writes Mitchell. \parencite[xviii]{mitchell} “It is not enough for him to hope or believe or know that there is absolute justice in the universe: he must taste and see it. It is not enough that there may be justice someday in the golden haze of the future: it must be now; must always have been now.” Job calls for an account of what has been done for him because he does hunger and thirst after justice. He’s an upright and honest man who is struggling against hope to maintain this disinterested faith he desires so greatly.
Job has confronted God, has seen Him in His whirlwind, has heard Him speak, heard that note of exclamation, heard when “the deep will, contemplating the world it has created, says “Behold, it is very good.”” \parencite[xxviii]{mitchell}
Rather than simply falling back into his old life after this, he is changed, and at this point of change, he is at last presented with his choice.
At the end of his last speech, Job has hit his point of least faith. He has long since grown exasperated with his wife. His friends have heaped dull words of remonstration upon him and have proven themselves worthy only of being ignored. His God, worst of all, has ignored him. He has not answered Job’s call for simply to be addressed.
It is not until God does answer, though, that Job is presented with the option to elevate the unknown. “Look! See? Even I do it,” God says. “It is a much stranger world than you ever thought it was, yes?”
At his point of least faith, Job is presented with a choice: he can fall into fear, that all of life might be taken from him. Perhaps he might even wind up “angry enough to die.” (Jonah 4:9, NRSV) After all, Jonah asks similar questions: he fled for Tarshish, remembering the destruction wrought by Nineveh, and was commanded to go save them, that wicked city, that stupid city of “more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and many animals”. Why should he warn them? Don’t they, too, deserve to die?
This is the point at which he might, seeing this preferential treatment for none, fall away from faith entirely: a vanishing point of least faith. His friends have done their best to convince him that faith is interested: surely, he must have done something wrong. Seeing that he has not, he might give up on God.
Or he can take up the path of Qohelet: yes, all may be meaningless, a chasing after the wind, but is there not also beauty in life? There is folly, yes, but better, there is also wisdom. There is toil, yes, but better, there is joy and celebration. There is grief, but there is also standing beneath a tree after your spiritual transformation, instruments in hand, singing with your family in a glowing life.
None of this is written, but such is the way of a text like this: it does not do the work for us. We must do the work. We must read between the lines and between the letters, and we must pull together this meaning from fable and verse. We must elevate the unknown things. After all, if we fail to do that work, we fall upon the simple terrors of phrases like “bad things happen to good people” or, worse, “bad things happen to sinners, and aren’t we all?”
“It is the lesson of the whole work that man is most comforted by paradoxes.” \parencite{intro-to-job} We must imagine his choice. We must imagine that Job, too, can be happy.
I’m Madison now. I’m no closer to defining what it means to be transgender. Were I pressed to describe what it feels like, I may have the words — it feels like an oscillation between dys- and euphoria as I move further away and closer to this sense of identity — but I don’t have the connection to those words that makes them feel real, feel true.
This point of least faith implies for some an ideal of least faith: that one should strive to live their life taking the least number of things on faith as possible, that to rely too much on faith becomes a fault. For others, it is a principle of least faith: it is an intrinsic property that we tend towards the least amount of faith required to live, as is evidenced by the ever-increasing understanding of the world around ourselves.
And, perhaps because of that principle, this point of least faith is always shifting, trending usually downwards — though some discoveries, if they are to be believed, may make that line tick upwards. Every day, we drift towards some point at which all things may be known.
Or, to speak in terms of cost and benefit, that point of least faith is the point of faith at its most disinterested. It is the point at which you may hold one singular thing on faith rather than all of those countless aspects that lie within that exchange, that power dynamic. That point where, against all the world throws at us, we are still able to hold to that which we believe to be true.
And that was mine. That was my point of least faith. That was the point at which I…’doubted’ is not quite the right word. That was the point at which I shouted at nothing, the point at which I demanded an advocate from no one. That was the point that God, the universe, that very same no one answered my note of interrogation with one of exclamation. Instead of some explicable approach to the problem of identity, it insisted that it is much stranger than I had ever thought.
That was my point of least faith, and that was my own choice of Job. That was the point at which I could have looked at the mess that had become my life and taken one of two paths.
The path of Jonah lay behind me. That was the path of fear, of running away from such an overwhelming unimaginability, whether or not storm-tossed ships and all of God’s biggest fish lay before me. That’s the path of falling back into Matthew, of being so angry I could die.
The path of Qohelet lay before me. That was the path of disinterested faith, of pushing through all that shit that the world had thrown at me. That was the path of looking back to see folly and looking ahead to find that, yes, “wisdom surpasses folly as light surpasses darkness.” (Qohelet 2:13, Alter) That was accepting my birth as Madison on the grounds of that faith that I was being true to myself. Sure, I may yet hate life, might hate what choice I’d made, might hate all things under the sun because the wise, too, dies like a fool.
But I would have at least done it.
I was young, once, and dumb. I can hardly say I’m any smarter, now, but at least I’m Madison. At least I’m not that angsty, angry asshole who thought to himself he needed to come to terms with being a terrible person.
It just took me a long, long time to figure out disinterested identity.