Collisions
There are so many collisions throughout a lifetime. Even through a day, we may bump into this or that, may clip a wall by taking a corner too tight, or bump hips with a partner, or even just smash ideas together to see what new thoughts come of them.
Or perhaps it’s the way a car, lowered too close to the ground in order to show off at some car show, scrapes over each and every speed bump as it goes. Perhaps your truck floats gently along a slick of ice and bumps against the truck beside you on an icy February night’s drive. Perhaps it’s the collision of ideas, where your future husband thinks you’re dating your friend, who thinks you’re dating your future husband, and you think your friend is dating someone else. A collision of knowledge that leads to a tangled skein of relationships that never actually existed in the first place.
And, of course, a collision may be a simple knock against a friendship that sends the entire thing toppling over. You watch as, almost in slow motion, it totters on its base and then goes crashing down, shattering into thousands of pieces that go skittering across the floor — they never shatter on carpet, right? It’s bound to be on some marble or tile. The noise is fantastic. The mess is stupendous.
It was almost unnoticeable at first.
This was back in the days of AOL Instant Messenger, before Telegram and Discord — though I think by this time ICQ had breathed its last. At this point, I had two accounts, since my boss at the time had decided to use the service for communication
It begins with a comment, it seems, though perhaps the true beginning was some time sooner. It begins with you laying together on a bed while each of your partners plays around in the other room, the both of you cozied up under the covers in your much quieter bed. It begins with a few smug words from your very own Elihu.
“I’m honestly disappointed that you would do something like that.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like what you did with Younes.”
I frowned. “What about it? I didn’t even know that it was something you’d seen.”
“Why bother hiding it? I watch those artists, too,” she said.
“It felt personal.”
“What, appropriating the experiences of very real people? Pretending to be what you aren’t just to get your kicks?”
I don’t remember what I said. Perhaps a mumbled apology? I live a sometimes apology, after all. Perhaps I simply lay silent.
I like to think that it was the latter. I like to think that we settled into an awkward silence, even while the rest of ourselves remained there in comfort, there beneath the covers while our two partners played around in the other room, in some noisier bed.
That’s what I mean by a simple knock. I don’t know if we were under the covers. I don’t know if there was noise in the other room. Perhaps Andrew was simply showering while JD was asleep — I think he was working first shift at the time, so perhaps indeed. I don’t remember when this happened, though I do remember that it was this simple conversation that bumped its elbow against our friendship, sent it rocking back and forth, and eventually left it in pieces on our imagined tile.
It was this knock that led to her blocking one of my accounts on AOL Instant Messenger (which should do well to date this story), then forgetting she had done so and accusing me of blocking her. It was this blocking episode that led to her silently dropping most all contact with me. It was my wedding to JD in the interim (which should date it further; sometime in May), to which only family was invited (and, in her mind, pointedly not her), that sent the friendship tumbling to the floor. There was a sudden silence, only a few words exchanged and only ever in reply to something that I had said directly do her. She stopped coming over with Andrew, and soon, he stopped coming over, as well.
I don’t have it saved anywhere, but our final communication was a letter and a gift. I sent her a book — a comic, really, a limited edition of Rruffurr — along with a hand-written note apologizing for what I had done, though at that point I wasn’t clear just which of these wobbles of our dynamic had been the true cause of her silence.
Her response was a request for no contact moving forward.
The primary clash between Job and his friends can be boiled down to this very discussion of interested versus disinterested faith.
This is not limited to the book of Job, nor even Jewish or Christian liberation theologies. Take, for instance, -the eighth-century Sufi mystic and Muslim Saint Rabi’a al-‘Adiwiyya al-Qaysiyya:
O God! If I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell
and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise.
But if I worship You for Your Own sake,
grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty.\parencite[35]{rabia}
Here, she describes not just an interpretation of the concepts of heaven and hell in a disinterested fashion, but in an emphatic rejection of interested faith. “I want to put out the fires of Hell, and burn down the rewards of Paradise,” she writes elsewhere. “They block the way to Allah. I do not want to worship from fear of punishment or for the promise of reward, but simply for the love of Allah.” \parencite{rabia2}
This is the God that Bildad, Eliphaz, and Zophar present.
Job, to all of this, replies with disdain. They are, after all, responding to the wrong question. They have accused him of speaking wrongly of God, of doing wrongly by Him. They have said that surely Job has done something wrong, or, worse, that perhaps his family did something wrong — and remember, Job is noteworthy for praying and committing sacrifices on behalf of his children to ensure that his family stays right in the eyes of God — and for that they deserved to die.
I have heard much of this sort,
\vin wretched consolers are you all.
Is there any end to words of hot air,
\vin or what compells you to speak up?
I, too, like you, would speak,
\vin were you in my place
I would din words against you,
\vin and would wag my head over you.(Job 16:1-4, Alter)
By clashing with him thus, these three friends crash up against the wrong wall of his defenses. The wall is well fortified, yes, but the gate is shut. It contains the wrong door out of which Job cries. “I was tranquil—[ha-satan] shook me to pieces, seized my nape and broke me apart, set me up as a target for Him,” Job cries (Job 16:12, Alter).
In this, however, Elihu is perhaps the worst, because Elihu does respond to Job’s request.
Let us take a case to court,
\vin let us know what is good between us.
For job has said, “I’m in the right,
\vin and God has diverted my case.
He lies about my case,
\vin I’m sore-wounded from His shaft for no crime.”(Job 34:4-6)
And then, of course, he immediately turns on him:
Who is a man like Job,
\vin lapping up scorn like water?
He consorts with wrongdoers
\vin and walks with wicked men.
For he has said, “What use to a man
\vin to find favor with God?”(Job 34:7-9, Alter)
He goes on to claim, as did Job’s other friends, that as God cannot possibly act in the wrong, surely it is Job who has wronged God, not the other way around. All of this is invective(“Would that Job might be tested forever for responding like villainous men.” (Job 34:36, Alter)) is hidden behind his own innocence and couched in apologies. “Discerning men will say to me” or “therefore, discerning men, hear me” he prefixes his insult. After all, he’s the youngster, right? The upstart?
I am young in years,
\vin and you are aged.
Therefore I was awed and feared
\vin to speak with you.(Job 32:6, Alter)
This youngster, this upstart, crashes up against Job’s defenses, far closer to the wall at which Job stands, and strikes at him with barbs. He enters into this discourse, clashes with Job, and then leaves. He is not introduced at the beginning, nor is he acknowledged after. He is not one of Job’s friends as are Bildad, Eliphaz, and Zophar. He exists, it seems, solely to tell Job all that he has done wrong.
Up until that point, my interaction with gender had been the tentative pressing against a bruise. It hurt, yes, but one cannot help but press on bruises, yes? There it is, blue and purple, an angry discoloration that aches at the slightest touch, and yet you cannot stop touching it, defining the edges of that ache with an apophatic walk of the fingertips.
This exploration began to stutter as doubt began dart around and in between the wandering feet of curiosity, tripping it up and making it hold still so that it didn’t fall flat on its face.
I would interact as Younes for a day or two, and then back off in a wave of self-loathing. I would log in as Makyo, that other character who remained stolidly male, and be just Matthew, that gay man who would most certainly never be anything but, right? I would log in as him and park myself in the PN where I was a gay man, where other gay men would congregate, and I would put on my brightest smile and pretend that that bruise was not there.
And then, I would hit that ache with my exploration, and I’d log back onto Tapestries to prowl around as Younes. I would find new ways to engage with his body, with the femininity inherent in his form, finding the euphoria inherent in that in turn.
Rinse.
Repeat.
Guilt and shame.
Exploration and euphoria.
Masculinity.
Tentative gestures towards femininity, towards specifically not my inherited masculinity.
And with each of these alternations, with each of these swings of a pendulum, came the reasoning.
As I swung closer to Younes, I began to feel those tentative wrigglings toward gender as it applied to myself.
As I swung further away, I began to feel that doubt. Gender? But how could it? I was a guy, yes? I was comfortable enough in my body, yes? He/him! Bepenised! That was fun enough, was it not? And certainly easier than the path of anything even resembling transing my gender.
And then as I swung back, there were these feelings of euphoria. Surely it couldn’t be that hard to trans my gender. I would…what? Drop my testosterone and up my estrogen? That wasn’t too difficult. I could perhaps even do that myself, if I was willing to order the medications required online. After all, JD had his own experiments with such.
And always there was the discomfort with myself. There was JD and I on that couch, the way our own intimacy began to feel strangely misshapen.
The pendulum would swing, and I would promise myself that I could simply ignore that. Bodies are bodies, and sometimes they are stupid. Perhaps I could just not engage with mine whenever I began to feel bad, and focus my energy on something else.
The friendship had crashed the ground and shattered, and then the shards began to crumble, themselves. Now, even my engagement with gender began to crumble, or at least the surface began to flake away.
But here, at last, God answers. “Then the unnamable answered Job from within the whirlwind” (Job 38:1-3, Mitchell). God the unnamable, HaShem, whose true name, were it ever to be spoken, bears power, calls out to Job in turn:
Who is this who darkens counsel
\vin in words without knowledge?
Gird your loins like a man,
\vin that I may ask you, and you can inform Me.(Job 38:2-3, Alter)
This is when Chesterton’s quote becomes clear. God answers with a note of exclamation to Job’s ceaseless questions. When taken strictly as a work of theodicy, this is perhaps ultimately unsatisfying. Job asks: why is the world cruel? Why have such terrible things been levied against me when I’m doing my best to be a good person? God answers: I made this world in all its strange and terrifying grandeur; who are you to question me when you don’t know one tenth of one hundredth of the smallest iota of what I know? This is when an attempt at theodicy turns into a weak shrug and the mealy-mouthed statement of “God works in mysterious ways.”
Chesterton, here, disagrees. “God will make Job see a startling universe if He can only do it by making Job see an idiotic universe,” he says. \parencite{intro-to-job} “To startle man, God becomes for an instant a blasphemer; one might almost say that God becomes for an instant an atheist.”
“What is all this foolish chatter about good and evil, the Voice says.” as Mitchell puts it. \parencite[xxiv]{mitchell} “about battles between a hero-god and some cosmic opponent? Don’t you understand that there is no one else in here?” But contrast this against the God of the legend, who Mitchell, earlier in his essay, suggests “would himself doubt the disinterestedness of his obedient human”.
It’s the God who responds who bears the most gravitas in this dialogue. It is the God who responds by saying “Yes, suffering exists. Yes, I know of it. And yet the world is still grand. Even you are still grand” who positions Job in the right. His apology is unspoken, sure, but it is provided in the returning of his wealth and his family (yes, a different family, but such are fables). What comes off as capriciousness by theodicy and apologetics is intensely personal to Job.
This, then, becomes a performance. It’s a moral stage-play put on for our benefits to better understand the intersection of pain and faith.
But so, too, is interested faith a performance. “If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue,” Chesterton cautions Job’s friends. “Men will leave off the heavy task of making good men successful. He will adopt the easier task of making out successful men good.” \parencite{intro-to-job}
Job replies simply out of awe. Fear, yes, for the sight of God is truly fearsome, but the overriding emotion to be found here is awe. It is the beauty right at the margin of the terrifying. “And we marvel at it so because it holds back in serene disdain / and does not destroy us,” as Rilke has it. \parencite[11]{duino} He says in response:
“Who is this obscuring council without knowledge”
\vin Therefore I told but did not understand,
\vin \vin wonders beyond me that I did not know.(Job 42:3, Alter)
“Therefore do I recant, and I repent in dust and ashes,” he says, and we may picture Job bowing his head, his thoughts swirling violently around this knowledge that has been imparted to him. It is a glimpse of everything, the barest whiff of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That can be interpreted, after all, a merism: by offering the opposites of good and evil, everything that is between them is specified. All of the gray areas are in that knowledge, but not just those; God, with his omniscience, is far more beholden to some Blue/Orange morality than anything else. He has “a moral framework that is so utterly alien and foreign to human experience that we can’t peg them as “good” or “evil”.” \parencite{blueorange} Job, for a brief moment, smells blue, hears orange, and is able to maintain his faith in the face of it all.