Nellie Croy Smith
I accidentally wrote a dead book. What do I do now?
I finally finished my book and all I got was this uncomfortable truth.
I'm going to start by doing something absolutely insufferable, which is to start off a blog by quoting myself. (It's short. There's a point.)
Here you go:
A realization that hit me hard early in my graduate degree was that craft was not vision, and, while even a tiny amount of vision could make up for a multitude of technical sins, no amount of technical prowess could make up for a lack of vision.
If a piece of work was fundamentally lifeless, it could and would not be revived—not by might or willpower or impeccable sentence-wrangling. The work had energy to channel, or it did not, and it was prudent to figure out which statement applied to the situation at hand and cut my losses immediately if the outlook looked bleak.
That paragraph is quoted verbatim from my MFA thesis, where it languished in the middle of a section about creativity and the philosophy of AI. In the section, I wondered where writerly “vision” came from and whether such vision could be replicated by a machine. Interesting stuff! Certainly zeitgeisty enough for any self-respecting thesis.
But now all that high-falutin' talk of craft vs. vision has come back to haunt me, because I've finished my book and large swaths of it are, yes, fundamentally lifeless—they feel patched in, or too heady, or simply aren't breathing in the way every bit of a book needs to breathe. This book has no energy! It's kaput! It is an ex-parrot! (Confused? See [a] below.)
What's worse: The book has taken a long time and many drafts to complete. So much for “cutting my losses immediately.”
You shouldn’t feel sorry for me, though. This realization, while discouraging, has put me firmly on the path to figure out exactly what it is that makes a work lifeless or energetic.
One promising hypothesis has come from Nuar Alsadir’s book, Animal Joy, in which she discusses the mechanics of communication—namely, the unique vitality that only emerges when one speaks authentically, which is to say—from one’s own body. Drawing on her experience as a psychotherapist, Alsadir talks of Wilfred Bion’s theory about elements of thinking:
Alpha elements are the brain-to-brain elements, ego-ridden, thoughts which are digested and can be articulated in concrete forms. Beta elements, meanwhile, are the raw experiences—the sub-language textures that can be communicated body to body without the higher linguistic brain being any the wiser. Alpha elements can be deceitful; beta elements never can be.
It occurs to me that the kind of writing I instinctively recoil from — from others or myself — is the alpha-lead stuff, in which it’s clear that the writing is ultimately an elaborate performance—a theatrical mask. Brightly painted, yes, and very possibly beautiful, but an obfuscation.
My hypothesis here: The lifeless sections of my book are the ones that my body and instinct had nothing to do with. They're the bits of my book that came from my ego, the part of my brain that wants to make itself feel better by being A Really Excellent Writer.
The lifeless sections of my book are the ones that my body and instinct had nothing to do with. They're the bits of my book that came from my ego, the part of my brain that wants to make itself feel better by being A Really Excellent Writer.
There's no easy craft fix here. There's no way to replicate beta-lead work through technical means. Amateur writers try to induce a similar effect via explicit body words (all those elbows and bones!), but this shortcut works only sometimes and only on a surface level. If the work itself is lifeless, such sensory writing isn't so much evocation as affectation. The brain, speaking of and as the body, is wholly unconvincing, rife with ulterior motive.
In short: The long way ‘round is also the only way ‘round and that is: To get work that speaks, body to body, you have to tell the truth from the body. Feel your way forward a little. Be willing to slow down, stop for a while, wait until the body knows what it wants to say.
In my situation, there’s no rectifying the bad bits through revision (that part, at least, I got right in my thesis!). Poking at dead things won't make them any less dead. The only way forward is to throw out any corpses and go back on the hunt for what lives.
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Postscripts and references.
[a] If you didn't catch that reference, that means you're lucky enough to be seeing this for the first time. (I envy you! Sincerely!)
[b] Mats Eilertsen, who I listened to on repeat while writing the above.
(2/2024)
On winter and its music.
January is cold and miserable. I love it.
January has now ended, which means I can say this: January is my favorite month of the year. No one expects anything of it.
Folks who like Valentine’s Day start to get a little fruity-eyed at the beginning of February, but January—January is great. It has nothing imposed on it. In Ohio, it’s gray and gray and gray, and mostly rainy, and free as a whistle. Everyone else stays inside thinking fondly of the bygone holiday season but not me—I’m out in the drizzle in my not-quite-waterproof gear, nose pointed toward the horizon, frizzy-haired, feeling alone and fantastic and utterly relieved.
Last week, when it was below freezing and somehow raining instead of snowing, I went to the zoo, and every zoo employee I ran into looked at me strangely. The implied question: Why on earth are you here? I was there because no one else was; the zoo was cold and damp and abandoned. A turtle and I stared at each other for two full minutes, ala Annie Dillard. It was unmitigated bliss.
Some of the relief of January for me is the re-establishment of routine. December is a month of nonstop interruption and exclamation points, when the world rings bells and flashes lights and insists that everyone achieve their personal apex of happiness.
January is the Monday of the year; the time when we’re all dumped unceremoniously onto a blank slate with a lot of mundane shit to get through, and since we’re out of flashy toys and holidays to distract ourselves with, the only thing to do is…start. Work, school, bedtime, kid drop-off, kid pick-up, Friday all-hands meetings. January is the reestablishment of boring patterns and the same old, same old. (How do you eat the frog? One bite at a time.)
My music for January has that kind of energy: repetitive motifs, minimalist, notes against a ground, phrases played so many times in a row it takes three days to evict the sound of them from your skull. Routine, but with the light breaking through.
Here you go.
#1: William Basinski | The Disintegration Loops
The same loop, play over and over for an hour, as it fades from existence. Metaphorical bliss if listened to attentively. Meditative in the background of projects.
#2: Caroline Shaw | The Beech Tree
Caroline Shaw is one of my "drop everything for new releases" composers. This isn't a new release, but it's beautiful—and beautifully played by the Attacca Quartet.
#3: Dawn of Midi | Dysnomia
Uncannily precise, constantly evolving, mind-blowing. Dawn of Midi didn't release another album after Dysnomia, but this one will last forever.
#4: The Mistral Noir | Daniel Herskedal
My music service files Herskedal's albums under "jazz," which I'll allow because there's no category for "horns whispering secrets to each other."
BONUS: Satyagraha | Philip Glass
The piece that made me finally "get" Philip Glass, played by the artist who played it for me somewhere in a little church in Cambridge. It's come back to me many times over the years and each time it's a little bit richer.
(1 / 2024)
What we talk about at 12:23 AM on the Amtrak train.
The train at night is unsettling, but there are plenty of strangers to talk to.
Second night ever on an Amtrak train and—wonderfully—I am no longer violently, gobsmackingly ill.
What I am is: Wondering whether I can sleep.
Where I am in time is: Late. Probably after midnight.
Where I am in space is: Stuck in the observation car, avoiding my assigned seat.
(Need the sonic backdrop? Play this in the background.)
I like the observation car during the day. In it, you are almost completely surrounded by windows—glass on both the sides as well as the roof—with sunlight pounding on the corners, lighting up the booths and the observation chairs and the hats of the Amish people. It’s a communal space, a whole enclosed terrarium of people—every seat is taken during the pretty parts of the trip! You can eavesdrop with abandon. Sitting in the observation car during the daytime makes me think of the part of that Arlo Guthrie song The City of New Orleans where he describes the people hanging out in the club car:
… the sons of Pullman porters
And the sons of engineers
Ride their father’s magic carpets made of steel
At night, though, the situation changes. The light draws in around the train and disappears from the outside world and the experience of riding on the train fundamentally changes. The windows, which are so darn cheerful during the day, so full of vast and distant and benign landscapes, grow ominous as the dark thickens, as reflective and unknowable as the eyes of wild animals.
It’s an eerie and unsettling thing, sitting between them, hurtling through unseeable scenery in your little pod of abrasive light. It’s like being on a spaceship, or in the Edward Hopper diner, if the Edward Hopper diner was going 80 miles per hour across Arizona.
I guess an easier way to say this is that the train is a little bit scary at night, which is probably why the few of us who are left in the observation car start talking.
“I actually feel like I’m high on some drug,” Patrick tells me. He’s a music producer who has been steadily tapping away at a laptop in the adjacent booth. He’s taken off a massive pair of headphones to talk to me, and now he shakes his head at the windows.
“It was fine before. But this,” he says, “This is fucking weird. We're just so separate from the dark on the other side. Isolated from the landscape by the glass. It’s like a very spiritual experience with none of the profundity.”
He’d wanted to visit some pals in LA and had decided to take the train for the experience. His home base is Philly. He definitely (“definitely!”) plans to fly home.
Noah got on the train in Albuquerque and is heading to Los Angeles for a wedding. He’s a few booths away and soft-spoken, hard to hear above the sound of the engine. He’d moved from LA to ABQ a few years ago for a litany of reasons he seemed not to fully understand himself.
“I just felt it was time to move — Albuquerque seemed interesting — I needed — I don’t know — some kind of change —”
He trails off. He talks as if he is reluctant to talk, and it’s hard to tell whether that’s because he wishes to be alone or because his small talk has gotten as rusty as mine.
“It’s been hard to meet people,” he admits, finally, “COVID. I’ve gotten kind of used to not talking.” He will, eventually, be the first to leave the conversation.
Before that, Patrick asks me what I think of being on the train, and why I think it feels so strange, and I tell him I’m not sure yet. I think it has something to do with time, and the lack of escape. There’s so much darkness out here that we normally just fly over. Now we have to acknowledge it—really feel that it’s there—
We talk until one of us asks a question no one feels like answering. It’s 2 AM and makes no more sense to talk.
I can’t bring myself to climb over my seatmate, so I move myself and my possessions from the dining booth to one of the little two-seater couches, where I curl up in the fetal position and try to rest. It’s very uncomfortable. It’s very bright. I sleep in fits and spurts all night long, and whenever I open my eyes the blackness of the windows stares back at me. The constant din of the train, the hum of it like the hum of deep space—the constant invasive light—the constant unknown—
This is the experience of nothing, I think, suddenly, waking up during the night, It’s almost as if I am nothing! That’s why it’s wonderful!
Though when I wake at 6:12 AM with an ache in the middle of my neck, the thought does not feel like an epiphany so much as an experience that’s neither spiritual nor profound.
Elon Musk has a plan of salvation. It won't work.
Giving up and moving on is an American tradition. But where else can we go?
One warm night in my mid-twenties, I sat in a Florida parking lot with an electrical engineer. We were, alternately, making out and discussing plans for saving the human race. I was mostly dependent on God for this project at the time. His plan—to my astonishment— was to colonize Mars.
“It’s the only thing left,” he said.
Are you kidding me? I thought. It was the first time I'd ever heard such a thing. Imagine! I was indignant. Imagine living unprotected in waves of solar radiation (you couldn’t), or, more likely, in transparent bubbles through which you watch the fleeting rivulets of cold stewy unbreathable air? Imagine living off of the three tasteless plants you could cultivate under grow lights in hydroponic corridors under Martian soil?
Worse: Imagine doing all these things and remembering a planet once-upon-a-time, which produced millions of colorful plants and birds, which was strewn with crystalline lakes and rivers, which smelled like soil and honeysuckle and iron, and on which you’ll never stand again? The prospect was awful. I couldn't believe anyone seriously entertained it. But it turns out that my electrical engineer was one of many who believed that mankind's fallback plan should be a freezing, inhospitable planet 90 million miles away.
A more famous adherent to this idea, obviously, is Elon Musk—American deity extraordinaire!—whose Space-X rocket prototypes exploded a few months ago.
The Reuters article in my newsfeed paired it with an image of a thick tongue of flame, as though the rocket had been part of a funeral rite. What a sight! There weren’t any people aboard, of course; it was an unmanned probe, part of testing for the Spaceship project, destined—according to Elon—to take billionaires to the moon in 2023, and to lay the groundwork for Elon’s big ambition: Mars. According to reports, the test was a relative success—the rocket did successfully land before bursting into flames. An impressive technical achievement. The engineers would go back to the drawing board, tweak something about the fuel tank, and spend another million or so to test another prototype. A rocket in the sky would grace the sky again soon enough.
A few days before Elon’s rocket exploded, though, the Atlantic published a piece by Shannon Stirone that I wanted to wave in the face of every citizen of the country: Mars is a Hellhole. The article itself is great—you should read it—but you can get the gist from the headline.
Mars sucks. Mars is awful. It’s hot, and bleak, with an impossible atmosphere. As a prospect for future human settlement, it needs to go.
Mars sucks. Mars is awful. It’s cold, and bleak, with an impossible atmosphere. As a prospect for future human settlement, it needs to go.
It is manifestly unsuited for human life and no amount of technological prowess is going to turn it into a paradise. Can we just put this to bed this now?
Well, it doesn’t seem like it.
Okay, then.
Of course, Musk is a high-level god in the American pantheon, which is to say: He’s got the money and power to do just about whatever he likes, and he does it all in the brazen, devil-may-care spirit of the mythical American cowboy. He’ll spend millions on car elevators. He’ll name his kid an unintelligible string of babble. He’ll sell you a flamethrower. And for these reasons he is venerated from the sacred halls of Reddit to the boardrooms of startups in Silicon Valley. For these reasons some, at least, are inclined to believe him when he says he can do the impossible—say, for example, move humanity to Mars.
And, granted, maybe he can do certain nigh-unto-impossible things (like, say, popularizing the electric automobile on the shores of a gas-guzzling country). But we’ve got to put our collective foot down when he starts romanticizing Mars as a future place for humanity.
Elon's plan of salvation isn't even close to new. Moving on to the next "pure" place is how this country has always dealt with its problems. Ancestry.com informs me, personally, that I’m from a long line of leavers. My ancestors headed to the American continent on some of the first ships out of England, landed on the east coast, headed to Pennsylvania, then on to Ohio, then moved further on whenever we felt like it. That was how we coped, and how we still cope: When things get too crowded, dirty, or smelly, we leave. Find a fresh, untouched, pure place. Build something new.
And I think that's kind of the American assumption, right? There will always be fresh material. There will always be a new tomorrow and somewhere else to move to. There will always be a place to expand to, and materials to expand with, so...go ahead! Pull up roots, make more fuel, build more rockets, make more worlds. It all seems so possible because that is the assumption which has fueled our culture.
The problem, of course, is that this assumption is manifestly false. We are fragile beings on a fragile planet, subject to the laws of physics and biology. Neither or resources nor our time are endless. Limitless expansion has always been a lie, because limitless expansion is literally impossible. And evolutionary theory warns us of what happens when a species refuses to recognize and adapt to its limits.
"Limitless expansion has always been a lie, because limitless expansion is literally impossible. And evolutionary theory warns us of what happens when a species refuses to recognize and adapt to its limits."
To be fair, though, maybe Elon’s not completely wrong? Perhaps human life will, indeed, peel itself away from the crust of this planet and move elsewhere in remnants, in little Ark-like pods of explorers. Perhaps we will even form refugee civilizations capable of sustaining themselves on hydroponic plants and vitamin capsules. But even if that happens, I have zero expectation that that life will cease to be of Earth in the ways that matter. Any group of people, transplanted anywhere else, will face the same problems as we do here, but in a place that’s way less habitable and way less pleasant.
Can you see it? Our great-grandchildren growing up in pods on an inhospitable planet; eating mineral pellets and suiting up in veneers of airtight, flame-retardant...stuff?
I can. I imagine Earth sliding into myth. I imagine children of the future being told about this planet as children now are told about heaven, that ethereal, unreachable place, perfect for humans—but unattainable. I imagine mankind's culpability being slid through a thousand interpretive lenses until it is not our fault at all. I imagine the past morphing into the future, and the Earth as paradise, as unattainable utopia…
Yes, it’s bleak. That we have come to this, despite all our technology and all our best efforts, would lend itself to some version of the Christian prayer: “What must we do to be saved?”
Which is actually the wrong prayer, or at least, an outdated one. We already know what we must do. We have very little time to do it, and apparently no collective willingness to admit that we have no other choice. So I guess the prayer becomes now, “What will we do to be saved?”
As long as we persist in taking Musk’s very American idea seriously—that is, so long as we insist in denying reality—the answer will continue to be “Not much.”
Hope is an unsexy word, but it might be what we need.
The movement for change is getting mired in Internet Despair. Rebecca Solnit has a recipe for getting out of it.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: The last several years have been, arguably, the most depressing years in recent record for those unsettled by extremist currents in American public and religious life, and, yes, it was especially painful for those of us with ties, however frayed, to the Evangelical church. We’d been betrayed, yet again, by those who claimed to speak for God. It’s an old story, but no less painful for being old.
Still, something about the way we’ve handled all of this has bothered me deeply. It’s a discomfort that I haven’t quite been able to name, a resistance to the the way our collective discourse has gone: the biting sarcasm, the streams of comments and retweeted toxicity, the doom and gloom and casting of blame. About halfway through 2020, I turned off Twitter, unable to deal with the collective indignation. It all seemed profoundly unhealthy in a way that I wasn’t quite able to parse out. We’ve been mishandling something.
Last week, I picked up Hope in the Dark and Rebecca Solnit helped me out. In her chapter about the American election of 2004, “When We Lost,” she writes:
Sometime before the election was over, I vowed to keep away from what I thought of as “the Conversation,” the tailspin of mutual wailing about how bad everything was, a recitation of the evidence against us—one exciting opportunity the left offers is of being your own prosecutor—that just buried any hope and imagination down into a dank little foxhole of curled-up despair. Now I watch people having it, wondering what it is we get from it. The certainty of despair—is that kind of certainty so worth pursuing?
There it is! This has been the era of the Conversation, of accusation and self-flagellation, of wallowing in the 24 news cycle of unceasingly dire news, of endless social reposts and mounting anger, of mourning things we knew and things we did not know, of the endless projection and refraction of anger until we stood in a house of mirrors, our anger infinitely morphing and reflecting and thwarting itself into new forms until finally settling into despair—unfocused, ruthless, self-destructive despair.
This has been the era of the Conversation, of accusation and self-flagellation, of wallowing in the 24 news cycle of unceasingly dire news, of endless social reposts and mounting anger.
Throughout all of this, we—yes, yes…I—forgot one thing which Solnit points out with laser-like specificity: None of us actually know what is going to happen next. That story has not been told. But by wallowing in the Conversation, I was robbing myself of the opportunity (and, frankly, energy) to help tell it.
Solnit is ardently anti-wallowing. She writes,
“[H]earing people have the Conversation is hearing them tell themselves a story they believe is being told to them. What other stories can be told? How do people recognize that they have the power to be storytellers, not just listeners?”
How, indeed?
The tricky part for those like me (that is, who grew up in fundamentalist-leaning faiths) is acknowledging that we’ve yet again succumbed to the temptation of certainty. For—as Solnit points out—however well ensconced in correct language and well-intentioned outrage, that’s what our collective fatalism ultimately is: A certainty that things will turn out badly.
And, as former Evangelicals know all too well, certainty how the world’s story ends leads directly to inaction, a paralysis so well-rationalized that it feels like righteousness.
Certainty how the world’s story ends leads directly to inaction, a paralysis so well-rationalized that it feels like righteousness.
So maybe we could take a page from Solnit and reframe all of this. Maybe this isn’t American culture’s long and inevitable slide into decay, but an upheaval which enables the rebuilding, the wrecking ball that makes way for something new. Maybe what we’re looking at is not a culture on the edge of the abyss, but a bunch of humans confronting a profound disruption of narrative, a sea-change of thought in American culture and a mass exodus from the old ways of perceiving and talking. Maybe. It could be.
The point: I don’t know and neither do you. But I don’t think it’s beyond us to leave the Conversation and, instead, tell a new story about faith and its place in the world.
To do that, though, we have to have a story, to be for something. We can’t simply reject the old narrative, be the “ex,” the against, the ones who say no. We can’t just rage against the inevitable on social media. We’d have to decide what we’re for, declare what kind of world we want to live in and live in that world as boldly as we can. We’d have to eke out the courage to, as Heaney puts it, “Believe that further shore / Is reachable from here.”
We have to have a story, to be for something.
And there’s the rub: those of us who grew up righteous had a story and it let us down. For many of us, the dissolution of our old narrative was deeply traumatic. Our communities, self-worth, families, and identities hemorrhaged. And for those of us who walked away wounded, committing to a new story—with the fervor necessary to join in the telling—is a step of such bravery and vulnerability that it feels, frankly, impossible. Believing in something again would be an act of self-donation, profoundly religious. It is exposing our neck, once again, to the axe.
And, when we come right down to it, is it even possible to tell a story, collectively, without certainty? What do narratives about the future, faith, belief, and religion look like when you remove the platitudes, the systems of control, the neat sorting algorithms used to sort one another into cleanly edged groups marked In and Out? In the vacuum left by old orthodoxies, can we build a new orthopraxy strong enough to hold us together?
Again, I don’t know and neither do you. But since the Conversation no longer seems an option, I’m game for trying hope instead.
Orthodoxy won't save the world. But orthopraxy might.
To channel Bruce Wayne, it's what we do that defines us.
As with many other young evangelicals, I grew up under the auspices of orthodoxy, which is to say that what one believed is what mattered. To save people, you got them to "believe in Jesus" and declare as such. Believe with thy heart and confess with thy mouth. Any admonitions to read the Bible and do God's work were decidedly after the fact. What one did was important, too, but only in a hazy, ill-defined way I never understood. What was clear was that if you screwed up you could be forgiven as long as you believed in the appropriate doctrines. In other words, you can raise hell your entire life, be converted on your deathbed, and skid into heaven on a technicality.
This culture of right belief over right action—of orthodoxy over orthopraxy— was a large part of my early and ongoing grievance against my evangelical upbringings. The more I became disillusioned with evangelical leadership and action, the more the pontificating on belief and public skirmishes over belief-centered artifacts began to grate.
Before my final exit from the Christian fold—although "final exit" is perhaps a bit too strong for my slow drift away from the altar and out the church door—I was drawn to more ancient practices of Christianity, mostly because they were practices. Physical objects appeared and were handled. On high holy days one fasted, or prayed, or threw confetti at a church altar, or something. People did things. Sometimes the Lutherans opened hospitals and cared for the poor. It was nice.
By the time I got as far as Roman Catholicism, though, it was too late. The well was poisoned. The drift bore me relentlessly out the door.
The combination of the DJT presidency and the utter lunacy of my former spiritual leaders has turned me a bit religious, though, in the sense that I feel devoted to things; I want to save the whole damn world.
But not by thinking the right things, saying the magic words, or joining another Good Guy Club. In truth, I find the intellectual posturing and political correctness of the left nearly as exhausting as the rabid ideological insanity happening on the right. There are so many rituals and code phrases—things one must think, things one must absolutely never say, and questions one really shouldn't ask in public or out loud. It's as as steep a purity spiral and as rigid an orthodoxy as any I ever saw.
In the aftermath of Charlottesville car attack—remember that?—there was a push on social media to stand up and declare which side you were on. It all felt very religious: Think the right thing—and then be sure everyone knows you're one of the cowboys in white hats. But how much declaration is enough? How many words will it take to sort out this mess? How many rallies do I need to attend before everyone sees I'm on the right side? How loudly and how long do I have to declare the doctrine before I'm one of the so-called good guys?
How many rallies do I need to attend before everyone sees I'm on the right side? How loudly and how long do I have to declare the doctrine before I'm one of the so-called "good guys"?
In the midst of the mêlée, the quote I've turned to the most is from Wendell Berry, who humbly suggests that "[m]aybe we could give up saving the world and start to live savingly in it."
Those who grew up with the same kind of evangelicalism I did will recognize this concept as pretty much fundamentally opposed to evangelical orthodoxy. Because everything in evangelicalism is about saving the world. Not the actual world you and I live in, mind you, but the theoretical, futurey-wuturey world that will be labeled as Saved when all the people in it (who are future people—not us) believe and say the right thing about God. It's an unreachable utopian ideal, as is so much of evangelical theology.
What I like about Berry's idea is that it's rooted in the real, the concrete. The word "living" is in the present perfect progressive tense. It must be done here—in the muddy and half-baked Now—and it will continue into the future with no specific expectation of an end. Living savingly has no finite goal and no real measure of success. It's a concept grounded in messy and unending reality—in the humans, relationships, and physical objects which surround us and which we have the power to affect.
What does living savingly look like? I've been trying to figure that out. I have an ache to figure that out. My own attempt at living savingly has looked largely like a series of adjustments: staying in conversations from which I'd otherwise excuse myself, a sputtering project to gather people in my home every week, carrying around a coffee carafe, changing where I shop, changing my writing goals.
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. The adjustments don't feel like much in the grand scheme of things. They are slight reorientations. Sometimes they are too slight.
So, in the end, I have no great revelation, but I have come to two conclusions. The first: No other human can tell you how to live savingly—or give you the conviction necessary to do it. Likewise, no one has the right to extract a confession of belief or demand that you flash a "good guy card." There are no lawful initiations to this game we're all born into, squalling. You must do the best you can by your neighbor. You must—to risk quoting an old nemesis—"work out your own salvation."
No other human can tell you how to live savingly—or give you the conviction necessary to do it.
The second: releasing oneself from the obligation to save the entire world—to "think of the small as large" as the Tao Te Ching puts it—is one sure step away from despair. The dismissal of Everything is what allows us to start on the road to our Something—whatever that might be. Of course, our Something will never be enough. But I don't think it's supposed to be. The cosmos of good appears to operate by a math I don't understand.
In his 2014 article Burn Your Indecision to the Ground, David Sessions outlined a plan of resistance:
"[S]tart living different ways, a little at a time. Start committing to people, places, things. Say yes to your friend’s party Saturday night, and go anyway even when something better comes up. Join an organization that fights for an issue you care about, and keep going even when the meetings are long, boring, and seem pointless. Fight for someone . . . . immigrants, minorities, the homeless, the incarcerated, whoever; you’ll realize you had more in common with them than you thought. Commit to a person or people; stay in the same city with them, live with them, marry them. Join a union, especially if you’re the only member under 50; if there isn’t one where you work, start one. If you can find one that hasn’t retreated into spiritual apoliticism or reactionary traditionalism, I don’t even care if you take up a religion. The point is to build human ties, add little by little to your network of solidarity, make it thicker and stronger. It won’t be enough, but it’ll be a start."
Sessions wrote this well before Trumpist hell broke loose, so the resistance he described was not against Trump or his cronies but against the very ideological current that later was to bear them up. His advice was even more sound for its prescience. After all, the year really makes no difference: be it in 2014 or 2017 or 2025, we deal not so much with the power of people as with the power of ideas, of too-simple narratives, of ego-stroking propaganda. We wrestle now not with fellow citizens, but with an old American demon—an ideology we have fought with since the beginning.
We wrestle now not with fellow citizens, but with an old American demon—an ideology we have fought with since the beginning. If it is to be defeated, it will not be by repeated declarations of horror on Twitter or by heroic acts in flames of glory.
If this ideology is to be defeated, it will not be by repeated declarations of horror on Twitter or by heroic acts in flames of glory, but by the stalwart obedience of a multitude of ordinary people able "to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways," as David Foster Wallace put it. In other words, a communal system of action, an orthopraxy of everyday justice, of bull-headed devotion to good work, and of deliberate attention to those things and people termed inconsequential by a for-profit culture.
Again, it's not enough. But for those of us orphaned from our faith communities and haunted by old gods, it is something: A rubric of sanity and a way to approach our days.
(This article was written in 2017 and updated slightly.)