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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here.
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Plurinity
Lydia Paar
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Your husband’s best friend, a poet, gave him a postcard.
Red background, black pen, and the words: “This machine kills fascists.”
How quaint, you thought, more soundbite wisdom, but your husband framed it and hung it in his office.
At the end of another bad election year, where soundbytes sounded good enough to sway the vote to a spin king, you have begun to wonder how much writing matters. You scoff when you glimpse the framed postcard, passing from the kitchen.
You scoff although you’ve written a lot. Years and years of essays. You obviously have some belief in the value of attempting to articulate things to people beyond your own brain. In fact, the word essay, used as verb, means “to try.”
Try you do.
The essay you’ve tried hardest to write, one roundly rejected by venue after venue, is on actively seeking peace. It’s awfully “Crunchy Christian” (Hippie Christ, not “Hoorah-Hoorah Guns and Country” Christ), more conversion than the killing of fascists.
The need to seek this, like so many needs, took root through experience, an experience you are reminded of when you walk by a certain building every day on the campus where you work.
It’s the Harshbarger building, connected to the Mining building by a broad, open stairwell.
The Harshbarger building has a photo taped to its outside signage now: the professor shot to death by his former student there:
Mining is where you taught that same term. And on that day of your colleague’s murder, you had, by some miracle, or by chance, canceled class to hold conferences in your office, far enough away, that day, to be safe.
You think about it constantly now, as you pass en route to class: how you used to dawdle in the halls before teaching, examining wall-mounted ore, fun facts about human consumption. Marvel at the resource we’ve brought up from dirt.
Now, you shy from entering, where the ghost of your own potential alternate reality stalks: the one where you didn’t schedule those stop-gap conferences, where gunshots were in earshot, and you stood frozen in front of a roomful of students only recently released into the world: too young for a legal beer but old enough to join the army.
In that reality, you stood in the midst of new chaos and thought: Run? Hide? Fight? –The paltry three options your mandated active-shooter training offers annually.
You thought: is it against my principles to pray? You hate to beg. You’re not into the quid-pro-quo crap (If you save me, I’ll go to church. I won’t watch porn).
What are the odds you could get your students to turn their cellphones to silent? Could they even hear you over gunfire, giving instructions? You’d be in the center of two radically separate forms of communication colliding, making an ineffectual trinity in this lopsided and now-failing metaphor.
Meta (noun): referring to something’s own genre or structure.
Anyway, you wrote many Op-eds about this scenario you fear, sent it out and said we need to do more than say things about it, and since this is not the first school you’ve worked for where there’s been a fatal shooting, you can say so: offer hastened solutions with hazard-pay pressure. Or mandate some peace practices in classes: more than new locks on the doors. More than our current careerist, profit-focused curriculum: Gandhi's Satyagraha, and/or the removal of social situations that cause inequity/harm/rage to start.
You emailed your thinking into the internet and waited for an answer.
Present tense: wait.
The only response you hear is a distant groaning, a giant media machine rising slowly to full height. It grows as if vacuuming smaller entities, drawing them as if by magnet, compressing them into the pulpy pile of itself. The pile purports to know the right answers about damn near every human question.
Well, you think, as you pause between end-year protein-potato feasts, presents, and shelf-elves to again approach one of your least favorite holidays, you suppose you can concede that writing, or “essaying” does indeed matter: in fact, the whole premise of this supposedly-hallowed consumer holiday, for better or worse, is rooted in and repeated from a massive essay collection…carried forward through each new century in stilted prose through thousands of jagged translations.
Ironically, here in the Bible, the idea of a diligently-practiced peace (“turn the other cheek”) is nestled in a swathe of stories of inequity, and how such inequities lead to unholy machines of violence.
It grates on you that now, when you think of Christmas, you think of fascists. Your mind blinds red like the anti-fascist postcard on the wall.
Hegemony, mired now, you think, in the homogeny of “The Word” (singular).
But you must try.
So you go home and open other books. Any other collection of words that doesn’t claim to be the only important one, and seek to learn of life and death and EJfhalwfb from anyone who might have met divinity here, there, or anywhere, any shape: a glimpse. A moment. Eureka. The quiet in the chaos.
It goes beyond the need to read one text, but to inscribe anew. Articulate or even to rearticulate in fresh language. You don’t like other peoples’ prayer words.
But you can find reverence in a research paper.
Prayer in a podcast. Poetry. Maybe even porn.
Every text, really, an attempt to render reality and utter Sjfhaklj without paring down such mystery into mandate.
Mythologist and religious scholar Catherine Bell describes this phenomenon, where the simple act of writing an idea makes it feel real, gives it authority: staying power on papyrus, now in gigabytes. There’s a physicality to it, creating muscle memory in this ritual: inscribe, read, recite, retain.
The third-person voice sheds its shyness and suddenly, seeks intimacy.
Singularity slides to plural.
This essay is due in three days and you’re supposed to be grading portfolios.
Words about words.
Which is what you’re doing, too, composing or assessing. Rinse, repeat.
This essay is already reinscribed, since you typed it at 4am two nights ago into your phone in the dark, and now it needs a bigger vehicle to travel.
Both times you type, every time, you find light, jrskjhrflkh-made, then human-made, the unexpected pleasure of unearthing things once dim, only felt but not observed, now noticed: the ways old pieces fit differently.
And then the spaces where giant structures start to shudder: the hallowed holes in homogeny, a porous hegemony after all.
The mega and the meta and the monolithic, readied for disassembly, because you just taught yourself how.
Thank Aelrkjlakurh: the trying cannot end so long as there are people with pens and paper or disc space.
And after you end your own efforts, whether from exhaustion or being shot to death without hazard pay in a building made for learning, the words will surely go forth and multiply.
Turns out it’s not just one Word that matters after all.
Turns out the You is not simply an ashamed “I.”
Nor is it singular.
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Lydia Paar is the author of The Exit is the Entrance, an essay collection about love, divinity, class, and violence, and teaches at the University of Arizona.
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