I’m thinking about workmanship.
We hired some painters this fall to finish painting our apartment, 8 years after we moved in. There were still rooms that were painted a yellowish-white flat paint, what I called “developer white”. Our kitchen was one of them, and after 8 years of cooking the walls there were all sticky with grease.
The painters were a team led by a friendly Brazilian guy, and they had painted our second-floor neighbor’s apartment. She is an exacting woman, bless her heart, and we figured if it was good enough for her, it was probably way too good for us. But we had no other painters in mind, and we were feeling more flush with money -- and less flush with time -- than usual. Also, some people we knew were just winding up a gazillion dollar renovation on their house, and we had just seen a perfect house ourselves, around the corner from us, that was far too expensive to actually buy. So compared to a giant renovation or a new house, getting a few rooms painted seemed very sane and modest. Well, because it is.
Most of the other rooms we’d painted ourselves. (“We?” asks the husband in my head. ) They were perfectly acceptably painted rooms. Maybe not all the trim got done, or the ceiling, and maybe the walls were not perfectly smooth, and maybe the edges were wonky in a few places. No biggie. We didn’t care. It was not like in my husband’s parents’ dining room where, once upon a time, when painting, he’d painted the word ‘party’ in giant letters, before immediately painting over it, except that in certain light, 25 years later, you could still see it there.
Anyway, so the Brazilian guy and his team were in our apartment for a week and a half. They sanded and painted. They cleaned up at the end of each day, they left everything spotless, and they did extra work just to meet their own standards. It’s a beautiful, beautiful paint job.
There’s a book I keep meaning to read and not getting around to, written by someone who might have been a banker or a professor (I really can’t remember) and became a motorcycle repairman instead, Shop Class as Soul Craft.Only of course now he’s a writer, not a banker or a professor or a motorcycle repairman. It’s about craftsmanship, and about what we lose when the work we do is not a craft, when it is all in our heads, when it’s pushing papers and sitting at computers and clackety clacking on our clackety keyboards.
Me, I love my clackety keyboard. Clackety clack, it goes, and keeps the silence at bay. I am reminded of A Wrinkle in Time, of the shriek of anguish as evil destroyed a little piece of creation. And I am reminded of The NeverEnding Story, of the Nothing that came to devour the universe of the imagination. There’s the power of mind, and the power of body. We’re all up in the clouds with our heads, or we have our feet solid on the ground. Oh, the manichean divide between the material world and that other one, the one in our heads. But it’s not a real divide, because in truth our heads are full of squishy brain stuff and the material world is built with abstractions, like money. There are our neurons, and at the same time, money, art, music. God.
I haven’t even talked about the parsha, have I? Typical. The parsha is all about how to build the tent of meeting, the mishkan, within which God, or the Shekhinah, the emanation of God, the Spirit of God, will dwell. It’s a long and tedious parsha, especially coming as it does without illustrative pictures. I’ve read the fundamentalists are fond of their recreations of the tent of meeting, recreations of the ark of the convenant, with the cloud above it by day and the glowing pillar of fire by night. A mobile home for God -- who ever heard of such a thing? The gods lived in high places; they did not traipse around with ragged bands of worshippers. Gods were for going on pilgrimage to, they were not a traveling hit Broadway musical, advertised on taxicabs. What sort of God consents to be schlepped all over the desert, in what, however nicely made, was a box inside a tent?
Anyhow the instructions for the tent take a very long time to get through. God is quite exacting. And strictly speaking it’s not just one tent, but four, with lots of fancy curtains and gold clasps and threads dyed with rare shellfish and all kinds of special things. It’s a whole tent city, magnificent and gaudy, a traveling gypsy circus. Come one, come all, come see the God within. Well, pay for a sacrifice at least; don’t get too close, the unholy may be incinerated.
So that’s the parsha.
Back to human craftsmanship. Why all the fuss about the stuff, exactly? We’re all about stuff, aren’t we, these days, and at the same time, we want desperately not to be about the stuff. We are drowning in stuff. Cheap stuff, nice stuff, pretty stuff, ugly stuff. Sometimes you look around and the human race just seems a blight upon the world, spreading our shitty stuff everywhere you look. Building ugly buildings, and leaving ugly vacant lots. Paving over everything in sight and shopping all the time and buying our new mobile phones each year and donating our old ones to women suffering from domestic violence, as if that makes it okay, as though there could possibly these days be not enough mobile phones to go around. Like the clothes donation bins in parking lots, always too full, full of our lightly worn and badly made clothes, as though somewhere someone does not have enough old navy t-shirts.
So there it is: disgust at all our stuff. Disgust at what we humans make, what we have wrought upon the face of the earth and upon the sky and upon the waters and everywhere on this great and gorgeous, magnificent world. It’s miserable, really. If you’re so inclined to believe there’s something more out there, something else beyond this world, it’s awfully tempting to think what happens here, what we do to this place, is quite irrelevant. If our world is just a testing ground, a waystation, an illusion, what’s it matter, what happens here? Given, say, the toxic electronics dumps of Lagos, and, say, the Mall of America, that would be a relief, really.
Well, most of my readers, I bet, are not inclined that way in any case. There’s nothing here but here. It’s awful what we’ve done to it, we’re hardly likely to recover. The global warming and the pollution; the overpopulation, the slums, the strip malls. All those ugly houses in the suburbs. We’re stuck with it, until it kills us, pick your version of materialist apocalypse: the weather goes all wrong, or the soybean blight, or the new and awful plague, the collapse of society driven by the end of cheap oil. What a miserable future we have to look forward to. This, we say, looking at each other, this right here is as ridiculously good and insanely profligate as it is ever going to get. When we are old, if we are lucky enough to grow old, we’ll tell stories about the glowing screens in our pockets, about the heavy metal tubes that somehow flew, very fast, all over the world, about listening to a radio station broadcasting in Paris via a tiny computer the size of my hand, in Boston. That’s the very best we have to hope for. The very worst involves guns, and starvation, and fiefdoms, and death. We’ve fucked this world up, and we’re not likely to fix it, humans being what we are. Our heads are not in the clouds, but there’s not really any ground there either, is there? Just a choice of terrifying materialist apocalypses, none of them less awful than the traditional kind with the hellfires and the horsemen.
So this is us, right? These are our choices: we can take the shiny things and the mountains of junk, or we can leave it all, the beautiful and the damned of it all, the gorgeous paint job and the faux leaded-glass. Either the stuff is important, or else it is irrelevant or worse, a hindrance (spiritual or psychological, as you wish). Augustine of Hippo vs. the Stoics. What else is there?
Oh, but.
Step right up, come one and all, let’s see what’s behind these curtains here. What’s this shining tent in the desert, glittering in the sandstorm? An extravagant confection, this tent, a Turducken of a tent, tents inside tents inside tents, a beautiful fairyland of a tent. Like Tivoli, this tent. Traveling in the desert with a whole people, the rich and the poor, the craftsmen and the weaverwomen and the moneychangers too. All the people having made this tent, with the very best work they could do, some with their hands and some with the mushy stuff inside their skulls. The people have made the tent and they honor their God who dwells in it, and their God honors them right back, by dwelling in their midst, in the place that they have made. Not a high mountain, not a sacred spring, not a grove of trees or a volcano or a valley or a sea -- not for this God. This God will take up residence in a hand-made tent, with all its hand-made imperfections, an entirely human place.
This God has truck with humans, pitiful as we are. This God consents -- no, commands -- to be dragged all over the desert in a circus tent, like a dancing bear. But why? What can this possibly mean?
It means this world is not a terrible mistake. It is not a hardship to be struggled through, and it is not an illusion, and it is not a sort of school to get through on our way to some other, better, less-cluttered-up Reality. This world is not purgatory, and it is not hell, and it is not nothing, either This world is real, and what we do here matters. The future looks like eight different kinds of disaster to me, most of them all our fault. If not for that ridiculous tent I’d be despairing. That tent means that God trusts our work. The tent means that God doesn’t plan to burn up this world and start all over again, and that even given all the crap we make and the shit we throw out and the awful way we treat this world, sometimes we can make things so beautiful and special that God Godself will dwell in them. Whether there are other worlds after or beyond or interleaved with this one, I don’t know. But I do know that God does not consider this world to be disposable, that God has faith in us, that God hopes and trusts and yearns for us to be up to this task of making this world (and that is what we are doing, for better or for worse -- we are covering the face of the world and we are making it over, a new creation, of a sort, not always to my taste, but still -- you can’t deny the enormity of it all).
God hopes in us as much as we must hope in God. And how could I have hope if God did not have hope in us? Who can believe we humans will muddle it all okay in the end, without something else than us? We cannot get away from things. Can you imagine us not building, making, doing, painting, singing, sculpting? We build our cities and our gardens and our violins and bookstores. We build our world financial markets and our currencies and our philosophies and our websites. Let us hope there is some way to turn all our doing toward the good. It seems impossible to me. I cannot imagine how we can make all this come out all right. What a nasty broken mess we’ve made.
Fix it, says God, from the ridiculous tent in the desert. Follow me and fix this world, brick by brick, nail by nail, day by day. I’m right here with you. Many hands make light work, remember? You don’t have to complete it, but neither can you refuse to do it.
Somewhere in the distance I hear the blast of the shofar, calling us to the tent of meeting. A Terumah is a gift, an offering. But who is offering what to whom? There are so many layers to this tent, rooms within rooms, like a dream, like a mystery inside an enigma inside a secret, like diving into a deep pool, like a funhouse, only very serious and very strange at the same time as it is very glad. A cold high kind of glad mixed up with a warm furry kind of glad, smoke and incense and animal skins and everything utterly strange and yet familiar... I feel as though I’m falling through a mirror, I try to focus on the clickety clacking of my fingers on the keys, a siren outside, the rain in the trees, my own burning skin. Everything is hyperreal. I feel quite strange. (I wonder if I’m losing my mind again?) Sometimes life is like this -- numinous. The world itself is a tent of meeting. Let us sanctify it.
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