Last bit of my thesis. Hope you like comparing figuring out one is trans with the book of Job.

--- > Job puts forward a note of interrogation; God answers with a note of exclamation. Instead of proving to Job that it is an explicable world, He insists that it is a much stranger world than Job ever thought it was. > > (Chesterton 1929) I've heard it said that "forgiveness is releasing the hope for a better past," but it's more complicated than that, isn't it? That quote itself is more complicated than that: > There are ways around being the go-to person\ > even for ourselves\ > even when the answer is clear\ > clear like the holy water Gentiles would drink\ > before they realized\ > forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past > > (Wakefield 2010) Primed as we are to take text out of context, wrap our own needs around it, and pretend that it is in all ways applicable to all situations (for did I not already ramble about mistaking accidental, individual symbols for universal ones?), it's so easy to misremember that the better past we hope for is just some dream, something we cling to long after the us that lived that past has died. Who knows if I was the go-to person, the punching bag for my Elihu, the object of her simple angers? Who knows if she remembers me? She cut contact without telling me, without telling me why, and who knows if even she knows the reason? Who cares, other than me? All stories are perforce interpolations within real events. The story of identity, the story of coming to terms with existing in some particular way, is as much an interpolation into the whole of us as anything. I am trans, yes, but that is not the story; that is the identity. I am who I am specifically because I did what I did, I learned what I learned, I changed how I changed. No amount of academic language will make that untrue, no overanalysis of this or that will make me be anything else. "If Matthew died on September 6th, 2012," I asked myself some years ago, "was Madison born then?" That date, September 6th, had nothing in particular to do with gender. The answer was no, after all. Madison was born some two intercalary years later. Matthew's death had nothing to do with gender—he died when his friend died, when Margaras hit that barricade at fifty miles an hour. Matthew died and then I don't remember what happened. I suppose there was a few years of fumbling around, poking and prodding at various parts of his body in the hopes that something could be salvaged. The hair, maybe? Or the softness of skin? Perhaps he could simply be recycled into something new, the same lump of clay molded and remolded until some fresher breath of life was breathed into it. If Matthew died in 2012 and Madison wasn't born until a few years later, if I don't remember those in-between years, then I keep questioning whether or not I actually existed then. I suppose 2013 involved dealing with the tic, and I guess we moved in 2014, but both of those stand-out events feel as though they happened to someone else, someone not Madison. If Matthew died in 2012, why was I not born then? ----- The Book of Job, out of all of the books in the Hebrew bible, is buried deepest under layers of guesses. Even in the Christian bible, the only book that comes close is Revelation. Perhaps it is the dire nature by which both approach the world. Job takes a look at the world, heaves a weary sigh, and says, "I suppose this is it. This is the lot we have been given in life," while Revelation looks at the world and growls deep in its throat, a sound coming from the belly, and says, "This must not be it. This cannot be the way in which the world works." Or perhaps it is the way in which they view death. While Job looks on death almost fondly, Revelation reiterates the Christian sentiment that death has been defeated using the genre of apocalypse (that is, a revealing, a pulling back of the curtain). The world that was is no more, and as there is everlasting life beyond it, it is worth considering only in that context and otherwise only worth discarding. Gustavo Gutiérrez, in his investigation into the Book of Job *On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent*, posits that Job exemplifies *disinterested religion*—that is, a non-transactional faith that holds even when there is not a direct benefit or punishment. "\[The author of the Book of Job\] believes it to be possible, although he undoubtedly knew the difficulty that human suffering, one's own and that of others, raises against authentic faith in God. Job, whom he makes the vehicle of his own experience, will be his spokesman." (Gutierrez, n.d., 1) While I find this argument extremely compelling as a way to describe the entirety of Job and its role in both Judaism and Christianity, my own thesis does not necessarily have anything to do with theodicy. Rather, I'd like to posit that there are at least two possible outcomes for Job *after* the events of the book. On the one hand, Job might follow the path of Qohelet in the eponymous book (called Ecclesiastes in Christian bibles), or he can follow the path of Jonah. That is, he can maintain his disinterested faith, or doubt can overtake him. He can become the wise, if perhaps jaded, author of a text that argues "there is nothing better for man under the sun than to eat and to drink and to make merry." (Qohelet 8:15, NRSV) Or he can become the reluctant prophet who says to God upon saving the stupid Ninevites that he is "angry enough to die." (Jonah 4:9, NRSV) The framing for The Book of Job takes the form of a fable, a set of universal symbols designed to instruct as well as entertain. The structure is as follows: Job is a prosperous and pious man living in the merry old land of Uz. He is wealthy in livestock and in family, with his 7,000 sheep, his 3,000 camels, his cattle and she-asses, his slaves and his ten children. His seven sons love and respect each other, and he loves them all in turn (though he does seem a tad suspicious of their piety, making sacrifices in their names on their appointed days). God, holding court with the sons of God, greets the Adversary and asks where they have been. They respond that they have been roaming the Earth, to which God replies, "Have you paid heed to My servant Job, for there is none like him on earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and shuns evil?" (Job 1:8, Alter) Adversary, here, is the translation of the phrase in Hebrew, *ha-satan.* Alter notes that it wasn't until much more recently that this was refigured as specifically Satan: \"The word *satan* is a person, thing, or set of circumstances that constitutes an obstacle or frustrates one's purposes.\" (Alter 2019, 466) The Jewish Publication Society concurs. (Job 1:6, JPS) It is a job title more than it is identity. In fact, the transition from the Adversary to Satan himself is fraught. The specifically academic New Oxford Annotated Bible (NOAB) retains the New Revised Standard Version translation as Satan qua Satan, but acknowledges in translation footnotes each time the term *ha-satan* shows up that this is \"Or the Accuser; Heb. *ha-satan*\". (Coogan 2018, 736) And here is where we first run into trouble, for now is when the Adversary shoots back, "Does Job fear God for nothing? Have You not hedged him about and his household and all that he has all around? The work of his hands You have blessed, and his flocks have spread over the land. And yet, reach out Your hand, pray, and strike all he has. Will he not curse You to Your face?" (Job 1:9-11, Alter) And God does it. He does it! He gives Job up to the Adversary, and of course, all that Job has, all that he's gained and all of his offspring, are destroyed. Cattle and she-asses? Felled by the Sabeans. Camels? Stolen by the Chaldaeans. Sheep? Burnt up by none other than the fire of God Himself. His men are dead. His sons and daughters are dead, crushed beneath the walls of a house torn by a sudden wind. Job, pious as he is, does not curse God. He tears his clothes, bows down, and blesses Him. Even Job's wife seems to sigh: "Do you still cling to your innocence? Curse God and die." (Job 2:9, Alter) There is a difference in interpretation, here. On the one hand, Alter suggests that Job's wife is being sardonic, saying that she "assumes either that cursing God will immediately lead to Job's death, which might be just as well, or that, given his ghastly state, he will soon die anyway" (Alter 2019, 469). Might as well curse away, eh? The editors of the NOAB take a more sympathetic view of the exchange. "The outcome of all Job's piety has been to rob his wife of her ten children, her social standing, and her livelihood." (Coogan 2018, 737) Curse God, then. Who else could be responsible? How can you continue to praise after our ten (admittedly unnamed) children have died? Once more, God says to the Adversary that there is none more pious than Job, and once more the Adversary jeers, "Skin for skin! A man will give all he has for his own life. Yet, reach out, pray, Your hand and strike his bone and his flesh. Will he not curse You to Your face?" (Job 2:5, Alter) Yet again, God gives Job up to the Adversary—"Only preserve his life"—who strikes Job with a rash from head to toe, leaving him to sit among the ashes and scrape at his flesh. ----- Why was Madison not born then? In reply to asking myself that, I say, "If Matthew died in September of that year, then he was sick long before. This was part of his long, slow death rattle." He'd been sick for months. He'd contracted something terminal, been infected with some terrible, memetic illness earlier that year. Words had been whispered, implications, innuendo, little hints in growing silence and distance. These drilled their way into him, teased out an immune response in the form of defensiveness, then left a husk behind. Some long winter followed. He had died and crumpled to the ground. He mouldered a while before decomposing into the soil. He lay dormant beneath the earth, waiting for a thaw. Madison began to grow during that false spring that hits at the beginning of March, those two weeks of warm weather that convince you that winter must be over, it must have passed and it was time to air out the house, to wash your jackets and hang them up for the year. We always forget about the second winter, but false spring is enough for the buds to peek out. Stories are as bound to time as we are, and all we can do is steal back a bit of that memory through however many words. All we can do with these memories pinned in place is regard them from a distance and make guesses. All I can do now is make guesses as to the meaning of however many conversations—those very real words lost to the whims of technology—that lead to the slow and not always but often painful death of who I was. ----- Between the two halves of the fable—Job's fall and God's reinstatement of him—lies an intercalary period of at least a week wherein his friends—Though perhaps this ought to be put in qualifying quotes: "friends"—Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar (there is also Elihu; more on him later) commiserate with him, sitting silent for seven days and nights. There is then a series of speeches before the last chapter of the book containing the conclusion of the framing device. God commands that Job's friends offer up sacrifices on his behalf, and when they do, all of Job's wealth is restored twice over. 14,000 sheep, 6,000 camels and so on, down to seven more sons and three more daughters (which he gives the delightful names Dove, Cinnamon, and Horn of Eyeshade). Job lives another hundred and forty years, long enough to see four generations of offspring, until he dies "aged and sated in years." (Job 42:17, Alter) Job's life being torn to shreds means that his brief time here on Earth, the only time he has with nothing after it, is divided into finite fractions, into a before, a during, and an after. Job is struck for, what, two weeks? We may only guess, as the Adversary's second visit to the sons of God and the Lord is not dated. And yet those are two weeks out of a finite number of years. This centers God's response as the sticking point. He spends four chapters responding to Job and the conversations that have taken place between him and his friends. While these conversations make up the majority of the book, His response solely in the context of this framing device (which, we must remember, is an older folktale which has been re-cast as a framing device for the rest of the book) gives us a particular flavor of "God works in mysterious ways" with more nuance than one commonly finds when that phrase is employed. God appears to Job and his friends and expounds on the fact that none of them do—nor indeed can—possibly understand the ways in which He works. They're not just mysterious, they're vast and incomprehensible. This makes the most sense in a panentheistic view. If He is outside time, then, from our point of view, those ways stretch both forwards and back. If they envelop and pervade all things tangible and intangible, then they are beyond even our causal domain. Even in a grounded, Jahwist, immediate and physical view of God (He is, after all, there in the form of a whirlwind), his entrance comes off as bizarre and unnerving. He passes through the physical plane as the Sphere does in *Flatland* through the Square's planar existence. Even in so real a form, He proves His very incomprehensibility. These interpretations are doing a lot of heavy lifting, however. They accept at face value Job's capitulation in chapter 40, where, after being thoroughly excoriated by no less than God Himself, he says, "Look, I am worthless. What can I say back to You?" (Job 40:4, Alter) and "I have spoken once, and I will not answer; twice, but will proceed no further." (Job 40:5, NRSV) And if He does not exist? The folktale and the book as a whole do not depend on the existence of God in their interpretation. They still work to repudiate the idea that, if bad things happen to you, it is because you're a bad person. Our Job, though, our poor, ruined man, has he changed? Has he grown into something new? Has he integrated who he was during those weeks or months of grief with who he was before that? Has he built for himself a new identity? Has he become braver? More fearful? There is a belief that, with near-death experiences, there are two likely outcomes. One is that you become a braver, more vivacious person. You live your life all the fuller because you got so close to not living at all. After all, if you have been given a second chance, why not? But still, there's that second option: you become consumed by fear. You freeze up and do not leave the house. Any potential source of death is a thing to be avoided. This is no value judgement. To be consumed by fear after having your own mortality stand up before you, sneer down its nose, and give you a playful shove bears no shame. It is an honest acceptance of who you are in the face of the enormity of the universe. And sure, it might be a spectrum, and there's probably that absolute midpoint where there is no change. You make it through that brush with death and come out the other side precisely the same as you were before. There is terror in this prospect, that death might be so overwhelming that there is nothing you can do but wrap that experience up in butcher paper, tie it with twine, and set it up in the attic, high on a shelf beside that dusty box labeled simply 'regrets'. Alter argues that the names that Job gives his new daughters points to a change. "The writer may have wanted to intimate that after all Job's suffering, which included hideous disfigurement and violent loss, a principle of grace and beauty enters his life in the restoration of his fortunes." (Alter 2019, 579) This is indeed a beautiful take on it, too. Job comes out the other side and names his daughters after growing things, beautiful things. Dove and Cinnamon and Horn of Eyeshade, the most beautiful in the land and a sign of Job's joy in living. # The Fundamental Unhappiness of Identity How do we remember the past? How do we remember all of those countless conversations that make up our friendships, our relationships, our enmities? How do we remember the past? The Book of Job remembers it through discourses. It remembers entire conversations, entire histories of friendship, through the lens of those two weeks Job spent in the cold fire pit, covered with ashes and sores. It remembers them all through discourses and speeches and prayers. Perhaps strangest of all, though, it remembers them disjoint and out of order. ----- We, too, remember out of order. I met her through a friend, Andrew. My boyfriend at the time, actually. I'd flown down to Florida some time in 2009, I think, to visit him. A quick jaunt down to Clearwater where his ex-Scientologist mom and step-dad had set up their own business, bought some ridiculous house on the beach, and raised their only child. So much of that trip was so fun, too, even if it was the last. We drove out to some car meet-up at a strip mall. Fast car after fast car lined up in a parking lot. Men in sunglasses. Someone, years younger than I, crouching down to try and stick his cell phone, held up on its edge, under his car to prove that it had been lowered that much. "Fucking idiot," Andrew whispered. "Speed bumps would rip the shit out of that." He was the car nerd, not me. He was the one who had a black Dodge Dynasty with a red velour interior—his "mob car"—and then that terrible minivan he tried to strip and paint black by himself, and then the...was it a Passat? That last one we drove out to Orlando where one of his friends, Jill, her family the holders of a Disney pass, had procured a hotel room somewhere on the outskirts of Walt Disney World where we could have a small party—Andrew and I, her and her...was it her boyfriend? And Floe and Necco. A mostly quiet night of drinking and talking and more drinking. Andrew and I got drunk. Floe and Necco got drunk. Jill got drunk, and her boyfriend got truly wasted. He ran a bath, climbed in fully-clothed, and cried about how much he loved his friends. We sat on the rim of the tub, dangled our feet in the warm water, agreed earnestly. And I did too! I loved Andrew, of course. I still do, from however far away. We haven't talked in years, but I would not be who I am without him. I love Floe—I've worked with him on dozens of illustrations over the years. I may have loved Necco, even if he also fills me with loathing now. I suppose I must have loved Jill and her boyfriend, too. That sort of sticky-sweet love is infectious in a vodka-tinged haze. After that, we went to some event. Another alcohol-fueled party. Another awkward night. Another drive back home and then the rest of our stay. It went less than stellar, and we broke up the day I returned home. It had been a long time coming, not least of which because, without telling me, he'd been dating Jill for months beforehand. ----- Edward L. Greenstein discusses the transpositions, interpositions, and interpolations that go into the book of Job. Take, for instance, Job's first speech. "For many reasons," he writes, "the passage 4:12-21 should be read here, right after chapter 3, as the conclusion of Job's first speech." (Greenstein 2019, 16) In that speech, Job bemoans the horrors that have befallen him and his family, spelling out in poetic detail all of the ways he wishes he'd never been born. Where, in the traditional ordering, this would lead to Eliphaz's first speech, Greenstein instead places a description of a vision that had, in those orderings, been given to Eliphaz. He provides three reasons: in similar tales, it is the complainant who receives a vision; Job, rather than his friends, receives the theophany in this story; and both Job and Eliphaz himself refer to Job's vision in later chapters. I can't speak to the details beyond this and a few mentions in the Apocrypals episode on the Book of Job. Both describe the ways in which the original story would have been kept on leaves of papyrus, how easy it would have been for such leaves to be shuffled—accidentally or intentionally—by some time-forgotten redacter. The Book of Job remembers its events out of order, and attempts to fix it, whether its addressed explicitly in the text as Greenstein does or through footnotes as Alter and the NOAB editors do, cannot be done so without addressing this fact. ----- We, too, remember out of order. Andrew and I met all the way back in 2000. He went by Miro, then, a name cribbed from the surrealist painter Juan Miró. I later learned, though far before that 2009 visit, that his parents actually owned an original Miró, and that's where he'd thought of the name. This was before I was going by Makyo, too. Before I was Makyo, I was Ranna, a name stolen from. "Ranna the sleepbringer, the sweet, low sound that brought silence in its wake." (Nix 1996, 80) We bonded over being young—we were both young, once, the youths of our friends group—and the fact that we'd both stolen our names from elsewhere. We bonded over being gay. We bonded over being furry. It was a perfect match for early romance, for the first time we dated. I say "first time", as we eventually drifted apart in the young-love fashion: we got frustrated with the fact that we were growing into different people than then ones we'd fallen in love with. We fell into love, fell out, and then, years later, as he moved to Colorado, some strange triangle—or perhaps quadrilateral—formed between us. He moved to Denver while I was up in Fort Collins, working on my bachelor's at CSU, and I spent the occasional weekend with him, whether that was him driving up to our place or me heading down to visit him and Kinematics. I thought he was dating Kine, he thought I was dating my now husband, JD, and JD thought I was dating him. It wasn't until he moved out of state—this time off to Carlsbad, CA to get a degree in gemology—that we actually sat down to have that conversation. I hadn't started dating JD yet. He and Kine had never dated. The us who we had become fell back into love, found some new way to exist together without driving each other nuts. Not yet, at least. We remember out of order. I know that. I know, for instance, that my conversations with my husband around transition were many and scattered. We would chat over dinner, or we would talk on that horrifyingly yellow couch that he'd inherited about the fact that I was feeling strange about all these different aspects of identity. But you know what I remember? I remember sitting on that couch and talking in well-formed sentences, in paragraphs and essays, about why it was that I felt like the body I had and the body I *had* overlapped incompletely, or I remember sitting on one of the dining table chairs turned to face the living room in a skirt I had made for myself, explaining to him that I felt like a part of me died when Margaras did. These were almost certainly conversations. True conversations. They were full of filled pauses and the backtracking failures of speech that come with just plain chatting, but that's not what I remember. I remember discourses and speeches and prayers. I remember the way we constructed well-reasoned dialogues back and forth, with none of the doublings back or filler words, none of those pregnant silences that come with his speech impediment or my preemptive justifications that leave me gasping for air—the need to be understood far outweighs the need for oxygen. When I was 17, I got in my first car accident. The roads in Boulder are beholden to its landscape, the shape of the hills upon which they were built defining the curves. The entirety of the town huddles up against the feet of the Rockies, crowding against the Flatirons. Broadway, the main drag through town, carves a gentle curve steadily closer to heading truly north from its initial gentle westward bent. At one point, a sort of surface-level slip road ducks off to merge with 28th, the street on which my friend lived. Driving him home after a February rehearsal, icy and disgusting, that gentle curve of slip road relinquished its grip on the truck and we seemed to float a few inches above the pavement. It was an almost gentle sensation as we bumped against the truck beside us. Beyond that, it was all boring. Get out, exchange information, go our separate ways. I don't remember much more than that, only that I had to call my dad once I got home and tell him what happened. I don't even remember what I said to him, only that he interrupted me, laughing, and told me to stop talking like a lawyer, that he wasn't suing me. My justifications for every second of that accident had to be airtight. My need for air came second. I don't imagine the same was actually true of my conversations with JD about gender. We probably just slouched on that horrifyingly yellow couch and talked about how I was feeling, how every time he got close, it felt like he was getting close to the wrong me. But that's not how I remember it. I remember it as a story. There is a linear progression from 2010 to 2015, complete with an arc, with a beginning, middle, and end, with a supporting characters and with an antagonist. Similarly, the story I remember of Jill comes with a beginning, middle, and end. I met her through Andrew, we grew close, there was that snippy message, a sudden silence, and then that final exchange, and we haven't spoken sense. Acts one through five, all told in order: introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, catastrophe. ----- It is important to reckon with two interpolations within the text that appear to be later additions, and it would be nice to address these before coming to the text that they interrupt. The first interpolation is that of a poem that comprises the entirety of chapter 28. The poem takes the form of a Hymn to Wisdom that Alter describes as "a fine poem in its own right, but one that expresses a pious view of wisdom as fear of the Lord that could scarcely be that of Job." (Alter 2019, 458) The NOAB, however, suggests an additional interpretation of the Hymn to Wisdom, which is that it may have originally been the conclusion of Elihu's speech. For evidence, they mention that this topic, the elevation of wisdom, feels familiar to those chapters of Elihu's, wherein the youngster harps on the topic of wisdom and knowledge at length. Additionally, the editors note the similarity in the final verse of the Hymn, "And he said to humankind, "Truly the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding" " (Job 28:28, NRSV) closely echoes Elihu's final words as they stand: "Therefore mortals fear him; he does not regard any who are wise in their own conceit." (Job 37:24, NRSV) The hymn itself is a respectable piece of poetry. It begins in a roundabout way, discussing the acquisition of physical wealth. It describes the ways in which gold and silver are extracted from the earth and copper smelted from ore. It describes paths unseen by beast, ones that require work to acquire. Throughout these few verses (1--11) runs a very clear directionality. From the start, they are heading *towards* something. They are pointing *at* something. Verse 12 illuminates: "But wisdom, where is it found, and where is the place of discernment?" (Job 28:12, Alter) Certainly not beneath the earth! If Qohelet has taught us anything, it is that. Wisdom abides despite toil, despite merriment, despite even riches. In fact, though many of the same ideas within the hymn are also there in Qohelet, those in the latter tend to be more refined, more fleshed out. This might be due to the later date of composition of the former, but may also be due to the context of the book and the interpolated nature of the hymn. The author of the hymn views wisdom as an ephemeral concept. It is not something that can be held or perceived by man, or, indeed, life itself: "It is hidden from the eye of all living" (Job 28:21, Alter). Even other abstract (though often personified) concepts seem to have difficulty with it: "Perdition and Death have said, "With our own ears we have heard its rumor." " (Job 28:22, Alter) ----- And we, too, remember out of order. "Memory is playing tricks on me" is a phrase I'm never sure how to parse. Tricks? Is it tricking me? Is it fooling me? Is it hiding a smirk as I dig and dig to try and remember dates? I don't quite remember when this love quadrilateral all went down. I think we had a lot of these conversations back when I was in the house on Maple Street, the one that caught fire in my housemate's room, which means that must have happened before moving out in 2006. I remember living in the apartment on Remington Street and flying out to Carlsbad to visit Andrew, to meet his friends Toni and Wish, which means that must have happened sometime before 2009, back before we moved to the house on Andrea Street and him back to Florida. Memory plays tricks on me, and perhaps that's just in us remembering through transpositions, interpositions, interpolations. That's me remembering those times with Kine and then those times we were dating in Colorado before remembering that, between those, he'd gone to school out in California. And perhaps it's just the ways in which *this* is pushed out to make way for *that*. What year did I visit Carlsbad? I don't remember. I do, however, remember—vividly—Toni and Wish sleeping on the floor. I remember talking about all those people we knew together from IRC channels tainted by snarky assholes two steps away from the fascists in the fandom. I don't remember when we had those conversations about relationship quadrilaterals, but I do remember sitting on the floor with JD, there with the gray, plush carpet, which must mean that it was in the Maple street house, given the Berber carpet in the Remington apartment. I don't remember what house it was that I lived in when Andrew and I broke up, though I suppose it must have been before JD and I moved in together. There is an order to the events that happen in our lives, but that does not mean that we remember them that way. Perhaps it is that we remember things in the order in which they are most important to us. I remember that break-up conversation in one very clear way: I was on AIM and in the Denver airport. I had not yet gotten home. I remember that being such a low point in life, and yet it neared the top of the list in terms of importance—at least when it comes to this particular story. I remember visiting Andrew and Kinematics in Denver, but all I remember out of that was Kine doing a burnout in his car, laughing about how "the tires have a flat spot on them, better smooth that out." Smoke blossomed behind the car, then, and I clutched at my seat, pretending to laugh, pretending to care. ----- Qohelet, on the other hand, has a much more grounded view. He says that wisdom is one of those things that you gain by experiencing, something that abides through all of the ups and downs in your life and is only ever strengthened. This is not to say that he is in any way upbeat; wisdom, folly, riches, merriment, these all will go with you to the grave. They, too, will be meaningless. That is, until, one gets to the end of the book. The second half of chapter 12 of Qohelet is, per Alter, likely an interpolation of its own, where an epilogist rounds out the remainder of the book with some sounder, more conventional piety. "The last word, all being heard: fear God and keep His commands, for that is all humankind. Since every deed will God bring to judgment, for every hidden act, be it good or Evil" (Qohelet 12:13-14, Alter) echoes the end of the hymn from Job, which puts it, "Look, fear of the master, that is wisdom, and the shunning of evil is insight." Both of these interpolations seem to be taking the raw feelings of the authors of Job and Qohelet and trying to soften them, shaving off all those coarse edges. In Job we have a man striving to be heard by God Himself, and in Qohelet, we have a teacher who is bordering on nihilism, yet both of these editors are trying to fit these texts into the context of a tradition that, while it does include (and even encourage) the capacity to call God to account and to feel that certain sense of nihilism, would still appreciate a somewhat more positive view within its scripture. And though even this discussion of interpolations may feel like an interpolation itself, here is where it ceases being such: one possible outcome of Job's travails is that, as suggessted, he becomes Qohelet. Can one imagine going through the experiences that Job went through and not coming away with at least a little bit of that nihilism? Your family dies. Your livelihood is stripped away. You sit in the pit of ashes with lesions all over your body, and then God comes down in his whirlwind and fixes it all for you. You look back on all of your piety, you look back on all of your wealth, and suddenly yes, it is all a chasing after the wind. ----- Above all, I remember the past in fragments of identity. I remember my various selves. I remember the me who was gung-ho about music composition, just as I remember the ways in which I fell out of love with writing music. I remember the Matthew who dove into working in tech, just as I remember the Matthew who, so burnt by work, tried to kill himself. I remember the me who loved Andrew and yet I also remember the me couldn't figure out how to actually mesh with him. I remember, of course, the me who struggled with being me, the Matthew who did not want to be Matthew. The Matthew who did not want to exist. # Gender Play and Hidden Selves {#gender-play-and-hidden-selves .unnumbered} I was young, once, and dumb. Which is not to say that I'm not, now, of course. I certainly feel it sometimes. Even the young bit: Madison is, what, eight now? Nine? Not many nine year olds are smart. I still fumble. I still seem to create those humiliating moments that stick in the memory and make me wince whenever they come up, though they've changed in tenor over the years. But I was young and dumb and desperately trying to figure out what the hell was going on with my identity, this awkward pile of senses and sensations that were causing so much friction in my life. An aside: "Identity is psychopathological," my first psychologist said. "You only feel it when there's friction." I'm not totally sure that I agree—trans joy is as much a thing as trans pain—but, as a statement, it's true enough, most of the time. Something about the way my life was built such that the smallest things, coarse as sandpaper, would brush up against something integral, and scrape away at its surface, leaving tracks colored cherry. It's strange to think back to those early discussions with him, too. That insight hit at such a strange time in my life. It came up in a discussion about my stresses around work. I think I had said something like, "I've wrapped up my need to be productive as part of my identity." I had been talking about the burnout I felt looming on the horizon. I had been expecting some discussion of how to tackle the concept of burnout (something I struggle with bad enough that I quit my job in tech to focus on an MFA in creative writing), but instead, I had that simple phrase thrown at me, and I was left scrabbling after truths. After all, that wasn't the only bit of identity I was feeling acutely either, was it? I'd felt that before, back when I first came out as—at the time—gay. I felt it with work and how it was grating at me. I'd felt the way it ground up against me, skinning my elbows and knees, a sort of road rash of the self. But now I was feeling it in some new, far stranger way, though I couldn't put my finger on just how, exactly. I was feeling *something*, but heaven knows what. Something deeper, far more integral. There must be some way of debriding that scuffed and stripped self-stuff, I thought, so that what you're left with is some purer version of yourself, something all the more whole for what was once there now being gone. There must be some way to pare that cruft away. There had to be, right? If one was to live happily, there had to be. Years later, one job and one house and one more dog and one more self later, I called him to ask if he would be willing to write a WPATH letter for me so that I could start HRT, and he said, "I don't think I can. I don't know enough about it, and you don't want to know how I feel about it." I never talked to him again. ----- The second pertinent interpolation is Elihu's speech—and, indeed, the entire character of Elihu, who is never mentioned outside his own chapters—in chapters 32--37. Alter holds a particularly dim view of Elihu, stating, "At this point, in the original text, the Lord would have spoken out from the whirlwind, but a lapse in judgment by an ancient editor postponed that brilliant consummation for six chapters in which the tedious Elihu is allowed to hold forth." (Alter 2019, 460) Few seem convinced that the character and his speeches are from the original text. The NOAB, notably bearish on the whole Bible, agrees that this may indeed be the case, though it does so with a sigh and a tone of resignation, adding, "In any case, the Elihu speeches are part of the book we now have", (Coogan 2018, 767) with Greenstein echoing that sigh: "Even if, as most scholars think today, the Elihu chapters were added belatedly, they form part of the biblical book." (Greenstein 2019, 22) Mitchell, on the other hand, flatly and without fanfare simply removes Elihu entirely, the chapters and verses listed in a blob of "glosses, interpolations, verses out of place." (Mitchell 1992, 131) Job and his friends have three rounds of arguments, which shall be covered soon, and then, beginning in chapter 32, Elihu is introduced out of nowhere. "So these three men ceased to answer Job, because he was righteous in his own eyes." (Job 32:1, NRSV) It is perhaps interesting to note the differences in tradition, here. Alter has "because he was right in his own eyes" but offers no note as to why, which is a little disappointing. JPS ("for he considered himself right" (Job 32:1, JPS)) and Greenstein ("since in his own eyes he was right and just" (Job 32:1, Greenstein)) agree. All three of these are Jewish sources. Christian sources, however, all lean on 'righteous', while the HCSB, NIV, and KJV having identical wording for that phrase. This colors the meaning, does it not? Alter, JPS, and Greenstein describe Elihu as being angry because Job is declaring himself more right than God, whereas the Christian sources all interpret the text as Job justifying himself *rather than* God. Interestingly, the 2001 translation of the Septuagint has Elihu upset that Job is "declaring himself righteous before God" (Job 32:2, Septuagint 2001), a more uncolored plainness that is missing from the other translations. In this case, Elihu is seemingly upset at Job for being upset. The editors of the NOAB offer additional insight, that Elihu's speeches may have simply been shuffled out of order (a problem elsewhere in the text) and that his speeches may have originally come after the final of Job's three friends' speeches after chapter 27. This both lends credence to the Hymn to Wisdom in chapter 28 being the conclusion of his own speech and ensures that God replies to Job immediately after *his* final speech rather than after Elihu's, which would better fit the structure of the book. There is no reason it cannot be both, of course; the two additions could have been both interpolations and inserted out of order through some mix-up or whim in an early editor's haste. Indeed, Greenstein suggests that this goes even deeper: that much of the text from chapter 24 through chapter 28 may be jumbled due to this process of interpolation. This would include the interpretation that the Hymn to Wisdom belongs to Elihu. "I would explain this phenomenon by observing that toward the end of chapter 24 is a later insertion and that a roll of papyrus pages would have had to have been taken apart in order to insert the Elihu discourses, which include, I am convinced, chapter 28." (Greenstein 2019, 28) In the connection of the Hymn to Wisdom to Elihu, he is of one mind with the NOAB; indeed, in his reordered translation of the Book of Job, the Hymn is placed at the end of Elihu's speeches. He, however, disagrees with the potential interpolation of Elihu before Job's final speech, saying, "The motive for inserting Elihu into this point in the dialogues, just preceding the deity's speeches (chapters 38--41), is apparent. The divine discourses dwell on God's power and majesty, not on his justice or concern for humanity---which are the elements Job has been seeking." All this to say that Elihu presents a departure from the rest of the book. ----- I was young, I was dumb, and I was flaking away at the edges of that more fundamental identity. I was making use of the space I had to explore in clumsy, gangly ways. I was building up new versions of myself, one after another, to search for the smallest bit of relief from that friction. An aside: furry is a notably queer space. It's a subculture in which you present to others a new version of yourself; not always better, but almost always more earnest. You provide an avatar, a front-stage persona, that everyone simply takes at face value. There is no unwinding, no attempted translation of the front- to the backstage version of you. We commission art and ignore the names on the PayPal invoices. We meet each other at conventions, share rooms with each other, and still never learn each other's real names. We refer to each other by species, a cute way to reinforce the idea the ostensibly human being in front of us is not what we're seeing. There's no reason that such a space would not attract a queer crowd, yes? Some of it is doubtless the sense of safety that fandom has always provided to gay and lesbian people as well as a place where gender-bending is welcome. Still, in a place where our own original characters are the norm (as opposed to a fandom centered on canon, where canonical characters are the norm), where we become those characters, one is primed to play with identity. So I did. I was going by Makyo at that point, had been for a few years. Shortly after I started to realize just how ill-suited I was to music education, I went through a change of identity online. While before I had gone by the name 'Ranna', cribbed from Garth Nix's beloved Old Kingdom series, I now began to go by the name Makyo, from a Zen Buddhist term which bears a similar meaning. Something about just how focused many of the general teacher education classes were on things other than education filled me with a sense that I might not actually be in any way helping students, but simply standing in their way. I was *makyō.* I was *satan.* I, at one point, was overtaken by the need to tell my story through the frame of a conversation with an ally. I described them—or perhaps they described themselves; the boundary between framing device and reality blurs—as "an ally, not a friend." Towards the end of the project, we had a 'conversation' wherein I attempted to describe their inverse. Their response: "Not your enemy, but your adversary." (Scott-Clary 2020, 25) Those around me, those within furry spaces at least, saw me as that well-dressed arctic fox, the one in the subtly pinstriped suit based off my old suit from jazz choir. It was the most comfortable performance of masculinity that I could manage: one based off looking good. Not looking masculine, per se, just looking good. Looking nice. A focus on clothes, on looking good with the knowledge of how to look good. There was, in retrospect, a desire for some shallow interpretation of femininity involved in this. It wasn't enough, though. I needed something more. More explicit. More integral. Enter Younes. ----- The next verse is all over the place in translation. KJV and NIV suggest that Elihu is upset at Job's friends because they couldn't find any fault in Job but still condemned him. JPS agrees, but uses 'merely' before 'condemn' which adds a value judgment. Alter has him upset because Job's friends couldn't show Job to be guilty. Though it is difficult to pin down why, Alter posits that Elihu is angry at Job's friends because they just couldn't actually find a way to condemn him: "because they had not found an answer that showed Job guilty" (Job 32:3, Alter) (a sentiment echoed in the footnotes for verse 13: "In attributing this statement to the three reprovers, Elihu shows them admitting the failure of their own arguments." (Alter 2019, 548)), while the NRSV walks the middle path with "because they had found no answer, though they had declared Job to be in the wrong." (Job 32:3, NRSV) Weinberger continues to be relevant: "\[...\] translation is more than a leap from dictionary to dictionary; it is a reimagining of the poem." (Weinberger and Paz 2016, 46) This is where we leave off, and then this youngster, this whippersnapper, this upstart Elihu starts talking. "I am young in years, and you are aged. Therefore I was awed and feared to speak my mind with you," (Job 32:6, Alter) he begins, and we are off to the races, or at least to some brash exhortations to wisdom. Job's friends may have left off on their attempts to convince him of some perhaps-guilt, but Elihu does not: "And I attended to you, and, look, Job has no refuter, none to answer his talk among you." (Job 32:12, Alter) Were it not for the (admittedly quite beautiful) poetic form of Elihu's speeches, he would be beyond tiresome. He goes on for more than a chapter simply talking about how he is going to answer Job before he actually does so. He is going to talk. He is going to get there eventually. He will speak. Verse after verse of promises. The NRSV has the unique wording "See, I open my mouth; the tongue in my mouth speaks." (Job 33:2, NRSV) In a post-*Alien* world, this brings to mind some smaller mouth rebuking him. Or, to look at it more seriously, a shallower voice. Perhaps that internal Elihu we all have within us doing its best to convince us that we have, at some point, lacked the wisdom required to have kept us from our current predicament. Perhaps I'm taking up too much space here, though. ----- Looking back, coming up with a character that looks male, has that plausible deniability of masculinity, yet could engage with femininity on his own terms in more intimate settings was the perfect vessel for exploration. There are many terms for such a bodily configuration, one with both masculine and feminine primary sexual characteristics. Most of them are awful, but the one that many have landed on, purpose-built to be affirming rather than denigrating, is 'altersex'. I can't even seem to write about this without leaning heavily on the clinical. Something this fraught, this embarrassing, is difficult to acknowledge, but it remains integral to the story. How can I possibly put something like this down on paper? How can I possibly admit to something like this, after the fact? How can I-- but that's the me of today writing. That's the me who went through this whole series of events, who decided to toy with the form she presented to that particular segment of the world, to feel tentatively around the edges of gender and search for the tender spots. I was young, once, remember? And dumb. And that isn't to say that I disrespect those for whom this is their own lived identity, or those for whom this is their own lived experience. Plenty who aim for this altersex goal do so because that's how they see themselves. I don't remember if that's how I saw myself. I just remember I certainly no longer saw myself as Matthew. Tiresome as he is, and despite the non-sequitur nature of his speeches, his language remains beautiful, and he does at points reinforce the point mentioned in the epigraph: Job questions God as to why it is that his world has become so miserable, and God cannot but reply with an exclamation that this world is far stranger, far worse and far better, than any man, no matter how righteous could hope to understand: ----- > Why do you contend with Him,\ > if He answers not all of man's words?\ > For God speaks in one way\ > or in two, and no one perceives Him:\ > In a dream, a night's vision,\ > when slumber falls upon men,\ > in sleep upon their couch\ > Then He lays bare the ear of men,\ > and terrifies them with reproof,\ > to make humankind swerve from its acts > > (Job 33:13--17, Alter) This unspoken and unspeakable, unknown and unknowable language is the only way we can possibly move within the world under the guidance of God. Here, however, he falls back into the common theme of Job's reprovers, that he surely must have done something wrong that he feels the need to call for an advocate before God—an ally rather than an adversary, perhaps—"For a man's acts He pays him back, and by a person's path He provides him," Elihu reasons. (Job 34:11, Alter) Strangely, Elihu, for all his talk on wisdom, seems to lack the wisdom required to understand the first part of his proposition: that the workings of God are so far beyond human understanding that we cannot know them well enough to call Him to account for his actions. He immediately falls back on the comforting assertion that visible cause must precede obvious effect. Of *course* Job is experiencing such hardships! If he is experiencing such effects, then there must be a cause, and that cause must be the most rational one: an offense against God. *We* know that it's much more complex. We have the benefit of the framing device to keep in mind. Elihu speaks of wisdom yet lacks the knowledge. He can claim to have one and yet still not know that he lacks the other. Indeed, all of Job's friends seem to be acting outside that knowledge. They seem to be speaking without the wisdom of what is actually happening. "\[T\]he Accuser's dirty work has resulted in an epidemic of accusations," Stephen Mitchell observes in his translation. "Once the archetypal figure disappears, he is absorbed into the poem as if by some principle of the conservation of energy." (Mitchell 1992, xvi) Job's friends accuse and accuse and accuse. After all, surely Job has done something wrong, yes? After all, what need would he have of crying out to God? What does this say about such a God? That that He is the type to demand an interested faith? "\[T\]heir god is revealed as a Stalinesque tyrant so pure that he "mistrusts his angels / and heaven stinks in his nose" " Mitchell says. (Mitchell 1992, xiv) ----- There are countless ways to approach confusion. Perhaps one dons a cap and cape, sockets a meerschaum pipe into the corner of their mouth, and picks up an oversized magnifying glass to hunt for clues. Perhaps one sits and lets their eyes lose focus, letting their mind wander over the possible solution space to whatever problem that confronts them like some prophet of old. And perhaps one simply freezes, proverbial deer struck dumb by the proverbial headlights. I'm not quite sure which of these I did. I know that I froze for quite some time. I know that, confronted with this identity-friction, I stood stock still for days and weeks, unable to internalize and unable to let go of this feeling of wrongness. I also sat and thought and explored the landscape before me: what *was* it that I was feeling? Was it regret? Remorse? Was I feeling discomfort? Was it mental? Emotional? Spiritual? I know also that I did my own investigations. Perhaps much of what I was feeling was due to the ways in which I engaged with sex? This would require experimentation. Perhaps much of what I was feeling was due to an estrangement from who I was as Makyo? Perhaps I could create another character. Enter Younes. Enter Younes and exit Makyo—at least in part. Enter Younes into so many situations with so many different people. Enter Younes into the lives of JD and Kita. Enter Younes into the home of Whiskey on that text-base role-play setting. Enter Younes, too, into art. Into drawings of him—him alone and with others—commissioned from artists throughout the fandom. My day to day life began to revolve around this reflection of some more feminine version of myself. Someone masculine, yes, but not *solely* masculine. Someone who might easily pass as male, even nude, and yet not solely that. My interactions with others online in particular were all wrapped up in this new identity of someone somehow more than I was. Every time I would talk with friends—Iridon, perhaps, or MaxRaccoon—this would be acknowledged, silently or not. They would speak to me differently, touch me differently. The vocabulary was different, the hugs were different. And, sure, the sex was different, too. The sex was an acknowledgment of this part of me. More than acknowledgment, it was worshipful. It was fulfilling on an identity level, rather than simply sating the baser needs. # 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 marble or tile. The noise is fantastic. The mess is stupendous. ----- The primary clash between Job and his friends can be boiled down to this 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. > > (Singh 2012, 35) 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." (ʻAṭṭār 2009) This is the God that Bildad, Eliphaz, and Zophar do not understand. ----- 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 earlier. 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 AIM, 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, 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. ----- 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,\ > wretched consolers are you all.\ > Is there any end to words of hot air,\ > or what compells you to speak up?\ > I, too, like you, would speak,\ > were you in my place\ > I would din words against you,\ > 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,\ > let us know what is good between us.\ > For job has said, "I'm in the right,\ > and God has diverted my case.\ > He lies about my case,\ > 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,\ > lapping up scorn like water?\ > He consorts with wrongdoers\ > and walks with wicked men.\ > For he has said, "What use to a man\ > 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 insults. After all, he's the youngster, right? The upstart? > I am young in years,\ > and you are aged.\ > Therefore I was awed and feared\ > 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 I? 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. ----- "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, finally calls out to Job in turn: > Who is this who darkens counsel\ > in words without knowledge?\ > Gird your loins like a man,\ > 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 disagrees. "God will make Job see a startling universe if He can only do it by making Job see an idiotic universe," he says. (Chesterton 1929) "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 (Mitchell 1992, xxiv), "*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, all 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." (Chesterton 1929) 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. (Rilke 2003, 11) He says in response: > "Who is this obscuring council without knowledge"\ > Therefore I told but did not understand,\ > 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, as a merism: by offering the opposites of good and evil, everything that lies between good and bad is implied by those two boundaries. All of the gray areas are in that knowledge, but not just gray; 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"." (TVTropes, n.d.) Job, for a brief moment, smells blue, hears orange, and is able to maintain his faith in the face of it all. # 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 what of 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. (Scott-Clary 2023, 122) 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. They are perhaps too hot to touch directly, so we define them apophatically. We circle around them along with yet more 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. It 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. ----- Of all of the book of Job, it is this fable which seems to cause the most controversy. Even the Apocrypals podcast, whose tagline is "Where two non-believers read the bible and try not to be jerks about it", drops the 'and try not to be jerks about it' for this episode, host Chris Sims explaining, "Unfortunately, this week we are reading the book of Job." (Cereno and Sims 2022) Sims's argument boils down to the fact that this framing device leads to Job being a narrative, moral, and commercial failure: a narrative failure for not resolving any of its plot points, a moral failure because it fails to explain why bad things happen to good people, and a commercial failure because "it is the most cogent argument against religion that I have ever heard." It's a compelling argument, too. He goes on to explain that it is almost the inverse of Pascal's wager, in that it "presents a world where it is impossible to distinguish between God's wrath and God's indifference." Whereas Pascal would have it that there is no downside to believing in God as there is the possibility of infinite salvation if you do and you're right and infinite damnation if you don't and you're wrong. Here, we are presented with the fact that, whether or not you believe in God, you're equally liable to suffer. This, it should be noted, is an argument presented from a contemporary Christian perspective. Sims mentions earlier in the episode that reading the Book of Job is one of the reasons he is no longer a Christian, but he still speaks from the perspective of an ex-Christian. Indeed, the hosts of the podcast The Bible for Normal People (tagline: The Only God-Ordained Podcast on the Internet—what is it with podcasts and their taglines?), list the difficulty and, yes, perhaps moral failure of the Book of Job as leading to a sizeable portion of the genre of apologetics within contemporary biblically literalist Christian traditions, saying, "\[...\] that's why you need a really hefty apologetics industry to keep \[biblical literalism\] intact". (Enns and Byas 2022) The interpretations of the same text a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, twenty-four hundred years ago were all different. For instance, Cereno explains that the historical context of the book, written between the sixth and fourth century BCE, does not include the same concept of the afterlife. The pre-biblical Jewish audience of Job when it was first penned would have had the concept of *Sheol*—that place of of stillness and darkness where both the righteous and unrighteous wind up—rather than than the contemporary understanding of an afterlife. This was written before the concept of the messiah, before heaven and hell and life after death. ----- It was that period of exploration that was at once my point of least faith and one of my 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. 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 (Blake 1903, plate 1), 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. (Blake 1903, plate 21) 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." (Mitchell 1992, xxix) 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. 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 pleas from within the whirlwind—cannot possibly know. "A man who hungers and thirsts after justice is not satisfied with a menu," writes Mitchell. (Mitchell 1992, xviii) "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 to 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." " (Mitchell 1992, xxviii) ----- 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. ----- 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 to simply 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." (Chesterton 1929) We must imagine his choice. We must imagine that Job, too, can be happy. ----- 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. ## Works cited * Alter, Robert (Trans.). 2019. *The Hebrew Bible[^1]*. W. W. Norton & Company. * Blake, William. 1903. *Illustrations of the Book of Job*. D. Appleton. * Cereno, Benito, and Chris Sims. 2022. "Ep. 101: The Apocrypals Solve Theodicy." *Apocrypals*. . . * Chesterton, G. K. 1929. "Introduction to the Book of Job." . . * Coogan, Michael D. (Ed.). 2018. *The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, Fifth Edition[^2]*. Oxford University Press USA. * Enns, Pete, and Jared Byas. 2022. "Ep. 200: Does the Bible Still Matter?" *The Bible for Normal People*. . . * Greenstein, Edward L. 2019. *Job: A New Translation[^3]*. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. * Gutierrez, Gustavo. n.d. *On Job (m. O'connell, Trans.): God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent*. Orbis Books. * ʻAṭṭār, Farīd al-Dīn. 2009. *Farid Ad-Din ʻAṭṭār's Memorial of God's Friends: Lives and Sayings of Sufis*. Paulist Press. * Mitchell, Stephen. 1992. *The Book of Job[^4]*. HarperPerennial. * Nix, Garth. 1996. *Sabriel*. Harper Collins. * Rilke, Rainer Maria. 2003. *Duino Elegies[^5]*. Green Integer. * Scott-Clary, Madison. 2020. *Ally from Start to Finish*. self-published. * ---------. 2023. *Mitzvot*. self published. * Singh, Khushwant. 2012. *The Freethinker's Prayer Book: And Some Words to Live*. Aleph Book Company. * TVTropes. n.d. "Blue-and-Orange Morality." . *Various. 2001. "The 2001 Translation[^6]." . . * Wakefield, Buddy. 2010. "Hurling Crowbirds at Mockingbars (Hope Is Not a Course of Action)." . . * Weinberger, Eliot, and Octavio Paz. 2016. *Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: (With More Ways)*. New Directions Paperbook. [^1]: Denoted *Alter* when verses are quoted. [^2]: Denoted *NRSV* when verses are quoted. [^3]: Denoted *Greenstein* when verses are quoted. [^4]: Denoted *Mitchell* when verses are quoted [^5]: I mentioned in a previous footnote the difficulty in citing works within the realm of chosen names and modern technology; I wrote a small art-song using the opening lines of Rilke's first elegy, but were I to quote *that* instead, how would I do so? As Matthew? He is dead, his name should be fair game. And yet that was me, was it not? As Madison? [^6]: Denoted *Septuagint 2001* when verses are quoted.

#What Right Have I

The Elevation of Unknown Things