Whim

A second entrance

Dec 13, 2020

⩩ 6

There comes a day when one — stops hiding. What had been backstage, in the shadows, is allowed to come forward, to stand front and center. A long period of ignorance, denial, negotiation, preparation is over, and the growth of an epoch is consolidated and expressed in an hour. A person turns inside out: the whole sphere of one’s relations is remade, rearranged, even one’s obligations to one’s family. One goes home and says, “You carried me, fed me and clothed me. You sang to me, read with me, spoke for me, — you judged what was good, what was in my interest. Now I think, I am. I speak for myself.” In doing so you bow and draw a line between yourself and others, and thereby claim your natural inheritance. No one else knows what is good for you. How could they? They don’t see everything you see, don’t stand at the corner of experience and reality that is called “you.” They don’t know you, and neither do you know yourself until you know what is deepest in yourself and allow it to order and define the rest. Standing at that origin and spring you bring everything else into orbit, and learn to name things by your own lights. Who are my people? What are my relations? What are my obligations? By asking this question you have left home already.

Jesus turned to this line, again and again. When a man said he would follow – let him first say goodbye to those at home, Jesus said he wasn’t ready. The line wasn’t drawn. To follow him he would have to have already gone from that home, said goodbye to the old way, left “father and mother and brothers,” — except that instead of speaking of leaving them he speaks of hating them, and not only them but even yourself. And yet he spoke more bluntly and clearly somewhere else. When he was sitting with people around him, teaching, and some of them came up to him saying his mother and brothers had come and were outside looking for him, he asked, simply, “Who is my mother or my brothers?” and answered, “Look,” nodding at those sitting around him in a circle, “my mother and my brothers.”

Emerson wrote that he shunned father and mother and brother when called. When given the sign, he would depart from them without hesitation, without explanation, or almost: he would leave a note of a kind. He says that up on the doorpost he would write, Whim. That he leaves a note at all means that he will come back, that he will make good on his sudden departure in the end, justify it at last, that he already is trying but that it takes time, patience, faith. But that there, above the door, where the Hebrews put blood, where they put scripture, where they write one of their names for God, — that there in their stead he would write, Whim: what does this mean?

In its nature whim is from outside. This has one meaning between you and me. Whim is associative, idiosyncratic, total, personal. Anyone who writes its name above the door he walks through expressly disclaims any injunction that others walk through it after him, follow him. Though we can see where this road led him, consider his life as evidence, though we can listen to his voice if we want, if it speaks to us, we have every right to listen elsewhere, to ignore it, to overlook it, to deny it audience. His work, his ministry, his life is an experiment, a human experiment, by his own lights. We can stop at the door and look in, or pass on: either way we have his blessing. And even after its long growth, even in its fullest development, as a calling, as the total action of that person’s ability and nature, and we can recognize it as the perfect expression of one type of human character, as genius, it remains a whim, his whim, and one person’s whim and part has no authority over others’.

It has another meaning between you and yourself. Because you too have a calling, a job that is the work of your total self, or might have one someday, and, however it may appear in the end, at the beginning it appears as a whim, — to you, too. That means it is extraneous, a distraction, a disturbance, an impertinence, and yet one that speaks to you, calls to you, one that prompts you to stray from the path, to leap over obligations, — one that won’t go away, despite being ignored and overlooked, a voice you can’t not hear. Then you are in a bind there is only one way out of, as it were on the doorstep of molting. And in truth this is part of the structure of the human being, an inevitable moment in our growth due to the order and timing of our development.

Before we have begun to think we are dressed up with habits, goals, obligations, an outfit, a kind of uniform adopted from without. But nature is exquisitely textured, and even two brothers are radically unalike. In time our natural shape comes out; we grow internally, piece by piece, until what is inside catches up and pushes through and the inherited outfit must come off. It shows up first at the border, at the gate, in the background, a wandering thought, a wayward impulse. A script, a set, a cast, a play, and halfway through a stagestranger. Stranger though she is, after a while it is possible to acknowledge this stranger’s authority, or rather to stop denying it, to give up hiding it. When this happens, there is a second entrance. You acknowledge that you are called to change, to follow, to enter into discipline, — that whim is something you must learn not only to hear but to obey.

A shoutout to my collaborator Danny at breakfastswerved, who not only created this drawing in tandem with the essay but has done the same for each previous letter in this series. If you haven’t seen them, check them out. You can find them here.

Did a part of this essay resonate with you? Did it make you think of something you have seen, heard or read? Do you have another angle on the topic?

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