Rabbit Rabbit #19: Where is on Down the Line?
Divinity, Art, & Being
Zoe Ziegler and Julianne Nicholson in Janet Planet
I was asked recently what my relationship is to the idea of a higher power. In effect, I was asked if I believe in a god. Fortunately, I think about this concept with startling frequency and had earlier that week landed on a satisfying answer. “I believe there are seeds that were planted long before we were born, and that they lie dormant in us until something –it could be anything– causes them to sprout,” I began, reminded of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex which traces the journey of 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, the chromosomal mutation that causes intersexuality, through multiple generations of women before presenting itself in a child named Calliope in 1970s suburban Michigan. “I believe in lineage, in things passed down, whether we know it or like it or not,” I concluded. “If that makes any sense.”
My mind spun, my tongue faltered. My answer felt lackluster. Was it even an answer? I never said yes or no to god. I wanted evidence, an allegory, something to quote from. Maybe if I’d ever attempted to crack open a version of the bible or taken a religion class in college or attended more than two church services in my lifetime I’d have something more definitive to say. But of course, none of those things would make it easier to answer the question. We all remain a little stuck here, struck dumb by various uncertainties pitted against various hopes. What are we doing here?
I have written about Marilynne Robinson as a novelist, but have said little about her profound insights as an essayist. To understand Robinson is to understand that she is a devout Calvinist, a Christian by word and action, and writes with genuine curiosity about religious history, tradition, and thought. She adores the Puritans. She pulls from obscure seventeenth-century treatises. Her novels are filled with biblical references and sentiment; four out of the five of them follow the lives of three Congregationalist ministers and their families in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa. Amidst a tradition of theology that considers the potential existence of a great before and a great after, what I appreciate about Robinson’s body of work is its focus on the present moment, the here and now as an entirely new and miraculous invention. She proudly shirks teleology in favor of entelechy.
Marilynne Robinson. Photograph by Ryan Pfluger
Robinson’s 2018 essay collection, What Are We Doing Here?, which I have spent the last year studying, features fifteen essays, most of which were presented by Robinson as talks on an extensive lecture circuit during the Trump years. Each one analyzes American political and cultural institutions to seek threads of human spirit and faith, applying her Christian lens to debates ranging from the fate of public universities to what makes a good president.
“The Divine,” a lecture given by Robinson at Harvard Memorial Church in 2016, is the most accurate depiction of Robinson’s metacognitive ability to ruminate on the human urge to make sense of the world. In it, she outlines the history of the use of the phrase “the divine,” stemming from the Latin divinitas meaning “godhood.” In ancient times, she recounts, we turned to myth and story for answers about why we have all landed here, and what, if anything, came before. Language even in ancient times reached far beyond the commonplace toward the stars. We need only to remember Galileo or Copernicus. “Then,” she ventures, “along came quantum physics, relativity, a theory of cosmic origins, and science ever since has been continuously at work at a new poetry, trying to capture something of the startling elegance, novel to our eyes, that eventuates everything that is.” A new poetry. Science as poetry. Is that not what it is, has been all along?
Upon reading this passage, I thought of a class Kenji and I took in college to fulfill our “natural science requirement” called Einstein and Relativity. We had no idea what was going on most of the time, fumbling with our lecture clickers among a sea of dance and theater majors, but we did manage to collaborate on a creative final project. We composed an epic poem inspired by Beowulf, which we were reading in our medieval literature class. Our professors lost their minds in a good way. We wrote of Einstein’s endeavors from birth til death:
But evil Death loomed near all along, snatching
Innocent physicists with her claws.
In the year 1955 our hero did fall, to the greed of an aortic aneurysm. The People built a pyre for Einstein, and mourned his death for years to come.
A Bunsen Burner swallowed the smoke.
Even now I laugh. But I also wonder if there is not something emblematic in our choice to marry the epic poetry form with the discovery that rear clocks are set ahead by L。V/C², “as the God of Synchronization wills it,” we added necessarily.
I have always been intimidated by science. It has been presented to me in opposition to the arts, to creative endeavors, for as long as I can remember. Still me, at a family gathering or trapped inside small talk: “My sister got the science gene. I was always into the more creative stuff.” Even more staunchly it was presented to me as the direct antithesis to what today we call religion, which has been distilled into the image of people forever debating the creation of this complex and fundamentally unknowable universe. Was it the Big Bang, or Adam and Eve? Do you believe in made-up stories, or the cold, hard truth? Which side are you on? It’s all reductionism.
Science, art, and religion, Robinson tells us: they’re siblings, forever intertwined so long as human life remains on earth. We use them as methods to seek out and then organize our knowledge. The scientific method accounts for the human propensity to err. What a relief, because sometimes we make bad guesses. The distressing aspect of all this is that we do not as a species seem at all compelled to honor our insatiability. “We do these things that are the unimaginable realizations of antiquity’s old longing, and there is scarcely a poem or prayer by way of celebration,” she writes. “Properly speaking, we are the stuff of myth.”
Alice Munro and Marilynne Robinson in 1983
Scarcely, she says. Meaning not not. I exhaust myself worrying about the purpose of the artist today. The work can feel trite; journaling helps. As I am finding, at least part of the purpose is to create the very poems and prayers that celebrate. There is a new film out that, as I see it, is in direct conversation with Robinson’s theology for this moment. Renowned playwright Annie Baker’s debut feature Janet Planet follows Janet and her 11-year-old daughter, Lacy, during the long and hot summer of 1991 in Western Massachusetts. Janet, a single mother, has made a habit of inviting strange people –men and women alike– into her life. These people simultaneously bother and bewitch the self-proclaimed friendless Lacy, who would rather spend every waking and sleeping moment with her mother.
Essential viewing here is the film’s trailer, to which I will refer more than the movie itself simply because it is perhaps the most brilliantly executed movie trailer I have ever seen– perfectly subtle, quiet, yet momentous, without revealing massive plot details. (Plot, with a Baker piece, strikes me as too shallow a word anyhow. Its meaning is eclipsed.)
Baker’s work has always had a magical tendency to ponder the very fact of Being using both the visual and spoken languages of the quotidian. Her stuff brims with allusions, most crucially in Janet Planet to the fourth installment in Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Duino Elegies.” “To counter-balance my searching gaze, an angel / has to come as an actor,” the poem reads. I would be remiss not to point out that Zoe Ziegler, who plays Lacy, possesses a transfixing, extraterrestrial look. Naturally, Baker’s referential style mirrors Robinson’s fiction, which weaves tales of Lot’s wife, Carthage, Cain, and Abel.
My favorite moment in the Janet Planet trailer comes towards the end, when Avi, the charismatic leader of a local theatre troupe/maybe cult, waxes poetic one night at dinner. His voiceover narrates, “In the beginning of the universe there was nothing. And out of nothing came something. BANG! Everything changes in an instant.” Right when Avi says “Out of nothing came something,” we cut to Lacy holding a single strand of her mother Janet’s hair up against the moonlight. In the context of the film, Janet has given Lacy the lock of her hair during one of her first nights spent with her new boyfriend, Wayne. (“Wayne thinks it’s weird we still sleep together,” she states.) Lacy, distraught by the prospect of dreaming alone, asks Janet for “a piece of her.” The strand of hair, physical evidence of the body from which she emerged, comes to symbolize the tether between a mother and daughter. Some might call it holy. And when combined with Avi’s statement that “out of nothing came something,” it becomes a meditation on the act of creation, not just of one human being from another, but of the entire universe from what, we do not know. Maybe a first particle, a dormant seed. Again, what are we doing here?
At the epicenter of the pursuit of knowledge as exercised in science, art, and religion, those brawling siblings, is whether or not there is a god, some external force that eludes humankind. Instead of re-attempting an answer, I want to qualify what we might mean in asking the question.
Most ingenious about the movie trailer is its featured song, the ethereal and hypnotizing “Hammond Song” by the Roches, also three siblings. Please, please, for once, the song beckons in its opening strums, do not fight against the current of the fact that everything around us is a mystery. For once, relax and float. The sisters later sing:
Do your eyes have an answer
To this song of mine?
They say we meet again
On down the line
Where is on down the line?
How far away?
Tell me I'm okay
Where is on down the line? I think that, if we knew for sure, life would be infinitely less beautiful and exciting. Thank god we don’t. It can be so lovely to wonder. And who is “they?” We are told big things about the world from birth and we forget who said them. The people who told us are useless because they forget who told them. Amazing, how much is lost in the great spiral of history.
When we ask someone, “Do you believe in god?,” we might as well be asking, “Where is on down the line for you?” What are the myriad ways we attempt to distract ourselves from the not knowing, or to revel in it? Lacy spends her hours as the puppetmaster of a shoebox world populated by salt and pepper shaker figurines. She leaps out of bed to tuck her tiny dwellers into Kleenex blankets. “Imagine that you are God,” Avi advises at dinner for the sake of metaphor. Lacy smiles; she already is. Janet throws herself wildly into Buddhist philosophy and alternative healing modalities, microdosing ecstasy with Regina and debunking the phrase “bad decisions.” These ways of Being are sacred and essential to our survival, Baker reminds us, detached as we inevitably grow from the ones we love most in the process of enacting them. Her film, in scarce company according to Robinson, honors them deeply.
Annie Baker on the set of Janet Planet
The last church service I attended was in 2019, when two friends and I were in Rhode Island for the weekend and we impulsively stumbled into the United Congregational church where my parents were married in 1998. The interim minister, filling in for his daughter who had just given birth, read us the story of Lydia of Thyatira, a merchant of indigo cloth. She was a successful businesswoman (admirable, given the year) and a beacon of hospitality who invited groups of missionary men into her home to stay. I’m realizing that Lydia sounds a lot like Janet, offering her home to Regina, an old friend and lost artistic soul mourning a breakup, and Wayne, whose debilitating migraines are eased only slightly by Janet’s acupuncturist powers. But I digress.
What stuck with me most from that service was the minister’s adherence to his scholarly duty to interpret the text, mining it for revelations in a gesture of wild hope to enlighten the congregation. Tell me I’m okay. Humanities students close-read Austen, Woolf, and Eliot. Actors and designers pore over scripts to make informed, truthful decisions. Is that not the same thing? If this is the case, each work of art might be better understood as an experiment, testing the limits of our capacity for tolerance, strength, or love, the apparatus a camera or stringed instrument, the results delightfully inconclusive. We begin always with a question, as we are taught in school. And then, rather courageously, we venture to guess.
***
Recs: Sabrina Carpenter’s cover of "Good Luck, Babe!” (perfect), Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse just in time for summer, & this NYT article about small-town pride celebrations.
