Holding Things Together

So many streets around me are ugly. I do a lot of walking and jogging. I notice the trash, the little (or often larger) piles of dust and dirt lying along the curbs, broken pavement, scattered weeds. Occasionally, if I stop to tie my shoe, or drop something and go looking, I can peer into the midst of this debris. Its bits are fascinating, swept together as tiny signs of our society, our world, our lives: scraps of fast-food wrappers or candy boxes, plastic bourbon bottle caps, cigarette and vaping remains; but also little beetles or spiders, nubs of branches, edges of leaves, a few petals. To pick through the street’s filth is to uncover the gears that make us tick.

This kind of dismantling of the places we live has become a modern imperative. The courageous moral critic is asked, in the phrase of the Marxist thinker Henri Lefebvre, to “demystify” the world’s streets, as it were, in order to expose their economic and political levers as they impose injustice. This is not just a left-wing vocation, but one taken up by every therapeutic adept from Freud on. Whether it’s our play or labor, our restaurants or grocery stores, the “everyday” is, we are told, the site of conflict and violence, a perverted spiritual realm. Lefebvre and theologian-sociologists like Michel de Certeau became virtuosos in describing the corners of our quotidian existence as both witness to and means of oppressive diseases.

But deconstruction of this sort can easily ruin us, marking the last step before despair’s own regression into human dissolution. Bits and pieces have no meaning apart from God’s great work of design, the only true measure of ugliness and beauty. Peering beneath this great canvas of meaning, however modest its scope (like a city’s streets), gets us no further than the grimness of the “granular” (this last word one of our era’s annoying, if telling, lexical tics).

This truth weighed on me as I revisited one of the great writers of the latter half of the twentieth century, Georges Perec (1936–1982). And Perec was great. Most English-speakers don’t know him, though a few have vague memories of a strange 1969 novel (La Disparition or A Void) in which the author avoided using the letter “e” throughout. Perec was initially part of a loose group known as OuLiPo, whose energies were devoted to writing works under imposed constraints—verbal, topical, structural—meant to yield new ways of seeing through their combined demands. Think of a novel without a single letter, or sentences in which each word grows (or shrinks) by one letter.

One of the more topical and referential constraints that Perec employed, with moral obsession, was to describe the smallest details of a place, an action, or a set of events. His most famous novel, Life: A User’s Manual (1978), revolves around what is happening in the different rooms of an apartment building at the same moment. His writing reflects an ascetic discipline that takes the digging about in a city street’s debris and expands it to the whole of common life. Not surprisingly, he wrote many volumes in his few years, for common life is made up of a myriad of otherwise unnoted details: There is no end to it. He often invites his readers to adopt the writer’s craft in this quotidian form as a way of being in the world.

He tells us “to question what seems so much a matter of course that we’ve forgotten its origins.” In this, we can rediscover the “astonishment” at what “existed, along with thousands of others,” and has “molded us.” Describing the minutest details of something—the leg of a chair, the slant of a light through a blind, the mottled edge of a piece of plastic in the sink, the sink itself—is not a static presentation of the world. Rather, it is an active investigation of a problem, a “question” about the nature of our lives. He exhorts in Approaches to What? (1973): “What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare. Make an inventory of your pockets, of your bag. . . . Question your tea spoons.”

Perec’s literary motives were shaped by his parents’ disappearance—in battle and in the concentration camps—during World War II. “I write because we lived together, because I was one amongst them, a shadow amongst their shadows, a body close to their bodies. I write because they left in me their indelible mark and the trace of what has been said; I write because they have left me with no memory.” His own life was a surviving distillate of a world that had been destroyed and thus the everyday was something that was left over, “saved” in a way, but in a shape precisely of bits and pieces wrenched from the coherence of an assembled meaning. Perec called the object of this writing the “infra-ordinary,” that which lies beneath the common places of our earthly pilgrimage, the bag that contains the shreds of survival. The infra-ordinary is the form taken by the world when it persists under the conditions of the Fall, you could say, purely and obdurately. Which is why the infra-ordinary is, at least in my view, deeply frightening.  

By contrast, coherence is a divine imperative. It is how God engages creation, and is thus a divine gift. Small things, bits and pieces, make up a something, something that works, moves, carries, and gathers us. We are fascinated to learn, as we have in recent years, that our guts are filled with trillions of microbes. But we are foolish if we wish to make friends with this microbiome and its members. The numberless sands of the sea, or the hairs of our head—of which we know nothing in particular, though God knows each—exist in relation to us as overwhelming sin or incomprehensible grace (Ps. 40:12; Ps. 139:18; Luke 12:7). But just here, the infinite extent of the world’s teeming underbelly removes the infra-ordinary from our functional grasp.  

Since coherence is the form of divine creation, coherence protects our existence. A street is a road; it is not a line of debris. Clothing covers; it does not patch together bits of textile and rag. Meals gather and order our nourishment in circles of affection; they do not punctuate the ingestion of calories and proteins. Music focuses and integrates mind and spirit; it does not dismantle sound into fragments of perception. If this seems like a set of cultural assertions, it is: Coherence is a social and political virtue, from which flows a host of commitments, as well as joys and satisfactions, a balm to the anxious and the wounded. If the street is ugly, clean it up. Sweep it, fix its cracks, plant a tree. Do not delve or pick apart. This goes for schools, institutions, fields, songs, jobs, families. The commonwealth coheres. Fie on those who would disintegrate what only God understands.

The idea that the quotidian, the ordinary, even the infra-ordinary needs to be exposed and revalued as beautiful has made the rounds in some circles, mostly in that corner of the spiritual market that appeals to women stuck home ironing. My mother, caught in her spiraling depression, despised ironing, despite doing it for a large family over many years: underwear, shirts, sheets. She might well have benefited from the writing of Kathleen Norris. But Perec would certainly have confronted her with the dull impossibility of her own unhappy existence. She needed a grand picture, not a list of the pigments and brush hairs, or the small hand muscles that paint the canvas. 

For Perec the details are also “all that’s left.” These are the “crumbs under the table.” The Syrophoenician woman is a good model here (Mark 7:28). We might say to her, “You want only this? Crumbs?” Without God, the everyday becomes the valley of death: everything open to a withering and dissolving view. But as tied to God, “only this” is expanded to “everything.” Jesus calls this insight “faith.” There is potential for transcendence in the infra-ordinary that is often missed in our paeans to the “everyday.” God himself, when Jesus enters Jerusalem, turns the pebbles into glorious epiphany and gives them voice (Luke 19:40). Meanwhile we endure; we are patient; we are steadfast in looking to the grand coalescence of divine purpose. The infra-ordinary “groans” perhaps (Rom. 8:22), but not in despair; rather in hope for the great revelation of God’s design, his artistry, his coherent love. 

Everything is beautiful, from the smallest artifact to the greatest. But only God sees this. Our job is simply to hold things together, for the Perecs of the world and for us, until he makes it clear.