Have you noticed those "LDS Millionaire Matchmaker" billboards that have been flowering through Utah Valley the past couple of months? I sure have. And it…really is weird to me. But, since I'm not a single, vivacious, unique, starry-eyed blonde Mormon woman (I am, according to my latest calculations, not even half of those things), I didn't put too much thought into it save, in true LDS-fashion, a quick "What the fetch?" as I was continuing my commute. Now that we're in the last throes of June, the deadline for the millionaire's matchmaking dreams has come and passed, the ending of which I still don't know. The blessing of Twitter, however, has given me a much needed (and wonderfully snarky) update to the story. You should read this before you finish mine, if only because the professional writer does such a great job, plus it fills you in on some of what I'm talking about. And, as a heads up, I'm not interested in simply ridiculing those involved (Meg Walter does it well enough). Everyone finds those who matter in different ways, so perhaps this millionaire finds happiness through this process. In fact, it's less the people and more the process that I want to look at here. From where I sit (in my Tudor-esque office, overlooking a neighborhood street with wind-rippled trees undulating prettily) and from my essential non-experience*, I feel like much of what is constructed in Mormon-culture (or, as I use the term, Mormonism, which, I would argue, is quite different from the culture endorsed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, much as the doctrine of the Church and the history of Mormonism are not necessarily the same, either) with regards to dating, courtship, and marriage, is massive spectacle. Consider Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle: The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation. (1) There's a highly performative aspect to Mormonism on many (perhaps all) fronts: Clothing, verbiage, political point of view, daily behaviors, and much, much more. The interiority of conversion is encouraged, via monthly testimony meetings (Open Mic Sundays, as I like to think of them), to be brought out publicly for communal commodification and inspiration. Tears are not uncommon accompanists to the spiritual retellings of private moments**. The society of Mormonism is a fascinating amalgamation of traditional accumulations and nonce incorporations. Ossification happens, as does innovation. In many ways, the "modern conditions of [spiritual] production" truly do prevail within Mormonism and the Church proper. (A quick example: The Church has fully embraced the power of social media--to the point that a process of "selling God" is so prevalent that, though I don't have any Mormon-related views of videos on YouTube, I still get Church-sponsored ads on that website.)
One of the things, interestingly, that the Church has now given up on, is the spectacle par excellence of the "Mormon Miracle Pageant" in Manti, Utah, a sanitized version of Church history, performed with all the spectacle that a pageant ought to have, on the extreme slopes of the Manti Temple. (I went once. I was not a fan.) Despite that, there's still plenty of spectacle that's part and parcel of the Mormon experience, though it is often a spectacle that is done with an eye toward symbolism and spiritual depth: Baptism is one, complete with attendant witnesses and audience; marriage (as it is throughout non-Mormon society) is also highly spectacle driven, even if the ceremony itself is often privately attended inside the temples. Performative worship, while nothing compared to, say, the whirling dervishes, is also part of the Mormon experience. So it's little wonder that there's also performative spectacle when it comes to Mormon cultural expectations. Which leads back to the LDS Millionaire Matchmaker Challenge (it's not really a challenge, which is sad, because it would have been great to see a played-straight Iron Chef segment where the ladies had to incorporate something bizarre into their Jell-O dishes, ranging from carrots to marshmallows) and the experience as shown in the video and described by Meg Walter (again, follow the link). What happened at the actual event is, for me at least, an awkward afternoon that has a serious assumption underpinning what was thought of, by some of the contestants, as a joke, and that has to do with prosperity theology. This is not a uniquely Evangelical (though you could make an interesting argument about how Evangelical-like (-lite) Mormonism is), and though it isn't an official Church doctrine, it is absolutely part of how many Mormons view wealth. Particularly here in Utah, it is much more unusual and uncommon to see a teacher, a librarian, or any number of countless lower-middle class workers become involved in Church leadership than those who are of a more wealthy class. Since the Church is a lay religion, the bishops and stake presidents all come from the wards in which these leaders live. They don't attend seminary or any sort of rigorous, full-time training to do their service. It's all on the Church leader--say, the stake president--to do both money-making and Church-leading activities. Again, it's not the rule, but it is the trend to see those who are financially more well off--upper management, software CEOs, retired-before-50 types--in the leadership roles. Implicit, then, is the idea that wealth = righteousness, with the idea of additional wealth an indicator of even greater righteousness. I can't cite numbers, as this is more my intuition than anything, but I think it's fair to say that members who struggle financially, despite doing all of the things prescribed by the Church, have moments of wondering if they simply aren't righteous enough--aren't obeying the manifold rules well enough--to be given the blessing of wealth. One other thing to add to the mix: Mormonism's highly conservative tendencies mingle in disastrous (in my view) ways when it comes to self-reliance (an actively taught principle in the Church; it's a part of the doctrine, which is probably why part of me likes Milton's Puritanism to a certain degree) and what happens when a family requires Church assistance. There's a stigma to taking welfare of any type in the Church (but not, interestingly, in giving it…provided it's with the Church's name slapped on the side of the truck, rather than a governmental agency), and, from what I can tell, that is only made worse by the assumption on the part of some members that the reason a person is failing financially is because he's*** also failing spiritually. So the words "LDS Millionaire Matchmaker" sound, superficially, as though that's all there is: A millionaire who happens to be LDS is looking for a relationship. As I mentioned before, there are manifold ways of finding a worthwhile partner. Why not advertise it, if you have the means? But those words imply an additional level of piety that may not be visible to the uninitiated. This nameless, sheet-drenched millionaire (who couldn't afford to just, I don't know, take all the ladies on dates?) isn't simply saying that he's financially well off (I don't want to say "stable" because millionaires don't necessarily make good financial decisions all of the time--another assumption about wealth that, I personally think, plays into the trust that members put in their (rich) leaders: He's wealthy, so he must know how to make the right decisions!). No, those three words mean--to me, at least--that there's someone who is available and is, in essence, flaunting his righteousness by asserting his wealth status. Like a peacock whose feathers are made out of dollar bills, there's the outward spectacle that's meant to catch everyone's eyes; but the peahens are also aware of what those feathers are really saying. --- * Many of you know that my courtship with my wife involved meeting her as a junior in high school, dating her exclusively (so exclusively that we've never had any other serious relationship; we've only ever held hands with each other; neither of us has so much as kissed any other person romantically), and marrying her when we were both 21. I do not speak with personal experience at all when it comes to courtship and marriage. ** Please note, I am not disparaging those whose emotional response to important things is through crying. If anything, we need to have more times where it's socially acceptable (though not expected or required) to shed tears. *** And I mean he in many of the cases. The idea of a working Mormon woman as being someone without condemnation is a recent phenomenon and it doesn't have a lot of widespread application. That's a whole other subset to this: Single women are judged as somehow being unworthy of the blessing of marriage; poor men are judged as somehow being unworthy of the blessing of wealth. Less than a week away from the end of June and, looking back over my productivity this month, I realized that I only wrote an essay once so far this month. I guess, since I have a couple of moments now before I head off to swim with my (almost) six year old, I could jot down something here.
Summer is a necessary, ephemeral, and necessarily (?) ephemeral experience. I'm a fan of it--definitely one of the perks of the job. And it's not just the fact that I get to sleep in (especially when, as I had two nights back, a horrible bout of insomnia). I crave the punctuation marks that a scholastic year provides. Having only had a grand total of eight years of life not being in school somehow, I crave the stability that this kind of schedule provides. During the three non-school years of my early adult life--sprinkled between missionary service and being an unemployed (and, it felt, unemployable) graduate--I remember feeling unmoored by the idea of having work off for the 4th of July. How do most people do it? Life becomes this gray wash of routine, unpunctuated by the shifts of anything other than seasons. There are hiccups to look forward to--flashes of planned vacations or carefully orchestrated times off--and the holidays are always there to give the entire country, as it were, a slim chance to catch its breath, but on the whole, there's very little to distinguish office work from the day to day, the week to week, or the month to month. Yet summer slips so smoothly into the plans of a calendar, albeit one that I've made with my family. We have cabin trips to go on, camps to attend, reunions to avoid, and as many memorable days as we can pack in (and afford). This is by design: My wife and I both feel that, as the boys grow older, we want summers to be bedrocks of positive memories. And, considering how allergic I am to conspiring about Santa Claus, I'm surprisingly committed to weaving the cloud-foundations of an idyllic (and idealistic) childhood for my children. But perhaps that's too harsh. There are lots of real things that happen in the elementary school summers, those days that make for the future-memories that my boys (I hope) will look back on with fondness. These days at camp. Chasing down the ice cream truck. Filming short movies in the woods outside the cabin. The taste of chlorine and sunscreen. Sticky fingers. Mosquito bites. The acrid whiff and white-yellow billow of fireworks. Maybe I'm just stuck in a perpetual childhood. Maybe my theme song isn't "Skin and Bones" by Foo Fighters (I've put on some pounds since that song was first released anyway), but is instead the "Toys 'R' Us Theme". Maybe I teach in order to have these ten weeks' release from the constraints of my job, a time when I can sit and think more carefully, read more fully, and try to be more present in the different events that we have planned. I'm rereading It (which, for those of you keeping track at home, makes for a third pass) and getting more and more out of it. I have filled twenty pages with thoughts and quotes, and I'm not quite half-way through the brick-shaped book. I'm in the part that I find less interesting--the part with the Losers' Club being adults. The movie that came out in 2017 focused on the 1958 version (though, for the film, they pushed it into the mid-eighties), with the film coming out this September being the 2019 adults. (Strange to think that the book is itself (Itself) old enough to have already seen a return of Pennywise the Dancing Clown), and though I plan on seeing Part II, I'm less interested in what it does. The thing that has mattered to me--that which rattles inside of my head like a dried pea in a tin can--is the way that nostalgia and a summer filled with terror can make such an exciting and thorough world that I feel like I'm there in the Barrens. In some ways, I need summer so that I can relive through fiction what I think I felt when I was younger. Perhaps I need summer because of my own arrested development. Or maybe I just like sleeping in. No, I didn't miss an apostrophe in the title.
A few weeks ago, I tweeted the thought above. I picked up It back in the summer of 2017 in an attempt to read an actual horror story. (I may have mentioned this before, but if not/as a reminder, I wanted to do that because there was a book I was reading that dismissed the entire genre of horror writing as "bent books" and I had a distinct feeling the author had never in his life read a horror book and had no idea whether what he was saying was true or not, so I set out to see if he was right; he was not.) While it may have been buying into the popular conception of Stephen King as the genuine grandmaster of horror, the idea that It was his most frightening work, or the fact that a new movie was then on the horizon, I decided that if I was going to read a horror novel, I may as well start at the scariest. This was a mistake. Not because it ended up being frightening or anything--a couple of genuinely creepy moments, a lot of disgusting moments, and a couple of What-the-crap-did-I-just-read moments, but nothing really scary--but because It ended up being something that I could not get out of my mind. I've thought a lot about Derry, Pennywise, the Losers' Club, and what I've gotten out of the book was enough that I ended up studying it. (In fact, I typed up a good 3,800 words or so of the book before finishing my novella, Mon Ster, which is clearly emulating King's style, though with my own story running throughout.) During my '18 summer, I started writing in my personal reading journal. It turns out that I really ought to do that more often, as I just finished rereading the twenty or so pages I dedicated to It last year. There is a lot of really profound stuff there--and I skipped over huge chunks of it--and being honest with myself as I reflected on my readings and then wrote about them helped me to see that It is a unique and significant part of American literature. It isn't the sort of thing I'd want to teach high school students about, but that's less to do with the explicit content (though that's part of it) and more to do with the fact that the novel's themes of childhood, adulthood, memory, and forgetting don't really resonate with children. At least, I don't think they would. It's much like how Langston Hughes' poem "Dream Deferred" doesn't really strike a high school student the way it does someone who has to give up on his dreams to ensure that there's money enough in the family's coffers to fill the table. It isn't that It wouldn't be impactful, either; it probably has enough spooky stuff in there to make for a memorable read to any of the kids who tackle it. But I'm not certain I'd be able to transmit what it's given me, personally. There's a magic to It. A dark one, to be sure, but a potent one. The book is hardly flawless: There's all sorts of mental magic that furthers the plot but otherwise looks like a pretty stupid move (think, if you've read it, about the dinner that the Losers' Club in 1985 go to, and then decide--foolishly--to wander through Derry on their own, without relying on their numbers to protect themselves from Pennywise). The Turtle and Chüd are a couple of other weird things, as well as deadlights and a dozen other it-makes-sense-if-you-read-the-whole-thing examples. These pieces of inexplicable magic make the story move, yes, but the novel is much more than these pieces. It strikes me because the magic within is not about killer clowns, time traveling smoke-caves, or convincing a monster that an asthma inhaler is acid, but instead about the way that people can come together and then, inexplicably, drift apart. It's about how the most important things in a moment are disregarded, ignored, or unknown by the world at large. Graduation was this past Friday, and I am--as always--sad to see the class go. And, for the most part, I think those kids will live fulfilled, excited lives. They have much to live for…and many of them will fail to live up to even a fraction of their desires. Their small victories in a tiny charter school in Utah Valley are important to them, but are grand-scale rather insignificant. So, too, is the experience of the Losers' Club. They risk their lives--twice--to defeat a malevolent evil. Not because it threatens the world--Pennywise has lived in Derry for centuries. It never leaves the city (and why should It? There's fear enough to sow within the city limits), It isn't threatening the whole of mankind. If anything, there's a harsh, Machiavellian trade going on here: Every 28 years or so, Pennywise wakes up and wants to start eating a couple of dozen people--not hundreds or anything. Yes, they tend to be children, often seasoned with a good dose of fear to make them more appetizing, but It's not even concerned with eating all of them. A few murders and then Pennywise leaves everyone else alone. Not a bad agreement, in the big picture. Yet the Losers' Club reunites in 1985 to stop Pennywise again. They sacrifice a great deal--life and suffering, as well as causing a lot of property damage--in order to keep a rather small evil from spreading. That is, in many ways, the kind of heroism that most of us can aspire to. We haven't a lot of reach, most of us. I have been lucky to have taught about a thousand kids over the past decade-plus; my wife has probably had almost 3,000 pass through her classes. Though those numbers may seem big, they really aren't. We're making small differences that the world-at-large will never appreciate, never understand, never care to do. We all do hard things in our small, immeasurable ways to make the world better. If we don't do them, the world is worse off, yes, but in small, immeasurable ways. Rare is the experience that matters so much to the course of history that we can even see it. And though it may one day be true of my students that they will alter the events of humanity, I certainly see no such path for myself. This is part of why I'm returning to It again this summer. It eats up about a third of my summer--it is a long book, after all--and I plan on writing more of my thoughts as I go along. It is rather sad, I think, that something so gruesome can mean so much, but I suppose that isn't too surprising. I study modern history, and if ever there's a time where the gruesome can mean a lot to those looking at it, it's the twentieth century. Perhaps there's something to be said for seeking out more uplifting things. I know that there are other books that deal with similar themes. So why do I return to It? Its magic is potent, frankly, and, despite my assumptions upon finishing it last year, I don't think I'm quite ready to say that I'm actually finished with it. |
AuthorWould you like to support my writings? Feel free to buy me a coffee (which I don't drink, but I do drink hot chocolate) at my Ko-Fi page. Thanks! Archives
July 2022
Categories
All
|