Rake

The Details

by Chris Pipkin












(Picture: A groundskeeper's house in Sighisoara, Romania)


Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee;
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.

--Alfred, L. Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H.

It’s all artificial, of course. The order in my room. “A place for everything, and everything in its place,” my mother said once, quoting someone who was quoting someone else. But nothing really works that way. There are always more things than there are categories, or, if not, more categories than there is space. Even a good rake allows the occasional rogue leaf through.

At some point, there has to be compromise. I will have to place the sketchbook in with the other books, and store the drawing pencils with the pens, thus dividing “art supplies.” I will have to decide if The Great Divorce goes with the fictional, theological, or devotional books. This annoys me, but I remember that the ordering principle is only good insofar as it brings you closer to the objective of having a clean room. That’s hard, because I’m a fundamentalist at heart. Either the room is disregarded, like the ozone, or it must be faultless, like the Bible. You can only care about so many things when you care about them this way. But to follow the Way of Organization as simply a means--to not become obsessive-compulsive--actually feels like hypocrisy to me. In reality (I’m told) it is healthy.

I’ve noticed that certain of my English students are practically fluent. After painstakingly memorizing every rule and studying for years, they’ve arrived at an excellent working knowledge of English grammar--better than most native speakers, in fact, and frequently better than me. But they won’t sound like native speakers until they forget all the rules they’ve learned and just speak English. Rules were certainly not made to be broken. But they were also not made for their own sakes (especially not English rules).

I’ve toyed around with writing a (possibly heretical) story about Moses. He’s up on the mountain, and God is dictating the Law to him. As God dictates, Moses’s arm gets really tired. He starts missing words out, here and there, and God refuses to slow down. By the end of the day, he’s leaving out whole paragraphs, and his arm is completely numb. Night falls, and Moses, exhausted and depressed, hears the voice of God again, telling him to get up. Moses obeys, and God brings him to the stone where he’s been scratching out the commandments. God tells him to begin sanding down the words, and as Moses does, he feels the presence of God in the pitch darkness, terrifyingly intimate. The next day dawns, Moses is reinvigorated, and he tries taking God’s dictation over again, fails, and rubs it out that night in the midst of God’s presence. The process repeats itself thirty-nine times until Moses gets every last word etched into (what is now) a tablet. He feels thrilled that he has at last gotten it right, and goes to sleep. But lo and behold, he is woken up by God and instructed to sand the tablet down, as usual. Moses protests that he has written it all perfectly this time, every word, but God insists, and Moses again rubs the Law out. The next morning, he wakes to see the words on the tablet again, but in God’s handwriting this time. Moses is annoyed and asks what the point was of all the writing and erasing. God says “I Am,” or something equally Zen (and hopefully more satisfying in terms of story). I don’t know for sure, as it’s barely started. It takes so long for me to write anything. I get too hung up on the details.

On the other hand, if all are sinners, as Paul says--if none of us can yet speak the Language of God fluently--then grammar lessons we must have...