Working

A fairly common complaint from my kids, almost always offered in woundedness and exasperation, is that some item or another is not working. (Neither can form a hard American r, so this also runs aground a haughty British air.) And I get it; it’s frustrating when things are not doing what you expected.

Often, though, things are technically working. My kids are just having a hard time. They’re not pointing the remote control at an appropriate angle to the TV’s receptor, or they’re trying to rewind with the back button. Sometimes the remote actually is broken, and sometimes that’s even because they’ve thrown it against the wall out of anger over thinking it was broken when it wasn’t.

Their desires are riven in dead ends. Soup’s too hot to eat. Ice cream’s melting too fast. An Etch A Sketch isn’t erasing when shaken too lightly. A zipper isn’t zipping. A puzzle piece doesn’t fit where it seems it should. It’s not woh-king!

I feel for them and their infelicitous sense of how the world around them is meant to work on their behalf. I try to reconcile the issues: I wrap a napkin, shake with force, point the remote high and true. For I am their father and, as such, a font of briefly appreciated minor wonders. I can, within this slim pocket of existence, repair the gap between what they presumed should happen and what they had been able to achieve.

A., the five-year-old, is already moving a step beyond this, into learning why things are the way they are with a mechanistic David Macaulay glee. From a Magic School Bus perspective, this means embracing the howlingly intricate aspects of a world that exists at all: gravity pulling down, the tides bulging at Earth’s globular waist, the existence of Neanderthal DNA in our genome, the gears of a clock, the fuzz on a peach but not a nectarine.

There’s true satisfaction in this kind of working knowledge. I can share with A. how a tree works, how the roots dig down and across, and the branches bud, and the rings hold horology in their concentric squiggles. How code compiles. How printers ink a page, or dough rises in the oven. How wax supports a burning wick. How a deep breath slows a heart even amid an indescribable panic. How powers are meant to balance in the tripartite American system of government, and how nation-states have borders on his globe but not imprinted on the land and sea as seen from space. How a lot of dadas pee standing up, like I do, but not all of them, and not all who do pee that way have to be a dada. How a Passover seder operates in its orderly fashion but only really works, to my mind, if it’s genuinely wrestling with the innards of justice and freedom. And I do share some of these things, even if, before long, I get lost in a desperately inseparable mixture: basic physical functions of the world butting up against my sense of how our world should work.

Because of course it’s the should that gets you. I think from time to time about a phrase from my past life in book publishing. When a particular title got all the way through the publishing process—from manuscript to agent to publisher to retailer—but didn’t sell well in its first printing run, one would say the book “didn’t work.” (The flip-side of this were the rare times a book “worked,” but 15 years ago that was only about 20% of them, and I can’t imagine that’s markedly improved.) Corporate publishing, after all, is a machine that works by obtaining the means of its own persistence and growth: money to pay people and shareholders so the company can continue making money to pay to other people. The appreciable byproduct of this cycle is that we get books, many of them invaluable on their own affective merits rather than per industry logic. The shoulds split. Even if the SKU-object doesn’t profit, the written work inside it might succeed on its terms of attention and fascination and edification, or some other readerly need. Written works work or don’t depending on what kind of work you want them to do. Most of my favorite written works didn’t “work” at all. Work is a weird word.

Plus, contra Borges, the universe is not a library of books; it’s not even a universal remote. Most things work and don’t work at once, depending on who you are and what you value as your desired working behavior. That’s where we roost and roast and go rogue, where we do most of our living. The uncomfortable knot where control meets knowledge and ethics, where systems meet life and care, where selfhood—if we’re doing this all right—meets love. It’s exhausting and important and undeniably real.

And it’s a struggle; it’s the struggle. Who gets to decide what it means for society to be working? For a forest? A religion? A people? A person? Latter-wise, I know what I’d tell A.: That he works when he’s happy and he works when he feels bad or mean or shamed or full of despair. That he’s working when he’s sweetly building a boat to Antarctica out of foam blocks with his little brother, and he’s also working when he’s screaming at the top of his lungs and kicking my face while I’m trying to get him ready in the morning. That the only metric required to evaluate whether he works is the fact of his existence. Is there a person you love about whom you wouldn’t say the same?

What’s been fucking me up, besides everything, is the horrifying force of those who feel they get to decide what it should mean for a world, a whole world’s kettle of humans and creation, to work. The iniquity is obscene. More than just requiring that a person who immigrated to a country needs to be “hard-working” in order to merit staying, and regardless detain them away with brutality alongside their children who know no other home. Not just demanding that people fulfill arbitrary work requirements to get support for living from the governmental entity which should exist entirely to support their being alive, and even still refuse them sustenance. Beyond declaring trans people are not people unless they accept an identity that doesn’t work because it’s not who they are.

It’s the idea, the very idea, that the goal of a world is for it to work without incorporating its own gorgeous disorders. The idea that, at root, your callow should should be able to invalidate another person’s maybe, just maybe. I was poking around The Critique of Cynical Reason a few weeks ago, in which Peter Sloterdijk describes the figure of a Nazi philosopher as “the drummer of functionalism who employs everything that works.” Turns out there’s no rule that a fascist knows how to make anything work at all, though. They only want to dictate the suppressive, peremptory method. All things instrumentalized, solutionized, controlled; all things deprecated, stupefied, terrorized.

All things, I realize, can be perverted by selfishness; all can be elevated by grace. Every ounce of hope ends up a function of unutterable conditions. “An existential truth about contingencies of living,” wrote Lauren Berlant, is, “namely, that there are no guarantees that the life one intends can or will be built.” I accept this. Maybe it’s because of it that I find myself attracted to the specific inefficiencies of being: the tectonic disposition of the everyday. These demotic world workings, slant rhymes to work out.

I know, for instance, that when measles spreads among the unvaccinated, it lodges in a child’s nasopharynx cells before heading for the lungs. That the downside of searchable text instantiated on the web through strings of code is you can easily find any word some po-faced sourpuss might wish to disappear. That the continental rock supporting North America is dripping blobs and thinning out. That researchers read a medieval book of Merlin stories using a scanner meant for fossils and said, with hope, “There are still things to be discovered.” That when a ball-handler is successfully double-teamed during a basketball game, broadcaster Kevin Harlan likes to say they’re “in a straight-jacket.” That the band who wrote “Nothing Is Everything,” the jingle for the drug I periodically have infused into my bloodstream, is called Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine. That the Fifth Circuit court which denied Tufts grad student Rümeysa Öztürk bail once allowed doctors to sue the FDA because the agency discouraged using ivermectin in a post that read, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow.” That a Galápagos tortoise named Mommy became a first-time mother after a century of life.

I know that Robert Morris, the U.S. Founding Father known as the “Financier of the Revolution,” was later sentenced to debtor prison and then died by injuring himself while trying to clear a blockage in his urinary tract using a whale bone from his wife’s corset. I know that John Adams, that other Founding Father, had a dog named Satan. I know that out past Neptune the exoplanet Makemake, named for the Rapa Nui god of creation and fertility, is generally cold enough to freeze Earth’s atmosphere but has a hotspot working in ways we don’t yet possess the understanding of astrophysics to explain. I know that popster Huey Lewis created his stage name out of love for his godfather, Beat poet Lew Welch, who disappeared into the Sierra Nevadas in 1971 and is believed by his friends to have offered himself to vultures, per Tibetan Buddhist tradition. That Welch once asked in a poem: “Does it need to be that dark or is / Darkness only its occasion.”

I know that a sixty-seven-year-old immigrant to the United States was at a friend’s home in Williamstown, New York, when three agents came to arrest him. That his wife later said it was done so quickly, “They didn’t even let him take his teeth!” That Isabella Hammad recounts, in her extraordinary Recognizing the Stranger, a Palestinian man who, after losing his wife and children in an air strike, was found holding on to a shaft of rubble. That he was wailing, “Who do I hug? Tell me who do I hug?” I know that anyone who believes these two events are the result of a world working correctly does not share my sense of what it means for our world to be worth it.

I know you work as a human even if you are—as I know I am—a piece of work with variously disordered aspects. The hug works, given or not. The unsold poem works. Physics works, even misunderstood in deep space. A flat basketball works for some purpose we might yet divine. You do not have to be working to work; an apparant function may break whatever about you should be otherwise humming along. From time to time this or that protest or action or phone blitz leads to a legislative change, and we cry, “It's working!” The lost teeth work, and so do the dadas who give birth and have to sit down to pee. I can’t repair this for my children across the broad plain of existence. Still, here I am, among the hoary trees high up that work, and work, and work.

What machinations can we see from here? “And the bright future, nothin’. And the dismal past, nothin’,” says the wrestling heroine of Roslyn Drexler’s To Smithereens. “And what was I? Nothin’. Nothin’, nothin’, nothing’!” She says this because she’s everything, and so are you. An ice cream cone half-dripped away, a neap tide going gibbous, a crime of passion, a house before the rubble, a weed in the median, a compression binder sweating for a wash, a comma splice, a lost sea of reeds, a remote control we should try our very best not to throw against the wall.