Gift From A Preacher: Need for Beauty
a creative writing edition (#7)
Lots of pictures in this one, so your email client may not handle it well. You can also see it at the Substack website.
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Context: after growing up in Mississippi and Alabama, I moved to Vermont to begin the process of working to put a dark past behind me, and to attend college. It has been my first experience living somewhere with four distinct seasons, and I absolutely love it, even the winters. Lately I’ve been reflecting on how part of my childhood was an enormous and unqualified blessing, which is a rare sentiment for me, and how it relates to beauty.
The state of Vermont can be a typical nanny state, the cobalt blue territory of Bernie Sanders and an ingrained belief that more government is the answer to everything. I find most of this annoying, and if I were ever going to start a business that required building, renting, or hiring locally? I would move first. The regulations would make entrepreneurship maddening, most likely impossible.
But there is one, and only one, aspect of Big Government here that I adore: the regulations on billboards and signage.
My adoration for this stems directly from lessons that my childhood preacher taught, which is a notion that would make him roll his eyes at best.
I would register and vote, go door-to-door collecting signatures, and otherwise do whatever it took to protect this regulation of signage, should it ever become endangered.
The state heavily regulates these things in order to protect the right of everyone to enjoy its natural beauty. Every time I’ve driven to New Hampshire to see a specialist or have a medical procedure done at Dartmouth, crossing the state line feels like a psychological assault. The ephemera, both paper and digital, immediately clamoring for mental and cognitive space—none of it valuable to me, none of it invading my mind and field of vision with even a modicum of my consent—feels terrible, insulting and unwanted, and makes me long to get back home.
Businesses, churches, libraries, government offices, schools—all of them are required to keep their signage small, tasteful, and beautiful. They function only to help drivers find destinations they’re already looking for, not to grab and demand attention.
Indoors, in my own space, I have prioritized surrounding myself with items that I find beautiful, and that help to bring me peace.
This priority is healthy, I believe, but—unusually for me—it is a healthy impulse that I recognize as healthy both rationally and emotionally.
It both is true, and feels true.
The Monty Hall Problem
Many things in life, for me, are like the Monty Hall problem. It’s a famous puzzle in which the answer, while provably true, is so counter-intuitive that it can take even dedicated logicians a long time to believe the correct answer is correct.
Wikipedia is shit for most things, but its article on this is actually helpful.
Short version: you are a game show contestant who can choose between three doors. One hides a new car; the other two hide goats. You choose door #1.
The host opens door #3, which shows a goat.
The host asks if you would prefer to switch to door #2.
Intuition tells you no, that it is not to your advantage to switch. It feels true to say that holding is a rational choice, as you have a 50/50 choice of winning either way.
But you don’t.
It is to your advantage to switch, and this is demonstrably true.
The Monty Hall problem doesn’t drive me crazy anymore, but only because I’ve done the proofs myself. Many times. Many, many times.
If I think about it now, the counter-intuitive aspect of it drives me crazy (still). It is only reminding myself that I’ve done the proofs, many times, that lets me calm my mind.
Many things are like this for me, and for other adults who survived deeply traumatic childhoods. For example, the belief that I wasn’t, couldn’t possibly, have been born unlovable. Rationally, I understand that this cannot possibly be true.
But it still feels true, so I have to do the mental proofs, or at least remind myself of all the times I have done them in the past, to move on when this notion flares up and causes me pain.
A Preacher Made This Okay for Me
Growing up in fundamentalist Christian insanity, I was exposed to all kinds of retrograde sex role crap, including repeated warnings that I should hide my brains so that Stephen, the boy that everyone expected me to marry, wouldn’t be intimidated by me. It was important that I show him my willingness to be submissive and let him lead, and this apparently extended to letting him outdo me scholastically.
But there was one thing that the preacher gave me, for which I will always be grateful.
He taught the men of our church, repeatedly, that God gives women “a need for beauty and order,” and that as long as the woman of the house wasn’t spending more than the man could afford, where and how they lived, including location, decorations, furniture, etc., was her business, and hers alone.
“You close your mouth and smile. God put that need in her heart. How she meets that need is between her and God, gentlemen. You don’t matter in that one. You set the budget, then you smile. If you don’t like her choices, you take it up with God.”
As an adult, I have embraced both Buddhism and atheism, and what the Christian God, in all its many constructs and fables, is said to think is of no consequence to me.
My need for beauty has always been something that I can rationally defend as good and true, healthy and meaningful.
Thanks to a preacher, my belief that this need is good is a value judgment that also feels true.
I never have to devote mental energy to doing any proofs, nor to reminding myself that I have done this.
I am grateful for this. So grateful.
To end this, a few pictures of the beauty in my little apartment.
Your ability to mine nuggets of goodness from otherwise upsetting times is a wonderful quality.
Wikipedia remains good for military history. I suspect because there are so many military history buffs and because military history has a certain inherent realism to it. There was a battle, it had consequences, etc.