jinx, hex, hoax

This Week in Reading

Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle

All summer, I waited for summer to start. It was sunny and warm as ever, but the triple digit temperatures, the heatwaves that distinguishes LA-summer from our year-round-regular-summer, never seemed to arrive. I mentioned this to my boss at the end of the July: it’s been a surprisingly mild summer, I tell him. Maybe the fires won’t be too bad this year—knock on wood. A jinx in the making.

Every September California bursts into flames. This year is the worst one yet, but so was last year and the one before that. It is a worsening apocalypse that grows more ordinary with every passing summer. Here in LA, we are far enough from the Martian skies of the Bay Area. The light glows dimly sepia. The air is heavy with the scent of smoke.

I read Madness, Rack, and Honey a few weeks back—a recommendation from my friend Annie. Annie told me I would really like it, and I did, but its not the type of recommendation I usually pass forward, it’s a little theoretical, a little academic, the kind of book that people that are not me might describe as dry. I keep saying I wouldn’t recommend it to people, but I also texted probably a dozen photos of various passages to Kyle, which is perhaps the mark of how engaged I am by a book—make with that what you will.

Mary Ruefle is smart and in moments, dryly funny. Madness, Rack, and Honey is a collection of lectures about poetry. She writes about themes, about sentimentality, about Emily Dickinson. About secrets she writes: “When the secret is exposed we look away. When the secret is hidden we try to see it.” It is a book about inversions, about concepts that rely on holding to opposite truths at the same time. Jinxes, so to speak.

They say no news is good news, and so by extension, all good news is merely the current absence of bad news. Good news is treated cautiously, a bubble of luck destined to pop at any moment. We must not jinx it by speaking of it. Bad news itself is not protected from the reach of a jinx—to point out the severity of any misfortune may only jinx that things will worsen further. If good news is the absence of bad news, bad news only precedes worse news. Was RBG’s death caused by us bemoaning that 2020 could not get any worse? Did we jinx our way into our current predicament?

To believe in jinxes is to believe good fortune rests in the hands of a petty god. Strokes of luck are mistakes inadvertently dispensed by a cruel universe— a luck that can be undone if I look it too hard in the eye.

We are debilitated by our fear of jinxes, but are also obsessed with the idea of manifestation: that through hard work, or spiritual prayer, or the sheer force of our desire, we can summon the outcomes we wished for. We (a free agent) manifested (with our personal agency) opportunity. Success is a reward earned by our focused concentration, by the magnitude of our longing. Manifestation allegedly promotes personal agency, but this is belied by the most common conjugation of the word— as the first half of the phrase manifest destiny. An assumption that we are entitled to prosperity—if only we possess the will to seize it.

To believe in jinxes or manifestation is to believe in fate, but it is also to believe that fate can be tricked or coaxed or cajoled into shape. They are contradictory inversions with the same result. A jinx and a manifestation are both exercises in fatalism and ego. They both believe that we are destined for certain results, but paradoxically assert that that our promised destiny can only be secured by our own actions: whether that be hoodwinking the universe to leave us be with our good fortune, or coaxing our destinies to fruition.

Manifestation is inextricably linked to privilege— the spiritual conjuring of success aided, undoubtedly, by skin color and class and gender. But is luck not also a form a privilege? Is privilege itself, not a type of fate? To be born into a body in a society in an era that positions you closer to opportunity? No one ever said destiny was just.

The harder part of this broader societal reckoning about race, for me, hasn’t been negotiating the concepts of race and privilege, but rather questioning the American foundation of individualism that had rooted itself in my earliest mutable brain and calcified there. I want to believe that I have agency over myself, and thus, over the corner of the universe I occupy, but where is the line between agency and ego? Between control and the illusion of control?

We have been watching that HBO documentary about the NXIVM cult—one part multi-level marketing scene, one part professional development, one part deranged sex cult literally branding women. The series unfolds slowly, introducing the audience to the vocabulary and theories of the organization. The concepts are familiar to anyone who has spent any time in the self-help space or has had an extremely basic introduction to rudimentary psychology. Members are told they are being controlled by limiting factors, which are the fears and insecurities instilled in them in early childhood. If they find the root memory triggering their fears, they can reprogram their responses to these triggers.

Its American Individualism taken to new toxic depths. There is a better version of yourself being suppressed-- manifest her. You, alone, have control. Everything you do is a choice. Your fear is a choice, your pain is a choice, the manipulation and abuse being inflicted on you by the cult leaders is a choice. After all—if it were bad you would have left, right? If you are here still, it must be because it is okay.

We see American Individualism on the right, with the anti-maskers protesting violations of their personal liberty. We see American Individualism on the left, who in one breath preaches the importance of the collective, the power of the system, while in the next breath places the full blame of the pandemic on each individual who doesn’t seem to be upholding our own personal rules. Can we reshape our entire world through personal accountability, or is that just something we say to make order feel more within our grasp?

Maybe we knock and wood and throw salt over our shoulders because it is easier than not doing so. There is no harm in superstition, only caution—besides the harm of assuming I am the last bastion against planetary doom. Perhaps we are drawn to the concept of jinxes because personal culpability is an easier burden to bear than complicity in unruly and unjust systems. To believe in American Individualism in our era of social justice is to hold no power but all the responsibility. 71% of green house gas emissions are created by only 100 companies. As an individual consumer, I have next to no power in shaping those corporations carbon emissions—but as an individual I have untold responsibility to hold my representatives accountable and advocate for sweeping policies to back our planet away from the brink of destruction. Responsibility with no power—is that not a jinx?

I am sorry for jinxing the entire state of California—my bad.

Further Reading:

Another book that I think is brilliant but a little bit too academic for me to recommend to a wide audience: Known and Strange Things by Teju Cole (the first part is literary criticism exclusively about books I haven't read...hang tight or skip ahead to his writing about photography and place.) I've read it more than once.