Choosing Penelope

On Marriage.

Anthony Frederick Sandys, “Penelope” 1878

Riley and I were married on a Saturday in a small Los Angeles church.

We had only been engaged for a month when, at the counsel of our close friend, we decided to have the wedding in three weeks, right before we planned to move away from LA to live in a small town in Louisiana, where I was born and raised. Initially, the wedding was going to be an incredibly humble affair. I pictured us and a couple of friends in the first few pews. To our surprise, three weeks later, with the nearly-free and movie-montage-esque help of friends and family, eighty-something people showed up (some from clear across the country) at the behest of a mass text that said what amounted to “I know you probably can’t make it, but…” It was a strange and beautiful wedding, not least because it was also a goodbye. It was a little like the final episode of a beloved sitcom. Also, thirty minutes before the wedding, I was helping my groomsmen clear away shelves of Narcan and lube for the homeless program in the very room where our reception was going to be about an hour later. This is that sort of perfect memory that arises from unplannable imperfection that no amount of time or money can reproduce. Pronounced man and wife, we ran outside to be showered in rice. Cars horns erupted and windows rolled down to release pumping fists. People just can’t help it, possessed by the spirit of a cloud of cheering witnesses.

My argument for marriage starts and ends with that image. Even jaded LA people sitting in traffic automatically know a good thing when they see it, before they can rationalize their way into thinking something else. Generally, language makes us into casuists, able to twist ourselves into believing whatever helps us avoid the pain of making a permanent choice. Automatic responses remind us what we really must think and what should be attuned to with gentle attention. That’s a long way of saying why we know stories are truer than data.

Speaking of The Data, it suggests the opposite of happily ever after. Divorce is more than likely. My parents got divorced. That whole ordeal nearly ruined me. But the end of my parents’ marriage being catastrophic did not convince me it was a poor institution. If anything, it made me think that the force of the catastrophe could only be produced in the destruction of something good. What kept me living the bachelor’s life into my 30’s was not fear of repeating my parents’ mistakes; it was the lie of eternity promised in fleeting relationships. It was Swiping’s Lie: hookup culture and the corporate hustle that we all know is its conjoined twin.

In The Odyssey, Odysseus is held captive on an island after the Trojan war. Holding him there is the goddess, Calypso promising him eternal life, eternal youth and eternal sex. This is the image of hookup culture, in case you thought it was something new. It’s the age-old promise of never having to grow up—the ability to continuously find newness and youth in others and to therefore renew the youth in yourself. You can easily imagine how a man like Great Odysseus would be tempted to rest on his laurels. The dream of Calypso, after all, is only available to those brave, chosen few men who have risen to the top of the hierarchy. She, then, is the spirit within the droves of young women who would share a hero instead of settling for a man. That image is also still alive and well. Think of DiCaprio. It’s maybe not a coincidence that you might also picture him on an island with his girls, or a yacht at least.

The first part of a man’s life is occupied by the desire to become worthy of Calypso’s island. For Odysseus, that took place in The Iliad. Once the war is over and he is well-known as a brave man, the rules change. The very desire that drove him away from Ithaca to go on a grand adventure now threatens to keep him trapped on an island of his rewards. What the gods conspire to inject in him now is a new kind of courage: the courage to choose his eventual grave. The temptations against this odyssey are great: Calypso is more beautiful than any mortal woman could ever be (because she is the essence of youth and beauty itself, expressed only in part and at times in individual women). His wife back home, Penelope, though very beautiful, does not compare to Calypso. Worse, she will quickly become old and ugly and tired, like Odysseus himself would, if he left the island.

He chooses Penelope. He chooses to go home. And he is punished for the length of the novel as a test of the graveness of that choice.

Riley and I had a strangely old-fashioned wedding, which was made even more strange by its setting in the infinitely hip neighborhood of Silverlake. An artist friend of ours, who, in my opinion, is very hip indeed, said the aesthetic was cool, almost “gothic.” I liked that. Riley’s antique dress made her look like the Virgin Mary. Mine was a navy-issued, double-breasted felt wool suit, authentic from the 50’s. We’ve joked that we should have done it real old-fashioned and gotten married in our own graves.

What’s romantic about a wedding is not the passing promise to pretend we’ll feel puppy-love for each other for the rest of our lives (e.g. “You’re my person”). Or else the even-sadder and more common promise to always watch TV together, as if we know all adventure is over and we have firmly settled for less than we once dreamed of. What’s romantic about a wedding are the parts modern weddings cut out or downplay: the “til’ death” part. That’s not to be morbid. The opposite. Given that we both have the choice to stay on the proverbial island with Calypso—forever looking for something new and better—we both look each other in the eyes and choose our eventual decay. We’re going home. As a result of this sacrifice there are no immediate riches; storms will rage and probably a cyclops will try to eat us, but we are going home to be with each other, come hell or high water.

People love romantic love, especially when it breaks rules, because it has no “why.” The moment you put a “why” on love—economic reasons, reasons of convenience, or because you’ve finally accepted that you just can’t do any better—it dies. So people yearn for the reckless and reasonless love they think can only be found outside the bounds of marriage. They have associated marriage with necessity, and cannot conceive of any other way it could be.

But, before-you’re-ready marital love has a lot more in common with puppy love than co-habitation. Both of them lack a “why.” That’s why one leads to the other: puppy love wants to proclaim eternity by entering into a lifelong commitment. Death cults of reasonableness tell you this is irresponsible. They repeat the cliches of Scientism like, “Your brain doesn’t even fully develop until you’re 25!” I don’t even know where to start with that. No, when marriage is done rashly and youngly—and long before you are “ready”—puppy love is multiplied by some strange extradimensional powers. Life’s responsibilities and challenges unfold as gifts to be navigated together, rather than stodgy commitments done since time began and, through you, must be muddled through once more. Having kids, for example, somehow loses its predictable cynicism and becomes infinitely personal and yet universal.

The number one reason young people give for not getting married is money. It seems likely to me that this is a convenient substitute for the real reason. If you have enough money, after all, it can make commitments go away when they become inconvenient. Money makes kids go away when they annoy you. It can even get you a younger wife down the line, which is to say that money makes for a false sacrifice. At the same time, people damn well know they shouldn’t stay in Calypso’s cave forever. They sense they will wake up one day as an old child and with either no children or estranged ones, but they lack the courage to choose Penelope outright. So they try to have it both ways: to keep the island as a backup plan. We can all guess what half-measures avail us.

Speaking of money, it shocked Riley and I how much people wanted to help us once we announced we were getting married. Dozens of people worked for free to make our wedding happen in less than three weeks. There is an old Italian saying that married couples always have bread under their arm, which, you could argue (cynically), is just a way to encourage poor people to get married. It has proved to be incredibly true for us.

As a man, it has also been incredibly humbling. Had I continued searching for more and more ways to win friends and accumulate resources before I got married, it may have never taught me that provision is better gained as a gift received than something to be wrestled from a hostile world. Marrying a woman taught me what women know intuitively: that the world wants to help you. When I was still a single man, the sentiment was more like that it hated me. And it did, in the sense that young men, unlike young women, have to prove their worth. Joining flesh with a woman means that my personal war against the Trojans is over. That courage is not wasted, it has just outlived its usefulness and it’s time for me to develop a new kind of courage. The kind that takes me home.

Home, here, also means that I have to become a king of my own house rather than the defender or servant in another man’s. I say “king,” despite it being language people don’t like anymore, and I mean it, too. Monarchy is innately human and cannot be discarded any more than a left leg. As Bob Dylan said, you gotta serve somebody. Democracy is not the evolution away from kings, but the freedom to put them at different scales. Democracy (at best) affords you a choice: your king could be the president, the CEO of your remote tech company, God, or your husband. But there is no getting out of bending the knee. The metaphor of home as castle and father as king may seem old-fashioned but it is actually more like a modern marvel. It distributes power structures into fractals, decentralized. It is only very recently and occasionally tolerated because, when taken in aggregate, a family-centered country is a more prosperous country, on average. Still, politicians are always playing at how much sovereignty they can steal back from the family and relocate towards themselves, but never so much that their country as a whole falls behind its competitors and we stop making kids. This all plays out mostly unconsciously, of course, as power games are transpersonal patterns.

That’s all to say, the intuition that “the family is the bedrock of Western society” speaks to what we all feel to be true: without the sovereignty of the families, we go back to feudal kingdoms. It makes no difference to me if these would-be kings are on the left or right politically. They all want as much of the power of the family as they can steal, and, unlike your family, they don’t care about you.

Unconsciously, also, Riley and I originally moved to LA looking for a king to serve: a big Hollywood king who could bestow power and fame on us if we pushed the correct sycophantic buttons. From that high place, we dreamed, perhaps, our king would die (or something equally fortuitous) and then maybe we would be king. This is the unspoken language of the American dream. We, of course, unlike every other person who has ever existed before us, would use our power for good, our world uncorrupted by our slobbering pursuit of pleasing those corrupt kings we claim to despise. Articulating it like this makes it plain to me now that this plan doesn’t even work in theory, much less in practice. It is also plain to me that we were on a pathway of likely-forever frustrated mediocrity because our spirits were at odds—we wanted what we also hated. And a house divided cannot stand. If we had managed to fully abandon ourselves to our ambitions (which some do manage with the help of some mixture of new age sorcery and hard drugs) we would have been so spiritually mangled that our fates would be something worse than death. What does a man gain if he gets the whole world but sacrifices his soul?

I can forgive myself (a little) because patterns like these usually can’t be apprehended from within. Perspective is required. Waking perception can’t see the forest for the trees, so we sometimes have visions or dreams. These are vague, counterintuitive, and don’t play by the rules of the game you are currently fixated on. So, most people ignore them, most of the time. We also have lost most of our sophisticated language to understand visions or dreams, seeing it all as arbitrary or unscientific. The language didn’t go completely away (it can’t), so it just became unhelpfully simplistic. We’ve settled for, “Follow your dreams,” which now means something like, “Get what you already think you want at any cost and ignore any subconscious warnings against that, especially in the form of other people (aka ‘haters’)” when it probably ought to indicate something more like, “Do that thing you have a strange sense you should do, where people also seem to want you around, even if you lose whatever you once thought was important to you.”

Riley and I found each other in LA as the former type of dream follower. Funnily, though, we met each other as a direct result of a small act of the latter type of dreaming. For in the midst of all our big dreams in LA, we had both followed a still small voice to go to that little church down the street. It was uncomfortable to keep going, I now realize, because it was at odds with the larger part of our spirit that was looking for a good earthly king to serve. But we just kept showing up and volunteering at the food pantry. Right outside of that church was where I first broke the news: “I think we like each other.” And with that, old dreams began to lose their power and new, strange, and humble dreams started to crowd in.

When we visited my hometown in Louisiana last year, something about the place resonated with us, which still comes as a surprise to me, given the swamps, memories, and poverty. I started having dreams about finishing my father’s house, something I had started working on with him when I was a teenager. As of a couple of weeks ago, we have done the unthinkable as a young LA couple: moved to a small town in a red state. I frame it like this not because this is how I think of it, but this is how I am constantly reminded others see it. Not just by our LA friends, either. Around here, too, when we tell people where we moved from, we get blank stares of amazement. “Do you know where you are?”

These, to me, are good signs that we are where we ought to be. Maybe that is partly my contrarian personality. I’ve always felt that if a place is well-known enough to draw a crowd—much more so if it is a hip crowd—then it is already too late and that place no longer has anything of genuine value to offer. The spiritual frontier is already settled by the hipsters who are ready to sell you the veneer of provincial quaintness for a considerable mark-up. No true leverage in life can be gained without the courage to see potential before hipsters come to assure you that you’ve made a high-status choice.

My father’s house was built in 1885, originally as a funeral home. I can’t help but feel that this “works” symbolically, given we came close to being married in half-dug graves, after all. Modern people with all their obsession with newness and loss of context are really just afraid of the past and its ghosts. Even people in this town are afraid of our house. To be fair, there are still crates that once shipped coffins and old glass bottles of formaldehyde (good Halloween decorations, too). I’m not haunted by these things, though. I feel about them what my artist friend said about our wedding: “gothic,” in the sense that in the context of a postmodern world, there is something a little calming and countercultural about remembering and embracing the messy ghosts of the past. That’s not to say that this is all a fashion statement. If it was, I’m sure we would be happy to settle for the “farm-house chic” found in some Millennial home in some otherwise safe suburbs, rather than going home to face the genuine decay of my historic childhood home.

I have to remind myself, that although what I’m trying to do here is make some sense out of all this, there are aspects that go plainly beyond sense. I doubt I will ever recover them with language. One example would be the dream that led me here in the first place, another would be my wife’s exceptional character in the face of these circumstances. For context, she is not just some aspiring actress from LA who, on some level, wanted an excuse to leave the thankless grind behind. She filmed a movie this year and was part of a Disney project last year. She had every concrete reason to stay in Hollywood. She left only because of my weird dream. Now that we’re here and living in the old house, I am the one who is much more likely to forget the dream and fret over some concern of status. Or worry that she doesn’t want to be here because there are too many blighted and abandoned homes on our street. She is usually the one to remind me why we are here: to be involved with people and to do what we are told. This is a special place. There is real history here, and that’s part of it, but what I find remarkable about the town is its aliveness and relative beauty in spite of its total lack of economics. Once you dig a bit, you realize that this town is kept alive only by the good will of a few wealthy families who care about the community.

I should probably disclose at this point that I see our house and the town as an extended metaphor for our marriage. That’s not to diminish the idea, though. The whole project of my Substack (The Metaphor) is that saying something is “just” a metaphor betrays a serious misunderstanding of the shape of things. The explicit is not “more real” than the metaphorical, it is just an expression of the metaphorical with most of the meaning trimmed away in favor of a limited and temporary but useful purpose. Those things that contain the most rich layers of metaphorical substance are the most real. Perception without metaphor, if you could even imagine that, is not a perception at all, but something unwitnessed or forgotten. For to notice something at all is to attach meaning, and meaning—a message within a larger narrative—is a metaphor. When I say fixing up my dad’s house is a metaphor for our marriage, I’m saying that the act of cleaning and organizing the house is our marriage, at least in part, at least for now. This is something Riley and I take very seriously as a belief system. We always say that everything you do matters. Not only that you do it, but how you do it. It’s as if we see life as a big play. Everything you do has valence, character, voice; it all gives off a vibe, which at the very least you witness, and which, if nothing else, shapes the delicate curves of your face. You get away with nothing.

It also keeps us attuned to how our broader environment may be shaping our inner environment. We notice, for example, that to the extent there is unexplored territory in the house—places filled with dust and cobwebs—there is also unexplored territory in the mind. It is important, then, to intentionally clean every corner of the house, slowly and consciously, literally getting your fingers in every nook and cranny. While you do that, your psychology changes. You master the domain and your nervous system regulates to a more calm, resting state. Until the motions are embodied physically and dramatically, the cobwebs remain also in the marriage. This is not to say dust and cobwebs should be eradicated. Just that the opportunity of their maintenance should be perceived as a privilege rather than the terrifying indication of inevitable decay they are usually seen as. In fact, the modern compulsion to eschew all signs of rust incur an ever-increasing debt that I, at least in this phase of my life, am no longer willing to subsidize my time to afford. I’m thinking of clean, glassy, modern architecture; I once heard someone joke about that sort of place—I can’t remember who said it or where I read it—that those places would be perfect if it wasn’t for all the people in them. The cost is not just in the anti-people aesthetic (which brings a psychic cost probably higher than anyone reckons), but the literal salaries of uncountable maintenance, janitorial, and security people, all built into the ever-increasing hours demanded of the email workers inside. And all that for what? To avoid looking at some dirt, to avoid the realization that you were once that dirt and are quickly becoming it again. And by avoiding those realizations, our resilience to them gets lower, and so we erect even more walls and glass to keep it more securely away, and the cost of it all rises and rises and so we are forced to work our email jobs for longer and longer hours while someone else, also paid for with more and more working hours, makes life-long memories with our children in our stead. You start to think that a little dirt is a small price to pay for freedom.

Jackson does not have a PR department or an office building with fancy email jobs. If you were to drive through town, you would see a few homes and businesses of genuine historic beauty, a few places that could easily soon shine again with some care, and also abandoned trailers and derelict houses well beyond repair. In Louisiana, the divisions between chaos and order are more like a suggestion. Because of the constant rain and humidity, walls and fences quickly dissolve back into the earth in the absence of care. Grass and trees quickly overwhelm all places even a month absent human attention. As a result, it is plain to see who’s still tirelessly cultivating the walled gardens we’ve negotiated with nature, against her universal chemical solvent: water, which also happens to be the substance which gives us life. It’s all very salient to me. In the places where she has partially or fully reclaimed our efforts, I try to be grateful for the reminder of the impermanence of all things. In the places where 200+-year-old structures still continue their tango with decay, we remember how miraculous that is.

At this point, I realize that in writing about marriage, I’ve talked a lot instead about the town we’ve moved to. That has to be right—there is no way to “be” in a marriage in isolation. Marriage can only exist insofar as you act it out in the world. I could go on and on about the magical kismet that has resulted from this marriage and its odyssey home: the happiness or small moments and the inside jokes, the healing of familial relationships and old friendships. But synchronicities, like dreams, are endlessly interesting to the affected party, but difficult to explain and usually pretty boring to others. That just must be magic’s way of keeping its secrets.

By choosing Riley, I have made the decision to leave the island of Calypso forever. I went home, in my case both figuratively and literally. That means we have both sacrificed the illusion of eternal youth and have intentionally chosen to have kids, make a home, get old and ugly together, and then eventually die. By making the choice in full consciousness, I feel that I have received a better kind of eternity in exchange.

In the final part of the Odyssey, Penelope wants to know for sure if the stranger is really her triumphantly returned husband. She tells him he can be with her as long as he relocates their bedroom. What only the real Odysseus would know is that he built their bedframe from the tree that grew out of the foundation of their homestead. At her request, Odysseus flies into a rage. He refuses to (literally) uproot his bedroom, his place of sanctity and rest. His rage is how she finally knows it is really him and he is really home.

Marriage is nothing without a place, home, roots. This is worth sacrificing everything for—even immortality. These roots extend not just into the earth, but connect us to all the people we know and care for, and whose love and care cultivates us into being. Without that, you risk no pain of loss or the dust and rust of eventual decay, but you never truly exist either. The choice, once fully understood, is obvious. Still, we are given that choice.

I choose Penelope.