Parish or Perish

Live in the world immediately around you or die.

Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (c. 1663)

I hope this finds you well.

That phrase struck me as funny this morning. It’s what we call a dead metaphor, in that the sensation it was once meant to evoke is now so tired that it no longer evokes anything beyond the assemblage of sounds.

It sounds like something a certain sort of person would say. It’s easy to reach for when what you really want to express is, for example, “I am beginning an email!” If you examined the feeling you’re expressing through “I hope this finds you well,” and realized that what you were really saying is “Eh-hem… I’m beginning this email!” you would probably just get on to what it is you’re trying to say.

I hope this finds you well.

It sounds like a phrase invented in the times when far away meant months of horses and hunger and weariness, and perhaps never seeing that person again. As if to say: wherever you are in the world, I’m thinking of you. I’m yearning for your return. I hope that, at whatever point in your adventure you’ve stopped to sit down and read my letter, you are well and you are fed. I hope no highway bandits robbed you. I wonder if you are someplace good in the world that I can only imagine. Please describe it.

My wife and I were at karaoke at the nearby brewery, talking to the superintendent of the school district. She was complaining that she now gets a lot of AI-generated emails from parents. They usually, she joked, start with “I hope this finds you well.” I wrote that as an anecdote in one of my pieces, “We Know You’re Using AI,” and it seemed to ruffle some feathers among people who are fond of using the phrase to open their emails.

It harks to the idea of yearning for your home, or writing to someone who is far away from theirs. We invoke some unexamined sense of olden days because in reality, we feel homeless of places like a true home. We no longer have a shire we would kill to get back to. So, if anything, “I hope this finds you well” almost feels like a taunt. I hope you’re enjoying your fourth coffee and your horrible posture, Sharon. I have an invoice for you.

We put a lot of conspicuous effort into hiding from ourselves the fact that we still very much occupy a place, and do rituals in that place, and those inform most of who we are and what we value. We don’t like thinking about what we look like when we’re on the computer; what it is we do all day, seen from the outside. There’s very little romance in that.

The other day, I was sitting on the couch arguing with someone on Substack, and my wife looked up at me and said, “Careful. You’re hunching over that thing like a turkey.” She was implying that, for one, my posture was bad. Also, just generally, what I was doing, and what I looked like while I was doing it, was unsexy. I was indulging in wrath over something dumb with a stranger, while she was sitting there waiting for me and we were about to have dinner.

I didn’t want attention called to the fact that a ritual I’m performing a lot of my day is an ugly one that also doesn’t cultivate home. I work damn hard to not know what I look like when I’m doing what I’m doing so as to better focus on what I’m doing. Really though, over time, it informs exponentially more about what I believe and think than whatever it is I’m typing to the idiot in my comments. These are uncomfortable truths.

So I can understand why people like the postmodern line: religious rituals are something only peasants could do unselfconsciously, long ago. There’s no way you can truly believe the rituals they performed in their old-fashioned church. You’re just doing a self-conscious trad larp. We live in too much of a technological/democratic/scientific world. People in the medieval era couldn’t know to believe anything else. They were too provincial, too local. They had no choice but to go to church and say the prayers and get on their knees. They weren’t like us, who can go off into cyberspace from the comfort of our toilet.

This is an understandable objection. But it’s wrong, because the turkey neck typing thing is still a ritual. I’m in a place. I’m on the couch. I’m with my wife. I have a computer on my lap. I’m even kinda bowing. I’m only imagining I’m in a different place in my head, which makes what I’m actually doing physically ugly. The postmodern still has embodied rituals. You can’t not. Ritual precedes thought. It already did, in the case of your toilet nihilism.

We are just as provincial as our peasant forebears. We’re just a lot more dangerous, because we think we are lost kings in wastelands, in meaningless universes, in seas of stars. When in reality, it’s the rituals we perform, and the state of our souls, that we’re actually perceiving as meaningless and then projecting out into the cosmos.

Solving the postmodern problem is as easy (and as hard) as changing your habitual rituals. There’s an enormous amount of courage required here, unique to the postmodern age, perhaps. You have to be willing to accept how you seem to those who really see you as an indication of the efficacy of your rituals. You have to deny the part of you that wants to project your soul, mangled as it is by its attempted disembodiedness, onto the world and pronounce it odd and broken. Instead, crack yourself open, even just one percent, to the notion that perhaps you are the one that’s broken. That if you just told your intellect to shut the hell up for a second, and acted out what you know to be the better thing, your intellect would eventually come along for the ride.

I hope this finds you well.

I’m writing to you from Jackson, Louisiana, the town I was born in, which resides in East Feliciana Parish. Louisiana calls its counties parishes, a word it kept for the church districts from its letter-writing days. I’m the chair of the beautification committee. My wife is the president of the Feliciana Theater Project. I want my kids to live here, and I hope they might benefit from what we build and the relationships we cultivate. I go to Mass, and I like my friend’s kids. One of them has a brown bowl cut and likes to talk during the homily and so we call her Coconut Head.

The internet is part of my work, and truly part of my ability to enrich my soul with mentors and wisdom and literature. It is also, however, a great, dangerous room of filing cabinets. An archive of every negative thought coming out of every person on the planet’s asshole, 24/7. An easy way to know when I’m participating in the second thing and not the first is when my wife catches me hunched over and muttering to myself, and says to me, “Ew.” Then I know to force myself to get up and go do something else.

There is no crisis in the West from loss of ritual. It’s impossible to not have rituals. As always, there is only a crisis of the rituals that work. It is perhaps only now possible to not know that you are doing rituals, and therefore be deeply protected from realizing how stupid and destructive your rituals are.

I’m already doing a bunch of weird rituals, I might as well do the ones of the people I most admire. If you do that, your ability to admire the right people will increase, and your ability to imitate the rituals of those better people will also increase. I happen to believe that will lead you the right way well enough, without my having to guess at where you’ll end up.

The internet is not a parish. It’s an archive. A warehouse, a room full of indexed files and resources. You cannot live here. You must live in the parish you are. And the parish where you are needs you, wherever it is.

I hope this finds you well.