self-repair
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Michael Torevell, News of Great Joy, mixed media and digital painting, 2022 [/caption]
The basic form of the sin from which we need to be delivered is the myth of self-sufficiency. The diabolical urge that destroys our well-being again and again is the temptation to think of ourselves as somehow able to set our own agenda in isolation, and the greatest and most toxic paradox that results is that we become isolated from our own selves. We don’t and can’t know what we are as participants in the symphonic whole, and so we block off or screen out the life we need to receive, refusing to share the life we need to give. We live shrunken, hectic, short-term lives, stuck in futile conflicts and vacuous rivalries. We refine our skill at identifying other human lives, as well as the entire nonhuman environment, as competitors for space, forces that will, left to themselves, diminish rather than enrich us. We need to be healed from this habitual screening-out.This Plough issue on Repair is really wonderful. I expect I will post on other essays from it.This means that the “repair” involved in Christ’s coming in flesh is a repair of our relation to ourselves.
Annie Soudain, Winter Glow, reduction lino print, 2017, appearing with this wonderful essay by Adam Nicolson.
brokenism
“Everything is Broken,” Alana Newhouse wrote in an essay that I see quoted all the time. But of course when you look into the essay and into other essays that quote it approvingly, you come to understand that by “everything” they don’t mean everything, and by “broken” they don’t mean broken. They mean something like “Our dominant political and cultural institutions don’t function nearly as well as they should.” But that doesn’t sound as interesting, does it? “Everything is broken” is not a defined claim; still less is it an argument. It’s a cry of frustration.
I’ve decided that the social media landscape is irredeemable, but this new project by my old internet friend Erin Kissane — Erin is an absolute treasure — and Darius Kazemi is allowing me to see a tiny ray of hope.
Matthew Crawford on a broken tail light that cost $5600 to repair:
On this particular luxury pickup truck, moisture in the tail light caused the usual corrosion, making resistance on the circuit go out of range. This circuit is in communication with many other circuits, so electrical gremlins propagated (probably reading as ground faults) and eventually the truck was completely dead. At this stage, identifying the root cause of the breakdown was no trivial task. But most of the $5,600 charge for getting the truck running was for parts confined to the tail-light housing, not the diagnostic and parts-swapping labor. Commenting on this case, another YouTube mechanic named Uncle Tony points out that salvage yards are full of recent model cars that are in great shape — mechanically sound and rust-free, with good interiors and good paint — but underwater on repair costs due to electronic complexity.
Presumably the carmakers want us to realize that (a) we can’t repair our cars ourselves, (b) can’t afford to have them repair our cars, and (c) therefore must buy a new car from them — just because of a broken tail light.
I’m gonna do my best to keep my 10-year-old car for another ten years.
Campus lookin’ real purty today.
Austin Kleon’s new post on reading is fantastic. I will have things to say about it when I can clear a little time. I think if I could only subscribe to one Substack it would be Austin’s.
