Paimana

Matt asked me once, half joking, what it was like to hold ideas that put distance between me and nearly everyone I love. I shrugged and changed the subject, and the question has come back at intervals ever since, usually late, usually when the day has run out of other business.

The word I reach for is exile. The word flatters me. Exile is a border, an authority with the power to enforce it, a life cut into before and after by someone else’s decision. My situation is domestic. I keep the invitations, the phone calls, the seat at the table, the standing expectation that I appear in Muharram. What I have lost is the ability to mean the sentences spoken around me, and with it the confidence that everyone else means them.

The second loss is the one I keep having to talk myself out of, since it rests on a claim I have kept carefully untested. I take the people I grew up among to believe as they speak, without remainder, without the half step backward I take before agreeing to anything. I have kept from asking. Half the room may be doing what I do, with longer practice and better technique, in which case exile is the wrong word twice over, and I am an ordinary member of a family that shares a habit and keeps it private, distinguished by having narrated the habit to myself.

The sensation stays specific, and it changes direction depending on the room. In majlis I sit through the recitation to the end, and at the passage where the room breaks I hold still, and the labor of the evening goes into composing a face that will keep anyone from asking. In a seminar the same report arrives as a text with a transmission history, handled by colleagues with a competence I admire and a lightness that irritates me, since the soundness of the chain costs them nothing, and I hear the irritation as scholarly while suspecting it of being injury. At a bedside a family once asked me to pray with them. I did, fluently, and it helped them, and I left the room able to describe the act as kindness and as a small fraud committed while everyone present was too frightened to check.

Among believers I am the one holding something back. Among people who treat the tradition as material I am the one who still flinches, carrying an investment my discipline gives me no way to defend. Membership has become a thing I can perform in either place and hold in neither, and I perform it well enough that the holding stays my own business.

I have written before that I envy the ease of those who believe without effort, and the sentence deserves withdrawing. Ease flatters me by assigning everyone else the position of having thought less. What I envy is singleness of attention, the sentence arriving and being received with nothing running alongside to appraise it midway. My colleagues have their own version of that restfulness and I envy them on the same grounds. Whether the second track amounts to thought or to noise remains a question I have arranged my life to keep open.

The consoling account says that a man at the edge of his community serves it, keeps its honesty, performs his discomfort on everyone’s behalf. I have used the line. It converts an unchosen situation into a vocation, which is what a man reaches for when he wants his loneliness to mean something, and both rooms would carry on exactly as they are if I stood up at dinner and told the truth.

So I keep going, to all of it. The obligation I feel is to the people in those rooms, who have done nothing to earn my withdrawal, and I discharge it by sitting there with my face arranged, which is a species of the dishonesty this essay has spent seven paragraphs congratulating me for escaping. That is the whole of the position. Matt deserved it and got a shrug.