The Sacred and the Symptom

Available as a downloadable PDF at this link.
Posted also behind a paywall at From The Forests of Arduinna.

The announcement on the intercom began again. Our train was delayed another twenty minutes, and I looked at my husband to see how he met the news. He was too busy to care, though. He was shaking a high-tech vending machine on the platform as a young girl and her mother looked on, hopeful.

Among the many reasons I’ll adore this man until the end of our days are moments like this, his quick, charming, and always automatic transformation from a pensive intellectual with aristocratic fashion sense into a dashing street hero. Suddenly he’s all wry wit, his smile that of a rogue crusader, and before you blink he’s carrying some old woman’s groceries, lifting heavy luggage off a train for a young woman, or wrestling with a vending machine.

We were traveling to Köln, Germany for a night. Thanks to some extra sales of my recent book, I’d had enough money to finally do what I’d always wanted to do for the man—take him on a trip somewhere interesting and pay for it all. He’d never had a man do this for him, as it’s always been he who paid and took care of all the details. Finally someone else did, and I was thrilled to do this for us. It felt well-timed, also, as I myself needed distraction from too much thinking about the world.

I watched him shake the machine again, and I asked him what was happening. He pointed to a package of candy that’d become stuck, suspended just before being dropped to where the girl could reach it. In the grand scheme of human suffering, such things might seem trivial, yet I’ve always felt a deep, indescribable sense of sadness witnessing such moments.

It’s happened to everyone, I’m sure, and most often to us when we’re children. Something behind a glass case draws our desire. We ask for coins from our parents, or search them from our own pockets, and, following the instructions, do everything we’re supposed to do on our end of the transaction. The machine then fulfills its part of the bargain, delivering on its promise—until it doesn’t.

The machine is unthinking, unfeeling. We cannot ask it why it lied, why it failed. It is stealing from us, and we cannot beg it to return what is now rightly ours. There is never anyone else really to call, even if there’s a number printed somewhere. They won’t answer, or if they do at best they’ll offer you a refund by mail. Worst of all, you look a fool and feel to be one: others around you (if there are others) shake their heads in sorrow. “That happens,” they might say, or “there is nothing to be done.” You feel you should have known better, and tell yourself never to trust anything again.

The sight of my husband shaking the machine was a beautiful sight. He’s not really the sort to shake anything, to apply what we might call brute force to a problem. He’s too deft for such responses, and too aristocratic. But he was shaking it, and it was beautiful.

The sight pulled me from my thoughts for a moment. I had been thinking about a friend I’d had some twenty years ago. We were roommates for a little while. My fondest memory of her is the morning she walked unannounced into my bedroom. I was naked in bed with another man, both of us asleep after a very long night. In my memory it was champagne in the wine glass she handed me, but maybe it was just sparkling mineral water, but either way she was holding two of them, and one was for me.

“Wake up, dear,” she said, then turned on the radio in my bedroom so I could hear the news everyone else was hearing that September morning. “It’s the apocalypse.”

She was such an elegant mess, always darkly funny, bitingly and charmingly insulting. Her insights into the world bore the marks of morbid genius and a contagious misanthropy which seemed regardless somehow kind and compassionate.

While we lived together, she got pregnant. The father was the type of man I came to know and recognize too well in radical circles, the “sensitive dreamer” type who is always working on a self-described “brilliant” project that will change the world. They never have jobs, are usually on some sort of disability scheme or another, yet nevertheless have all the computer or music equipment someone with an actual income would struggle to purchase. He’d gotten her pregnant, and then he moved in with us for a little while, setting up his music equipment in our living room.

He told her he didn’t want to be a father. She was already a mother, having had a child when she was a teenager. The father of that child had decided to take care of it with the help of his parents, and she had visitation rights. This father of this child had no intentions to do anything except live off of her while he worked on the music project he named in honor of the baby: “Fetal Distress.”

I kicked him out. She acted angry about this, but I don’t think she really was.

There were other ways she acted that I realized later didn’t actually reflect how she really felt. She talked openly and quite caustically about how excited she was to get rid of the “parasite” growing inside of her, and told us of her complicated scheme to do so. Because she couldn’t afford it, she’d hatched a plan to get funds from a Catholic pro-life agency and use those for the abortion, a big “fuck you” to the Christians.

I didn’t realize until later that’s not what had really happened. She’d gone to them because she’d actually wanted the child.

I and the other roommates were all verbally supportive of whatever she decided to do, but none of us actually had the financial stability to back up that support with something tangible. The father was a useless waste of humanity, so nothing would be coming from him, either.

Things got difficult in the house. She’d had an ultrasound, and had been given a printout of the imaging. For a few days it was taped to the refrigerator door in our kitchen, and then one day it was taped to a metal coat hanger which she suspended over the toilet in our bathroom. I asked her if I could please move it, and she got quite angry: “you can’t understand,” she shouted, and she was absolutely right.

The hardest moment was when she decided she would abort the child. She’d kept two rats she’d rescued from someone else who wasn’t taking care of them, and true to her dark misanthropy named them “War” and “Pestilence.” Pestilence had died of a cancer, but not before mating with War. War was pregnant while my friend was pregnant, and then gave birth and killed her children a week later. Even more morbid than all that was what the rat mother then did with the corpses. She didn’t eat them, but rather piled them together and climbed on top of them for more leverage for an escape attempt from the cage.

So my friend decided to do the same.

I was remembering all this on the platform, watching my husband try to shake a child’s candy free from an uncaring and treacherous machine. I looked then to the mother, whose face shone with the same look of relief you can see on anyone who suddenly finds they don’t have to figure out a pressing problem alone. Help an old woman with one of her grocery bags, offer to guide lost tourists to their destination, pick up something someone just dropped and offer it back, and you’ll see that expression, too.

Very rarely do we ever even think to speak of all this in discussions of abortion. It’s here that the American left in particular reveals itself to be utterly devoid of compassion or humanity, preferring instead to speak in vague principles rather than acknowledging the core horror of the situation. From my experience, very, very, very few women ever want to kill the child growing inside them. The women in my life who have aborted often speak of it with pain and regret, wishing there had been another way instead.

The right isn’t any better, of course, except that it at least still holds to the idea that there is something crucial to the health of humanity that mothers have children. American Christians speak of motherhood as sacred but leave it at that, forgetting that it is the sacred which makes demands on humanity, not the other way around. The left, on the other hand, can barely even say the word “mother” anymore without adding Woke gender clarifications so a very tiny and very psychologically fragile handful of people don’t get offended.

The end of Roe vs. Wade in the United States was inevitable, as it was a right granted by judicial fiat rather than one wrested from the government by the people. While access to abortion was seen as a “victory” for US feminism, there was no connection between the Supreme Court’s ruling and protests in the streets. Rights granted by the powerful—rather than extracted from them—are rights easily taken back, and it’s doubtful the pathetic excuse for a left in the US will ever understand this. Regardless, for the next few years and probably for the next decade or so we’ll all have to endure screeds and altercations about principles fully detached from the embodied existence those principles claim to describe.

As for so many other things, abortion is a treatment for a symptom which does nothing for the underlying condition. Every survey ever done on the reasons women get abortions shows that the material conditions of the mother are the primary problem. Poverty, lack of support from a partner, unstable or abusive relationship situations, the inability to care for another child, or a likely end to university studies or a career: these are all the most commonly cited reasons, and they are all material conditions.

If you want to make abortion rare, you have to make it possible for women to be mothers without a descent into abject poverty, without becoming trapped in abusive relationships, and without motherhood becoming a death sentence to any hopes of self-betterment. The right needs to hear this, of course, but even more so does the left, because these were all things every leftist movement worth the name once saw as crucial principles.

Abortion has become a poor replacement for an actual politics of human thriving. It’s always happened and it will always happen, but it’s also always been quite rare until the last few decades. People have always tried to stop it, but it cannot be stopped. Witch hunts didn’t stop it, the end of Roe vs. Wade won’t stop it either. But this is all beside the point: it’s a shitty and unfortunate solution to a symptom, not the disease itself.

What if we again saw motherhood as truly sacred? I don’t mean this in the faux American Christian way, but rather in the pagan and animist sense. What if motherhood was so sacred that society saw itself obligated to support it? What if not just the act of conceiving and giving birth but continuously mothering a child was seen as such a holy thing that we acknowledged a duty to make sure women who chose to do so never lacked for anything?

And what if we also saw fatherhood as truly sacred? Of course to do so, we’d also have to see the act of sex itself as sacred again, and not just in the monotheist way nor the empty Woke way. The sacred demands things of us, demands ritual and veneration and most terrifying of all duty, obligation, and boundaries. We’ve come to see this all as primitive or reactionary, to see ourselves “liberated” from all the power and consequences flowing out of the very magic of human creation itself.

So we now have sex without obligation, fatherhood without duty, motherhood without support, and no politics yet exists that can do anything else except argue about who’s at fault and who should be elected to fix it all. We cannot talk about the sacred, and increasingly lose the language with which to speak of it.

If motherhood were sacred, and if fatherhood were sacred, then so too would be other acts and other choices. These were all the thoughts that came to me watching my husband struggle with that vending machine while remembering my friend. I think it was because of the way he’d just naturally stepped in to help like a father might, responding to some very ancient human drive no longer seen as noble or even useful in modern capitalism. He isn’t a father, nor will he or I ever be, but there’s no other way to describe the duty with which he approaches his role as godfather to two kids and uncle to two nephews—and his struggle with that damn vending machine—except “sacred.”

The sense of sacred—which again also comes with a sense of duty—is what is missing also from all the arguments about gender and trans identity. Some form of gender or sexual variance has always existed throughout human groupings, but it’s always until now been seen as a sacred variance. Being outside “the binary” was a rare and protected thing, and along with its sacred nature came roles the sacred demanded of them. What we in modern secular language call homosexual or trans had countless other words, and it meant something much more than mere self-identification and mere difference. Forgetting and fighting that is what makes this all a mess now, and it will only get worse for everyone.

We cannot speak of motherhood or fatherhood as sacred because we cannot speak of men or women as sacred, nor of sex as sacred, nor of anything as sacred at all. So we’ll all only ever be able to treat symptoms, and fight about what those symptom treatments should look like and who should be allowed to get them.

My husband’s strength didn’t prevail against that machine, by the way. However, another coin fed to the automated monster forced it finally to let drop what it had so cruelly withheld from the child.

I watched her and her mother walk away happy, relieved, and felt still we might all one day figure this stuff out. We of course cannot fix everything, and we never will. We can only make some things less difficult for each other, less burdensome, less crushing. Doing so should be sacred, too, because that’s how we’ve always survived.

Rhyd Wildermuth

Rhyd is a druid, theorist, and writer living in the Ardennes. He writes at From the Forests of Arduinna, and his latest book is Being Pagan: A Guide to Re-Enchant Your Life