God of Imagination
When does age diverge from experience? This year I straddled the week between 2020 and 2021 the same way I’ve done for a decade- watching every version of Pride and Prejudice while pretending I’m the lonely, glamorous upstairs spinster in my house-sit, slowly spiraling over the course of seven days into a hole of anxiety that even I, the person I find the most interesting in the world, can’t entertain myself out of.
In no year yet have I learned that the promise of an empty house will crack three days in, and even the person whose company I enjoy spending the most time with (my own) will prove unsustaining.
And still, each year I breathe with relief entering a silent house; that rare time alone when you’re renting and your flatmates are visiting family, or a colleague who’s heading away needs someone to look after their cat. Every year I plan the vacation by myself, and every year I realise there is such a thing as too much time alone.
We are supposed to go from innocence to experience, naivety to knowing. We are smacked in the wide open face with these lessons about ourselves- when people we love let us down, betray us, dump us. When a boss we got along with is revealed to be a predator in the workplace. When it becomes clear that our parents were the fun friends because they neglected us.
Such lessons, as glib as they sound up there, happen around little black gems of life that help us internalise just how unfair it is.
I’m a survivor of Catholic school. It’s a cold hard fact. Every day for seven years I spent surrounded by chicks, and we weren’t encouraged to talk about the experience of going through that. That we were whistled at and harassed walking home, that we had weird periods, that we gave BJs against the wall at dances (not me, but I heard about it, of course.) That our friendships were intense, painful, and had moments of laughing ‘til you peed.
Each day we were there to think about sin, streams, and sports. If you tuned out early on there wasn’t much to bring you back in. I remember learning about feminism in sixth form, from the Guerrilla Girls, as a component in NCEA art history. As if it had nothing to do with the rest of our lives, with why we were scared of someone starting a rumour about you being a lesbian, or when we were shown photos of abortions by the Religion teacher.
You’re in school for so long, and then, one day, you just get to leave, and you never have to think about it again. You detach from the routine like a car returning a trailer. It doesn’t take long to forget about the weight that you used to drive around, allowing for.
Of the lessons that stuck, the one that keeps surfacing is how made-up everything about being a person is. We made up rules of how to live- pay this much digital money to rent this shelter, and attend this other place to earn it. Wear clothes because self expression is great, but not too much. All the rules we set ourselves, and everyday decide to accept them or not.
I look for this in everything; acknowledgement that the rules could just go away in a second and humans would still manage to live on the earth. What we have now isn’t right, or natural, or fair, it just is what we make it. Some people could feel more scared, some more happy. I could make a point about how 2020 showed up the stains of what in reality we truly deem to be essential- but I’m too lazy to.
I recently watched Yes, God, Yes, a quiet slice of life film that explores the world being revealed as what we’ve made, from the point of view of a student at a catholic school. Here is where watching movies comes in handy, as a reminder of what you used to know.
Yes, God, Yes is a film barely about religion, or sex- it’s about rules. It’s tempting to compare it to what might be its closest analogue, Ladybird, the Oscar-winning portrait of a young woman steamrolling through school without any idea that she’ll be knocked back. But the gentler tone of Yes, God, Yes slowly polishes a truth only perceptible the moment we turn from quiet, abiding teen to knowing adult: that the scaffolding around us is made of make-believe; the rules are made up, and the points don’t matter.
Our protagonist Alice (Natalia Dyer) is quietly investigating what “tossing someone’s salad” means, as there’s a rumour going around about her, at the crux of the film. What she finds pulls the curtain away, leaving the wizard (or priest, in her case) exposed. Church camp counsellors preaching abstinence but hooking up secretly in the woods after lunch, among other frauds that once committed and observed, reveal to Alice a hypocrisy that if the rules are lies, and lies are believed, then what else can go unpunished? Reaching out and touching the hair on a man’s arm, to see if it feels the way you imagined? Walking right into a bar and ordering a drink?
Natalia Dyer plays across age, the at-once grace and gawk of growing up and away from an institution that thrives off shame and silence. She discovers there to be no consequences when she goes looking for them, and in the end pushes her own amorality towards proving this point.
After someone’s Internet search of salad-tossing is discovered on the priest’s computer she frames Wade, suspected salad-tossing rumour-monger, for it. What she observes is that Wade’s only punishment is to recite a vague, rote-learned apology in front of the small camp. She then holds the priest in mutual jeopardy during confession, letting him know she saw porn on his computer, teasing her own rumour, punishing him, in turn, for the penance he prescribed her own supposed salad-tossing.
Perhaps Alice’s lesson is that being amoral isn’t what we are taught it is. It isn’t sex before marriage, or cybering with strangers; in fact it’s those people upholding the scaffolding of shame around others, denying the complex nature of what it’s like being a person who wants.
Catholic school in Yes, God, Yes could be a stand-in for most other institutions of the world, whose rules go largely unquestioned in ordinary life: visas and borders, for one, money for another. Patriarchy and white supremacy, it’s all the same formula: Here are a set of rules we made up, which mean that only some of us get to win, and those that do get to hold it over the heads of those that don’t, as a way of maintaining their grip on something imaginary.
If there is a way to opt out of any of these systems it probably only exists in the individual mind- finding likeness in others once you’ve reached the other side.
Alice meets her guardian angel in a bar one night when she escapes the camp, and they start comparing all the stupid reasons they each thought they’d be going to hell. We see the pressure release when Alice hears how objectively impossible it sounds, once you say it out loud.
We thought we would go to hell, and that our dead grandparents were watching us on the toilet. Twelve years of going to school every day made it seem that way. It turns out that they just made it up, enough people repeating the rumour over time.
Alice returns to school having gained some experience from camp after all: That she can move freely around the halls when she isn’t trying to hold herself away from her body, in case someone accuses her of knowing it too well. The shift in her is from the reconnection of her mind, her body, and her choices.
When we glimpse the idea that the rules will never hold us to them, it is only we that holds them to us, we get ready to come out of it, revitalised. Ready for life.
