Stopping God

It is so beautiful up here: it is a stopping place.
Sylvia Plath, Berck-Plage

Many years ago when I was living in Rome—between jobs, between apartments, between relationships, already too old to be sleeping on someone’s sofa yet talking airily of lives I could make in other countries—a friend of mine, Alessandra, taught me a new word: sfiorare. To skim over. To kiss the surface. To graze. Literally, like a butterfly, to dance from flower to flower.

I was momentarily confused. Sfiorare looks and sounds a lot like another Italian verb, sfiorire, which means, of a flower, to wither. Alessandra clarified for me. At some point, she said, you have to stop. You have to make something substantial. You cannot remain perpetually in transit. 

There it was. Sfiorare or sfiorire. Flit or wither. Wander or settle.

For a while I lingered in Rome, then drifted back to the east of England, to Cambridge, where, in the gathering twilight of the Blair-Bush administrations, and on the eve of becoming a father, I settled down. And this crisis of settlement, when it fell, fell both suddenly and naturally. As easy as breathing. We are, after all, a species which has programmed itself to settle.

But Alessandra’s boyfriend later told me that when Alessandra had moved in with him, she had for many months kept a suitcase packed and next to the front door in case she needed to bolt. She never did; but when it came to settling, and thresholds, and the cautious unpacking of a life, she clearly knew what she was about.

...

How long must you stay still to consider yourself settled?

Hard to say. Settlement exists on a spectrum. First you stop, then you linger, then remain and dwell, finally, perhaps, settle; trans-generational settlements ensue, with all their paraphernalia of deep-time meaning, of ancestors and ancestral lands; and those settlements in turn throw out fresh settlers like raspberry suckers, looking to propagate themselves in self-similar soil, with their portable, pop-up cultures. 

Somewhere along that spectrum, right now, there is you. Sitting reading, stopped for a moment, settled, perhaps. Or on the point of bursting away from your prior settlements (but bringing them along with you all the same). Or slowing to your own characteristic settlement.

But in the beginning, there is a stopping place. 

...

In 1881, the American ethnographer Alice Cunningham Fletcher spent time living with the Dakota Sioux. In a footnote to her voluminous reports presented to the Peabody museum in Harvard which had sponsored the fieldwork (and which now holds her extensive anthropological collection), she quoted a Dakota elder on the subject of stopping. Theirs, he explained, was a stopping god: 

Everything, as it moves, now and then, here and there, makes stops. The bird as it flies stops in one place to make its nest, and in another to rest in its flight. A man when he goes forth stops when he wills. So the god has stopped. The sun, which is so bright and beautiful, is one place where he has stopped. The moon, the stars, the winds, he has been with. The trees, the animals, are all where he has stopped, and the Indian thinks of these places and sends prayers there to reach the place where the god has stopped and win help and a blessing.

The Dakota, by the time Fletcher stayed with them, were a sedentary or semi-sedentary people. They planted maize and made villages. They would, however, have known other tribes—Comanche, Cree, Arapahoe—who, after the Spanish arrived with their horses, had stirred themselves to follow the buffalo and who were by now fully nomadic, and whose gods would have been horse and buffalo and wind. And the Dakota Sioux shared a common ancestry with these tribes. Perhaps there is an element of wistful envy, a deep memory of movement, of volatile horizons, of Old Testament nomadic gods, in this long-dead man’s words.

Like him, we are caught on the cusp between settled and mobile worlds, and our language shows us this. We say that a bird settles on a branch, a butterfly on a flower. Settlement can be fleeting, a crotchet-rest in a dance-like progress through the world. But in the Psalms we read “Forever, oh lord, thy word is settled in heaven”. Romeo, when he wakes to find Juliet dead, notes with the finality of a surgeon that her blood is settled. If you settle the estate of your parents, that is that.

Conversely, we could observe that the butterfly does not settle for itself: it settles for us. Stopping on a flower, for a butterfly, is just part of a wider, mobile process. For us, however, it is a little window: we can observe the creature, and the world opens up a timeless little chink of itself. And when we say that things are settled in heaven we are not reporting an empirical observation but making it true in the moment of saying so. So too, settling an estate. To say that it something is so, with sufficient legal or social or, you hope, divine witness, is to make it, more or less, so. 

In both cases, however—butterfly or timeless God—the settling sets aside for the current calculus the possibility of, the need for, movement. It is taken it out of the equation. The philosopher Robert Goodin writes that consciously or otherwise we contrast settling with striving. Active people do not like to sit. But settlement, he argues, is more subtle than that. Settlement gives you the space and stability in which and from which to act in certain ways—to create and manage your surplus. 

Your settlement—personal, communal, legal, whatever—is a bounded space, but is taken for current purposes to be limitless. Within it, you operate as if there were no end to it. It behaves like a permanent solution. You can turn your attention and efforts elsewhere—you can build a stone house, raise a family, write that book on nomads, observe and sketch and make notes on that butterfly—just as in life, knowing that non-existence bounds you on all sides, you can nevertheless settle yourself to a task, to a community, to a project.

...

I wonder now what Alessandra finally pulled from that suitcase, the one she kept by the door. Was it really packed for flight, or was it in truth a case she had not yet committed to unpacking? Was there a ritual moment of opening? Did she place it on the bed one day—a heavy leather suitcase, held together with an old belt, perhaps, in lieu of straps—and clunk open its heavy sprung locks, and take from within it her emblem of settling, her toolkit, her little shaman’s assemblage or medicine bundle, a kit that could be deployed, laid out, used to summon or organise the spirit of settlement, the delicate matter of holding yourself apart within a settled social system, yet not wholly apart; did she take out of the suitcase, in a sense, settlement itself? 

Or did she just dip into it, over the weeks and months, removing this or that as need arose, depleting it item by item, until it was just an empty husk, gathering dust by the door, getting in the way of the new business of life?