This past weekend, I knelt on the concrete pad outside the back door of my house, contemplating the apotropaic gaping face of the outdoor outlet, burned beyond reconciliation by a combination of faulty cordage and bad decisions from a prior resident of this lore-heavy property. The context of this agamic, unavailing stare-off was the reel of Christmas lights in my hand, their depicted technicolor dreamworld almost vulgar in contrast to the otiose outlet, more suited to a funeral epicedium than a holiday jingle.
On an unseasonably warm and bright November day, my mood and resolve were both rapidly deteriorating. The five other outlets I’d attempted had all necrotized at the hands of electrical shorts, striking at some point in the last year. This significant effort in donning the house in lights suddenly seemed less and less worthwhile. When you have a narrow window of time with which to enact a little seasonal joy, any disruption feels like a karmic punishment, a sign to put down the nonsense and get back to work.
In this case, if I wanted to light up the night, I needed to repair the outlet. No repair, no lights. I was more than a little tempted to scuttle back into my house with Grinchian disillusionment and declare decorating, and thus any attempt to ease the weight and burn of what has been a tricky season of late, canceled. Why make an attempt at feebly constructed joy when you can revel in affirmed, omnipotent darkness?
The outlet has existed as a slow form of rot: in existence from before the time we moved in, unsightly but generally ignorable, inconvenient but an established non-option for electrical whims. Eternally assigned to the “one day” list, a cerebrally kept living document of semi-forgotten or untrodden repairs, both personal and impersonal, that illustrate shortcomings of care (Jackson, 2014). One day I’ll get to it. One day I’ll put in the effort, make the time, hold the space. And the length list of one-days extends, and extends, and extends. The rot, the mold, the sporous mephitis, slowly duplicates.
The methodology of this repair: unpack the circuit tester from Radio Shack, circa 1999, delight in the batteries that fire up as if brand new, test to see that the outlet does in fact have power. Upon confirmation, decipher the labyrinth of breakers with nonsensical patterning of numbers and scratched out letters. Unscrew the current outlet, untangle it from its mess of black and white wire with sufficiently vile language, release the grounding wire. Repeat the process to install the new outlet. Revel in its clean, unburnt face. Plug in the lights. Complete the stringing. Fin.
The act of untangling the wires, and then shoving them back in their pandora’s box of mysterious electrical magic before covering them with an illusory surface-level mirage of perfection, feels representative of the one-day list I feel so closely in my soul. Even in the act of repair; the discord, the entropic melancholia, the filaments of ennui remain below the surface. Only with continual care can bruises fade, tangles loosen, wounds close. Repair as an act is continuous and infinite. Eternally unfinished. There is always more to do.
The modus operandi of the spirit is a constant eidetic state of necessitous repair. But this repair is not easy work: it requires not only an attendance to the rot, but to the mettle to face it. And this personal work, I’m finding more and more, is cast away to the one-day list. One day, I’ll address the hurt. One day, I’ll unravel the anger. One day, I’ll tend to the sadness.
It seems poignant here to sketch the definitional bounds of repair: which I take, based on Jackson (2014), to mean the deep work, the hard work, of identifying and addressing what has decayed, what has slipped below, what has splintered. Repair is not the same, then, as fixing, nor is it synonymous with rebuilding. We cannot rebuild what has rotted beyond repair. Repair is an act of healing. Healing takes time. I can fix a wound by patching it up, and ignore the hurt below, aside from the deep ache that accompanies that work of repair. Fixing is far less attentive to care. Repair is perhaps all care.
Jackson (2014) describes how our world is riddled with constant reinvention, in the process (or on the verge) of falling apart, descriptively captured by “pain and possibility” (p. 222). So too, Jackson reiterates how this hard work of repair, where our act of merely existing in a broken world is fundamentally defined by constant fixing, can be generative and even beautiful: “…robust lives are sustained against the weight of centrifugal odds, and how sociotechnical forms and infrastructures, large and small, get not only broken but restored, one not-so-metaphoric brick at a time” (p. 222).
I am increasingly convinced that the stewards of rhetoric and composition are somewhat responsible for tracking the one-days. For providing the script for repair, the vessel for making sense of the rot, the mold, the chaotic existence of broken-world living. The act of writing is engaging in the act of repair, and by extension, an act of care. This act of care is not immune to violence, nor devoid of potential evil. This truth makes the weight of the work even heavier. By teaching others to write and write well, or to teach and teach well, we are responsible for a connective network of continual repair. And we have a hand in shaping the character of this network, its moral code, its communal plexus.
And yet, the field finds itself enraptured by “innovation, development, or design” (Jackson, 2014) more so than reparative work. Our obsession with parentheticals— (re)invention, (re)assessment, (re)vision, (re)clamation—is often as close as we come to that root of “re.” We approach repair, not acknowledging the true nature of the work, with a certain hyperattentiveness (Hayles, 2007) to the perceived best and newest and brightest, that will look good on a CV, shine brightly in a FAR, dazzle at a conference. But these innovative takes are not an act of repair: they’re an act of fixing. Patching, pushing the rot out of sight, though the infection remains beneath. We exist, in rhetoric and writing, as fixers by default, when we would be better served to make the difficult choice to learn to become agents of repair.
Personally, I am interested in the rot. I am interested in walking a bit longer in the chthonic underlife (Brooke, 1987) of the discipline before turning towards the difficult task of repair. I believe it is important to understand the rhizomatic darkness before we can turn to the light, certainly before we can light up the night. We must fix the outlets before committing to dazzlement. No repair, no light.
References
Brooke, R. (1987). Underlife and writing instruction. College Composition and Communication, 38(2), 141-153.
Hayles, N. K. (2007). Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes. Profession, 187–199.
Jackson, S. J. (2014). Rethinking repair. Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality, and society, 221-39.
