Where is God in clothes?

Repairing yourself & repairing the world

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Radical gestures have a depressing way of getting co-opted, reduced to pure aesthetics, dismissed as “performative” and sold back to us by the same torched forces they were originally meant to subvert. But some radical gestures are more resistant to capture than others. Withholding your labor is an obvious one: There’s an irreducible material bedrock to collective bargaining, walkouts and strikes that power can’t just absorb, aestheticize and de-fang.

Rescuing sick animals from factory farms is another. I (Jonah) thought about this the other day when I got an email from Direct Action Everywhere, a Bay Area animal-rights group whose work I caught wind of several years ago.

Erin and I have enormous admiration and sympathy for animal-rights activists. They’re fighting an extremely noble fight, and an extremely lonely one. It isn’t lonely because it’s unpopular. A majority of people agree that factory farming is heinous, if not one of the ghastliest moral atrocities of modern life. The fight is lonely, rather, because most of us — myself included — would prefer not to dwell for very long on animals suffering, much less engage with footage of the routine cruelty and miserable conditions inside farms. So we turn away. Seeing and thinking about animals in pain feels horrible, and we don’t think there’s anything we can do about it — why feel horrible to no clear end?

“Why feel horrible to no clear end?” is a question asked of us more and more these days, against so many interconnected backdrops. You can either try to put it out of mind altogether, or work to find a way to transform that horrible feeling into meaningful action.

Case in point: The DxE email I got, which came from a young organizer named Zoe Rosenberg, currently “facing over five years in prison,” she wrote, “for rescuing animals from Perdue’s Petaluma Poultry slaughterhouse in Northern California.” This is a common strategy among DxE activists: 1) insist on the right to rescue, 2) get arrested for it, 3) force the practices of transparency-averse slaughterhouses into the public eye.

Zoe Rosenberg’s court-ordered ankle monitor

As Rosenberg’s case moves toward trial, she’s been ordered to wear an ankle monitor. She characterizes this as “a daily reminder that the state, industry, and FBI is trying to paint me as a danger to society.” The device is above, which she decorated with a sticker reading “I RESCUE ANIMALS 🐓 🦆”

This battle has an explicitly aesthetic dimension, embodied in a literal accessory. But the battle isn’t only aesthetic. The symbolic status of the ankle monitor is in dispute (“badge of shame” vs. “badge of honor”), and so is the legal and moral status of factory farming, the animals it tortures, and people who intervene against the system.

I read Rosenberg’s email while I was finishing last week’s sletter about New Year’s Resolutions around compulsive copping, and how our relationships to clothes can feel disordered even though (precisely because?) sick clothes are very fire. I wrote about the virtues of throwing oneself into other, non-acquisitive passions and causes — “wearing dope clothes while doing other dope things.”

I didn’t have one specific cause in mind, just the general truth that it can feel great to give yourself over to something bigger than you.

Since I’m on DxE’s mailing list, the day we published that essay, I received another email announcing a midnight “vigil for chickens” outside a slaughterhouse from 11:30 p.m. to 2 a.m. that Thursday.

Reading it, I imagined how it might feel to commit yourself to a cause so fully that you join a vigil for chickens outside a slaughterhouse in the dead of a freezing January night. I’ve stood on picket lines with striking Oakland teachers in the morning sunshine, and those were happy scenes: people playing music and singing songs, and commuters, bus drivers & delivery people smiling and honking as they passed.

Standing outside of a slaughterhouse in the cold at 1 a.m. must, necessarily, feel sad and lonesome: an act of witness-bearing to horror that the world seems all but guaranteed to ignore. But doing it in the company of friends & fellow beast respecters? Even in the wee hours, even in such a remote place, that must feel good, too, in a way few of us will ever know.

If you do it while getting a chicken-vigil-appropriate fit off? And if you hatch a plan to return another time, infiltrate the operation and rescue as many ailing birds as you can? And then come out the other side of that mission with an ankle monitor incorporated proudly into your Footwear Ankle Pant interface and the knowledge that four chickens are living better lives for your trouble? More power to you.

I wish this was the point where I say I joined the vigil. But my commitment is not, at this juncture, that complete. Erin and I donate money to DxE, we keep ~95% of our meals vegetarian, and when we do eat meat it’s not from factory farms.

In our sletter coverage, we’re ambivalent about the complicated subject of clothing made from animals — a sector of the apparel industry deeply entangled with factory farming. When it comes to bugs at the cribbo, we observe and endorse the S.A.C.R.E.D. Mindset, which holds that one should Save Annoying Creatures in Respect for Earthly Divinity.

We proceed here not from a strict set of rules so much as a right-feeling but fuzzy-edged sense of principle. Which, given how confusing and opaque this s**t is, we try not to beat ourselves up about.

We gotta ask ourselves sometimes, though: Is that enough?

Contemporary life feels significantly organized by a post-1960s schism, where much of the energy that fueled outward-oriented activism and mass politics (“repair the world”) was diverted inward, into the culture of self-help and the business of individual wellness (“repair yourself”).

The line between the two can be blurry. With, say, keeping vegan, or seeking out organic food, or buying clothes made without toxic chemicals and dyes, etc., a choice about personal well-being dovetails with a concrete abstention that positively impacts other creatures and other people (e.g., cows, agricultural laborers exposed to pesticides, or textile workers who incur health problems from exposure to synthetics manufacturing).

It’s worth underscoring, though, that contemporary discussions of ethical obligations — to each other, to animals, to the planet — tend to veer sharply off course, like a shopping cart with a busted wheel, into narrower discussions of consumer choice. Consumer choices matter, of course. But only to a point.

As Spyfriend and labor reporter Alex Press put it in a legendarily eye-opening edition of the Plane where I asked her about the merits of boycotting Amazon: “I don’t want to discourage people from acting nobly. Obviously, we all function as consumers and want to do things that are in keeping with our ethics, but at the end of the day, it’s a drop in the bucket.” Understanding our political power as fully extensive with our purchasing power, Alex added, is exactly “how Amazon wants us to act.”

“Blackbird Spyplane,” you might be thinking. “This sletter is profound in at least 17 different ways. But where are you heading with this? How do these profundities all fit together?”

Friends, I hear you — I’m operating in a poetic mode today. Here is the profound conclusion.

There’s a fascinating On Being interview with Nick Cave from a couple years ago, where he discussed his belief that “Religion is spirituality with rigor.” Whereas religion actively asks something of us, he explained, spirituality can feel squishier, less demanding and therefore, he implied, less rewarding.

Rigor is a magical kind of burden, after all: by carrying and honoring its weight, we can experience transcendence.

Shortly after hearing that interview, I went for a walk in Oakland’s redwoods, listening to Cave’s Ghosteen, a strange & beautiful album about finding God after the death of his son Arthur, in 2015. I was not high, but my mind uncoiled with a trippy kind of warmth. I felt God in the music, and in the trees. On that theme, a question occurred to me, I jotted it down, and my thoughts have returned to it frequently since: “Where is God in clothes?”

All clothes are shot through with politics, from the conditions of their creation to what they communicate when we wear them. Some clothes, though, seem shot through with God.

It’s easy to feel God in a sweater your mother knit you. It’s harder to feel God in, say, a pair of $1500 Loro Piana x New Balance 990s. But maybe God is in cursed things, too.

You can feel God in the brilliance of a design; in the way beautiful pants can transform the body; in the memories that collect in a garment over time; in fibers that blossomed from the soil, water, and beautiful beasts of Gaia. You can feel God in the care with which strangers whom you will never meet, living in places you will never go, handmade a jacket, stitch by stitch, for you.

I feel God in an “I RESCUE ANIMALS” ankle monitor, too, in a related but different way. It makes me think of Cave’s formulation about spirituality with rigor. This is a garment that demands something of the person who wears it. It reflects a sacrifice they’ve made. It indexes a chance they’ve taken. It marks a burden they’ve taken on in the name of truths much bigger than themselves.

How many of us own — much less want to wear — something like that?

Direct Action Everywhere is online here.

Our interviews with Adam Sandler, Kim Gordon, André 3000, Nathan Fielder, 100 gecs, Danielle Haim, Mac DeMarco, Matty Matheson, Seth Rogen, Sandy Liang, Tyler, The Creator, Maya Hawke, King Krule, Steven Yeun, John C. Reilly, Conner O’Malley, Clairo, Aminé, Father John Misty and more are here.

We don’t run ads, we refuse gifts, and we don’t use affiliate links when we cover new clothes. We do use them for one-off secondhand gems we find on eBay and Etsy, plus books on the independent bookseller Bookshop. We laid out our position on affiliate links and spon here.