Chapter 2 — The Wire Branch

Chapter 2

The first loop I closed was crooked.

I was four years old, perhaps five, and my grandmother had given me a length of soft copper wire, fresh from the cedar box she kept on the kitchen sideboard for exactly this purpose. The wire was about as long as my hand. I had bent wire before, of course — what child has not? — but my grandmother showed me the bend was to be made differently here: a curve formed slowly, the wire passed under and back over itself, the ends drawn together until they touched — and there it was, the feeling I did not yet have a name for: the wire warm and yielding under my fingers, the bend taking the shape I asked of it, the small rightness when the ends met. Then she put my hand around the small completed shape and said, in the slightly formal tone she used for moments she considered important, that is your first one. My fingers were stiff and the closure was uneven; one end protruded slightly past the other, and the curve was more pear-shaped than circular. She did not correct it. She placed it in my other palm and folded my fingers around it, and when we walked into the village that afternoon she carried it in her apron pocket so that I could place it myself in the offering box at the church. I remember, as I dropped it through the slot, the small clink it made against the others already accumulated there — hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, the contributions of most of the parish since the last recasting. The box itself had been there for generations; the loops turned over when the bell was cast. My grandmother put her hand briefly on the back of my head as I turned away. She did not say anything. The gesture, in our tradition, said what was needed.

What I bent that afternoon was the simplest expression of a practice which is, everywhere humans live, the central act of devotional life. The materials vary: copper, brass, silver, gold for the wealthy. They are always the metals the hand persuades easily — the harder alloys of industrial life have remained outside the tradition, and the tradition outside them. The ritual surrounding the bending varies more dramatically still. But the underlying form is shared with a consistency that has long fascinated comparative religionists: a length of fine wire, bent into a closed shape — circle, oval, figure-of-eight, by tradition — and offered.

The theological readings of what one is doing when one closes the loop are as various as the traditions that have developed them, and yet they cluster around a small set of underlying intuitions. The open wire is the unredeemed soul, or the broken world, or the unfinished prayer; the bending is the work of devotion, or the labour of reconciliation, or the patient cultivation of intention; the closure is grace, or completion, or consummation, or the seal upon the covenant. These are not the same theology. But they are responses to the same gesture, and the gesture is older, almost certainly, than any of the traditions that now interpret it. What came first was the feeling — the wire answering the hand, the bend forming, the satisfaction of the closure. The theologies are reaching for something the fingers already know.

The Hindu worshipper closes loops at dawn and dusk, in some traditions, before the household shrine; the closed form is read in different theological registers as the cycle of samsara brought briefly to its rest, or as the wholeness of dharma, or as the seal upon a particular prayer. Hindu practice varies more widely than perhaps any of the other major traditions: from the household loops kept in a small brass bowl before the family altar and renewed at the great festivals, to the elaborate temple economies in which loops are accumulated, recast, and integrated into the bronze of the temple bells across generations. Buddhist devotion to the loop developed in close relation to the Hindu tradition and the practices remain in many ways parallel; in some Tibetan traditions, however, the loop is bound with a blessed protection cord and enshrined in a sealed reliquary within a cave or chorten, where it will remain undisturbed for the duration of the kalpa.

In the Jewish tradition the gesture has been read, since at least the early medieval period, in the language of tikkun olam — the repair of the world. The broken-open wire is the world as it is given to us, fractured, incomplete, awaiting our work; the closed loop is the world as it might become, made whole through the patient labour of the faithful. The kabbalists of Safed, drawing on Lurianic motifs, developed an elaborate theology in which the gathered loops of the synagogue corresponded to the gathered sparks of divine light scattered at the world’s making; the loop was, in this reading, both an act of devotion and a participation in the cosmic repair. Many Jewish communities maintain a vessel of the community, in which the loops accumulate over a generation before being recast into the ornamental fittings of the next Torah scroll.

In the Christian tradition the gesture was inherited from the Hellenistic-Jewish synthesis of late antiquity and reinterpreted around the figure of Christ. The closed form became the seal of the new covenant; the bending became the soul’s submission. Eastern Orthodox practice, perhaps closer to the older Mediterranean roots, retains a deep emphasis on the loop as offered with the icon: the worshipper closes a loop while contemplating an image of the saint, and the loop is then placed in a small wire-vessel before the icon’s stand. Western practice developed differently. In the Latin church, particularly after the great reforms of the Cluniac centuries, the loops accumulated against the casting of the parish bell, which was understood, in a literal as well as a metaphorical sense, to ring with the prayers of all those who had contributed to its making. Aere precum, the medieval treatises called it: the bronze of prayers.

In Islamic tradition, the closed circle is read as the figure of tawḥīd, the divine unity, and the act of bending as the worshipper’s surrender to the One. The loops are accumulated at the mosques and at the shrines of the saints, and recast on a strict cycle into the architectural metalwork of the mosques — the cast inscribed panels, the calligraphic lamp ornaments, the brass fittings of mihrab and door. There is a particular theological literature, going back to al-Ghazali and elaborated by the Sufi commentators, on the moment of closure — the instant when the open form becomes the closed — as a recapitulation of the moment of submission in which the Muslim becomes Muslim. To bend the loop is, on this reading, to repeat the shahada in metal.

The East Asian traditions, Confucian and Taoist alike, read the gesture in the language of relationship and balance. In Confucian observance the loop represents the proper relationship — bent and closed, complete in its return — and the bending of the loop at the family altar is part of the broader work of cultivating right relation. In Taoist practice the loop is the tao in its closed and self-returning form: the way that comes back upon itself. Shinto practice in Japan has developed perhaps the most aesthetically refined wire-devotional tradition, with seasonal cycles of binding and dissolution that map onto the agricultural year; the loops at a Shinto shrine, accumulated over the half-year, are released into running water at the great purifications.

In the West African traditions, the closing of the loop has developed in close relation to the bronze-casting heritage of the region. Loops gathered at household shrines and at the compounds of the regional courts accumulate against the recasting cycles by which the Yoruba, Akan, and Edo workshops produce the commemorative heads, ceremonial plaques, and ornament of court regalia. The bronze of the loops, the chronicler-historians of the West African kingdoms called it, in deliberate parallel to the Latin aere precum: the loops of the household and the loops of the court returned, in time, as the faces and figures by which the community remembered itself.

The pre-Columbian traditions of the Americas present the closing gesture in a different social register. Working with native copper from the Great Lakes, gold and silver from the Andes, and the other materials available to them, the cultures of the Americas developed wire-devotional practices that were confined, so far as the archaeological record allows us to determine, to elite and ceremonial contexts — priestly, royal, the work of ritual specialists. The metal was too scarce and too precious to support the household practice that the Old World traditions had developed over the millennia of the copper surplus. The loops were few, and significant, and restricted in ways that the European traditions, by the time of contact, had long since ceased to be. The early colonial chroniclers found the encounter bewildering, for the gesture was sufficiently like their own to be recognisable and sufficiently unlike in its social location — rare, priestly, attended by restrictions the Europeans had never known — to refuse easy assimilation.

Below the level of the formal traditions, in the household practice that everywhere underlies the great religions, the loop has a domestic life of its own — at thresholds, in the seams of children’s coats before journeys, at the bedsides of the sick. They are among the small dignities by which a household keeps itself, and their absence is felt, in nearly every tradition, as a lack the language never quite finds words for. The loops are kept in cedar boxes in kitchens, in small offering bowls on hallway tables, in the linings of marriage chests. They are not always taken to a sanctuary. They are not always meant to be. The gesture, made, is sometimes its own offering; the loop, kept, is sometimes the prayer continuing.

The Polynesian variant has only recently been recognised in the comparative literature. Long before European contact, the canoe routes that crossed the Pacific carried looped offerings of pandanus and coconut fibre, exchanged from island to island as bearers of the genealogical and spiritual ties the great voyages maintained. When metal arrived in the contact period, the tradition adapted to it. Wire drawn from trade goods was bent into loops, exchanged across the same routes, and — at the major shrines and chiefly compounds of Tonga, Samoa, and the Society Islands — periodically collected and recast back into wire of the same gauge, which was then redistributed for the next round of bending and onward travel. The theology, drawn from older voyaging cosmologies, holds that the wire is a single continuous substance carrying the prayers of all who have closed loops in it, accumulating across generations and across the ocean. A loop bent in one household may, in time, return as wire that has been bent by hundreds of others on a hundred islands; the wire is in motion, the prayers in motion, the ocean closed by the bending. The tradition is small relative to the great religions of the literate civilisations, but it is among the most distinctive of the wire-devotional forms — and one of the few in which the closing of the loop is bound, at the theological level, to the closing of distance.

The loop is not, in most of the traditions that have made it central, an end in itself. It is a vehicle for something the materials cannot quite contain. The wire is the humblest of substances — copper drawn through a hole, costing little, requiring nothing of the worshipper but the few minutes of attention it takes to bend — and the gesture is correspondingly humble. One does not need to be wealthy. One does not need to be learned. One does not need, even, to be virtuous in any particular way. The wire takes the bend that is given to it, and the closure is what it is regardless of who has made it.

The loop has been called, in various traditions, a levelling sacrament: the ritual that any human can perform, that places no demand on capacity or station, that returns to the worshipper precisely what they brought to it. The wealthy may bring more wire and bend more loops. The poor bring what they have. The practice does not, on any orthodox reading, distinguish.

What it does ask, in nearly every tradition I have studied, is attention. The loop closed without thought is, all the traditions agree, an empty offering. The wire takes the bend; that is its nature. The point of the gesture is the mind that gives the bend, not the bend itself. In the wire there is nothing, runs an old saying attributed in some traditions to one teacher and in some to another. In the bending of the wire there is everything.

There is no human culture, so far as we have been able to determine in nearly two centuries of comparative inquiry, that does not close the loop. The forms vary, the materials vary, the theologies are sometimes mutually unintelligible, and the institutional arrangements range from the great temple treasuries of the literate civilisations to the household shrines of the village. But the gesture is the same. Wherever humans are, copper or brass or silver is being drawn fine and bent and closed and offered; and wherever this happens, the worshipper feels what we all feel when the ends meet — that small, inarticulate satisfaction that has, in every tradition, been read as touching something deeper than the closure of a piece of metal.

Comparative religionists have sometimes treated this convergence as a problem to be explained. I have, after long acquaintance with the traditions, come to see it differently. Religion is responsive to what is deepest in human experience. There is, evidently, something in the way we are made that is answered by the closing of the loop — something the wire reaches more directly than words have ever quite managed to do. The fact that this something appears in every culture, expressed through whatever theological vocabulary is locally available, is not a puzzle. It is, on the contrary, what one would expect: that the great religious traditions, working on different materials in different centuries with different conceptual tools, should all find their way to the same gesture, because the gesture corresponds to a feature of our nature that cannot be missed.

We have all felt it: the small satisfaction when the ends meet, the sense, briefly, that something has been completed, the reluctance to spoil the closed form by reopening it. These are not the responses of a particular cultural tradition. They are the substrate on which the traditions have built.

My grandmother is fifty years dead, and the parish she took me to as a child has cast two new bells since then: one in 1981, when the renovation gave occasion for it, and another in 2003, against the expansion of the nave. Each time the accumulated loops were melted and the metal went into the casting. Some of her loops, I imagine, are in the first of those bells — she had been dropping them through the slot for decades before she died. Some of mine are in both. I did not understand this as a child, and have come slowly to understand it since: the recasting tradition makes the loop continuous in a way that other devotional practices are not. The candle is lit and extinguished. The host is consumed. The flowers wilt. The loop persists, in some sense, even when it has ceased to be a loop — the metal carrying forward, taking new forms, but still part of the long material practice of the community.

Last spring I taught my granddaughter her first loop. She is four years old; the wire was soft; her fingers were stiff. The closure was crooked. We carried it together to the offering box and she dropped it through the slot herself, and looked up at me afterward with the expression of someone who has just done something important and is not entirely sure what. I put my hand briefly on the back of her head as she turned away. I did not say anything. The gesture, in our tradition, says what is needed.

Caroline Pell, of the Hartford Institute, writes on religion and the history of devotion. Her last essay for The Common Reader appeared in the spring 2013 issue.