D&C Bits

Thou shalt live together in love, insomuch that thou shalt weep for the loss of them that die

-D&C 42:45  It is false that the gospel requires us to believe that horrible things are not horrible.  True, Christ overcomes them.  The pioneers overcame the plains, does that mean the crossing was not harsh?  It does not make his victory less to say that the things he defeats are terrible.

Thou shalt not be proud in thy heart; let all thy garments be plain, and their beauty the beauty of the work of thine own hands

-D&C 42:40

Clearly we no longer weave and sew our own homespun.  Maybe we should.  But let’s grapple with this a bit. 

Fashion spirals are one of the most dangerous parts of the human condition.  In a way, you could say that fashion spirals and the Great and Spacious Building are the same thing.  Once you define fashion properly, you see that it applies outside clothing.  Fashion is the condition where status is self-referential, where status does not have a mooring in the created world.  Bell bottoms were in during the 70s because they were in.  There was no changed atmospheric condition or working condition that made them more suitable.  Nor did they do something necessarily better for the human profile and aesthetics than what came before.  I don’t want to say that fashion is inherently wrong, though at least in clothing the scriptures may disagree with me.  But I do want to say that fashion is dangerous.  The more unmoored it is and the more it swallows up the realm of achievement, the more people become divided by their status, the more they focus their efforts on something that doesn’t offer any growth or improvement, the more they become focused on pride or status as the over-riding end in itself which is Satanic.  Fashion in the sense of unmoored self-referential status is at the heart of credentialism, of ‘expertise,’ of narrative crafting on social and traditional media, of ‘academic and scientific consensus’, of celebrity, of modern entertainment, and a whole other long list of things that are wrong.  I could probably even go farther, and throw in things like bureaucracy or Too Big Too Fail (‘this company is important and needs to be kept alive because it is important and needs to be kept alive), but that’s for another day.

A rule that what is beautiful about clothing should be handmade doesn’t avoid fashion.  It would be naive to think it did.  There will be trends in what kinds of handmade adornments or nips and tucks are in or are not in.  There will be trendsetters.  But the rule does two things.  It means that changing fashions requires learning and applying actual skills, since you have to do it yourself.  That means there is real satisfaction in the result, its not all just status and fashion.  Second, having to make things yourself slows down and limits the fashion spiral.  It will take longer for fashions to change and they will change within narrower limits.

“Let all they garments be plain”-hmm.  I feel that what counts as ‘plain’ is specific to your time and place.  I don’t have any authority for this other than my own strong feeling that excessive plainness or dumpy frowdiness are also evils to be avoided.  But I do have that strong feeling that there is some kind of middle way between fashion flashy costliness and ostentatious ugliness or beat down indifference.