A lovely poem suggested to me, after a similar complaint.
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
The confidence proper to a Christian is not the confidence of one who claims possession of demonstrable and indubitable knowledge. It is confidence of one who had heard and answered the call that comes from God through whom and for who all things were made: Follow me. –Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence.[1]
Confidence, etymologically speaking, comes from confidere, broken down to “cum + fidere” or “with + to trust.” What, then, does this with trusting modify? Where do we place confidence? A good wager would be “I know with trust,” I confidently know. But this would not fit with Newbigin, the adverbial force of the word(s) places the emphasis on the one knowing. Looking closer at the quote above, the reader will notice that the second sentence very intentionally emphasizes confidence as the subject with one in the genitive. So, the weight of the word, loosely speaking, shifts away from the cum and towards the fidere: we are concerned not with what is acting confidently but what the confidence is in. Newbigin discusses this a few pages earlier:
“When Jesus called the first disciples with the words Follow me, he was certainly calling for an act of faith. He did not offer any demonstrable certainties. And so it is with everyone who has been so called through the faithfulness of the first apostles and their successors. To regard this as cognitively inferior to the rational demonstration of supposedly certain truths is to assume that the ultimate reality with which we have to deal is not personal but impersonal.[2]
This unpacks his understanding of God’s call in the first citation. The confidence we have comes from God. He calls and we listen. If we are concerned with the adverbial force then we are moved to view knowledge with an emphasis on the knower. Ultimate reality would only be grasped through bare facts (a cold, Cartesian objectivism) rather than our engagement with God’s expression of Himself. Prototypically, we should view this expression as Christ (John 1:1-14) and, secondly, as Scripture expressing Christ in his redemptive context. He furthers the argument as follows:
The truth is surely is not that we come to know God by reasoning from our unredeemed experience but that what God has done for us in Christ give us the eyes through which we can begin to truly understand our experience in the world.[3]
So, if we are to rest, secure in truth, we must rely not on our minds but by recognizing God’s faithfulness.[4] Because of this view, Newbigin became uncomfortable with words like inerrancy which, as he calls them, Protestant fundamentalists use to assert a Cartesian certainty which is unbecoming to Scripture (and finally impossible in itself):
“…[Christ's disciples] witness has come to us invaried forms; we know about very few of the words and deeds of Jesus with the kind of certainty Descartes identified with reliable knowledge. To wish that it were otherwise is to depart from the manner in which God has chosen to make himself known. The doctrine of verbal inerrancy is a direct denial of the way in which God has chosen to make himself know to us as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.[5]
To put it simply, the authority, reliability, and trustworthiness of Scripture is inevitably bound to the question of the truthfulness of the biblical materials. [6] And the truthfulness of the materials, according to the fundamentalist, is rooted in permanent expressions of unquestionable and irreformable truths.[7] The fundamentalist is, then, arrogant because the certainty in his mind is asserted over Scripture thus asserting himself over God and denying his creatureliness.
But is this just? Or are the Protestant fundamentalists he discusses just gremlins created to scare theologians? Sinclair Ferguson attempts to dispel that myth:
“Belief in the infallibility of Scripture does not imply that we know how to resolve every prima-facie inconsistency in Scripture. Indeed, we are not under the obligation to do this in order to believe in biblical inerrancy, although we will seek to do so for exegetical and apologetical reasons. We believe in the perfect love, righteousness, and sovereignty of God, although we cannot understand their operation in the connection with every individual circumstance of life. So too our faith in the inerrancy of Scripture rests on the Bible’s own testimony and in view of the consistency of that testimony, we anticipate further resolutions to those passages which as yet we do not fully understand[8].
Is it not very similar to our first quote? They clearly agree about the nature of Scriptures truthfulness; it is rooted in God’s character which is manifested in his acts in history. While Newbigin may find “So too our faith in, etc.,” an impish passage, there, inerrancy does not rely on man’s judgment but biblical testimony. Ferguson continues to unfold his claim:
“We ought not to be driven by the existence of some ‘problem passages’ into abandoning inerrancy, on the grounds that we are unable to prove it in every conceivable instance. It is important to recognize that there are difficulties in Scripture which are at present insoluble and will probably remain so until the last day. [9]
This is to say that inerrancy of Scripture does not mean complete objective knowledge. While it may not testify to the truthfulness of the gospel, it does not affirm man’s ability to understand it; so, he is called to continually reflect. Ferguson has no intention of finding absolute certainty, even with biblical testimony of inerrancy. The words of Scripture are not magical (hoc est corpus is not hocus pocus); rather, they are all too human.[10] Recall Ferguson’s Warfield quote:
“No one claims that inspiration secured the use of good Greek in Attic severity of taste, free from the exaggerations and looseness of current speech, but only that it secured the accurate expression of truth, even (if you will) through the medium of the worst Greek a fisherman of Galilee could write and the most startling figures of speech a peasant could invent. [11]
The biblical language robed in men’s expressions is a clear proof that Scripture is not simply propositional. In fact, language’s nuances are, with inerrancy, still found in Scripture, e.g. the sun rises is not wrong. And so, we find that Ferguson rightly views language as fluid and contextual rather than rigid and abstract. Does Ferguson now conquer Newbigin’s gremlin? No, being only a nominal problem, Ferguson never had to fight him. The text is clear: there is a mooring for proper humility through God’s character in the impish section, a realistic view of knowledge in Ferguson’s unfolding claim and recognition that the language of Scripture is not merely propositional in the Warfield quote. Regardless of either man’s terminology they both show that language has its breathing room, man his mind, and God His authority.
————————————————————
[1] Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995, pg 105
[2] Ibid., pg 95
[3] Ibid, pg 97
[4] Recall Dr. Williams’ example in his discussion of Revelation. He claimed he was once in trouble at a different institution because “I did not believe in the Bible but rather believed what the Scripture said.” The mind is queried rather than queries.
[5] Ibid, pg 89
[6] Dr. Williams’ notes on his Revelation lecture, pg. 11.
[7] Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995, pg 89.
[8] Sinclair Ferguson, How Does the Bible Look at itself?, chapter 3 in Inerrancy and Hermeneutic, edited by Harvey Conn. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House Co., 1988, pg. 64
[9] Ibid, pg. 64-65
[10] In fact, the discipled exegesis rings of Newbigin’s discussion of attending to Scripture on page 91.
[11] A.A. Hodge and B.B. Warfield, Inspiration. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1881, pg. 43. Quote found in Ferguson essay pg. 63.
There were ninety-seven New York advertising men in the hotel, and, the way they were monopolizing the long-distance lines, the girl in 507 had to wait from noon till almost two-thirty to get her call through. She used the time, though. She read an article in a women’s pocket-size magazine, called “Sex Is Fun-or Hell.” She washed her comb and brush. She took the spot out of the skirt of her beige suit. She moved the button on her Saks blouse. She tweezed out two freshly surfaced hairs in her mole. When the operator finally rang her room, she was sitting on the window seat and had almost finished putting lacquer on the nails of her left hand.
“… those of us who have the nerve to call ourselves Christians will do well to be extremely reticent on the subject. Indeed, it is almost the definition of a Christian that he is somebody who knows he isn’t one, either in faith or morals. Where faith is concerned, very few of us have the right to say more than—to vary a saying of Simone Weil’s—“I believe in a God who is like the True God in everything except that he does not exist, for I have not yet reached the point where God exists.” As for loving and forgiving our enemies, the less we say about that the better. Our lack of faith and love are facts we have to acknowledge, but we shall not improve either by a morbid and essentially narcissistic moaning over our deficiencies. Let us rather ask, with caution and humour—given our time and place and talents, what, if our faith and love were perfect, would we be glad to find it obvious to do?”
When I left seminary I pretty much gave up theoblogging, but a few interactions with an alumnus from my alma mater got me rifling through my archives. Here are a few choice pieces I thought that might be worth (re)reading:
I will be guest posting this week over at the Lone Gunman, while Lloyd is wandering the globe. I plan on doing a series on digital culture and publishing over the next few days.
Those who made their way over here from Lloyd’s site and are wondering what the heck ‘anti-expertism’ means will find the closest thing to an explanation here.
Posted: September 29th, 2009
Categories: Announcements
I have been mucking around a bit with sound equipment recently and have been particularly curious about the real world voices of bloggers and their relationship to their writings. So, in that spirit, I thought you would get a kick out of a few thoughts on Von Trier’s Dogville.
My friend Rick asked me these questions in the new-ish clusterflock interviews clusterflock series:
Q: Andrew, I just finished watching Dogville, the second time. You spoke of “shaking for days,” after seeing it. If you can recall, what shook you?
(I ask because I’m shaking again, or at least, I’m haunted.)
I have complained for years that Salinger has infected my pen and, quite possibly, my tongue (the incessant deferrals, obsessive qualifications, twitchy paretheticals, etc., etc.) for better and ill. But, it was not until I read Rosenbaum’s reflection on Salinger’s silence (via) that I got a clear (albeit, controversial and guessed) diagnosis of the problem:
There is also a critical difference between the two finicky writers: Nabokov was a finisher. Look how many dozens of books he wrote in two languages in his life. True, he tried to burn Lolita. (It was saved only by his wife.) True, he was a perfectionist, but, I’d argue, one who came to recognize that there was a time finally to publish. That a work was, at a certain point, as perfect—as perfectly Nabokovian—as it would ever get. Salinger seems—in his parentheses-choked later works, at least—to believe he could never get as Salingerian as he wanted. And that his work had to be not as good as he could make it but as good as God could make it. Which suggests nothing can ever be truly finished. Maybe that’s his problem.
There seems to be much confusion about Christopher Walken twitter account. Well, I know the story because I created the account.
In April of 2008, Clusterflock decided to try a PostSecret type account and open up the readers to contribute to our blog. There was some debate about the name (it was Garret who suggested Christopher Walken) and we put it to a vote. Deron, I guess, felt that Christopher Walken was the most compelling of the names: we just kept finding ourselves riffing off it. So, Deron created the account for the blog, not the twitter account. The rules for the account were simple:
Don’t be an idiot. If you’re an idiot, I’ll delete your post.
Otherwise, have fun, do anything you want. The Christopher Walken account may be used to promote something you’re doing that you’re proud of, as a sort of PostSecret for clusterflock, a way to point out something cool or funny or interesting. Really, for anything. Again, just don’t be an idiot.
Also, if you want to put your real name in the post, that’s fine, and if you want to point to your own site, that’s also fine. I may do some format editing until people get a handle on the house rules. Once we’ve lived with this for a while, we’ll decide whether to make it permanent.
Have fun.
Around October of 2008, twitter began to become popular with Flockers, so we all exchanged our twitter account information and took the sardonic irreverence to the twitterverse. The next day it struck me that a Walken account on twitter was a logical extension of our twitter presence so I created it.
You’ll notice, however, that the last link is cached. Turns out, after the account was fallow for a few weeks, somebody clusterflock related took control of the account, changed the password, and started posting hilarity. So, I deleted the now-cached link to prevent confusion.
What makes the whole situation just so brilliant is that I don’t know who it is. I have theories, but I simply cannot bring myself to ask.
Update: As of March 27th the account has been suspended for breach of ToS.
Update: As of March 30th the account has been reactivated, but it is now clear that it is a fake account.
Update: After twitter shenanigans and what we think might be an unintentional reactivation, @cwalken is officially being declared DEAD. I heard this from the gift horse’s mouth.
The late Derrida penned those words knowing full well that they were just that, penned words.
He must have seen those as an affront to his very ideas, the philosopher’s critique on meta-statements being a meta-statement itself. A critique, so named, because it was long thought (among philosophers) that philosophy was the queen of thought. She’d ask the most fundamental questions and these questions demanded answers and, as such, demanded an unparalleled gravity. In other words, they set the rules of the game. Derrida dared to question the question (he was not the first):
The interesting thing is that this gives Being and words (signs of vocables of beings) a strange polarized power. On the one hand, language could become a great means of power for those who best commanded and shaped it, but, on the other, it causes a break between the thing and the thing signified rendering language vacuous. Both ideas have equal merit depending on the presuppositions on is drawing from.
The consequences of these ideas is that there is no privileged, absolute perspective or language that stands above the rest: scientist, philosophers, and theologians command equal power. None trumps the other, instead we are to read each perspective as its own rhetoric in its most unpejorative sense (hopefully). At least, that is my reading of Derrida.
Regardless of one’s pressuposition, however, it is clear that we live in a world where signs and signs of signs of things capture our imagination. We call there collection media and, when we are not consuming it, we are talking about it or trying to monitize it.
If we take David’s argument seriously, then the need to parse and present visual language should be placed in the same category as other forms of language and should be understood as rhetoric, given my current line of thinking. Consequently, the interaction of these things in media, which is called design demands as much attention as philosophy or science.
A classic essay by Albert Camus which you need to read.
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.
It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife’s love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.
You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward tlower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.
It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.
If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.
If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man’s heart: this is the rock’s victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: “Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.” Sophocles’ Edipus, like Dostoevsky’s Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.
One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. “What!—by such narrow ways–?” There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. Discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. “I conclude that all is well,” says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.
All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Phaedrus: A ridiculous question! But tell me what you say you have heard.
Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who [274d] invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god Thamus, who lived in the great city of the upper region, which the Greeks call the Egyptian Thebes, and they call the god himself Ammon. To him came Theuth to show his inventions, saying that they ought to be imparted to the other Egyptians. But Thamus asked what use there was in each, and as Theuth enumerated their uses, expressed praise or blame, according as he approved [274e] or disapproved. The story goes that Thamus said many things to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, “This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.” But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another;
[275a] and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.
Phaedrus: Socrates, you easily make up stories of Egypt or any country you please.
Socrates: They used to say, my friend, that the words of the oak in the holy place of Zeus at Dodona were the first prophetic utterances. The people of that time, not being so wise as you young folks, were content in their simplicity to hear an oak [275c] or a rock, provided only it spoke the truth; but to you, perhaps, it makes a difference who the speaker is and where he comes from, for you do not consider only whether his words are true or not.
Phaedrus: Your rebuke is just; and I think the Theban is right in what he says about letters.
Socrates: He who thinks, then, that he has left behind him any art in writing, and he who receives it in the belief that anything in writing will be clear and certain, would be an utterly simple person, and in truth ignorant of the prophecy of Ammon, if he thinks [275d] written words are of any use except to remind him who knows the matter about which they are written.
Phaedrus: Very true.
Socrates: Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. And every word, when [275e] once it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself.
Phaedrus: You are quite right about that, too. [276a]
Socrates: Now tell me; is there not another kind of speech, or word, which shows itself to be the legitimate brother of this bastard one, both in the manner of its begetting and in its better and more powerful nature?
Phaedrus: What is this word and how is it begotten, as you say?
Socrates: The word which is written with intelligence in the mind of the learner, which is able to defend itself and knows to whom it should speak, and before whom to be silent.
Phaedrus: You mean the living and breathing word of him who knows, of which the written word may justly be called the image. [276b]
Socrates: Exactly. Now tell me this. Would a sensible husbandman, who has seeds which he cares for and which he wishes to bear fruit, plant them with serious purpose in the heat of summer in some garden of Adonis, and delight in seeing them appear in beauty in eight days, or would he do that sort of thing, when he did it at all, only in play and for amusement? Would he not, when he was in earnest, follow the rules of husbandry, plant his seeds in fitting ground, and be pleased when those which he had sowed reached their perfection in the eighth month? [276c]
Phaedrus: Yes, Socrates, he would, as you say, act in that way when in earnest and in the other way only for amusement.
Socrates: And shall we suppose that he who has knowledge of the just and the good and beautiful has less sense about his seeds than the husbandman?
Phaedrus: By no means.
Socrates: Then he will not, when in earnest, write them in ink, sowing them through a pen with words which cannot defend themselves by argument and cannot teach the truth effectually.
Phaedrus: No, at least, probably not. [276d]
Socrates: No. The gardens of letters he will, it seems, plant for amusement, and will write, when he writes, to treasure up reminders for himself, when he comes to the forgetfulness of old age, and for others who follow the same path, and he will be pleased when he sees them putting forth tender leaves. When others engage in other amusements, refreshing themselves with banquets and kindred entertainments, he will pass the time in such pleasures as I have suggested.[276e]
Phaedrus: A noble pastime, Socrates, and a contrast to those base pleasures, the pastime of the man who can find amusement in discourse, telling stories about justice, and the other subjects of which you speak.
Socrates: Yes, Phaedrus, so it is; but, in my opinion, serious discourse about them is far nobler, when one employs the dialectic method and plants and sows in a fitting soul intelligent words which are able to help themselves and him [277a] who planted them, which are not fruitless, but yield seed from which there spring up in other minds other words capable of continuing the process for ever, and which make their possessor happy, to the farthest possible limit of human happiness.
The second of a series involving noise in front of the coffee shop and my iPhone.
On a warm October Friday in St. Louis, worn down from the drudgery of a week in front of a computer screen, I was grazing in front of the café for a cigarette (I had run out of my weekly ration) with beer in hand when I ran into my friends, Derek and Greg. Somehow we found ourselves on the topic of music, an atypical discussion for the Newton scholar and designer (respectively) and, just as Derek’s screed against Billy Joel had hit its climax, we heard some commotion across the street in the abandoned parking lot of the old repair shop. Curious to know what exactly was going on in our neck of the woods, Al Roker style, we made our way across the street to spy on the situation.
I stood aghast with Derek nearly weeping. We had never anything more incredible on the Loop.
Download
(It’s a rough recording from an iPhone, so it is best heard with headphones.)
The first of a series involving noise in front of the coffee shop and my iPhone.
Loafing in front of Messhugah Cafe is something of an endurance sport for me. I live just around the corner and pretty much treat it as my living room/kitchen. On Saturdays I often roll out of bed and into clothes, sans shower, and stroll stumble to the café for coffee. These particular sounds, however, were on a Wednesday night, after six, when the usual busker was jamming on his guitar and another one, just walking by, decides to join in with his harmonica: the perfect frame for a slouched form enjoying a cigarette and Pabst.
If I had to play for one side or the other, and I had no other thoughts or feelings but the will to side with genius, I’d play for the Republicans. The GOP convention trumped the Democratic—because some intelligence there is, in their control room, who can conceive of mastery on the grandest scale; a moral monster, to be sure; a jinni of evil; a trafficker in political eschatology, unafraid to trespass on myths of the gravest consequence. Someone behind the scenes held the key and boldly turned it: someone foresaw that the means of hatching a McCain triumphant was to make of him a risen God. This was the burden of the Vice Presidential and Presidential addresses, and the galvanism of the last few days.
To understand the trick worked, you must see the core conceit: that John McCain is already dead. Nominee Palin’s speech was a memorial. Her strange phrases conjuring the Presidential nominee as the kind of fellow whose name you will find on war memorials in small towns across this country hung fire, on screens across the country and in the convention hall, until she qualified them—only he was among the ones who came home. The true feeling was that he did not: that somewhere on a town green beneath a motionless flag you can find his name inscribed in stone.
Presuming that McCain, given his age, will not live through one term Mr. Grief pens further:
Above all, the mythology must prove that the man in the flesh, standing before you, is not the man who matters. He is larger than this; his blood has been spilled and his spirit loosed; we will be washed in his blood. Is it a Christian allegory? McCain can’t lift his arms high enough to be pinned to a cross. It is all loose revelation: he died for us; he is the Great Papa in the sky; he was a man, but it’s all right if he should disappear; he is spread out in the soil, and above the clouds; this time, it is Country First.
Now I find this not the least bit uninteresting, particularly the idea of a President Palin and her extension of the George W. legacy. However vilified that story may sound, there are competing narratives typified by the essay A Truman for out Times. Plus, if we are to buy this whole narrative angle that the more leftist leaning academes have been pushing these days (an idea, frankly, I think has great appeal), then we cannot neglect the Obama mythology.
Hope, of course is nothing short of an eschatological claim which is building on the classic mythology of American progress, a myth underscored by the quantity of melanin in Obama’s skin. It doesn’t help that the mythology is hip and we find ourselves shamed into thinking he is the right man for the job (such has been my experience, at least). We should not, however, neglect how fantastic it is that a black man can be taken seriously in politics, but this shouldn’t distract us from the fact that both sides are using the Elightenment project’s eschatology, they just dress it differently.
Asking for Atlas (i.e.) is naive, it is only asking for the myth of Sisyphus in a different form. I do, however, know a guy but that is another story.
That’s just his way. Ever since the debacle in ’49 Robertson’s just been sore. I told him not to put all his eggs in one basket. I don’t care how long it lives, a man can only make so much on a headless rooster. Smith, on the other hand, had high hopes, even fronted him $50 to travel to California; kept calling it his “Big Investment.” Now I’d call Smith a fool ‘cept he made a killing on horses and has more than a few jockeys in his pocket on account of gambling debts. And, now that he has finally filled those enormous stables of his, he’s started selling gelatin.
“No sense wasting a good horse,” he says.
Still, I think Smith feels bad for Robertson, after getting his own taste for the high life, since he sells him horse meat at a significant discount (so says Smith anyway). Then again, what else would eat horse meat other than Robertson’s pigs? They lap that shit up like it was caviar.
This is an old-ish, revised work written during my Derridean phase of ’07 which was something of a philosophical blue period. (I was trying to be clever.)
The Ego, To Wit
The most frustrating thing about reading Derrida is the dizzying force of his writing. In the turns, the circularity, the ipse-isms of his thought we find a resting the autos, the “I” which, consequently, is also the “he” (were one to speak in his voice). The interalism, the ultimate, excessive, etymological, endemic, elliptical (not to say, alliterative) egotism is the self-same force that propels him outward to get knowledge, but this knowledge is not a knowledge of rest but of progress. This progress, in turn, reveals a nonprogress for the very ceaseless progression is no progression at all.
“Changing, it rests.”
Yet, it is in this ceaseless (non)progression that, by constantly searching for the other, we find ourselves returning to ourselves (all by moving away from ourselves toward what was once ourselves but is not, toward the “not-ourselves” which will/is now ourselves, for the time being). For this progression always involves a query which presupposes a querier that is always asking a query. But even this querier queries because of some other question which one sees posed. This heaping of question upon questions, the ceaseless wondering who is the Sphinx and who, Oedipus —by its very repetition— renders the query null and void. Its ceaseless repetitious lays its meaning to rest since the circularity unhinges itself because the self cannot justify oneself by oneself, thus this ceaselessness becomes status quo which is to say standard, stock, the norm, natural and, consequently, may be named “static”.
The consequence is the need to outwit oneself which involves a double duplicity: (1.) in order to outwit oneself, one must, of necessity, dialog with oneself which is to say he must become twice “half witted,” from this comes the doubling double (this double bind) for (2.)it is impossible to half-wittingly outwit ([3.?]let alone outwit oneself or “half wit” oneself). The very duplicity, which may be a quad-plicity, is the very moment when (4.) the self is most honest . For, in order to outwit oneself, half-wittedly, one must first admit to himself the half-wittedness. Once one recognizes this, one may proceed merely by one’s own wits (for in order to know one is foolish, one must be wise).
Therefore, through this enfolding of oneself, one (that is to say “you” which is really, were one as honest as Buddy Glass, “me”) may move outward towards the Other away from the autos to that which is not the autos, which is to say that which is not ipse-istic —and this is a purgative, salvific (in the most etymological and thermatological sense of the word) progression; hence, we are finally unable to escape from ourselves (for progress is nonprogress). So, in our constant state of difference (differance?), we eke out the very nature of who we are, rather than the thing in question, for all questions, both because they are asked by and posed because of self, must refer to self, the ever shifting and undefinable “I”.
It is a gorgeous afternoon here in St. Louis after a morning of rain and I have found myself in the usual haunt –with a large chunk of unexpected free time–with my left foot soaked and my right foot dry after a puddle across the street got the better of my agility, thinking about cognitive surplus.
At the very moment I had built the impetus to write that first sentence and plunge myself into the act of putting “black on white” a friend, an expert in paleotypography (Newton, primarily), comes to me with an existential crisis which evolves into a long conversation. The gist of our discussion is the obvious absurdity of his work on seemingly unimportant minutia in the face of unresolved injustices in the world. The hypotheticals of youth, his free time, and frustrated efforts led him to feel guilt for his sins of omission: he has done nothing to make the world better. The man who had dismounted his Harley at the peak of our conversation aptly said, “These are the problems of a man with a full belly.”
Too true and directly relevant to Clay Shirky’s point (text or video):
If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.
Full bellies and free time can be as much an asset as a deficiency and Clay articulates well they means a society cops with such existential dilemmas:
I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.
In an age where there is cognitive surplus (his phrase), easy exchange of information, I think, exacerbates these sentiments. His point was that the dawn of the internet and its increasing use is a boon for this cognitive surplus, a good medium for its trade, through blogging and content creation. However, in light of the social injustices in this world, I suspect blogging in all its forms is hardly the answer–and Clay, I presume, would agree with me. While it does get people thinking and interacting with ideas in a more engaging way then, say, television, it still is a means for deferral at worst and merely a way to organize data at its best. Cognitive surplus is certainly a blessing for Western culture but only if we can figure out how to cash it in.
This is very much Clay’s idea and I suggest you go check out his perspective.
A few days ago a fellow flocker asked for a theological analysis of Jung’s notion of Synchronicity. Admittedly, I haven’t read any of his work for about five years but his question was less academic and more concerned with the broad perspective of coincidence and meaning so wikipedia was a reasonable place to start for information on the subject:
Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally un-related. In order to be synchronous, the events must be related to one another conceptually, and the chance that they would occur together by random chance must be very small.
In other words, there is acausal meaning for coincidences which aren’t from God. Hence my friend wrote, “I think Christians are conspicuously firm in disregarding synchronicity, but certainly there are, at least for me in my research, questions regarding what happens in our free will that appear to have meaning, a synchronicity, yet the answer is not revealed or may never be revealed so we can feel strongly that it isn’t from God,” and then posed this question: “If there’s meaning and we conclude that it isn’t of God, then is it the universe? Time and space to connect with the subconscious?”
I took, not surprisingly to those who know me, a fairly circuitous route to answer the question. The first part gives some context and analysis of the Christian perspective of human free agency and God’s will and the second discusses the question posed. Below is a revised and reformatted version of my answer, rough but ready enough.
An interpreter is a decipherer and communicator of meanings. He is a translator between languages, between cultures and between performative conventions. He is, in essence, an executant, one who ‘acts out’ the material before him so as to give it intelligible life. Hence the third major sense of ‘interpretation’. An actor interprets Agamemnon or Ophelia. A dancer interprets Balanchine’s choreography. a violinist a Bach partita. In each of these instances, interpretation is understanding in action; it is the immediacy of translation.
Such understanding is simultaneously analytical and critical. Each performance of a dramatic text or musical score is a critique in the most vital sense of the term: it is an act of penetrative response which makes sense sensible. The ‘dramatic critic’ par excellence is the actor and the producer who, with and through the actor, tests and carries out the potentialities of meaning in the play. The true hermeneutic of drama is staging (even reading out loud of a play will, usually, cut far deeper than any theatrical review). In turn, no musicology, no music criticism can tell us as much as the action of meaning which is performance. It is when we experience and compare different interpretations, this is to say performances, of the same ballet symphony or quartet, that we enter the life of comprehension.
Over Easter I had a fun conversation with a professional metaphysician. He was a nice fellow who put up with a wine and pork glutted man’s complaints about academic philosophy. Were I to repeat the conversation, I would have handed him this essay and muttered something disparaging about the state of graduate students (it probably would have gotten a vigorous nod):
For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of “subjects”; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotized by the arts of the spell binder, we have the impudence to be astonished. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education–lip- service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school-leaving age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school hours; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.
BBC radio did an interesting segment on British Christian Pop in the 60s and 70s by, get this, members of the Salvation Army. The freaky thing is its actually really good.
What happened?
The answer is “nothing” until Danielson Famile appeared thirty years later.
