Monday, January 22, 2018

Patema Inverted

I really enjoyed this 2013 animated film from Japan, Patema Inverted, when watching it last evening with some friends and their kids. My point in writing about it here is not, however necessarily to discuss content, and I haven't really done enough thinking on it yet to really do that, but I suspect that it would probably be a productive enterprise to do so (Editorial NOTE: After finishing this, I realize that I do wind up doing a bit of it, but in the context of discussing the more core questions for this post ... and not necessarily in the most ordered way). BUT, just going into the matter, I want to point out a couple aspects that I thought were really well done or I really like. The first is the vertigo feeling that I thought they pulled off for Patema in Age's world, but also at the end for Age and the good guys from his world once finally on the true surface. Somehow they managed, at least I think they did, to pull off a vertigo of falling into the sky. I think they actually borrowed the feel a little, or at least it has to be admitted that there is an earlier instance of a feeling of "falling into the sky" dizzying vertigo, which is when Harry walks through the golden mist in the maze in the third task of Goblet of Fire. If the maker of Patema did borrow from Harry Potter for the basic idea: they still pulled it off visually well; and most artwork borrows in some way (as I have said before in other posts, there were only ever three original ideas in the whole history of the world: creation, fall, and redemption; and the only one of those humans can claim full originality on is the middle, negative one). And the second is that the vertigo feeling supports the same thing it supports in Harry Potter, which is the employment of trope that goes back quite a long way of seeing the heavens and the deep sea as analogous to each other. James Cameron instantiates it in Abyss when he has the aliens coming from the deep ocean ... indeed, deep ocean and deep heaven are united in theme of danger to humanity: the danger in space is lack of pressure and the problem in the deep sea is too much pressure. The direction in which PI takes it is inner earth (or at least that is my theory of the topography as detailed below) versus sky/heavens, but the dynamic is the same. C. S. Lewis also gets at the relationship by calling space "deep heaven" in the space trilogy, and "deep" is most recognizable, particularly in the realm of Lewis's work in classics and medieval and his studies in the Bible, as the "deeps" in Genesis 1, which comes from the turbulence and chaos of the primal/mythical deep sea in the ancient imagination. Anyway, PI really did, I think, pull off this vertigo of falling into deep heaven. It's all the more accented by the fact that it happens only for the one whose perspective is shown. When Patema is being guided along by Age and she is upside down, the feeling is more of a helium balloon being tugged along (some might complain that this seems materially inconsistent because if it is actual gravity we're talking about, it should be a full body's weight, the kind of pull that would have teeth gritted and hands sweaty holding on in real life upside down holding somebody, but I think there is leeway [and also that the "real life" version is skewed because one is actually contending with one's own weight in that situation] and that it is possibly intentional as a surrealist way to put an emphasis on how the vertigo feeling can be isolated to the one person in a relationship), but when she is right side up is when we get the vertigo feeling.

[SIDENOTE: Oh, and one thing that I think I was the only one in the room to get was the visual reminiscences of the first Halflife game in Patema's tunnels world, especially the broken foot bridge and the ladder up the wall ... I spent so many hours locked in to the visual world of that game at once point]

My main purpose in writing is to use two responses to the film, two theories about it's topography, as an example of what Owen Barfield takes about as pre-modern making of theories to "save the appearances" and modern issues surrounding a radical myopic quality in modern "scientific" thinking (what I call, below and in many other posts, actually "scientism"), particularly the inability to grasp that actual type of conversation taking place in what I, and I think Barfield, would say is really going on in literature (like the "outside" or "topside" people of Age's world in PI, not having the conceptual rubrics to grasp the reality)

So, one has to watch the film and, unless one is much better than me at analyzing things like this in the moment (which is not hard to do, meaning being better than me at it), read the plot description on the wikipedia page. The basic difference in interpretation is the topography. In the ones the kids I was watching with were describing (provided I am understanding what they were saying correctly), which originated from their older brother who is in college, Age's world is the real surface and the place to which Age and Petema go to briefly in the sky of that world is a chunk that broke off of the earth in the original accident with gravity and is sort of hanging up there. I'm not sure if that means in orbit just over Age's immediate city and its surrounding countryside or what, which is one of the reasons it's harder for me to buy this reading, that is has to keep coming up with new things. It might have the advantage of  accounting for the big pit in Age's world if that is the chunk that went into the sky, but there are still many more questions than answers that can be based in the actual data in the film (especially if you go with militant demands of scientific accuracy to real earth, which begs the questions of (1) how does is stay in orbit in exactly the right place to be the sky for his world and (2) at the height they are when they get to that place, the air has to be pretty thin, if not non existent because all the way outside earth's atmosphere).

Before I go any further, I have to admit two possibilities: (1). The kids misunderstood their older brother's explanation (entirely possible, as the two who were most avidly explaining, one of them trying to do so even before the movie was over, are 12 and 9), or (2). I totally misunderstood the kids (which is also entirely possible: I had a really good and big Mexican dinner with two 20 ounce beers, so food coma could have been wrecking havoc on my mental landscape ... stranger things have been known to happen).

Now, my topogrpahy, supported (and in no small part clarified for me) by the wikipedia author, is that the final surface found is the original and true surface of the planet, with the now-corrected/fixed proper gravitational orientation of earth=down. Age's world is a construction down under the earth made for those who got trapped in the inverted gravitational state and Patema's people [NOTE: this is corrected from the original of this post, which had "Age's peopl" here] are the descendants of the scientists who messed things up but then righted most things but couldn't save everybody, so they made this place for those who couldn't be righted to exist, and they themselves (the scientists) accept the penance of living in the tunnels "under" (really above) that manufactured world. Then the place in the sky of Age's world that the two reach for a little bit is a sort of roof (from Age's perspective) or floor (from Patema's) of the cave that has mechanisms to make the the "sky" appear to have stars.

[SIDENOTE: There may be a third possibility, but I think the perspective problems are of such magnitude as to preclude even the most robust suspension of disbelief, or at least that is my opinion: both Age's world and the final found surface are the surface of the planet, and Patema's zone is a tunnel all the way through the planet. For one thing, if everything else works the same with the circular planet etc, Age's gravity should work the right way when they get to the final surface, the same way it would if he walked around the globe to that opposite point, and a bit like the reorientation at the zero-G point of the pass through tube in the 2012 remake of Total Recall, and that would ruin the whole "opposites need to attract rather than fight" theme.]

I call these two explanations two "topographies." In each there are three planes and one intermediary place: there is the final surface found, which I am calling the true surface, then there is the surface of Age's world, and finally there is the plane of the place in the sky of Age's world that he and Patema visit briefly. The intermediary place is the place of tunnels inhabited by Patema's people, which shares gravitational orientation with both the final surface found and the sky plane in Age's world. That is the basic datum from which one must start in constructing ... not from the finished picture that one wants to see of a diagram of the situation looking this way or that.

And that is, finally, what I am talking about with drawing this all in as Barfield's "saving the appearances." The appearances in this case are those basic data of three planes and the intermediary place and one gravitional direction being shared by two of the planes and the opposite gravitational orientation being what operates in the third plane, Age's surface. Beyond this, things are constructions to explain those appearances. Barfield talks about the ancient astronomer's coming up with their theories to "save" or explain the appearances of the movements of the heavens. The key thing that he relates is that none of them were that bothered when they differed. They knew the theories were just attempts at models that would explain things, but they never assumed that any one of them would save all the appearances. In a sense, they were built to be adjusted.

I'll throw in something else here from a very famous writer who himself stated Barfield as a huge influence on his own writing ... C. S. Lewis. In The Discarded Image (one of Lewis's last books, and by his own statement, probably the summing up statement of his vision of what he studied as an academic), Lewis talks about maps and how maps done in medieval times were laughable from the perspective of operating at sea by them. But nobody ever laughed at them because no mariner ever consulted them to navigate. They knew that the purpose of the map was never for practicality of navigation. For that, they relied on other sources, descriptions provided by others before them, sort of like our appearances of the three planes for PI: you simply know that, to go in this direction, you detach this weight from connection to the flying ship etc. The point of a map in those old times was to tie those appearances into something other than pragmatic utility, to bring them together in a model in the realm of cosmology. They are two different projects, the practical and the cosmological, and they relate to two very different models or things, actual maritime tradition and medieval maps (Actually, I myself notice this difference in trying to actually navigate using google maps or i-maps). The map we make out of the appearances of the planes in PI will likewise be oriented to a purpose, and one that must be larger than the map, beyond the map, giving the map itself purpose ... a what to save the appearances for.

Basically, at least from what I could tell of what the kids were saying, and very interestingly given the name of the film ... our proposed theories or models (mine and the college-aged son) might be the inverse of each other (my "real" down is his "up," but more importantly, my "inner" is his "outer"). The real thing, though, as I was noting above that Barfield said of the ancient astronomers, isn't who is "right" or "wrong" on the material level. The real point begins with the fact that we are both simply coming up with models to "save the appearances," to explain the phenomena in the film. Like the various ancient astronomer's Barfield speaks of, we come up with differing theories ... but we also shouldn't take any one theory as possibly THE right one at the outset because at the outset we shouldn't be myopically focused on "accuracy" or even necessarily "consistency." Both models can be considered as equally valid at first, and maybe in the end both valid, like those pictures that if you look at it one side up, you get a young woman's face, and if you look at it the other way up, you get an old man's face ... both are true of the picture. It doesn't have to be advocating relativism across the board to say that one particular situation lends itself to two distinctly different interpretations with both being right in themselves in relation to the appearances (in the case of those pictures, the two would only ever be definitively mutually exclusive, and thus require radical relativism to coexist, in a world in which the existence of old men completely precluded the existence of young women, or vice versa). Both can be considered equally valid at first statement, although it is entirely possible to establish invalidity or unsoundness as well (somebody saying "and if you turn it this way, it looks like elephants going at it" and you can legitimately say "no, that is not there ... the old man and the young woman can be demonstrated, the elephants can't"). But in all of this, we are talking about approximation and differing levels of internal coherence and explanatory power ... never about one definitive "scientific" (in the modern scientistic, materialist sense of the word), completely "accurate," explanation (Barfield hits heavily on this radical shift in thinking about "theories" in which the idea of "one right theory" was a radically new way of thinking that entered with the scientific revolution).

And here is where I get into some of the contention and, for somebody from my direction, occasional frustration. Accuracy for accuracy's sake, to me, is pretty much not of much use or interest. For one, I don't think it is possible for any author of any literature that will wind up being interesting as literature about human questions. As I have written in my post on "story time," I think theme always breaks consistency of material details at some point if the theme is at all interesting. I don't think even completely non-literary scientific report accuracy is as possible as scientismists wish to believe it is.

But even aside form the question of whether complete accuracy or internal material consistency is possible, there is the larger question of whether it is desirable for its own sake. As I have said in other posts, I do think that striving for as much of it as you can get is in important part of literature being incarnational and not gnostic. But therein lies the point: it has to be in the service of larger things that can be discussed in such terms as incarnational or gnostic ... it doesn't qualify on its own. When radicalized in isolation and being able to be on its own for its own sake, it is neither incarnational nor gnostic ... it's materialist.

Talking about incarnational and gnostic and materialist is talking about qualities of literature in general. The elements I would pin out in PI are not at that level yet; they are the things in the movie that would be eligible for consideration in determining whether or not a film's/story's message and/or method makes it more or less conducive as support. But before we get to that point (which I'm not going to do in this post), we have to theorize about what concrete symbolic etc elements there are beyond the material set up that might be symbolized in the material set up, the topography. As I said, the topography has to be in service of something larger than itself. If my position on the topography is correct and the final plane is the actual now rightly oriented surface and Age's plane is inside the earth, then there is (I would guess intentional) Plato's cave going on a bit, which would then bring in some of the themes of Plato's cave, such as reluctance to accept understandings that challenge our original understandings. Even without Plato's cave, there is a lot of theme going on in those who are actually the inverts according to the original planetary gravitational organization . There is also possible symbolism in the fact that the "inverts," Patema's people, have no plane to call their own, no "ground." "Ground" is not only a heavy theme in contemporary theory, such as in Judith Butler's challenging of the language of "ground" in discussing gender, but also a trope in science fiction that has significance for evolution of society/race/etc. beyond older understandings: I always found it to be a very interesting aspect of Asimov's first Foundation novel that, on the planet on which the story starts, so much has been built both above and below the original "ground" that that point is at best an arbitrarily determined one now).

If my topography is right, there is also possibility of "scientific explanation" (at least in the radically thorough way that scientism winds up trying to practice it) being, like the number in Arnofsky's Pi, some depth at which the human mind cannot long dwell without being overwhelmed and torn apart (Pi) or burned up (PI ... get it? nice little spin on the names of the two films). Age and Patema spend only long enough there to realize the singular scientific datum that the "sky" of Age's world is a constructed mechanism to create an illusion, and even that "knowledge" oppresses the mind, represented by the heat from the "stars" that smites upon them, to borrow biblical language for fun.

Beyond that, and I'm not sure whether this film lends itself or not, I simply haven't thought about it enough and don't have time at present to do so, being as the core mechanism of the film has to do with gravity manipulation, there may be some themes possible in common with what I wrote about in Christopher Nolan's Interstellar.

It is definitely true that one of the emphases of the film is beyond the topography and on a personalist level, that Age and Patema have a connection together that enables them to function together (her weight offsetting his gravity in his world and making him able to fly-jump). One of the interesting things is that the gravity thing makes them naturally repel from each other, which makes the choice/intentionality aspect of them being together much more accented.


My final point: 
I must be clear that I think that beginning to do a topography in the first place is insightful on the college-aged son's part. It shows initiative in looking for relationality in the same way as I have talked about going from mere quantification to looking at juxtaposition and other placement relations in talking about interpreting the magically appearing 14 feet in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in my post on method and other places. And that is one of the things a map is about versus mere verbal description (e.g., Maritime tradition): being able to better understand the relationships by visualizing them. But I also think it has to then connect with more to be a meaningful endeavor. It has to connect up in a way that is more than latent or potential or subconscious. Once one has started down the path of the conscious endeavor of interpretation, one needs to go it to the right place (which isn't necessarily my topographical interpretation; it's connecting topography with literary matters like characterization and theme). Even though the beginning is good, stopping partway merely then provides fodder for other, mistaken types of interpretation, like scientism's conquest of literature.

I'm not saying the inverted version or the "all the way through the earth" models might not be able to have legitimate interpretive possibilities along the lines as mine, and maybe even some that both make mine not feasible AND beat mine as far as being demonstrable. I'm saying that it makes me a little sad that I don't think that the attempt will ever be made by those who side with that model (if it it were to be done, it would probably have to be done by myself playing devil's advocate) because, from what I can tell, analyzing symbolic and emblematic connections beyond the most simplistic versions of allegory is not on the radar enough even to be interested or disinterested in. That's not something intrinsic to that model, it's something coincidentally in the particular group of people whom I know who would get into that theory. But I also think there is a certain regrettable difficulty for people coming from a certain background, what I am about to call "Christian scientism" (NOTE: PLEASE KEEP THIS TERM DISTINCT FROM THE SPECIFIC CAMP KNOWN AS "CHRISTIAN SCIENCE"; my use here simply means the attempted assimilation of Christian thought to the philosophical [often unconscious] position that I and others call "scientism," the belief that historical material fact is the base mode of truth and that scientific discourse is the base mode of all discourse) when they try to grasp questions beyond scientific realism and strict moral exemplarism (this is the hero of the film and thus he is good univocally and therefore this thing that he does is good and therefore this is a way you should act ... basically a very didactic focus ... one that can't be avoided in the way that humans process stories, especially when young, but also one that takes into consideration only individual actions and only on one plane, basically, it does for the meaning of a story what allegory does to the plot, which is to borrow it from another work, which can be useful, but is always pretty limited in how far its value goes). It seems regrettable to me that I might be the only one who would even have it on radar to look at the possibilities of symbolic application of the topography as a possibly pertinent factor when asking the question of the respective validity of these two topographies in the film.

In a sense, this could be put again in terms of the language of "appearances." In the scientistic perspective, even the best case scenario of the attempted melding with Christian thought beyond scientism, at best, if there are "appearnces" to be saved beyond mere material accuracy/consistency, they are not interlaced with the material appearances. Radical scientism will not even admit of any symbolic or emblematic or  metahphorical meanings at all (the whole best role of literature is always to present stories in which science always leads to something better ... propaganda rather than literature .. .actually, to be honest, quite often it is mixed, but all the larger elements often have a fairly contrived feel of things only really understood in quote marks, as in "I'm not doing simply propaganda for science, see, I have some 'psychological characterization' in there, where he yells 'fuck' at her twenty-five times and then they have sex" ... that is a statement by such an author, a statement by such an interpreter would be "see, I do know about and look for more than propaganda, because I know that the gratuitous cussing and sex is really characterization").

But even in the attempts of Christian scientism, which admits of metaphors and symbols, the link between those and the literal meaning is never organic, that I can tell. There is always a sharp divide between the metaphorical and the literal, a strictly defined dualism. Something in conceived of as "happening" between them, but its a bit like how something "happens" between mind and body in Descartes's ghost in the machine. The thing that I advocate that I think neither radical scientism nor Christian scientism has is a connection between the literal and metaphorical/symbolist that is an appearance that also needs to be saved. Radical scientism can't have that because it doesn't even have any idea of the metaphorical/symbolic as an appearance needing to be saved/accounted for. And even though Christian scientism does allow the existence, they really only sort of halfway have it because they don't often define it as something that mush have organic connection to the literal, a methexis, a participation in it to even be what it actually is (for more on Reale's work on methexis in Plato in his project of "Plato's second journey," see the last chapter of Enrico Mazza's Mystagogy).  And so, while Christian scientism does in word save more appearances because it saves "metaphorical/symbolic" appearances, it doesn't (I don't think) understand those fully or accurately, and so they don't really save those appearances as much as they at first seem too, and possibly because you can't save them well without saving the participation, and the participation is the one thing they least save.

I'm not claiming I can do the job adequately ... I'm just saying that I think it is a step closer to the truth to realize that the project of analyzing literature means saving those three kinds of appearances, the literal, the metaphorical, and the participation between them (very much like soul as the relation between body and spirit), rather than simply the literal/material, as does seeking simply a model that explains the physical landscape or topography consistently. I think that mine/wiki's does even just that project at least as well, if not better, but it goes beyond (or, in the case of Wiki, has the potential to go beyond) that to explaining the metaphorical topography and its organic connection (personally I think the aspect with which I started this whole thing, the vertigo, which is a fear, is a psychological landscape that can be maybe the participation between the physical topography of the gravitationally inverted planes and the moral topography of the metaphorical possibilities [those arrogantly thinking that their up is the definitive up, when in fact they are the deprived ones, etc. might = assuming prematurely that one has the "right" take on things]).

I think that the older brother of the kids with whom I was watching it has the ability and the interest in such things, and even for those in that circle about whom I wonder if or doubt whether that could ever be the case, it's not a "fault" thing or a "virtue versus vice" thing on the subjective level necessarily. Such things do have the potential, as do all things of this type, to be that (virtue or vice or fault) in a given situation, but they don't HAVE to be that in any given situation and the assumption should not be made without solid evidence that there is a question even of intellectual honesty. I do think there is an objective "better"ness to being able to get not only the symbolic analysis itself but also the broader issue of the relations between elements such as topography and the thematic messages of a film, and the even broader yet question of Barfield's position that the idea of "accurate theory" underwent a radical shift in meaning in the scientific revolution when it became "THE right theory."

And it does sadden me some to see others laboring under the effects and fallout of scientism when coming to literature because it seems like a lot of mental and emotional is spent in trying to get the "right" answers that satisfy both aspects, "science" and "faith," when the whole problem may be the fact that both words are in quote marks that the person had foisted on them and then felt like they had to satisfy. It's a bit like the tortured labors some have put themselves through trying to beat "science" (meaning the scientism of the scientific revolution) on its own grounds without realizing that it will never work because its grounds are too shaky to support even scientism's internal coherence as a stated system, let alone coherence with the observed outer world ... but so much mental and emotional energy is spent in the endeavor. I mean, I spend a lot of mental energy in things like this blog, but then again, I'm bipolar II and hypomanic general thought patterns are an ongoing issue in life and always will be, so, like the hyper-active kid, I have a bit extra of that energy to blow off anyway. But some of these people have more than enough on their plate and to be getting on with without having to bear the burden of continually rolling the stone up the hill of trying to prove the (I would claim non-existent, and thus the Sisyphus allusion) supposed compatibility of scientism, which they probably got from people who imbibed it themselves unconsciously from trying to beat "science" on its "own grounds," with Christian thought. Maybe I'm wrong and they actually can get it but are aware of even further difficulties and, like Age's world, I am the one assuming I know the real broader "truth" when in reality I am the one living in ignorance underground (or maybe I'm just crazy about it all in the first place ... which is always a possibility). All I can do here is lay out what seems to me to be the case as best as I can.


[END NOTE: I should probably note here that I think that one of the reasons I am drawn to write on this movie on this blog, in addition to finding the movie very engaging in its imagery, is  the fact that I am lazy and a nice small-scale topography like this gives me the opportunity to talk about topography as symbolic without having to get into more serious big-ass ones like 1 Enoch's tour inside the earth (topography also gets used in one of the other two main second-Temple apocalypses, 2 Baruch, when Hebron becomes the new place with messianic significance because of its Davidic history, as the capital of his reign before he moved it to Jerusalem, now in 2 Baruch opposite corrupt Jerusalem, with Hebron symbolizing the marginal and [once populated but now] deserted place opposite Jerusalem's populated corruption). I mentioned C. S. Lewis's The Discarded Image above, and that book has heavy discussion of seriously enormous cosmological topography in the classics world as well as in Dante's Divine Comedy and other medieval works like Pseudo Dionysius's Celestial Hierarchies. PI is a much nicer smaller-scope instance on which to sort through some ideas ... and as I say, I like it alot ... and as I also say, I'm lazy.]


Addendum January 22, 2018

This is the same evening of the day I actually wrote this post, but at night after I rewatched (while on my elliptical machine) the found footage horror film As Above So Below, on which I have already done a post (but if you happen on the present post and follow that link, read the rest of this addendum before you do, as it has some adjustments). The thing I picked up in this watching of that film that I want to note here  us that it has a scene relating to visual maps versus statements of experience in dealing with actually navigating topography. The main character Scarlett is arguing with their French guide Pappilon about which way they should try and she is showing him the map and using it to argue for going the one direction, and he asks her something to the effect of "What does that map show you? Can it tell you which ones are caved in, or which ones are full of water? I am the one who has been down here!" So, that's another nice little example of differences of sources for knowing a topography for different purposes, as I was discussing above concerning Lewis's' comments on maps versus maritime tradition handed down and the making of a topography map for PI.

Now, if you want to check out that post on As Above So Below. You should read these adjustments first. (1) I was off on some of the sequence: she hugs her father's hanging corpse before she sees realizes that she is the stone. This doesn't bother me as much though because it simply means that she has made the realization of the confessional path early, maybe on a subconscious level, and maybe this is even the thing that makes her able to realize what it all means when she puts the fake stone back and sees herself in the mirror. I think maybe too that the way she sees herself in the mirror is important: her face is covered in blood from when she got pulled into the blood canal; you might even say "baptized in it," but so as not to get too over Christianizing things, what the blood symbolizes is the brutal experience of actually confessing/confronting; the her in the mirror, the one who is the true philosopher's stone, is the one covered in blood who has been through this hell (literally, in the Dante sense, having gone through the door that says "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here"). There is actually a lead up to the realization of the confession model in that, after Papi bites the dust (literally) but before all the shit starts really hitting the fan, when they first see the robed watcher go by and run down a side tunnel to hide, George tells her, "Whatever happens down here, the week in Turkey was the best week of my life" ... he "rectifies" things by forgiving her for leaving him in a Turkish jail while she pursued the lead. And that is the other lead up and tie out, that that language of rectifying is prevalent: it's what signals to her that she has to return the stone, and then when she comes back, while it is her kiss that heals the neck wound, in order to make the jump she repeats the line to them, telling them they have to rectify their horror by speaking it. I do think that there is something in her materially becoming a magician but I think that the message is that that can't be all there is: material control is not the highest good ... reconciliation and personal healing is. And notice that, while she is the magician, because she can heal George's neck and make the grabby hands disappear from the blood trench and all, she is not the ultimate magician, because she cannot herself simply make them survive the leap into the hole: they have to speak their horrors themselves, their traumas or sins, for that ultimate magic to happen.

(2) The other thing I noticed is a stronger Dante reference. Dante's Inferno begins "Midway through this course of life ..." In this film, in the materials they find on the tombstone in the museum (I think, or it could be on the bull in the Iran tunnel, not sure, but I think it is in the material on the back of Flamel's tombstone in Paris), there is a line about "midway between" that is a key in figuring out where they think the depths lie mechanically and all that, but what I think it really is as far as the film as a piece of literature is a clue to Dante being the interpretive model. I may have mentioned it in that other post, but if I didn't, Le Taupe's key line "the only way out is down" is pretty much straight up (or rather down) the Inferno and St John of the Cross's "The way down is the way up."

Thursday, January 18, 2018

Red Dirt Chiasm: is Emmy Lou Harris a Ring Writer?

Hope the title isn't too kitschy, but this is one of those quick posts for me of places where the line between exegesis and eisogesis is hard to discern for me, hence the question mark. It could be that I am reading this in and unnaturally stretching the material to make it fit, or it could be that I am accurate in seeing it there but that it is not consciously intentional on her part because chiasm is so hardwired into the human brain that it happens naturally with a good writer, or it could be that Harris is educated on this type of thing and does it intentionally. Whatever that case may be, I am going to argue that it is there.

So, for some reason, a line from the title track of Emmy Lou Harris's Red Dirt Girl album popped into my head, and so I looked up the lyrics to see if I was remembering it correctly. First of all ... man, can that woman write. Back when the ubran cowboy thing had just come out and her record company was pushing her to join the movement, she basically said "get bent" by her next album being entirely old time gospel (Angel Band), and ever since, when Nashville has been exemplifying Bo Burnham's mock country song (I loved Johnny Cash's and American Record's Billboard magazine full-page "salute" to the Nashville establishment when he won the grammy for best album in 1996 for Unchained), she has been been writing real stuff like Wrecking Ball, Red Dirt Girl, and Stumble into Grace.

So, here are the lyrics:

[Stanza 1: A]
Me and my best friend Lillian
And her blue tick hound dog Gideon,
Sittin on the front porch cooling in the shade
Singin every song the radio played
Waitin for the Alabama sun to go down
Two red dirt girls in a red dirt town
Me and Lillian
Just across the line and a little southeast of Meridian.

[Stanza 2: B]
She loved her brother I remember back when
He was fixin up a '49 Indian
He told her 'Little sister, gonna ride the wind
Up around the moon and back again"
He never got farther than Vietnam,
I was standin there with her when the telegram come
For Lillian.
Now he's lyin somewhere about a million miles from Meridian.

[Stanza 3: C]
She said there's not much hope for a red dirt girl
Somewhere out there is a great big world
That's where I'm bound
And the stars might fall on Alabama
But one of these days I'm gonna swing
My hammer down
Away from this red dirt town
I'm gonna make a joyful sound

[Stanza 4: D]
She grew up tall and she grew up thin
Buried that old dog Gideon
By a crepe myrtle bush in the back of the yard,
Her daddy turned mean and her mama leaned hard
Got in trouble with a boy from town
Figured that she might as well settle down
So she dug right in
Across a red dirt line just a little south east from Meridian

[Stanza 5: C1]
She tried hard to love him but it never did take
It was just another way for the heart to break
So she dug right in.
But one thing they don't tell you about the blues
When you got em
You keep on falling cause there ain't no bottom
There ain't know end.
At least not for Lillian

[Stanza 6: B1]
Nobody knows when she started her skid,
She was only twenty seven and she had five kids.
Coulda' been the whiskey,
Coulda been the pills,
Coulda been the dream she was trying to kill.
But there won't be a mention in the news of the world
About the life and the death of a red dirt girl
Named Lillian
Who never got any farther across the line than Meridian.

[Stanza 7: A1]
Now the stars still fall on Alabama
Tonight she finally laid
That hammer down
Without a sound
In the red dirt ground

Chiastic analysis:
The turn of the story is in stanza 4 (D) , the choice to "dig right in." A and A1 are the openings and closings in Alabama. In A, we meet Gideon, and in D, the crux, Gideon dies as a foreshadow of the statement of Lilian's death in A1: "Tonight she finally laid that hammer down." In C, we have the statement of the dream ("away from this red dirt town, gonna make a joyful sound"), and in C1 we have the statement of the death of a replacement dream ("tried hard to love him but it never did take," which is "just another way for the heart to break" ... the first having been the death of the beyond-Meridian dream of C). In B and B1, we have what I call the bipolar fates: The dream was to get beyond Meridian to someplace interesting ("up around the moon and back again"), but she never made it out at all ("who never got further across the line than Meridian" in B1) and he got too far ("Now he's lyin' somewhere about a million miles from Meridian," Vietnam, in B) ... that nice, happy Greek "golden mean" of seeing the sites and living someplace interesting but still being able to visit the old place, that dream of American suburbia (just the right mix of the rural and the cosmopolitan), that Anglican via media, just isn't possible for some of us: either we make it nowhere at all or we make it too far (and sometimes we do both ... but never the middle ground). And several of the key phrases from the progression pay off again in the A1 finale: the stars falling on Alabama, laying the hammer down (a nice John Henry reference too), the dream/lack of sound. Amazing song (the whole album is good too, most especially "Bang the Drum Slowly").

Friday, January 12, 2018

Mary Douglas's Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition

Intro

I can't write a whole lot on Mary Douglas's Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition beyond unreservedly recommending reading it. It's a seminal work in the field taken from a set of lectures she gave  at Yale in2006 or 2007.

By way of introduction, I will simply relate that I actually got around to reading it in full only recently, in preparation for being a guest on a mugglenet podcast on chiasm/ring composition in Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find them. And you can be sure that a link to that podcast will be going up on this blog and my Facebook wall and every other place I can think to put it.

These are not really fleshed out thoughts. They're just a few big issues that came to me while reading and then a list (by page number) of smaller instances that caught my eye.


For record, my posts on chiasm are:
Chiasm Basics
Chiasm in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Flesh, Blood, and Bone: Chiastic Bodies
Psychology in Harry Potter: a 3-4-5 chiasm
Clothes on the Chiastic Body in Fantastic Beasts
Music as an Analogy for Chiasm (and the idea of a body walking down the street)
Intersection of "Story Time" and Chiasm (including "Dream Think" theory)
(here is my original post on "Story Time" in Harry Potter [narrative defined as a "kairotic chronology"])

I also have material on chiastic readings of C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength and the 2017 Wonder Woman film.


Layered Chiasm

One of the highlights in this book is the amount of material she has on rings within rings, which is basically where I have gone with layered chiasms ... or at least in the same ballpark. The point that I go further than that is not really one of erudition and knowledge but of imagination, by which I do not mean to say that Douglas has no imagination or something silly like that. It's just that it's a particular imaginative move of mine to use the human body as an image for layered chiasm. I do not know of any ancient theoretical bases for this, meaning any sources ancient, medieval, or modern that have done any connections between human image as a metaphor for literature or stories or art and chiastic structure. I just think that the human body and form always work well as metaphor of what we as humans perceive intellectually (here is a somewhat dour reading of some other works along the line of weak or strong bodies; I should probably lighten up on the tone in places, but the basic substance of panning of Strike and Fury Road).

[I should be clear that, by using "image" and "figure" and like terms in this context, I am not talking about what she describes as a "figure poem," which is when dimensions of a particular image are represented in the structure of a particular work. She provides the figure poem structure as a thing that is completely other than ring and gives a particular example as a way of saying "I'm not just seeing rings everywhere, in which case you could say I might be imagining rings even where they may not be ... here's an example of how I tied another work out to a completely different structure." The example she gives is the book of Leviticus. Leviticus is all about the tabernacle, which has three areas: the outer court, which is separated by a veil from the holy place, which is then further separated by another veil from the holy of holies. And these areas decrease in size as they go. And so the first section of Leviticus, which covers laws applying to the outer court, is the largest. And then comes a brief section of text of a unique type representing the first veil. And then comes the section on the laws pertaining to the holy place, which is smaller that the section with laws on the outer court. And then, after another small "veil" text portion, the smallest section of all covers the laws pertaining to the holy of holies. This type of thing is NOT what I am talking about in speaking of the body as an image of literature: I am not finding big central sections that are a torso and then smaller sections that are a head etc. I'm simply saying that what the human form means to us as humans (meeting a person at the face or purely experiential level and realizing that there is a muscular and then skeletal structure underneath and then seeing the evidence of these in power and motion) bears on how we construct our own human communication, particularly in our literary construction of stories.]

But in going through her exposition on rings within rings (see it as one of her seven rules, on page 37), it may be that my layering them on top of the center (the same center to various rings within the main ring) may be unique to me ... not sure. My "layering" is definitely not the "strung together" type of rings within rings she talks about on p. 37. Mine would probably best be described, in terms of rings, as concentric circles. Even in her consideration of the Iliad, the central ring has demarcated boundaries from the legs (from the beginning coming into the center and going out of the center to the end) of the outer/main ring. Her structures can be accurately represented in a two-dimensional visual, whereas my layering really needs three dimensions. That isn't too say that mine is an advancement beyond what she does, just that it has different dimension, and it is definitely not to say "better" ... or even "good." Those qualitative judgments would be a matter for a further exposition (and may come in with a verdict of "bad" and "worse").


Historical Critical Method and Chiasm

A further point of interest of mine with regard to biblical studies is to read her book How Institutions Think. My interest in this is to see how the creativity of ring composition, which we usually think of as the product of the singular genius of a single author, or at least as occurring in a singular act of composition, might intersect with "trans-personal" or collective authorship (which is what the blurb for the institutions book points to), and particularly spread across an institutional history, to see if this can accommodate ring composition to the conception of source and redaction largely put forward in the Historical Critical Method of biblical study. I won't know if that is productive, though, until I read that book, and even then, it's a formidable intellectual task.

List of Minor Instances

P. 41: I like the guy who says rigid genrification is for novices. This is a sort of pet peeve thing for me. There are those, usually (in my own experience) people who are not actually studied in literary analysis, who like to look down on Harry Potter as below the "genre" of their choice, "adult high fiction" (usually they are fans of Game of Thrones, which I lost interest in about three chapters into the first one and never read further, but from what I can tell, you can get the main, and really only, point of the series in about 2 minutes of watching the dark and doom of the TV series). "Genre" is sort of thrown around like a magical word in the same way in which I have noted, in other posts, things like "logic" and "ethical" being thrown around as sort of nebulous magic words being invoked. "Adult high fantasy" sounds much more impressive than "Young Adult," and the importance of that fact is supposedly seen in the fact that those are "genre" terms ... a nice, fancy, educated, sophisticated sounding word that validates the speaker. In reality, some very good and creative and seminal literature winds up being works that break genre rules, and people who actually study literature know that it is a cardinal rule to be careful of making "genre" a procrustean bed, tortuously stretching (over-emphasizing certain elements that may in reality be minor) or amputating (completely disregarding elements that may in actuality be quite important) to make the piece fit the bed of the "genre" that you have decided it is. Genre is indeed in play as an aspect that must be considered in analysis, and it can often provide insight on tricky passages (e.g., how does the ancient genre of a vita [a "life," usually of a saint or venerated person] differ from the modern genre of "biography" and how might that explain this or that feature in a particular vita that seems anomalous if it is being read according to the categories of modern biography), but it should not be applied rigidly, and looking for places where the "rules" of a genre are broken, maybe combining two established "genres," can discover places of unique literary genius.

(On the side, I would also say that, with Game of Thrones and others, the "adult" part usually at least edges toward, and very often goes all the way into,  "adult" in our contemporary consumerist sense ... although, I do think that Jim Butcher's Dresden Files are strong characterization and theme, even though they do get quite racy at times; I question his level of detail and think some of it is gratuitous but it is usually in the service of a valid, and often strong, thematic point, whereas GoT and the like are usually just "we're adults because we can talk about sex," what I call the "titillation of sophistication" or the "sophistication of titillation," not sure which works better .. they're both true).

P. 46: Not sure what she means by Numbers following Exodus in the "canonical order" because even BHS (Biblia Hebraica Stutgartensia critical edition of the Masoretic Hebrew text) and JPS (Jewish Publication Society edition of the same) have it after Leviticus. But this brings me to an interesting thought I never had before about the Pentateuch as a unit and the theory of the priestly as final redactor: Leviticus is the crux of a chiasm, Exodus and Numbers are traveling books (they come to Sinai in Ex 19 and leave in Num 11), Genesis is the getting kicked out of a Land (creation) and the promise of a new land, and Deuteronomy is prep for entering that new land ... basically getting ready to be re-recreated, restored to the Garden.

(Michael  Coogan, in his intro textbook on the Hebrew Bible, covers a very interesting element in Jewish interpretation: The Decalogue in Exodus [ch. 20] is seen as completing the creation [actually, the fullest completion is the Temple, but this is a definitive and unique step in the line]: "Decalogue" literally means  "10-word," and so our traditions speak of it as "the 10 commandments" [as an interesting aside, there is no numbering in the original text and Jewish interpretation does differently than Christian: Christian interpretation sees the first commandment as "you shall have no other gods before me" and "I am the Lord your God who brought you up out of the land of Egypt" as simply a prologue to the whole set of ten commandments, whereas Judaism sees it as actually a part of the first commandment ... remember that this is the case and be this people to the full]. Jewish interpretation sees the Decalogue, the ten-word of Exodus 20, as matching the ten words of creation in Genesis 1, ten times when "and God said" is used in Genesis 1[the same exact verb and form, vayomar: third-person, masculine, singular, vav-consectutive-imperfect]. In Genesis 1, God created a cosmos through ten words, and in Exodus, God created a people, constituted them as a people by giving them the Law.")


P. 128: Goodman and Wittgenstein and Douglas's comments on the well-made suit ... sort of validates my use of clothing and body as imagery and the usefulness of that in examining chiasm.

P. 128-29: The idea of "repleteness" sparks an idea for me of "detective" clues: they are these the same kind of "internal cross-referencing," meaning that people who are doing predictions already have a little bit of an intuition about there being connections within a work?

p. 141-42: Bishop Gregory. This is what, when I finally get around to my large post on Tolkien vs Shakespeare, after reading the two books on WS as Catholic (one on his person/biography and one on his work), I will refer to as "mouthpiece literature." I will not mean it negatively, but simply as one among a number of ways for meaning to be present in a work. Rowling uses it to good effect with Dumbledore. Tolkien uses it with Gandalf sometimes ("and some who die deserve life ... can you give it to them? then don't be so quick to deal out death and punishment ... even the most wise cannot see all ends"). But Tolkien also uses what he calls "narrative art" in a way I don't think that you see in WS, and that if you try to make it fit WS, you come out with a religious writing bard who always does the same deus ex machina move and calls it "providence."

The essence of that post will probably wind up being (unless Captain Anglo-but-Catholic manages to surprise me and really blow my socks off with something) that I still think that the Tolkien perspective does have and is right to have a serious problem with a large impact of WS being the role of his work in a misguided placement of drama as the core of narrative art, whether that be through a focus of his own on doing exactly that, or a highjacking of him by modernism, or by his own focuses making him very easy to hijack thus, whatever the case may be (I think it is simply too demonstrable that things like, in Macbeth for example, the march of the woods and the charmed captain of evil tropes are completely devoid of any narratological symbolism and completely wrapped up in a psychological phenomenon of something like terror or the dramatic despair of the Macbeths).

The only thing that might change any of that would, I am simply guessing, not come from Captain Anglo-but-Catholic, but from somebody like John Granger or others who could demonstrate literary alchemical structuring in the plays akin to what they have hinted at as far as theories that the Globe Theater was designed on literary alchemical structuring. But alongside that narratolical shortfall, I will examine at least "mouthpiece" as a way to have meaning, and in the fifty pages I have read of the first of Captain Anglo-but-Catholic's books, the primarily biographical, he has had at least one good example of morality presented through a character of whom the author obviously takes (and can be easily read by even a popular audience as doing so) a stage-affirmative stance, which is how I would describe "mouthpiece literature" (although sometimes it can be done in the via negativa, such as the condemnation of "not speaking word" done in the fact that the person who says "I will never more speak word" at the end of Othello, Iago, obviously has stage-pejorative rating as one who incites murder). So I am guessing that the good captain can provide even more "mouthpiece" examples when I get into his book actually on the plays (but man is it going to be a long slog through his Anglo-triumpalism and conservative-market-ready heavy-handed rhetoric against the big bad bogeys of post-modernism).

P 142. On "the wrong kind of civilization" and an p. 125 on social Darwinism and the evolutionary model. This is, I think, pretty much straight up what I have referred to as scientism. I think that part of why we may have lost a taste for chiasm/ring is the linear-evolution thinking that goes along with scientism's reduction of "truth" to "historical" fact, or at least its idea that historical fact is the base mode of truth, and its assumption that scientific discourse is the base made of discourse (here is my post that probably best describes what I mean by "scientism").

P. 145: perhaps the cause of the postmodern skepticism is "knowing too much" ... my thoughts on Arnofsky's Pi (too much understanding will break the human mind).

Sunday, January 7, 2018

What is Prophecy? And Who Is the Messiah?

So, this is a "mystery" post. I have had it in my blogger dashboard in a draft with just one paragraph that is more of a hastily jotted list and, separately, the single word "Messiah" for a while, and honestly, I forget if I had any idea of purpose beyond that paragraph. But I am going to turn it into a bit broader thing by using it as an opportunity to write down in a concise way the base from which I always discuss prophecy. I'm sure I have probably mentioned it passing or in minor details in other posts, but this will give a chance to focus on in it in a dedicated version with the details filled out, from which I will then go into what I had jotted down on the Messianic prophecy in particular, which will give me a chance to group in some of the material on apocalyptic Judaism that I always wonder if I have recorded anywhere on the blog.

Prophecy
So, Rabbi Abraham Heschel was the one to make this formulation of prophecy (click here to see a cool picture of him with Martin Luther King Jr. and here to see and even cooler one [although, unfortunately, smaller] of him marching with King in Selma), but I would have to look through his two-volume work on the prophets to recall if he used the exact terminology I will give for it or not. I first heard the terminology from a professor while working on my MA, and I later became, on account of this and a few other things, somewhat disappointed in that professor, who has been a bit of a celebrity in popular-level publishing, which I guess is supposed to excuse one from keeping up to graduate class standards when teaching a graduate class for which a student is paying money by providing them with the sources of ideas so that they are better informed as they head out into the field.

While the particular alliterative terms I first heard from professor celebrity may or may not be from celebrity himself, and while broader forms of the idea itself probably go back much further than Heschel, it is Heschel who is known as the one to formulate it in concise and direct concepts: in the Hebrew Bible, prophecy is more about "forthtelling" than it is about "foretelling," and the true form of the latter is only ever the product of the former.

(SIDENOTE: Fortunately, I had a tendency to be quiet, so when a different professor in a doctoral class later brought the concept into a discussion, I did not blurt out "oh yeah, that is Dr. celebrity's insight" and look like a jackass and have to be corrected ... AND my professor in doctoral, who was also my adviser for coursework, did the thing right and gave the source ... hence my knowing it here  ... much better, yes? "I think this has been a very good experience for all of us, eh? Spiritually? Ecumenically? Grammatically?" to quote Captain Jack Sparrow, as long as we're talking about pirating credit for such an insightful formulation. END SIDENOTE)

 So, "foretelling" would be what many would think of prophecy ... the usual divination of material details of future events. "Forthtelling" is looking into a situation and seeing what is really going on. And the logic is that if you can see what is really going on rather than what interested parties involved want others to think is going on, then you can see the logical outcome: God said to keep the covenant and you're not (forthtelling) keeping the covenant, and that is why you will (foretelling) be conquered by the Philistines or the Assyrians or the Babylonians, as punishment by God; or God says not to oppress the orphan and the widow, but you are (forthtelling) oppressing the orphan and the widow, so again, you will (foretelling) be conquered.

As with a lot of things on this blog, I have a Harry Potter example to use to help explain in action but also to show how much has been worked into that series. When divination starts in year 3, Hermione echoes McGonnagall's opinion of divination as a wooly and imprecise subject, and in book 6, we get Dumbledore challenging the idea that the mere fact that the prophecy was made meant that it had to happen. Especially for the latter, it is what somebody chose to do with it, how they chose to act in the present, that was the deciding factor.

[SIDENOTE: Even though I have said it before in passing, I'll say it again here in passing too that I liked when the United State Council of Catholic Bishops made changes to the English translation to the Mass to get it back more to the senses in the original Latin and away from the "power" interpretation that had crept in. In the Sanctus, "Lord God of power and might" became the more accurate "Lord God of hosts" and, important to this post, in the Creed, "in fulfillment of the Scriptures" became the more accurate "according to the Scriptures," tugged back away from that fascination with divination (which was out of bounds at points in the OT ... going to mediums and such like). The Latin secundum means "according to," and that is more often in the sense in which it is used in the titles of the Gospels: Evangelium Secundum Lucam means the Gospel as recorded by Luke, not the Gospel as predicted by Luke. And unless some other concrete language is distinctly augmenting in the direction of prophecy and fulfillment, which it does not seem to me there is, secundum scripturas in the Creed should be taken simply in the sense of "as recorded in the Scriptures")
.
The Messiah
So, there is a lot that can be done with the Messiah, and I will bring some of it in here. But first I should put out the basic idea I want to put forward as the way in which the forthtelling and foretelling thing impacts the understanding of the Messiah: In the original setting, the Messiah was not a foretelling about a figure in the future but a forthtelling about God's faithfulness in the here and now. Originally, mashiach means simply "anointed one." It's primary usage as a term begins with it being applied to the king as duly anointed by a prophet, such as when Samuel first anoints Saul as king. When Saul is chasing David and David and his companion sneak into Saul's camp at night and the companion says David should kill Saul because, since Saul is seeking to kill David, it's justifiable self defense, David replies that he will not touch the Lord's "anointed one." In 2 Sam 7, the term takes on a more narrowed royal meaning: God promises David that there will always be a man from the line of David on the throne in Judah, he promises him an everlasting dynasty. And that man will be the Messiah, which is more of an ongoing office (the present legitimate Davidic king reigning in Judah) than a future singular personage. To quote professor celebrity, if it is viewed as a prophecy in the divination way, it was a prophecy that had an immediate fulfillment when Solomon took the throne, and then another when Rehoboam took the throne, and so on down to Zedekiah, who had his eyes gouged out by the Babylonians with the last thing they ever saw being the slaughter of his sons (which is a nice pairing with the Samson story as a nadir and Samson having his eyes gouged out [Joshua paired with Josiah and Samson paired with Zedekiah], probably an intentional pairing on the part of either the original single redactor of the Deuteronomisitic History or the second Deuteronomistic redactor in the exile, depending on whether the single redaction theory is right or the double redaction theory, or whether the DH theory in any form is right at all, etc. etc.).

So, that slaughter of Zed's sons brings us to how it gets from the ongoing present office to the single savior person that is "predicted" as Messiah in the distinctly futural projection sense of "prophecy." Zed's sons would not necessarily be the only ones eligible to succeed him to the throne. In fact, Zed actually succeeded his own nephew to the throne (Jeconiah/Jehoiachin, son of Jehoiakim, son of Josiah and brother of Zedekiah). Zed was the third of Josiah's sons to hold the throne, Jehoahaz and Jehoiakim being the first two. Jeconiah/Jehoiachin, the nephew Zedekiah actually replaced, was still eligible by Judah's standards, not having been killed when the Babylonians replaced him with his uncle on the throne of Judah (Judah at this time being a sort of vassal kingdom to Babylon), but simply taken into captivity in Babylon, the slaughter of Zedekiah's sons really is symbolic of the end of the dynasty. But Jeconiah/Jehoiachin is recorded in 2 Kings 25:27-30 as being released from actual prison in Babylon and given a sort of special status ... only remaining in Babylon and only really as far as what he received (VIP table), not with any ruling authority over anything. And this is the last that the Hebrew Bible sees fit to depict of that lineage. 2 Chronicles doesn't even include the release and dignitary status: it skips straight to the release of the kingdom by Cyrus the Persian after Persia conquered Babylon.

And the Persians did not allow a king. A "prince" was allowed, but looking at the records of the trouble Babylon had with Judah when it had a king and the collective experience of all suzerain empires when their vassal states had monarchies (the suzerain covenant treaty, which as a form going back at least to the Hittite empire from around 1600 BC to around 1200 BC, was a treaty formula for agreements between a singular empire, the suzerain "lord," and its vassal states), Persia decided that, since things always seem to run into trouble when you let them have a king, better not to let them have a king. That means no throne on which to have a man legitimately from the Davidic dynasty even if Jeconiah/Jehoiachin is still around or has had a son who is eligible.

So what is a faithful Jewish person supposed to think of a God who promises that there will always be a Davidic king on the throne in Judah and then lets the Davidic dynasty and the throne be wiped out? (Herod was no Davide; nor was he anointed by a prophet of the Lord ... that throne was not the same throne even as the one occupied by Saul.) This is where we get into apocalyptic Judaism, which centers around a set of events in the future that will be the last stage of this world, crossing over into the next, in which the promises made by God will be fulfilled.The principle is still that of "forthtelling" being the source of "foretelling," that God is faithful ... my emphasis on the present tense of the verb and that it has future tense implications. God promises (present of the text); God will fulfill (future of the text).

The promise was threefold: Land, Temple, King. This goes back beyond David in the Heilsgeschicte chronology of the Hebrew Bible. It goes all the way back to Abraham being promised the land (Gen 12) and then when, on the verge of finally entering that promised land, through Moses, God gives Israel the law that contains, as two prominent pieces, the law of the central sanctuary, a.k.a. the temple (Deut 12), and the law of the king (Deut 17 ... when I taught this material for undergrads, I called it the "no internet access" rule, no WWW: no building up Wealth, or Weapons [a standing army, symbolized by horses, particularly horses gotten from other kingdoms whose gods he will be tempted to ally himself with], or Women [taking many daughters of other kings as wives in political marriages, which would also entail religious inter-worship]).

[SIDENOTE: There is a lot in all this that goes into the reaction of diaspora Judaism to the formation of the state of Israel in 1947/48 and their slogans of "no homeland without a Messiah." If you don't have all three, then you don't have any. If God is waiting til the end to give any of them, then all of them are waiting for the end. And if the throne of Herod was not the throne of David, the political identity assigned by the United Nations certainly is not. A political nationhood connected to the religious identity will be given the way God gives it, not as determined by the UN. To be sure, there were practical motivations for the opposition as well, such as a fear that there would be backlash against Judaism worldwide in the form of persecution of one type or another, a persecution of a much greater percentage of Judaism for the sake of a handful in Palestine, but there is also a logic in the religious justification appealed to for opposition to the UN, a logic that stands on its own with legitimacy from within the Hebrew Bible. That's not my fight, and I have no right to make declarations on what should or should not be done, and so I am just noting the logic from within the text [although I will also add that: if you believe Donald Trump's  moving the US embassy to Jerusalem beginning at the end of 2017 is done out of any altruistic or virtuous motives on his actual part ... you deserve to be lied to]. END SIDENOTE]

So, what are you to think of God when the kingship he promised is gone and when the Temple he promised is destroyed by the Babylonians and then even the replacement (originally built by Nehemiah the layman at the direction of Ezra the priest/scribe, but become very problematic for some in the Herodian era) was definitively destroyed by the Romans in AD 70?  Does God not keep his promises? This is where you start to reinterpret what the promises must have meant, and the nature of the world in which promises hold starts to change.

The temple in Jerusalem is not the true temple. It is the truest in this world and definitely connected to the true temple in a way that no other thing in this world is, but it is not actually the true temple itself. It is only a model of it. The true temple is not confined to this world or even in it, and it has been seen by only the few to whom it has been shown in this world, such as Adam, Moses (who saw it on top of Sinai and built the portable tabernacle according to it as a model), Solomon (who built the earthly temple of Jerusalem according to it as a model), and "Baruch" and "Ezra" in the apocalyptic works known as 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra, who are both given tours of the true temple (to accomplish the same ends but by a different means, the "author" of 1 Enoch gets not a tour of the microcosm, the Temple, but the macrocosm, the universe ... the word "cosmos" for universe is actually connected to our usage of it in words like "cosmetic" by way of ancient temple practices: usually there was a surface element [like our "cosmetic"] on the walls in temples, sometimes canvas or sometimes paint on plaster or other things, depicting the heavenly bodies and natural elements [our "cosmos"]).

The same thing happens with the promise of dynasty. Like the true temple, it has gone into hiding for a bit. But it will come back as a last blast in this world, the Messianic age, a time during which the king returning from hiding will be preparing to conquer and lead the righteous into the next world, an age that is sort of a bridge to the next world, but also one in which, until the Messiah conquers, is going to have some pretty heavy tribulation for the righteous. And that is how we get to the Messiah as the single person expected in the future as opposed to the present succession of holders of a currently ongoing office (at least in broad strokes). That's how we get from forthtelling to foretelling with the Messiah ... or at least that's how it seems to me that it works.

Saturday, January 6, 2018

A Word, A Look, Mr Babadook

This is on the 2014 horror film The Babadook.

There is a review of this films Tim Teeman on December 19, 2014, in The Daily Beast ("Grief: The Rea Monster in the Babadook") that says some things about this film very similar to what I am about to say. I came up with my reading on my own and in dialog with my brother, but I take the fact that I/we hit on the same things independently as did Teeman as further support for saying they are clearly what is going on. I'll note where things that I discuss are also discussed by Teeman. The Wikipedia page on the film lists, among other resources, an interview with the screenwriter and director, Jennifer Kent: Ryan Lamble, "Jennifer Kent Interview: Directing The Babadook," Den of Geek (Dennis Publishing Limited), October 13, 2014.


I'll start by saying that Essie Davis does an amazing job with a really tough role. I can't imagine the psychological gruel that acting this role must have been.

The next thing I will say is concerning the place of this film within my interests in some kinds of horror. And here is where I put the *SPOILER ALERT* tag. I'm interested in the film in part because it is the clearest instance I have seen of distinctly psychological horror. The babadook is not objectively an external entity, but it is external to her in a sense. It is an element of her psychological experience that has concretized beyond her control. It acts as an external protagonist (it has to enter her from the outside at a particular point in the film, when she is laying in bed and it attacks from the top, entering mostly by the mouth, as it exits by the mouth in vomiting in the climactic scene), but it comes from her psychological experience.


Main Analysis:

I'll begin the main analysis by noting my theory on the origin of the name. I've not read the interview with Kent, so I haven't had any confirmation of my theory, but I will note that the theory is my own in that, even if it has been put forward by others elsewhere, I did not get it from them. It came to me on my own. The "baba" in the name definitely has voodoo type vibes, butressed by the presentation of the babdook (especially the hat, but also the big bulky cloak, reminds me of specters in graveyards with New Orleans funeral parade horns in the background and not far off from the oogie boogies of the Louisiana swamps). But my theory is that the most core source of the name is sounding like the word "dybbuk." A dybbuk is a name in Jewish folklore for a spirit that has departed but not gone on to any better place, instead hanging around the edges of this world disgruntled and growing malignant. In its malignancy, it looks for a way back in, usually through possessing somebody. There is a 2012 horror film called The Possession with Jeffrey Dean Morgan that centers on a "dybbuk box" as a container of a dybbuk that, after the box is bought at a yard sale, possesses his daughter. I don't recommend the movie; it's not really that good in my opinion. Rather, I mention it here because it was from 2012, just two years before Babadook, and so dybbuks were floating around in the horror world as a theme. There was also a 2009 film called The Unborn (which I also don't really recommend) with Gary Oldman in it that specifically involved a dybbuk.

But The Babadook is not about an actual dybbuk. As I said, it is a psychological "entity." But it does at a couple of points take on the physical form of the only departed person involved, her husband who died in the car wreck on the way to the hospital for their son to be born. And so this element of departed that would be an allusion if I am correct about the source of the mane (to be reminiscent of "dybbuk" sound-wise) fits with the film.

The real thing about the departed is the grief at the loss, which is what the babadook concretizes, and as I said, at a couple points in the form of her husband, and during the rest of the film as the big bogey man. (Teeman definitely identifies it as the grief, but I'm not sure if he adds the element of it concretizing around the persona of her husband ... we both say it's grief at the loss of the husband, but I forget if he says it is actually the babadook taking form as her husband; of course, it would seem fitting if he did, since the husband form is doing things only the babadook would do.) So that is the biggest thing, the identification of the babadook as the concretization of her grief.

To this should be added that Kent has definitely said that the film is a woman's film, a film on women's issues. The grief involved is not simply more general grief of losing somebody, but the grief of a woman losing her husband young and now a struggling single mother. I think that the film holds meaning for grief of loss of a loved one in general, but it is also true that it goes into this in a very particular way.

It can also be a film about feminine issues beyond the specific instance of grief on which it focuses. Being a mother is something that, as a male, I will never understand experientially, and it is significant here that the film was made by a woman. Even as a man, I know from listening to others that there can be a tension between the attachment of the mother relationship and other relationships. It's simply a fact of life, and one that it seems like Kent purposefully explores in the film. Especially even a single mother who had not lost a husband in this way would have these tensions.

But she did lose her husband in this way, and that happened on the way to have her son, and so that yields the next major point: the babadook sees the son as an antagonist. The book specifically states the killing of the son as a key part of the babadook's project, but the theme is probably seen most clearly in the fact that, when the babadook takes the form of her husband, the thing that it consistently and persistently asks is to bring the son to him.

So this likewise brings us to the "raciest" part of the film, which is also the clearest exposition of what is the specific grief for Amelia, which is the loss of physical intimacy with her husband. We are not talking about a widow who lost her husband, say, in her late 50s, after menopause, when their sexual relations would have taken on different manners. We're talking about a woman in her 20s, young, on her first child. It's not some gratuitous idea that, at that age, they were hot young things going at it like rabbits. It's that her life as a whole, what she would see herself as doing in life, which is having a husband and starting on a family, has sex as not just a regularly recurring activity, but as a primary way of relating to her partner in this endeavor of her life. It's a regular part of her way of living and processing that life. The way it is ripped away is on the same level as if you took away her voice and her ability to talk with her husband about what is going on for her in her day-to-day life.

The scene puts me in the mind of two scenes from other stories, one a film and the other a book. The film scene is from The Brave One, in which Jodie Foster's husband is killed in a mugging in Central Park. At one point she has a sort of vision/memory scene in which she sees his reflection playing guitar in the glass of a door, and she says to him, "you left a hole inside of me." The book scene is from Chaim Potok's Davita's Harp. Davita is the little girl who is the first-person narrator, and her father, a feisty liberal journalist, dies in the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish civil war in 1937 (the Picaso painting surfaces a couple times as a motif, as does the name of Picaso himself in Potok's two Asher Lev novels, or at least the second, The Gift of Asher Lev). At one point in the novel, Davita sees her mother through the bedroom door that has accidentally been left ajar, standing naked in front of a full length mirror. The action is not conclusive, but that is mainly not to be gratuitous. And adult knows what she is doing as Davita hears her whisper her father's name, especially if an adult reader takes into account that this is a woman who, like Amelia in The Babadook, lost her husband young, at an age when full physical intimacy would be a central and regular aspect of their relationship.

And so we come to that "racy" scene, which really isn't that racy actually. It's definitely not done with a gratuitous level of nudity: the covers are pulled all the way up to her neck. You see something get chucked out the side at the start, but it's too quickly even to tell the style; and you see her grab something, and it doesn't look to be an anatomically mimetic one of those, and again, the shot is so brief that that is about all you can get. The main thing that relays any "action" is the facial expressions.

The real core of this scene is how it ends ... the son comes bursting in before completion, I think complaining something about the babadook. Just as the birth of the son interrupted her physical life with her husband (and here, this could be extrapolated to some degree or another to a mother even in the regular run of things not losing her husband or being single: One friend's wife joked once, not disgruntled, just joking around, but still ..., that "you think you're gonna get your body back after the birth, but, nope, then there's nursing"), now the son himself interrupts what for her is probably not just "stress release" for the normal stress of life, but a coping mechanism for her grief at this very particular loss.

Now, in connection with or explanation of the denouement/resolution, we come to a literary element and the significance of the line "you can't get rid of the babadook." The setting of the story is coming up to the son's seventh birthday, which has never been celebrated on the actual day because it is also the anniversary of her husband's death. Seven is a significant number. It is especially significant if I am right about the Jewish source of the name, but even if not, the use of seven as significant is too well-attested to deny: Tom Riddles asks, "isn't seven the most powerfully magical number," in Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince; Samara always kills in seven days in The Ring because it took her seven days to die; Kevin Spacey "preaches" on the seven deadly sins in Seven; and the list goes on and on. In the Jewish background especially, seven is the number of completion. And that is the real question of the film: will they make it through the completion of the grieving process; will they make it through anniversary/birthday number seven? Or will her grief consume them first (the babadook indicates in the book that it knows full well that killing the son will not assuage the grief ... the final sacrifice will be herself). And they do make it ... and the son's seventh birthday  is the first that they celebrated actually on the day.

But having made it through the grieving process does not mean that the grief goes away, or even that it loses all of its terror and becomes all some warm nostalgia. You can't get rid of the babadook. And so it lives in the basement. And they collect slimy and grubby things from the dirt in the garden and she goes down and presents them to the babadook. And she does not sit down and have a nice conversation now with the babadook. It roars in her face, and she looks terrified. And then she tells it that it is ok, and it retreats into its dark unseen corner, and she and her son go on with life. But you can never fully get rid of the babadook. There will always be the hauntings ... in a word or in a look. There will always be things in her son that catch her off guard by reminding her of his father.

It's in a word
It's in a look
You can't get rid of the babadook.

(Teeman also hits on this "living with it" aspect.)


Postscript: The LGBT issue
I hesitate to write on this, but basically it's an instance of hijacking, and I am sorry to be so negative, but also an instance of how unthinking humanity is and how easy it is to eisogete ... and to bully (see tumblr exchanges like this recorded by Huffpost). I'm sorry, but this is a bit like the flipside of the confederacy idiots thinking they are actually saying something because they are using big words like "tradition" and "heritage." You start with a preconception of some broad general lines into which you could fit various things and then fabricate connections.

Babadook as LGBT is a phenomenon very similar to the "Dumbledore is gay" thing. First, I argue, JKR's statement morphed from honest to political in the actual statement itself: I think that "I always thought of him as gay" was an honest "hmmm, how to answer this because this asker obviously thinks of him as would have pursued girls and I based his personality on people I knew or knew of who were gay, so how do I answer this," which does not necessarily entail a definitive "DD was gay" (I kind of despair of talking about this because trying to make any headway on that issue with somebody already decided to see him as gay is like trying to get a Trump supporter to have even the faintest sliver of recognition of the so-evident-that-it's-almost-self-evident fact that Rush Limbaugh is a slimy pig), but "If would have known that would be the response, I would have said so sooner" is the point at which I think it turned to "I can make some political capital from this" (the capital in this case being positive reputation as having contributed to the specific issue of gay rights), and from there it went (in a later twitter exchange with a fan) to basically, between the lines, accusing a teenage fan who seemed to be honestly asking of homophobia (which, in this day and age, is tantamount to calling somebody a rapist), WHEN IN FACT, basically the very position taken by the teen fan was stated by an actual gay rights activist in Time magazine the week after JKR made the famous Radio City Music Hall statement: John Cloud basically said, thank you, we'll take all the support we can get, but it would have been better if you actually wrote him gay. (http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1675622,00.html: you have to have an account to login and read it all, but it ends with something akin to "makes one wonder if you might as well have just left the old girl in the closet").

Other things revealed in Cloud's reading, though, I think bear out the reason why treating works solely for one issue robs the work. He asks if it would have been so much to ask, say, to have the obviously gay styled Blaze Zabini ask the aptly named Justin Finch-fletchly to the Yule Ball. Asking this completely misses and then obscures one instance of the prejudice issue that JKR has going on and that is a part of the whole ensemble of Slytherin bigotry characteristics: to Slytherins (Zabini's house) Hufflepuffs (Flinch-Fletchly's house) are utterly contemptable, and a Slytherin would not be caught dead asking a Hufflepuff out in any context, straight or gay. I can hear the fan boys and fan girls firing up at my saying that and marshaling a battery of scoff at my complete cluelessness on the series, because everybody knows that it is Gryffindor who is the sworn enemy of Sltyherin. True, to Slytherins, Gryffindors are worthy of violent hate ... but Hufflepuffs aren't worthy of even that. To those who seek self glory, like Slytherins, those who anonymously work hard, like Hufflepuffs, are disgusting. The evidence for this, and for the idea that it is an important issue for her, comes in the first encounter Harry ever has with Draco, even before the school year starts, in Madam Malkin's robe shop: Draco says "can you imagine if you got put in Hufflepuff? I think I'd leave." His inherited bigotry and pride get displayed in ridiculing Hufflepuff ... not Gryffindor.

Cloud's reading misses things like this, just as explaining DD's gravity toward Grindlewald by a sexual attraction that, as Cloud notes, shows no actual presence on the page, robs the explanation that is there on the page and makes the character compelling: GG had a fire or rashness that appealed to DD after he was imprisoned (he probably feels) in his hometown taking care of siblings because of what some little muggle shits did that sent his dad off in a rage and off to Azkaban and messed up his sister's head such that she accidentally killed her mother ... a fire for glory and for payback.

 [SIDENOTE: Just as an example of the laundry list of fallacious evidence for Dumbledore being gay: if, as some have argued you should, you take the evidence that his eyes are always twinkling as a signpost of his orientation, then you have to assume that his father was living a lie as a man in a heterosexual marriage with children, because in the description of his father in the picture in Skeeter's book in Deathly Hallows, Harry thinks that he can see where DD got the twinkle in his eye, from his father. END SIDENOTE]

And all that roundabout on the issue of Dumbledore being gay (in addition to being working in something I had thought to do a dedicated post on that I think I never got around to) is to come back to saying the exact same thing about The Babadook. I would argue that, if you turn Babadook into a standard for something that is not even on the page at all, you rob it of the things that Kent actually has accomplished as a piece of psychological horror that explores a very real issue of feminine psychology and more general psychology on the issue of grief. You've basically just hijacked a piece of art, and that's it. All you have done is to prove that gay people can steal like anybody else, just as somebody else could come along and demonstrate that gay people can murder like anybody else.

Oh, the Rhetoric You'll Know:

Oh the place you'll go! Oh the rhetoric you'll know!

This is a post about forms of rhetoric unconsciously used in the modern world. "Rhetoric" is technically persuasive speech, but these instance are on the border of speech. Two of those I will list are speech, but one of them is simply the used of a person's name and the other is done through the connotations latently evoked by one word, and the other two are visual, physical-performative, and non-verbal.

But first let me address the larger issue of rhetoric and why I write a post like this at all, which can seem rather negative. In fact, in academic terms, (mostly) conservatives would accuse it of being a "hermaneutic of suspicion" (a big, bad bogey man for many "brave defenders of of object truth" [who themselves wind up being pretty subjectivist at times], a bogey man [meaning you] who accuses everybody of always being twistedly self-seeking and says that there really is no love in the world and that it is an epiphenomenal illusion), and using psychological terms, those who gain by the rhetorics discussed (or more likely those who neurotically wish not to rock the boat with the higher ups, so that the higher ups still gain but don't have to get their hands dirty doing it), are going to accuse of paranoid delusion (although they will do it in "I'm saying this out of interest for your well being" tones like the DD, Withers, in Lewis's That Hideous Strength).

But the fact is that, despite the centuries-long attempts of some types to conform Christianity to gnosticism and despite modern American Evangelicalism's secret lust for logical positivism, the faith still has room to accomodate actual psychology, that (contra gnosticism) marriage of body and spirit and it still recognizes that positive propositions and denotations represent only one aspect of language. And it also remains to true that, as human beings, we are often scared, while at the same time, like some animals (a horrific thought to some, that we might share aspects of animal soul), we can smell the fear of others, and that, without paying attention to these issues specifically, we will probably unconsciously take advantage of their fears through some of these forms of rhetoric ... at which point, if we manage to beat them down, like Jack Lucas in Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King, we will pop in the tape of Edwin saying "OK Jack" (because the real Edwin has been dropped off the line after being psychologically beaten down too badly to answer anything) and go off telling ourselves and others that we "won." When we do that, it might not end up in the pent up lash back being a shotgun in a nice bar, but that doesn't change that we have still done pretty much the same thing. (More often than not, when attempts don't work because the intended victim has a healthy sense of self and some native capability for processing things intelligently, the "plan B" is to engage in conversations with others about how sad it is that the person who refused to play victim is enslaved to their erroneous ways of thinking, or some such terminology, all said of course with the greatest performances of humility [although never admitting that they themselves may be in the wrong ... it's always a very humbling experience for them to have been chosen as uniquely gifted interpreters of reality] and genuine "charity" for the other person ... I'm being a bit sarcastic here, but I have heard some seriously melodramatic conversations in real life, such performances that make Donald Trump's tweets seem positively placid).

Does that mean that that is all there ever is to any human interactions? No. But I think that it does mean that when you deny that these things exist at all (as many conservative Christians do ... at least that they exist universally as issues ... they will admit that the "liberals" have this as a problem all over the place, but it's absolutely and decisively not a problem in their own set), you give them an in to being more powerful because unmonitored. I have long held that it is possible for a person to decisively win an argument without getting one inch closer to discovering truth about a matter (and probably getting further away from it).


So, here they are:

1. The rhetoric of the first name. If I am in a room and talking to you and a couple other people and I say something that I want applied only to you, then using your first name to signal that has a legit function. But if you and I are having a conversation with just the two of us and I use your first name, especially after the conversation has begun, then unless I am a woman who is in love with you and saying ti because I like hearing the sound of it and looking in the eyes and all, there is a pretty good chance that there is some of this rhetorical bullshit going on. It is a way to talk down to a person. The hope is usually to shock the person into "oh my gosh, they're talking to me like I am a child, so I must be being childish ... I need to do what they say." This works on the insecure to avoid any need to provide actual sound reasoning, and that is what somebody who uses it is probably unconsciously hoping it will do.

2. The moral dimension of "admit"adapted in "as you admit." This is kind of a transference of weight from one realm to another via an equivocally used common term, in this case, "admit." One can admit that one things more likely to be objectively the case than another. However, you also admit failings and weaknesses and sins. The use of this is usually unconsciously sort of a gravitational effect. If, by tone and performance, one can get "as you admit," while spoken of a non-moral issue, to latch into the core of moral emotions, then the mark can probably be manipulated into feeling the same moral compulsion concerning the objective matter being discussed.

3. The rhetoric of the exasperated sigh. This is a melodramatic sigh that implies that the sigher is getting exasperated because your silliness is draining them by having to spend so much energy on it. I think you're supposed to feel two things from this. First, your supposed to fear that others will see this effect and then see that you are wrong" "oh no, if they're this exasperated, I must be being silly, and the sighing is also visible to others, so I might get outed as being silly ... I better recant." And second, you're supposed to feel kind of guilty for wasting their time ... so you kind of owe them conceding that they are right.

4. Facial rhetoric: This comes in two forms. But also, by the by, I think they are on the same lines as what is described in prophetic books in the Old Testament (particularly the "minor" books like Habakkuk) as "shaking their heads" at the prophet, basically like Draco making the loony signs with rolling eyes at Harry Potter in Prisoner of Azkaban after Harry feinted on the train from the dementor.

A. The "saving you face" face: eyes semi-popped out and to the side avoiding eye contact in a comical "saving you shame" sort of way = "dude, I'm trying to save you face here by giving you some space to back out because it's obvious you're wrong and making a fool out of yourself by saying what you're saying because it is self-evident that you're wrong" ... to which the response is supposed to be an abashed but thankful-for-the-second-chance retraction, when really the response should be "um, excuse me, you have to demonstrate your logic like anyone else, you don't get to declare ex-cathedra what is self-evident, my dear little self-made pope."

B. The "good-natured" (but actually condescending) incredulity face: Eyes, narrowed, furrowed brow, with slight smile of "you know that can't be true, it's just not sensible, it's not credible, come now, I know you recognize this? I'll smile playfully so as to give you the out of 'was just kidding,' but also, if you persist, observers will see it as being charitable on my part when you're being sort of a loony." And, again, the response is supposed to be an abashed retraction with a sigh of relief at the person's good naturedness in not judging you for your obvious silliness and a willlingness to get on with the business of accepting their wisdom, when really the response should be: "Um, excuse me, what exactly are your qualifications for discerning what is obviously true or not in this regard? Can I please hear you discuss some of the core issues in this question so I can see if you have ANY clue at all how this particular thing works? Because I have seen the same expressions on a lot of people who, I later found out, were clueless, despite how sure they were of themselves."

Conclusion
With all of these, I feel like Professor Lupin in the shrieking shack toward the end of Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban, when Hermione says, "but Professor Lupin, that just can't be right,you know it can't," and Lupin asks calmly, "why can't it be"? When people use these rhetorics, they are often arrogantly convinced of their own rightness (often in the midst of delusions of being so humble), and they never "admit" for one second that it might be their perception that is skewed (my personal favorite among these is appeals to something like "the wisdom of the common man," and lots of quoting G.K. Chesterton's comments on common sense, while not actually discussing any reasoning at all, but rather unconsciously accepting the proposition that they are unique receptacles of some deposit of this wisdom of the common man, usually in some narrative in which their lack of formal education is the very thing that signals that they are such receptacles).

A lot of people in Christian circles will ooh and aah over the powerfulness of facial performances in films. But the second you suggest that they or the people they serve emotionally might be using facial or other performances with a real-world power in them (to manipulate), they accuse you of "hermeneutic of suspicion" and paranoia.

Addendum

All of those above I would call "performative" rhetoric except the "admit" one. The name rhetoric is hard to place, but in the end, I would class it as performative because they do not rely on the semantic content of a word in any way. The rhetoric of the first name relies on the referent, meaning you, but not on the semantic content, which would be like if there was some rhetorical impact of the content of the idea of a blackbird, which is what my first name, Merle, originally is, like the rhetorical effect of saying somebody is "admitting" something. So I will call these two classes "semantic rhetoric" and "performative rhetoric."

Another semantic rhetoric is what I call the "rhetoric of disappointment." Evangelicals and .. probably mainly because humans of all stripes love it. And once you learn to see through it, it goes to another level of what I call the "rhetoric of depression": you get so tired in your soul when you see over and over again this attempt to shame, and when you see that they actually believe that it works on you because it actually works on them, and then you realize that trying to make any headway in an actual understanding friendship is futile.

Another performative rhetoric is the "oh well" rhetoric, rhetoric of  resignation. The person has accepted that they cannot sway you and they are not going to try to shame you etc, they are will to accept things as they are (so charitably) ... but they're making sure by their performance of it that you know very well that it is a thing of resignation and that it makes them a little sad because it takes energy to keep up with your attitude in your wrongness. It's sort of a last-ditch effort to get all or at least part, an "if I can't get what I want, I will take what I can get" approach.