Emergent Theism

This is a short, basic-question-of-an-idea post just to get the thought out there. It winds up being not as short as I intended, but it's all stuff that interests me, meaning how it all connects in these ideas interests me (and note: a lot of the parentheticals would be footnotes if I were writing this out as a paper).

So, I have an MA in general Catholic theology and an MPhil (basically the PhD without dissertation and defense ... but that's a big "without," like half the degree, really ... I got a proposal passed and was trying to wrap up a draft of my intro chapter when I timed out) in theology with a focus in biblical studies with a concentration in Hebrew Bible / Old Testament. And now I copy-edit academic books and journals, among them biblical HB/OT. In 2016, a seminal HB/OT scholar named George Mendenhall died and I wound up doing a proofread for the publisher on a collection of his published essays edited by one of his longtime students, and his work on the Canaanite situation into which the "Hebrews" entered from the south interested me. I put it in quotes for his usage ... Mendenhall believed that there was probably a Moses who came north with a small group of refugees who, having quite possibly had a genuine theophany experience on their way north, became the base for a unification of disenfranchised indigenous Canaanites that became the "twelve tribes," with the name "Hebrew" itself coming from a Canaanite word for an outsider or fringe-dweller or pariah (a similar thing is true with the term "wandering Aramean" in Deut 29:5b in "my father was a wandering Aramean" as the beginning of a short poetic piece that may have been originally a cultic recitation stating identity with YHWH, with "wandering Aramean" being kind of like calling somebody a "gypsy" as a slam for being nomadic, reversing things by owning what was meant as a slur, now as a chosen sign of identification, like Hermione Granger's "mudblood and proud" ... had to work Harry Potter in there somehow, haha), and with the "tribes" really reversing the "inside–outside" relationship in which the city-states and their ba'als or lords were centers of ubermenschen-as-gods type power wielded for injustice against the disenfranchised, and with those power players and their cities now being the "Canaanites" to be thwarted and ruled by the "Hebrews/Israelites." I'm not sure how much I agree with the approach to historicity or what kind of historicity etc., but I will leave it there without answering those questions because what interests me is his idea that I have just described as "ubermenschen-as-gods" (the -en is the plural ending in German). It's not that Mendenhall necessarily thought that those societies thought "gods" were only ever a self-reflection by humans, like Feuerbach, or aspirations of certain humans, like Nietzsche: their may well have been conceptualizations of entities above the human level, but the distinction may not have been the way we think "gods" now, especially on the functional level of political power (one should read also a bit of Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances and his concept of "original participation" thinking in ancient cultures for insight on how those cultures may had some thinking other than either the pure-human immanence or the radical-spirituality transcendence categories in which we now think "gods").

Now, one of the long-standing questions in HB studies as an academic discipline before getting to examining it as the Christian OT is exactly how "monotheistic" it was (once it is the Christian OT, it's definitively full-on monotheistic in the terms we think monotheism now, or at least distinctively closer, and this "Christian OT" means also the Septuagint/LXX, the Greek translation of the HB commissioned by Alexander three centuries before Christ, which became THE authoritative version for nascent Christianity, and which was done in Greek language that had undergone shifts in thinking and meaning with the onset of Greek ontological thought some five centuries before Christ; I may have questions about the exact relations with and dispositions toward something like Stoicism, whether the disposition in the New Testament is negative or positive, but Joseph Ratzinger / Benedict XVI is absolutely right in saying that interaction with Greek thought is a core constitutive part of the NT and Christian thought, and the sort of conceptual seeds of the thinking was in the translation of HB into the language hammered out in Greek philosophical thought [of course, the real and full source of all of it, not just the conceptual rubrics, is the Incarnation], for instance the fact that, while it disagreed almost diametrically with the Elean idea of "nothing comes from nothing" [by which they meant that all change is an allusion], the first statement we clearly have of the idea of creatio ex nihilo in 2 Maccabbees 7 states it in language that was very specifically developed in the Elean school of thinkers such as Parmenedes and their statement that "things that are" cannot come from "things that are not": the Jewish mother says to her seventh son before he is killed, "if God can make the world from things that were not, he can raise you and your brothers from the dead" [paraphrase]).

As an instance of where people would debate the level of monotheism in the HB, while I was trying to take an entirely new line of inquiry involving using metaphor to tie the passage to theology of the land, the passage on which I was going to work, Deut 32:8-9, has been the subject of mountains of research and discussion about the level or type of monotheism in it, because it speaks of the nations being divided among the gods and Israel being the nation assigned to YHWH (whether a one takes this as the two verses positively saying that there was a god higher than YHWH doing this depends on rendering the fact that it simply says the nations were apportioned to the gods and then says Israel is the portion of the LORD ... not as clear as "El gave Israel to YHWH"). Most agree that, even in their earliest canonical forms of any kind, they were distinctly read as on the monotheistic end of the spectrum of what we would classify as monotheism (meaning, here: 32:8-9 may have originated in "polytheistic" literature, but once inserted into Deut 32, the Song of Moses,  even before that chapter was inserted into the canonical book of Deuteronomy, those verses became protomonotheistic simply by being incorporated into that chapter as the "Song of Moses" that is definitely protomonotheist). This idea of a protomonotheism goes by several names, such as henatheism [one highest, or even unique, god] or ethical monotheism [it began with "worship only this god"], and there are important shades of distinction between those terms, but there is pretty much agreement that, whatever trace elements of "polytheism" are left behind in the language borrowed to talk about YHWH, the Hebrew Bible texts in their canonical forms are some form of "mono" and not "poly." Genesis 1 provides a good example here. It has two elements that look like trace "polytheism": (1) "let US create man in OUR own image" and (2) the fact that the name Elohim is morphologically both masculine and feminine plural (the base is the name of the Canaanite high god El, then you add the fem plural ending -oth, and in Hebrew if you add another ending onto an original th [Hebrew letter thav] ending [Hebrew does this adding on of endings a lot: "im" = with, "u" = first person plural ending' "an" is a connector, and El is God, so im-anu-el is "with us [is] God"; ergo Immanuel = "God is with us"], the th changes to h [Hebrew letter heh] as the connector, which happens here because you then add the masculine plural ending -im, so El-o[t]h-im). But the canonical text is clearly at least protomonotheistic, because all the verbs used with Elohim, including "SAID let us create humanity in our own image," are masculine singular.

Combining this question of emergent monotheism with Mendenhall's ideas on the human power players as "ba'als," a term that originally means lord or husband but gets used as the name of a god or gods, my question is whether maybe it is not so much, or not just, monotheism that is new with the Hebrew Bible, but "theism" itself: the sharp distinction between human and "divine." Maybe the fact that the line is blurry between ba'als as human lords and Ba'al the "god" while the Hebrew Bible is often at pains to NOT blur the line between Elohim/YHWH and, say, Adam or Moses, or even say, David's son, the messiah, as the adopted son of God (this is the messiah as originally purely human: before the "messiah" became the one-and-future character in the shift to apocalyptic thinking in Judaism with the loss of the monarchy after the exile, but really coming into shape in the first century BC/BCE, the messiah was simply an ongoing office filled by a human, the present king from the line of David in Jerusalem; all the messianic prophecies had a literal fulfillment before Christ, fulfilled by Solomon and Rehoboam, all the way down to Zedekiah and Jehoiachin, although these last two did not live up to the calling) means that really some form of "theism" itself is new to the HB, what I have called in the title of this post, "emergent theism" (we don't get full-on thinking like this, or at least clear categorization and distinct conceptualization of it, until Greek ontological thought, but that doesn't mean that there can't be a precursor to it in a culturally different but still similar mode of thinking here).

One of the things that would interest me as an avenue of inquiry here is the heavy emphasis on the distinction of the divine from the human in the Pentateuch, particularly the cultic and holiness/purity material. One of the theories about the purity laws (particularly following on Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger) is that their logic is to emphasize the distinction between God and humans. One didn't eat bottom feeders like crustaceans and pigs because they feed on refuse, meaning decay, meaning dead stuff, and life and death are really supposed to be touched only by God; you don't eat blood, according to Lev 17:10-11 because it contains the "life" (Hebrew nephesh; it is stated here that part of the reason not to eat the blood in common life is that the blood of sacrifices has a special role on the altar, in the cultic life of the people); one didn't touch corpses because that is death; and menstrual and birth blood made a woman ritually "impure" because of their closeness to the generation of life, and life in its raw form is God's domain. All of these things were not moral impurity, and in fact  number of them are impossible to avoid--not just menstruation and childbirth for women, but one has to touch corpses to move them to burial if one doesn't want piles of bodies around to trip over. And ritual "impurity" could be cleared up in small, simple official sacrifices: outside of the ingestion instances, which one can control, ritual impurity was impossible to avoid but easy to clear up (but you had to clear it up before participating in the cultic life of the community again) ... the point of the system was to keep that distinction ever before the eyes of the people in these everyday ways of ritual impurity happening by touching the realms that are the purview of God and having to then get ritually clean (the idea, say, of connection between sex/procreation and the divine is not new, as this is basically what fertility religion does [whether or not thinking made it into concrete practices of temple prostitution is a debated question, but a number of the old deities definitely specifically symbolized fertility in the myths about them], but making a sharp distinction between divine and human in the connection is).

Anyway, the question idea of this whole post is whether the whole emphasis on the distinction between God and humanity, combined with something like Mendenhall's thoughts on the ba'als of the Canaanite city-states, makes the HB not just a system of emergent or proto-monotheism that came out against the backdrop of a world that was polytheistic in the way we think of polytheism now, as a belief in the "existence" of multiple "gods," but the emergence of a basic proto-theism in any form, mono or poly, the emergence of new thinking about the distinction of divinity from humanity. Admittedly, this is a VERY rough-form idea with a whole lot of ways to get off track from sound research and conceptualization and it would take not just a lot more work than I am able to do right now, but also a higher level of type of work. But the possibility does interest me ever since reading Mendenhall's work on the lords of city-states in Canaan as ba'als ... the idea that part of what may have been so unique was not just the emergence of monotheism, but the emergence of any "theism" as a clear distinction between divinity and humanity that defines the way we think "theism" in general.

[Note: It would take much longer to work it in here, but I did a paper in MA work on Gen 6:1-4 defending the pantheonic interpretation as not challenging monotheism, using some observations by Joseph Campbell (in the interview with Bill Moyer published as The Power of Myth) on basically what I call in persona thinking in aboriginal tribes to offer a hypothetical model of a reading that could be pantheonic in reference without being polytheistic in ontological or metaphysical belief because it was rhetorical against a real-world practice at the time basing itself in claims of "gods" procreating with humans  ... the point being that it's possible that the author of that passage even in its earliest form was not concerned with a question of "are we saying other gods exist," but rather, "when you hear these priests saying that their god has begotten a child with a woman, don't worry about whether it is only that the priest begot the child claiming to be acting in persona of the god versus some god actually doing it ... simply stay away from all of it ... that kind of behavior is what brought on the flood; whether the offspring, the nephalim, were actually incubi spawned by demons or actual sons of lesser-but-still-real gods or only despots who arose because a shaman got everyone to believe they were semi-divine, one way or another, whatever it was, that was what brought on the flood as punishment, so stay away from any of it, just focus on worshiping YHWH" ... basically, whether the "gods" "existed" or not, the heterodox practices did exist in the name of these gods, and the point is to stay away from those practices.]

[Caveat: I have to briefly address the issue of inspiration and the relevance of when I say things like "in the language borrowed to talk about YHWH" and talk about canonization as a long historical process, meaning the canonical version of a text being something that developed over time: that the arrival at a canonical text was a matter of a text materially developing over time always in a context of religious use, rather than the text being whole and static and then proposed and passed as canonical, like the enactment of laws in U.S. government. Even the NT has more compositional and redactional history than that, but particularly the letters of Paul are much, much closer to that idea of a static text that then receives canonical status (although the Christian idea is not that they became inspired at the time of canonization, but rather that canonization was God revealing through the authority of the Church that these texts were inspired from the start). So, when I speak of the HB having a long history of canonization involving a long history of composition of the texts in the canon, where exactly does the idea of divine inspiration fit into that: at what stage in that history of composition is the text "inspired" and on what basis? That last idea of "basis" means the role of the human author: I believe that there was a real Moses who had a real theophany experience and that what was communicated there was the author-itative base for textual formulation using borrowed language of the times and done by people in direct descent from Moses who "sat in the seat of Moses" in some way as a real institutional authority, which is not the same as saying that Moses actually composed the language itself that we now have, by hand himself or even by dictation. So, where in that "institutional" history between the theophany to Moses and our present canonical text does "inspiration" happen? I don't have an answer to that at present. But I am noting that it is a very essential question and have to admit it here and admit that it intersects the "rough idea" I have tried to outline here about emergent theism. I have a book on my shelf by James T. Burtchaell called Catholic Theories of Biblical Inspiration since 1810 that I have not gotten around to reading yet but would really like to read to delve into magisterial teaching on inspiration and what of it might bear on the historical-critical examination of the Hebrew Bible. I just haven't made it around to that yet. I studied what I would call the "original sense" in the HB, which is is not necessarily synonymous with the "literal sense" in the medieval system for Scripture called the "quadriga," which is about the relation between the literal, allegorical, tropological/moral, and anagogical "senses." The question here is how the development of the canonical shape of the original sense in the Hebrew Bible relates to inspiration, and I don't have an answer yet that I would state unequivocally, but I do want to admit that it is a VERY important question for believing in the Bible as meaningful to faith and present relationship with God and not simply as a historical artifact studied scientifically. But I also believe it is possible to make such critical explorations without having yet pinned down that answer (and, indeed, "the Word of God in human words" may be a mystery we never have a complete answer to, so requiring a completely satisfactory answer on inspiration before doing any historical research would mean that you never do the latter, but you need to do the latter when you believe that the word of God was given in a language from a specific historical setting and you have to figure out how to translate that language into the present language in such a way that you maintain the belief in both those halves: that it was communicated in that language as that language truly existed [that it was fully quasi-incarnational as the written record of the Incarnation and the salvation history it culminates, that the communication of that record took on the full flesh of that language's historical existence] and that we can have access to that meaning today as the ongoing locus of the inspired form of Scripture); you just have to admit that your findings will have to be coordinated with and in some way obedient to higher authority (while somehow also still retaining a proper independence for that science, the independence necessary to do its work but not the autonomy that divorces that work from the living power of Scripture in the ongoing life of the People of God relating to God ... not at all an easy feat, if even fully achievable in this life).]

So, anyway, that wound up being not so short as I hoped, but as with all the stuff I put on this blog, I'm attempting to both record and process a lot of the things I have learned over the years and idea I have had about it all and how different parts intersect.

Terry Pratchett Going Postal

I follow Terry Pratchett's account on Facebook (I am guessing run by his daughter now), and there was a link to some interview material and footage from the Sky1 production, so here is the link and what I tossed out on FB real quickly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zae-Tq73pQ8&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1WCoalyh3AZrt0ncBvRhShFyQycLG5lf4X2H8Au-vTME-akzGx_rRBeL0

Maybe even more a top contender for favorite Discworld book now. STP was even more prophetic than he realized here, as the USPS is now under attack by a swindler (the swindler in GP meaning Gilt, not Moist, who is a straight up, unabashed conmnan whose usual cons don't involve grandiose portrayal of himself as some paragon of "virtue" and who is able, when pushed, to turn what is good in the skill [the ability to encourage actual belief] toward a greater good ... our current president never makes it to that part of becoming about something nobler, and you would never catch him doing something like admitting his crime to a woman he is trying to woo by being actually honest for a change)
(But I'm not sure about the treatment of ADB ... the whole "naughty boy" has sexual undertones, and in the book, what made her character work so well is that she is so entirely a sharp-edged cynicism that worked as a complex and textured character because the genuine human shows through from under it and she isn't afraid for it to, because she knows that the waryness and no-bullshit insight and confident action are.also unmistakable .. you're never in doubt about her cynicism, nor that what drives it is the need to protect her love for her brother and her care for the golems .. and those things make her, on the page, I think, a woman who can also fall in love, but again protecting that ... one of my favorite lines, maybe in all the Discworld, is "she quite liked the bit where he was hanged and made him repeat it" ... on the sexual undertone of the whip in this scene, I don't think it fits with what is there for the props in the book, like the threat of the stilleto heel through the foot, which is simply a threat of sheer pain as deterrent to bull-shit and not some kind of S&M undertone [and STP throws in that nice pop culture reference of the kind he likes to do, in this case the Dirty Harry line: "Now, I know what you're thinking, you're thinking, 'could she press it all the way through to the floor?' And you know, I'm not sure about that myself"] ... the fact that it is something other than S&M inuendo of dominatrix heels is, I think, evident in the sheer adversarial tone [even-footed combative stance against an enemy on the same plane, not controlling domination] that follows it: "The sole of your boot might give me a little trouble, but nothing else will. But that's not the worrying part. The worrying part is that I was forced practically at knifepoint to take ballet lessons as a child, meaning I can kick like a mule; and you're sitting directly in front of me; and I have another shoe." ... btw, just as a plug for reading the book if you never have, Moist has an absolute effing awesome response later, when he says he will bankrupt Gilt and she asks how exactly he intends to do that, and he replies, "I've no idea, but anything is possible if I can dance with you and still have ten toes left. Shall we dance, Miss Dearhart?" ... it really is my favorite love story ever ... and an amazing piece of insight on the mysticism of virtue in a fallen world: the main target of a con like Trump's is actually himself, to be able to believe in himself as a strong and effective wheeler and dealer, and the rest of the world is just props, which is self delusion, but there is a mystical way to turn that unavoidable human foible on its head: when ADB asks who he is trying to fool with the good stuff he does, he replies "me, I think," and that honesty is what opens it to insightful portrayal of the project of believing in one's own ability to be good as a way to con oneself into actually being good ... and I am a huge fan of STP's use of dancing as a motif, recalling my suspicion that he is a T.S. Eliot fan, and he uses it in these wonderful odd places, like the dam-slam scene in Snuff when the captain's wife says, as the first surges of the dam-slam catch up with the boat, "if you don't learn to dance to the rhythm of the slam, you'll dance with the devil soon enough").

Politics and Culture: FB meme analysis #1: Bad numbers and bad logic

I wind up writing a fair bit in FB when sharing memes or responding in comments etc, And FB is a dicey medium on its own, and then there is the fact that the stuff you wrote gets lost way back in you timeline and is murder to find, but some of it has ideas and formulations I would like to keep more accessible, so I figure I will make certain kinds of posts in here. I already did it once with the interchange with my friend about the film Contagion. In some of these, it's necessary to the meme image up, so hopefully that goes off without a hitch.

Meme:

Comment:

Wow, it's gematria on acid ... only ... yeah ... it doesn't work on any level ... just insanity.
It's my job as a copy editor to try to make sense out of what people write, to guess what they intend to convey (the intended sense) from what sometimes is some very winding and twisting language on the page and then (1) assess whether the linguistic expression presently on the page is within the bounds of technical grammar and established conventions, (2) try it on for size reading (really, the first job of an editor is to be a reader) and see if there are any places that, while grammatically all right once you get them, make the reader jump through hoops to get because of poor placement of elements for flow (not just flow for a nice sound, or eloquence, but flow in parsing first-level sense in basic reading, before even getting to second-level sense like whether the argument works or whether the pieces of evidence chosen are relevant, which isn't my job as a copy editor .. although some knowledge of the range of such issues within a filed is helpful for assessing whether the sense will be discernible for the intended audience) or ambiguities from unclear antecedents or unclear grammar that needs the help of surrounding content to decipher (my general maxim is that grammar should reveal content, not vice versa), and (3) suggest edits that resolve any issues of type (1) or type (2). (There is also a tech side to my job of knowing the formatting conventions a publisher uses for citations and adjusting an author's citations to those ... and a tech side of providing Word documents that don't make compositors want to kill me). And I've also studied Judaica. And this sign has no sense beyond "hey there are numbers involved in something we don't like that coincidentally add to a number involved in something that's a current threat right now. But no hint of significance."

There is no proposition of causality. In gematria, a classic beginner-level example (you'll find it referenced in Darren Arnofsky's film Pi) is that, in gematria's assignment of numerical values to the letters in the Hebrew alphabet: alef = 1; bet = 2, daleth = 4, yod = 10; lamed = 30; mem = 40; so, alef + bet = av (father) = 3; alef + mem = im (mother) = 41; yeled (child) = yod + lamed + daleth = 44; both "father + mother" and "child" = 44; father + mother = child. The whole point works on the causal idea of "father + mother = child," the mechanics of which I certainly hope we all know as a real fact in life (the point of gematria is that the language in which The Holy One, Blessed Be He, has given us the Torah contains its truths not just on the level at which we usually do language, but on a secret structural level, an inner core that can be a path that the true student can follow to find deeper hidden meanings that aren't seen on the regular language level of the text, because the Holy One, Blessed Be He, is not limited to using language just in the regular way we use it ... this is a practice in Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, and its direct descendant, Hasidic Judaism, of which the Jewish man Lenny who does the gematria example in Arnofsky's Pi is a member). An example of a numbers game that might work in a recent context like this would be: the number of letters in Obama's name (5) and the number of letters in Clinton's name (6) add up to the number of letters in "Islamic State" (12), so Trumps "sarcastic" statement that Obama and Clinton created ISIS (their policies created a void that allowed ISIS space to form and gain ground). It's completely inane, but it is at least a discernible sense.

But there's no such idea in this lady's sign. Is it supposed to be that Obama's policy choices left gateways through which something like this could happen? What are those supposed to be? The sign doesn't have even the inane sense of my little ISIS number game above. All a sign like this is is a bunch of people who really can't think, just get a few basic things like addition, trying to couch their emotional flare-ups in something that looks like things used by people who think .
So, what is my point in this little excursion down analysis lane? Obviously this sign is crackpot and many conservatives still trying to maintain some sense of order while still supporting the party would admit this. But this sign is only the grossly exaggerated form of a very common tendency in conservatism in America. You will hear them use terms like, for instance, "logic" with no real concrete idea of what they mean by it. Really what they mean (although would have difficulty admitting to themselves that they mean) is that they have an emotional need to live up to some project set for them by their parents (or substitutions, if the rebelled against parents and now sail under another's flag, but the basic instinct really always goes back to the attachment to the parent in early development), who taught them to dislike liberals and evolutionists etc, and taught them to value the word "logic" as something held by the superior people, and so they gain a positive emotional experience from hearing themselves apply the designation "not logical" to liberals etc. ... which really has nothing much to do with the kind of thought employed by, say, very nerdy modal logicians who get excited every time they write "iff" (the siglum for "if an only if" ... modal logic is the branch of logic that deals with moods other than the indicative mood, particularly the mood of conditionality, closest to the linguistic mood called the subjunctive, which is best described as the mood of possiblity versus the mood of actuality, the indicative mood). It's obviously not the level of whackadoodle that this woman's sign is, but at its core, it's the same basic phenomenon, which was portrayed rather well in Kate McKinnon's parody of Laura Ingraham as spouting "feel facts," which "aren't actual facts, but just feel true" (like "Latinas can have a baby every three months" and "if you have fewer than five guns, you're probably gay"), and here, the feel is really the same one on which identity marketing and identity politics are based: it makes me feel safe (and not needing to be afraid of the chaos in human life) if I can please the people I view as my emotional protectorates by showing that the people we dislike are substandard (prejudice is always positive in the first instance: hating them is always a means to the end of loving us).

Contagion (flim; 4-25-2020 FB interchange turned into a review)

This post is saving a long comment that FB wouldn't let me post for length, but I had it penned and I would have put it up here anyway so that it doesn't get lost amid the many FB memes I post. I rewatched Contagion recently during lockdown and posted a link to youtube video of the musci and lyrics of U2's "All I Want Is You," which plays over the final scenes in the film, and what follows is an interchange between my friend Rob and myself about the film.

Me:
Can't stop listening to this song since I rewatched Contagion and the played it at the end over-top of Matt Damon's character setting up the prom dance for his daughter at home with the boyfriend who now has his inoculation bracelet, as Damon pauses looking at the pictures he found of his deceased wife ... they wrapped a lot up in that one scene about the struggle of being human.

Rob:
I agree. Those scenes were powerful n hopeful/nostalgic at the end of a pretty grim series of events!

Me:
Nostalgic but also, I thought, still painful and looking at character. I found the portrayal of Paltrow's character the most interesting on this watch. I think that one of the things that most drives Damon's character's reaction in finding the pics is the mystery of her doing what she was doing, because he works at being a good husband and father. And it's not really a moral or justice commentary on her action. I think it really is meant to be shown as a painful mystery. That doesn't necessarily negate any possibility of moral commentary being made on adultery, but the film is examining another point, or at least I think it is. I think that the whole way through, she has a kind of unfocused stare that bespeaks in modern life a quiet or masked desperation. I think that the whole way through her scenes, you see somebody who is not malicious, not saying things about what a loser her husband is, but somebody who is going through a lot of motions that your culture tells you you're supposed to go through when your company sends you on trips around the word: gambling at the casino, shaking hands with the chef, taking pictures with everybody, but always with this lack of focus that hints at wondering whether you're being a good "fulfilled" modern person, whether you're doing what you're "supposed" to do in these situations (I think you see that most in the blowing on the dice and things like that ... the "excitement" you're supposed to show when having fun in places like this, but always a little wondering whether you're getting it right) ... and then the same unfocused look (which Paltrow does well, and seems almost like a trademark of hers, just like everybody knows the pensive stare in the eyes of Harrison Ford that Abrams had to get him to break out of to do Han Solo again convincingly) and the same distant stare when she calls her old flame and the unsure "if that's a thing you would like me to do," that look of doing something because, well that's how things happen, right?, at least in all the modern stories you have been told. I think that what drives the final scene effectively is Damon's effort at rebuilding life for his daughter in the midst of the pain of the mystery of what happened with his wife (I've become a big fan of Damon's, he definitely has his stock characterness, but I find it pretty relatable, and what I really like is his choices of roles ... just recently rewatched Downsizing, which I think is an incredible commentary on the precarity and preciousness of life ... and rewatched Adjustment Bureau, which of course has the always-good Emily Blunt ... I think something about his sensibilities breaths some life into places you usually don't think about it too: I like SNL's political commentary and some of their individual players' characters, but there's also a good bit of stuff in which they get stale, and I noticed that, when Damon hosted, the whole thing felt fresher because some core human thing got injected through things like his Christmas skit with Cecily Strong and his being the finally revealed "Tommy" from the Weekend Update's recurring character "Angel, the girlfriend in every boxing movie" ... and the whole thing he has going with Jimmy Kimmel is among the most creative parodies on late night and has really had a staying power as a gag [although I didn't like the "who's the father?" one at all ... the topic was very morbid fascination]).

Rob: 
 I think u r correct in that the movie doesn’t really comment on g.p.’s character’s moral choices. I’m not sure if the influence of the modern world is the culprit behind her character’s actions. I really think it is more the case of a person putting their own desires over the commitments to others she had made. Good old sinful impulse at work there. When I was married, I was the stay at home husband taking care of young kids while my wife enjoyed a high profile job n travel n all that stuff. I think Damon’s character deserves better than what he got. In the midst of all the chaos, he remains true n steady, parenting the child he has left through the worst. Steady, faithful people aren’t often painted as heros, but that character is a hero to me! 

Me:
Oh, I definitely think he's a hero, and I definitely think he deserves better. And, as I say, I don't think seeing this other side precludes examining the story for whats there on a justice side for his character and maybe even a moral side for hers. But I think the commentary I'm thinking of on her is, I guess, not so much about whether the modern world is the influence that causes, but more about her as a sort of emblem or representative of humanity in the modern global world, which I mean in a little bit different way than metaphorical symbol but maybe still a little bit like it (I spent waaaaay too much time on metaphor theory in relation to other figurative language when doing comps). I think part of what the film examines is that, in our globalization, we are a bit in over our heads. We have ideas like "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" because we still think of the physical distance between us and Vegas like a safety buffer (ironically, while we keep it in mind in hoping it's a buffer, we have also become alienated somewhat from our own embodied nature through the speed of travel, it doesn't register with us that a thousand miles is a thousand miles because of how quickly we can cover it ... heaven help us if we ever find a way to make the Star Trek teleporter more than just fiction; even if the material side works, we're going to wind up the psychological version of Jeff Goldblum in The Fly), and THAT becomes sort of an "if you build it, they will come" in the form of "something should happen in Vegas that you would want to stay in Vegas" (I think this thing occurs on the consumer side that is a bit like the technological imperative, that we feel like, if something is potential in the package we paid for and we don't use it, we're somehow wasting it; I remember being on the BX 12 bus hearing a guy talking about sports on his cel phone loudly and thinking, you know, if we hadn't built the cel phone, we would have never thought there was a need to discuss sports scores right now on a crowded bus with a bunch of people also having conversations on their phones; we feel like, if we don't use up the airtime we paid for, then we overpaid), and we still sort of have these ideas of distances as buffers that we don't realize we have broken when we broke the barriers of getting ourselves there and back so quickly. We wanted to travel at jet speeds but thought that we were going to be the only ones who could or that we got to decide who else got to, as if we could put up a sign that said "no viruses allowed on this plane" and it would be obeyed, just like, once we could go to Vegas hundreds of miles away for a weekend, we thought that we could tell what happened in the weekend in Vegas to stay there (and there's a bit of social justice at play in this one ... if all the naughtiness that happens in Vegas stays there, then it's a pretty infectious place to live for those who can't leave Vegas because they live in the industry there, or on cruise lines, in both of which places promiscuity among personnel is supposedly rampant, and there I do think there is a bit more of a metaphor between the virus and lifestyles that sink in when people live in and services the zones where we think we get to go to have fun and then leave it there). I think maybe there is a bit of critique of not taking consequences into account (still one of my favorite lines, maybe in all of lit, at least for being both funny and very insightful, in one of the last two Tiffany Aching books in Terry Pratchett's disc world series, I think the last one, which makes it the last book in the whole series, actually published posthumously, when Tiffany's personal favorite excuse from the people she has to help, as their witch, out of the scrapes they get themselves into, is "I didn't know it would go boom," when it says "Goes Boom" in big letters on the side of the box it came in).

I think that one of the things that tipped me to thinking of the film Contagion like this is the abruptness of her death and the lack of exposition of any kind of interaction with MD;s character versus the amount of exposition you get through flashback. The process is sort of doing a character archeology in the same way the researchers are doing an archeology of the path of the virus's transmission. There I think there is a much more straight-up metaphorical relation: researching the virus is symbolic of trying to figure out the human behavior being interjected in flashbacks of her trip, trying to understand why we do the things we do. There's definitely a moral component and free will, but I think we also have a lot to learn about the psychological forces that impinge on it. The exposition of her character just seems too intensive to me and intensive beyond the issue of infidelity to be simply about that. It doesn't hold a real revelation placement, for one. You get pretty early on that she cheated, because the male voice on the phone mentions having sex recently and then she gets back to her house and it seems pretty obvious that it was not MD she had been talking to, if she is returning to him ... and then, just like that, she is dead, but then you have all this screen-time of her in the casino, making that the sort of setting that is important for some reason before you get the full researcher archeology of the timeline in which that is where it definitely started its spread (I think, along the lines of interpretation, that having so much time in the casino before you have the end-of-film revelation that that is where the spread started, happens not just so that you get this revelation feeling about the physical spread of the virus, but also so that the setting can saturate you brain a little bit and make you focus on her disposition there as a character exposition that works hand-in-hand with the revelations about the physical spread of the virus). And then, in that packed ending sequence, pretty much right alongside the final revelation scene of the bat dropping the stuff in the pig pen and her shaking the chef's hand, you get Damon's discovery of the collage of pictures on the camera as a last kind of emotional exposition in the midst of the trying to move forward and create a meaningful life experience for his daughter. I think that that is one of the things that really endeared me to the film on this watching, the layers of human issue and human experience in the midst of this pandemic. setting.

I think that one of the things that the social distancing in the present situation can do is to teach us to pause and think, take time to "be still" and, if not "know that I am God," at least reflect more on why we do the things we do, what ways of thinking we let in the door that make it easier or harder to have the presence of mind and the disposition to do the right thing. I don't think it is good for us to stay always like this because there is something quasi-holy in contact with other human beings, but sometimes we need to step out of being swept in the jet pace of the world we have created and realize that we might be bringing narratives on our travels with us that, in their impact on our disposition, will make it harder to be good (to answer that question so wonderfully put by the drunken angel singing a Lou Reed song in Wim Wenders's Far Away So Close, "why can't I be good?") , the same as we bring viruses on a plane without realizing it because we don't listen and take into account the fact that those kinds of things can be carried with you and can be spread "under the radar." I always like that moment at the end of Her when, after the OSes have departed, Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams are on the rooftop, forced to take a moment in the void left by the OS "relationships" to reexamine human relationship (I thought that film also had some strong exposition of the embodied nature of human existence and relation by contrasting it with the OS thinking ... I've thought for a while now that it's important to the understanding of the Incarnation to see that it's important that it says the Word became "flesh" [sarx] and not "body" [soma], I think of flesh as kind of the squishiness of human bodily experience, and while it's important that that is not the more sort of abstracted holistic concept of "soma," it does dovetail and mesh with that concept because, for that ancient mindset, body was not defined by extension in three dimensions [they did think about breath, height, and depth, but it was not what defined "body"], it was defined by relationality: the body is the way you relate to the soil through tilling it, to God or the gods through cultic acts, to your spouse by physical conjugal acts, to your kids through hugging them ... and the way we experience "body" is through the squishiness of "flesh" ... "Why had [Harry] never appreciated what a miracle he was, brain and nerve and bounding heart?" [Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 692).

OK, enough exposition lol ... but I will probably copy and paste this out to my blog. 

Numbers in Lord of the Rings

So, this is just a random thought I wanted to get out while it was fresh in my head today as it came about from listening to Return of the King in the car. I have this project piece that hopefully I get around to sometime in the not too distant future, but it won't be any time right soon. It will be a long piece, maybe the only real definitive thing I ever write about Tolkien's work. It will be about the "biblical mode" in his work, but it will be specifically stated as an interpretation, which is one way of approaching meaning in a text but not the only way and not a way that pins down THE meaning in a text, but that will be a lot of explaining of what is meant by "mode" and in what the "biblical mode" consists and the idea that the particular outflow of that means that a Christian meaning cannot obliterate the flavor from the other backgrounds on which Tolkien drew, cannot eclipse them, without cutting back on it's very own content (no time to elaborate, but in brief, grace does not obliterate nature; if the Christian source eclipses the others, then you're into bad allegory of the Bible rather than artistic subcreation) ... but that will all be a long story (hopefully I write it sometime before I grow old and die, as it will kind of encapsulate everything I have studied and cared to study across my life ... it won't define Tolkien's work, but it may well define the life of my mind over 25 years, from Tolkien, to biblical studies and theology).

But for here I just want to record a detail. I have mentioned in other posts and will use it for the once-and-future "Tolkien and the Biblical Mode" that Tolkien uses the number 40 as a cipher-like key to allude to a material source. Moria is 40 miles from east gate to west door, as stated by Gandalf. I believe Tolkien is borrowing from the book of Numbers, chapter 20. The people were in the wilderness for 40 years (that's actually the Hebrew name for the books, "In the Wilderness"; the Greek name in the Septuagint, Arithmoi, from which we get the English "arithmetic," refers to the two censuses taken, the first generation at the beginning of the book before they get banished to the wilderness for 40 years and not allowed in to the land and the second generation at the end of the 40 years; but the Hebrew name be-midbar means "in the wilderness" and refers to the 40 years themselves). There are a number of markers. First, there is an inclusio (sometimes called an envelope) consisting of an opening scene in which Gandalf is told to speak to the stone (door) but instead (among other things) strikes it with his staff in anger and a second scene in which he again strikes the rock (bridge) with his staff and forfeit his entry into Lorean, the golden land. When Moses struck the rock instead of speaking to it  as instructed in Numbers 20, he became symbolically connected with the first generation by suffering the same fate materially in that he was banned from entry into the land, just as the first generation was banned for failing to trust the two who said to trust the LORD for victory in Numbers 13 (hence the 40 years while the first generation reached retirement age and the second generation got old enough to be the main adults entering, led by Joshua). Another image hook is a first born son complaining "why did you bring is up here, to die in this desolate place?" Israel is called the first born son of the LORD and complains asking Moses why he brought them out of Egypt to die in the wilderness, and Boromir, a firstborn son, asks, if Gandalf didn't know the password, why did he bring them up to this desolate place.

Now, the thing with material like that and a forecast of an essay to be called "The Biblical Mode" is to clarify that I don't think he is doing allegories of Bible stories. Material from the Bible is only one among a number of sources from which he borrows. For him personally, obviously, the Bible is very important (interesting factoid: he did a translation of the book of Job for the Old Jerusalem Bible), and ultimately it's central to the faith that was for him the only reason really to do anything, in the end, but as far as the story of the LotR itself goes, the Bible is still only one among a number of sources from which he borrows to create his own unique story. In this case, he is building the character of a leader who is not perfect but is beloved and does manage to get something done even though he has to pay a price for his shortcomings. And the story of Moses is one model he uses to do that, although there are changes. For one, while Moses's striking the rock does identify him with the first generation, it doesn't provide them entry into the land, whereas Gandalf's sacrifice on the bridge does enable his friends to enter Lorien.

(As an example of not overdoing it on the connections, while I said above that Boromir is a firstborn like Israel, I don't think it goes much further than fleshing out that image of Numbers 20 here; I don't think he's an allegory of Israel.)

So, that was all build up to say that today I heard a second use of 40 in a key place and I think for a similar reason. When Frodo and Sam make it out of the tower past the watchers and begin their trek to Mount Doom, the text describes the mount as being 40 miles away. I have always thought that among other things, the via dolorosa was a model for the trek through Mordor, including the falls ... that line actually took my breath away on one reading; Tolkien ends a chapter masterfully for that when they finally get off the road and Sam finally gets them far enough away from it to be somewhat safe in a small crater and Frodo collapses in exhaustion, and the final line of the chapter is, "and there he lay, like a dead thing." I have to watch stepping on toes, but there is a definite birth canal imagery in emerging from the tunnel in Mordor, and especially if one recalls Tolkien's comments about Galadriel and the Blessed Mother, there is definite female and mother imagery going on, for which I take the main referent to be the image of being born into this mortal coil of Mordor, into the via dolorosa (to quote Randall Jarrell's "Death of a Ball Turret Gunner": "From my mother's sleep I fell into the State / And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze / six miles from earth. loosed from its dream of life / I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters / When I died they washed out the turret with a hose").  And if the Catholic Tradition sees the 40 days of Lent as mirroring Christs 40 day's in the desert, which itself is a callback to the 40 years in the wilderness for Israel, and as also the via dolorosa, the dolorous trek to the hill of the skull to die, it makes sense to use that number again as a motif for the trek through Mordor, the march with no expectation of return, across Gorgoroth to Golgotha, to the end of all things.

I also just wanted to note  another pairing that struck me (and part of this is the hope that writing about this will make it stick in my head better for when I go to the book club I love going to down at the Abbey in Lawrenceville section of PGH, in which we are now in Two Towers ... I always feel like I've been to the Green Dragon or the Prancing Pony after one of the meetings; I want to remember this pairing for when we get to this part). The trip through Mordor has a feel very similar to the trip through the forest to Crickhollow at the beginning of Fellowship, that line put well by (I think) Pippin (but maybe Merry): "short cuts make long delays." Tolkien is a master of that style of "interesting" detours you have to take in walking through the woods. In both cases there is a pronounced need to stay off the road, and there is even a mention made when entering Mordor of escaping a black rider in those earlier woods, because that is the song that Sam sings to get through the watchers and specifically because it reminded him of that escape from the rider in the woods.

And just to track another pairing, since I am on that subject (while I don't think Tolkien does chiastic ring composition, I am becoming more convinced that he uses inclusio structure on the level of the macro organization of the whole story ... maybe not planned from the beginning, especially if you read Shippey's wonderful telling of the birth of the LotR in Author of the Century, but still doing it fully aware by the end, and on this round, with some other recent learning under my belt even since returning from NYC and CLE, I am noticing it more on this reading ... I really am greatly inspired by this reading group, which is called "The Pittsburgh Inklings" ... and the Abbey is not a library reading room with meeting chairs or something along those lines; it's a bar/eatery that used to be a mortuary, and so it has all kinds of different seating, from the coffee shop and front bar back up around the loop to the back bar area, all dark wood interior, so it feels like being in a place like the Eagle and Child, and the big patio in warm weather, and not down at the ass-end of some super-mall parking area or manufactured "village" shopping area, but in a real city section, by all those tight streets and quaint ancient row houses of lower Lawrenceville with people walking by on the sidewalk outside ... I always try to exercise some in the day before going down, as their burger is delicious but I'm sure a lot of calories, and with the ever-changing import/craft selection on the taps, there's that too) ... anyway, the pairing is that I think the image of Gollum as almost an affectionate old Hobbit reaching out to touch sleeping Frodo gently near the end of Two Towers is meant to pair off against the flash of Bilbo as a greedy little monster in Fellowship.

Addendum: This was running through my head in bed after writing this: Randall Jarrell's "Death of a Ball Turret Gunner" actually has some strong imagery resonances, such as that of being born and waking, Frodo's waking from dreams in the tower (like the big guy in the original Blade Runner says: "Wake up, time to die") and the nightmare fighters, the nazgul, circling over-head and perching on the gate.

More Thoughts on Lost

Some thought from watching through Lost again on my ellliptical machine in January and February of 2020.

Middle of season 5 of Lost: for some reason the survivors spending three years in the Dharma initiative in the 1970s feels like going into the core of the world of the island, even though the further back origins of the oldest things on the island are revealed in season 6 (the further back origins on the island are what Owen Barfield would call "original participation," whereas the specific story of Lost is the myth of modernity, the interaction between the original participation of the Others and the science of the Dharma initiative, what Barfiled would call alpha thinking). I think there is this layering thing in Lost: The regular world seen in all the flashes, then the island that somehow mystically exists somewhere in that as it's mythos, as the land of smoke monsters and polar bears and mysterious remains in caves and desperate escapes and armed standoffs and temples, but yet inside that, there is this history of a "modern Western" world 70s-style, and now into THAT you get injected the present-day survivors who landed on the island in the crash, including Faraday crossing the line between the 50s others and the bomb and the 70s Dharma folk about to be taken over by Ben crossing from Dharma to Other, kind of the jungle's Barfieldian "original participation" taking back over again.

There's the obvious sci-fi draw of the time play (I love Faraday's line that either the island is moving through time or the people are, and the second is just as likely, that interplay of people and place and which is stable and which is dislodged and can you tell objectively when the people from the same time stick together in where they land, although I think that makes it that the people move, since the other people like Richard don't move with them), but my interest is beyond that. Season 5 in the 1970s is like all the layers coalescing in preparation for shooting out (after Jack "drops the bomb" literally, that key device of real-world horror coming into the 1950s) into season 6's core-triple-myth-connection: the side flashes that are "real life" (despite being the "purgatory" in the world in which the island is the real world, they represent "real [mundane] life" in the context of the island being the mythical dimension of real life; the episode that made the mythic reading coalesce for me the first time I watched the series was "Dr Linus" in season 6, with the same core decision going on for Ben in both worlds), then the present island as mythic battle ground, and then the mythic history of the island itself with the origin stories of Jacob and the Man in Black and Richard Alpert revealed and the most ancient mythical place of the island (the temple) in play (if you want to look at it another way, taking the material aspect of the sci-fi element, time play, and taking it to the thematic level: the history related in season 6 is no longer the flashbacks of the flight survivors, but rather the history of the mythic place; the present on the island is the battle ground, and the flash "sideways" are really the future aspect, the waiting room of the eschatological, not in the Marxist sense, but in the Jewish and Christian sense, the preparing to move on ... see below on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying).

And of course, the finale where it began; with Jack laying in the high grass in the jungle; to quote a source maybe disparate but with common theme, but also hopefully with a more optimistic tone; Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, a title borrowed from the lines of Agamemnon to Odysseus (but, and again hopefully the tone is more hopeful, but Aggie's statement to Odie does have to do with a recurring visual in lost, and the one that is right there at the end because it was there at the beginning, the open eyes). And maybe Southern Gothic was a little on their minds, as they did have Jacob reading Flannery Oconnor's Everything that Rises Must Converge as he sits on the park bench in the final episode of season 5 as Locke has his 8-story fall behind him... I will have to keep an eye out for any Faulkner, in the rest of seasons 5 and 6. I know from the general hearsay etc that they didn't have a clear plot path going in, but I think in the end, they skillfully rode the wave and pulled it together into a cohesive plotline, albeit perhaps a bit like chaos theory, but I think they would like that idea (it is one that I use to discuss structure in Terry Pratchett's writing, who would hate the thought because of his attachment to the rambling feel, but I think he would allow a discussino of structure if phrased as chaos theory; I think his brain just worked certain ways such that he came out with a structure while having fun rambling, and I think the same thing is probably true of those who crafted Lost), Also playing on that last shot as "As I Lay Dying," there are definitely similarities: Faulkner's novel is stream of consciousness told by 15 different narrators and involves the quest to bury somebody in a certain place, like Christian Shepherd's and then John Locke's coffins being on the planes ostensibly on the way to burial in a homeplace, LA for Christian and the island for Locke ... and the island is the place Locke's body returns and the place where Jack passes after returning..