Tolkien as Music and the Biblical Mode

I've been trying to work on an essay on Tolkien and what I am calling "the biblical mode." I have an outline and a bunch of stuff tucked in it, but it may be a while before there is a written product because there is a lot of stuff tucked in there ... it may be the only thing I have ever written that I felt really meant something, and it contains a lot of different things I have written on in posts here, including comparisons of same elements in Lewis, Potter, and others. The material below just came to me recently, but it will be the epilogue for that essay (the appendix will be my post on Tolkien and incarnational literature called "In a Hole in the Ground").

So, right off the bat I have to clarify the topic and content here, because we often use the same language or words for a variety of types of projects. This is not going to be examining any actual music or musical elements used on the page in the works of Tolkien. This is a different kind of project altogether, so I thought I would say that out front to save frustration if somebody found this looking for research or writing on elements of music in the actual content of the works, like ryhtmanalysis  of the poerty or instruments mentioned, This project is relating aspects of music in general metaphorized to narrative in general and proposing background sources for those in Tolkien.

It should be pretty brief from here on out. My dad, in addition to teaching math and computer programing at the college level and doing programming much of his adult life, was also a sort of country mystic at times, and he loved music, particularly singing and playing old timey and Gospel. And I wasn't there when he said what I will tell here, but two friends to whom he was talking when he said it related it to me. He said that he thought that, in music, rhythm relates to the body, harmony relates to the mind, and melody relates to the soul.

So, I started thinking about this in terms of what elements go into Tolkien's storytelling and which of those three base elements they would be if we think of Tolkien's narratives as music. I think there are three background sources for Tolkien (roughly for the Inklings, but Lewis and Williams have classics sources that play much more for them than they do for Tolkien and Tolkien has English sources that don't play as much for Williams and Lewis; they all probably knew all the stuff but gravitated to different parts more strongly, but that's another matter). In this musical schema of "melody = soul; harmony = mind; and rhythm = body," I think that in Tolkien: rhythm/body = the biblical mode (which is why this would be an epilogue to that larger essay ... and this one will probably take the longest to unpack when this is written in full); harmony/mind = the pagan mythological material like the old Norse myths; and melody/soul = the Arthurian material and Chaucer, because those are more wrapped up in characters (and I just ordered Tolkien's Lost Chaucer, and I never really thought about it, but Bree and the Council of Elrond have, in certain ways, very Canterbury Tales settings, with different travelers telling different tales and singing different songs for each other).

So, that's the basic idea for now.

Looking at Tolkien's narratives as music and his background literary influences as those three elements:

Rhythm/Body = Biblical Mode (underlying structure [typological fulfillment])
Harmony/Mind = Pagan Myth (relations of power players [harmony = relations of musical tones])
Melody/Soul = Arthurian and Chaucer (character arcs [melody is a movement with a progression from a beginning to a resolution])

NOTE: This type of project of interweaving elements, and particularly personalist elements like body, mind, and soul, of course very much resembles my readings of, say, the seven-element chiastic structure of the original Harry Potter series as containing three "body" layers: skeletal (structure), muscular (themes), and surface (characterization); I don't have clear ideas worked out at all on it, but it feels to me like the resemblance I feel like I see between the two triads is like the way Greek thought saw the four-elements cosmology and the four-humors anthropology as two out-workings of the four contraries. And of course, it has not escaped my attention that all of these are in triads, which, being as all these are about the human but some about the physicality of humans (three body layers in chiasm) and others about the psychiatry of humans (the three things moved in hearing music, a psycho-sensate experience), this system resembles Augustine's psychological models of humanity as the image of the Trinity and Bonaventure's focus on triads in material reality as vestiges of the Trinity.

I'm not sure on it yet, but I think that epilogue on musical elements and sources may be what I am able to put in the "in common with Lewis and Williams" category because it is structured and has symmetries etc., where as the sort of raw singularity the Incarnation drive I talk about in the "In a Hole in the Ground" essay to be used for the appendix is more like the uniqueness of singularities you find in Tolkien, his organic-ness.

A day Later (after the last addendum):
I'm just updating it here rather than making new posts,
One thing I have to say is that this gets a bit esoteric, which isn't necessarily bad. Owen Barfield and Rudolph Steiner were seminal thinkers, and the latter on a pretty large stage, especially with followers of Goethe, who was pretty seminal himself. But, anyway, my own personal take on legitimate esoteric reading takes what is implicit and draws it out, abstracting it and attenuating it not to claim that that is the whole picture, but to see it's logic, which must be done in viewing it as a whole unto itself, so that one can then think about how that logic interacts with others in a whole, how it is shaped by them and shapes them in return. Some of these could be tangential, while some of them could be at the core of the nature of the thing, just not as visible, and yet other could be so far inward that they are "beyond" in an inner sense, part of some inner world that inhabits our normal one and connects with it in ways we don't imagine (I have always like James Camreron's treatment of the idea of super-terrestrials in his film Abyss, putting the aliens in the deep sea, which is usually symbolic of chaos in ancient cultures, and in that film gets paired with the deep of the dark place into which the wife descends and the husband pulls her back [don't want to put spoilers ... but, man, that scene in the submerisible punches you in the gut and then rips your heart from your chest, kicks it around street for a bit in the grit and broken glass and slams it back into your chest still beating] and then she has to talk to him about on the mic as he descends into the trench to defuse the agent of overwhelming chaos [after the connected agent of "ordered" chaos, the military man played so well by Michael Bien, has been crush falling into that abyss], the nuclear warhead, and meets the extra-terrestrials in the sub-terrestrial world ... while breathing liquid that the tech compared to the water of birth; "your body will adjust; we all did it for nine months" ... brilliant melding of human-character drama [Harris and Mastrantonio are brilliant, and the line by the character "One Night" putting her hand over the mic and saying, "no, Lindsey . . . talk to him" give me chills every time] with the mythopoeic ... it was what Shakespeare could have been, mixing the mythopoeic with the dramatic in a more technically modern version of that same kind of Tolkien did for his Old-English-based more-organic mythopoesis and dramatic character elements ... with a bit of sci-fi and Heidegger's Abground tossed in [and note: int he Essay on Fairy Stories, Tolkien credits science fiction as a modern genre that might actually resemble the "narrative art" of fairy stories] ... can't praise the film Abyss highly enough, and as this started with comments about my dad, a funny story: I can't stand flipping through channels, but he always did it, and one night I said "hey, wait, go back, I like that movie a lot, let's watch that," and it was Abyss, and the whole way through I kept saying, "Dad, I OWN this film on VHS and have watched it numerous times, I like it that much ... that scene is not in it," and he would say, "don't know what to tell you, there it is" ... turns out there's a four-hour version, which they were running on late night TV, but the typical capitalists who did the VHS thought only the theatrical version would sell ... so when a DVD came out that had both, I of course got it).

Anyway, this triadic reading may be a bit esoteric but it may also be esoteric in a meaningful and apropos way too. The three elements may move from inner to outer. This is most evident in the seven-element chiasm of HP as a triad of triads, the bone, muscle, and face of the human person, in that order, from inner to outer. But the triad of music can do so too. Rhythm is most evident in the movement of the skeletal structure (the most inner) in the form of a human being dancing (I recently proofread an interesting book on abstract animation, which is part of where I get some of my ideas here on abstraction as part of isolating elements to see how they work so that we can better understand how they work in the whole, so the point of abstract art not always having been to take you out into the abstraction and leave you there [to quote a friend years ago on why he liked the Dead but not Fish: "the Dead took you out there, but they brought you back; Fish just takes you out there and leaves you out there"], so when Len Lye made his scratch films in which he attached needles to his hands to make scratches on film reel as he danced to music, not holding them in his hand such that his intentional thought was part of it, but rather only the movements of his bodily substructure as translated through his limbs, not of his mind as translated through consciously intentional movements of his hand, the point can be to then reincorporate what is learned into artistic ways of working with full-figural imagery in animation, although, admittedly, many take you out there and leave you out there; so, in addition to Aristotle and Aquinas on abstraction, I must also credit Andrew Johnston in his forthcoming Pulses of Abstraction). And in music, melody is the whole effect we encounter on the surface: rhythm and harmonic relations set in motion and connecting with that in the person that moves, and that movement is what we really identify as human ... we never would "get" skeletal and muscular structure if we didn't at first "get" seeing it in motion in  people we know living, and that movement comes from the animating principle, the soul ... we would tend to think of the soul as the most interior because it's the most "invisible" on a material level, but the soul may also be that mystical thing that it is outer because it is so far inner (and just as, in the ancient world, the idea of body was not defined, at its core, by extension in three dimensions, but rather as a way of relating [to God through cultic acts, to creation by tilling the soil, to others by bodily acts, like spouses relating through the conjugal act], perhaps here the body is that through which the so far inner relations to the outer, and not just "body," but also "flesh").

It is crucial to this way of thinking that, unless we do vivisection (and we see what Lewis thought of that in the prison of the giant named Spirit of the Age in Pilgrim's Regress), we never encounter skeleton and muscle except though not just the surface, but the surface as animated by the soul. And we seldom encounter harmony outside of melody, and even a chord on a piano or guitar is not interesting until incorporated into a melodic progression. In drumming, we do encounter rhythm in isolation, but the best drumming involves changes in pitch that sometime almost resemble melody ... I once went to the Brazil festival in "Little Brazil" near Rockefeller plaza and they had Forro drummers ... amazing sounds ... the two things I have heard elsewhere that approach it are the Forro drummers in Paul Simon's "Obvious Child" and Rusted Root's drum jams in the days of their shows at the (now gone) club Graffiti in Pittsburgh that became "Drum Trip" on the When I Woke album)

Anyway, in this progression, body is the most inner because it is the most basic, then mind is about the ability to realize a static comprehension of relations, but it is the soul that makes us able to realize those things in the experience of the appearance in motion, our soul recognizing firs the soul in the other and then cognizing the elements with which it works. So, body is inmost and basic, and then mind, and then soul as the so-inner-it-is-outer; rhythm is the most basic, then static harmony, then moving melody that animates those together (to use that analogy of modern bands and the "bringing you back" that my friend said the Dead did and Fish does not, Blues Traveler said, "the hook brings you back," and a hook is that basic small catchy melody that you keep reprising throughout a song); the bones are the most inner, then the muscles, then the appearance in motion that reveals them to others.

So what of the Trinity, of which I am saying all this is either image or vestige? What of this whose relation to the other triads I am suggesting might be analogous to one of the very vestiges of it we see, meaning the Geek thought that the four-elements cosmology (outer) and the four-humors anthropology (outer)  are both applications of the four contraries (inner) ... how does that relate to the Trinity? (and this is probably the most esoteric part of this whole thought experiment.) How does the Trinitarian principle reflected in those other triads itself have movement from inner to outer? The Father is like existence itself, and the Son, as the first other than the Father and in relation to the Father, is the principle of plurality and relation. But what of the Spirit that is itself the relation between the two. In Catholic/Christian theology, Scripture is the written record of the Incarnation and it is the Incarnation that reveals the Father and the Trinity, but it is the inspiration by the Spirit that brings about the making of that record and animates the moving life of sacraments and interpretation by which we encounter the Trinity. If the Spirit is the love between the Father and Son in the immanent Trinity and is also the animator of the Church and inspiritor of Scripture in the economic Trinity, then it is, like the soul, so inner it is outer [I am aware that in doing this, I need to be clear on the differences between the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity, but for here I can simply note that need].

As a last interesting note, this triadic inner to outer is also the way I used to describe for my students in OT the the Hebrew Canon, The TaNaK, the Torah (Law), Nevi'im (Prophets), and Ketuvum (Writings). The actual arrangement of books differs in places from the Septuagint/Christian canon: Ruth and Esther, along with Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, and 1-2 Chronicles, are all in the third section, the Writings.  The Torah is the core story of the people from creation of land to being on the verge of entering into the land (Gordan Wenham has an interesting book called Story as Torah and a classic article on sanctuary [tabernacle and temple] imagery in the Gen 2 account of Paradise). Then, once in the land, that core identity of a people expands into nationhood as a kingdom among other kingdoms and empires, which is always revealed by and sometimes also done by the prophets, the king makers and king breakers who respond to and bring the Davar Adonai, the Word of the LORD. After the fall of the kingdoms, the people enter a new kind of relation with the larger world, like the Persian and Greek empires, and this is recorded not only in books that recount events and histories, but also in works that interact with the understanding that larger world employs, like the wisdom literature of Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes, and the Psalter that structures the liturgical lives of those peoples in that ongoing present world. And that is a relation to the whole world, but as with the inner that is so inner it is outer, the whole canon of the TaNaK begins (the most inner because it is the beginning of the Torah) with the relation not only to the whole human world, but the whole created world, to "till and to keep" it. (I would also note that the relation to the larger world now involves a diasporic tenet of having the land in absentia, living in diaspora and awaiting the entry into the true land and nation in the next world, not like Nietzsche's emphasis on father lands here and now  [and if you read The Antichrist ... it reads like a manifesto for the Third Reich], which is why hundreds of Hasidic and Orthodox Jews marched in protest against the creation of the nation-state of Israel in the 1940s in Brooklyn with signs that said "no homeland without a Messiah" ... God constituted the nation of Israel among the other nations by appointing a king through his prophet [originally "the Messiah" was simply the present anointed Davidic-line king on the throne in Jerusalem; even David, before the promise of the dynasty in 2 Sam 7, called Saul "the LORD's anointed," literally the passive participle meshioch from the verb meshach, "to anoint"), not the United Nations ... and while I can't presume to speak for Judaism today, because there are descendants of the Shoah who see the state of Israel as an important symbolic reparation for the Shoah and I am not such a descendant and able to speak for that experience, I do find a certain kinship in the fact that I don't want Donald Trump or the GOP telling me what it means for me to be Christian any more than those Jewish marchers in the 1940s wanted the UN telling them what it means to be Jewish).

I do need to admit here how I conceive what I have just written in this addendum. Just as it is esoteric, it is also admittedly experimental. I'm not necessarily saying it all works and must be so; I am a bit like Nicholas Cage at the beginning of National Treasure trying on different cypher interpretations of the writing from the pipe.

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.