Creating Realities

Things aren’t real in and of themselves. They exist, they have substance, but they have no intrinsic meaning. They just are. Only things that have been made meaningful are real. Realities are created by embedding stuff inside a system of meanings.

The reality of a thing is its substance plus its meaning. Here’s a thing that’s a potential weapon; it’s inedible but it can be exchanged for food; it’s measurable; it has a particular name – multiple overlapping systems of meaning shape our awareness of everything.

A creator alternately contemplates the stuff of material existence and imagines what the stuff could mean. Looking stimulates the imagination, while imagining opens the eyes. Thing is substance; idea is meaning; thing imbued with idea is reality. Substance alone is proto-reality, devoid of form and meaning; idea alone is mere possibility without its realization. To create a reality you need both substance and idea, idea wedded to substance.

Making something tangible out of nothing has been the sine qua non of godlike creation. We creators can’t do that – except maybe for those of us who know how to run a nuclear accelerator. We can, however, organize matter in clever ways, turning raw stuff into hammers, highways, rocket ships. It takes more than just an opposable thumb to do this sort of thing. Even fashioning a simple tool out of rock demands the ability to impose a reality on the rock, a reality in which rock possesses properties useful for grinding or bashing or scraping. A new product, a painting, a new household – even modest undertakings demand attention to a host of details. Still, it’s the larger intent that guides the work of creation, from the earliest imaginings to their full manifestation. The ideas proposed and the words for communicating them, the tasks accomplished and the tools for performing them – everything acquires meaning by its participation in and contribution to the larger vision. When you’ve finished putting everything together it’s as if you’ve just created a whole universe. Well, perhaps that is a bit of a stretch.

To create a reality you have to “make sense” of raw stuff. Say you want to take a photograph of a parade. Do you try to capture the essence of the parade on film, or do you try to embed the parade in a photographic aesthetic? Now say you’re an abstract painter. Do you try to envision an abstract reality and then represent it on the canvas, or do you bring the abstraction out of the interaction of paint and canvas? Now say you want to be a professional artist. Do you create artistic realities that you see, then see if people like them? Or do you try to figure out what kinds of paintings people like, and then paint them?

You’re a creator of churches: do you imagine what a church might be and try to make it, or do you see what a church already is and try to make sense of it? Do you put the church out into the world and see who likes it, or do you try to discern what kind of church people like and then try to make it?

The world is interpenetrated by multiple realities: linguistic, social, economic, political, technological, architectural. The people who participate in the reality of a church also participate simultaneously in these other realities. Does a missional church attempt to subsume all these other realities within the reality of the church? Alternatively, does a missional church attempt to embed itself within the meaning systems of the other realities with which it shares the world? Or does church reality exist in parallel with all the other realities, each one imbuing the world with its own set of meanings?

An Introduction to Ktismatics

I’ve written a book on the theory and practice of creation as illuminated in the Biblical creation narrative. Thinking that my interpretation of the Biblical text might point to a relatively amicable resolution of the creation-versus-evolution controversy, I put my exegesis up on this website. Then I set about exploring blogspace in search of kindred spirits who might want to see what I had to show them. I’ve learned a great deal from many excellent bloggers, especially those who are emerging out of the traditional evangelical orbit. I will leave the exegesis pages posted on this blog for who have an interest in such things.

For the past three weeks I’ve been posting a series of First Lines — oblique reflections of creation that I see in the first sentences of various texts. I intend to continue writing these from time to time — perhaps I’ll open it up for others to write “First Lines” meditations on books that they like.

Now, though, I’m going to set aside my theological speculations to focus more directly on “ktismatics” — the theory and practice of creation. In Part Three of my book I identify several strands of what it means to be a creator. I don’t talk about “creativity” as a personality trait or a gift, as something inside the creator. Instead, I describe creation as a way of orienting oneself toward the world. To be creative, to be a creator, is to create.

Tomorrow I’ll begin with an overview of the first ktismatic strand, which is the creation of realities. You can get an overview of the strands by looking at the summary of Part Three of the book here.

Everything is Illuminated

“The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!”

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984

 

In the next sentence of Kundera’s novel his narrator asks: “What does this mad myth signify?” A unique occurrence is insubstantial; whatever returns is heavy. Each repetition of an original event carries within itself all its own prior incarnations; each repetition adds the indiscernible but real increment of its own small weight to the gradually accumulating mass. After awhile that which returns again and again becomes as heavy as eternity.

Third sentence: “Putting it negatively, the myth of the eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.” On the first page of his book The Myth of the Eternal Return, Mircea Eliade asserts that “neither the objects of the external world nor human acts, properly speaking, have any autonomous intrinsic value. Objects or acts acquire a value, and in so doing become real, because they participate, after one fashion or another, in a reality that transcends them.” Only the rare unique event becomes commemorated, ritualized, endlessly repeated until it becomes legendary. It is the accrual of legendary status through the weight of repetition that bestows meaning on the primordial event. Ever afterward, only actions that commemorate the legend have meaning, acquiring their reality by participating in the eternal return. All other actions are unprecedented, unique, meaningless – unbearably light.

Fourth sentence: “We need take no more note of it than of a war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century, a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand blacks perished in excruciating torment.” Now, six centuries later, as this long-forgotten war is brought before our imaginations, does its return give it a just little bit more weight? Fifth sentence: “Will the war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century itself be altered if it recurs again and again, in eternal return?” This war, repeated in the text, is repeated in our minds – perhaps we remember the war after all? A hundred thousand of us, after reading sentences four and five, advance like a mighty army to the sixth sentence: “It will: it will become a solid mass, permanently protuberant, its inanity irreparable.”

Citation is a procedure for adding just a little bit more weight to a name, an idea, an event, pulling it a little bit closer to eternity. When we cite we too participate in the heaviness bestowed by repetition, we get a little closer to participating in the larger reality that consists entirely of endlessly repeated mutual recognition.

When God created the heavens and the earth it meant nothing because it had happened only once. After the event had been recreated again and again in its retelling and in the eternal return of the workweek-Sabbath cycle – only then did the Creation become legendary, eternal, meaningful, substantial, real.

Note: You might recognize that the title of this post is identical to the title of a recent novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. Foer was citing Kundera: “In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”

 

Objects of Strange Shape and Unknown Purpose

 

“We cannot go on prostituting the idea of the theater, whose only value lies in its excruciating, magical connection with reality and with danger.”

– Antonin Artaud, “The Theater of Cruelty: First Manifesto,” undated (1930s)

Artaud, that belatedly celebrated and finally pathetic madman, had no use for “realistic” theater as we might understand it, for theater as the accurate representation of “real life.” Artaud wanted theater to be reality, or rather a reality.

The language of theater should not slavishly imitate the language of everyday life. There should be no costumed and rehearsed actors reciting lines from scripted, simulated conversations. Theater is an event arena; it should speak a physical language. “This language,” Artaud clarifies (if such a term may be used with respect to the verbal delirium of Artaud), “can only be defined in terms of the possibilities of dynamic expression in space as opposed to the expressive possibilities of dialogue.” In Artaud’s theater speech too becomes a physical thing, an interplay of intonations and dynamics, vocalizations resonating between bodies. And action: there is to be no narrative thread, no playing out of scenes imitative of life as it exists outside the theater, but rather “the visual language of objects, movements, attitudes, gestures… extended until they become signs and these signs become a kind of alphabet.” The characters and objects, their staging and choreography, become a true hieroglyphic language, the glyphs pointing not to the words and meanings they symbolize but only to themselves, to the interrelationship of physical bodies in space.

You may have seen Artaud in the silent classic The Passion of Joan of Arc. The saints, even the Lord himself, appear to Joan in visions, commanding her to expel the English occupiers. The English capture her and try her for heresy. She confesses under duress, then retracts her confession. Artaud plays the monk sympathetic with the young girl whose body will soon be consumed in flames. Artaud-as-monk holds a crucifix before the actress who plays Joan as, transcending that simulacrum of cruelty, she releases her cinematic spirit. The surrealty of filmic reality was not enough for Artaud.

The violence of the theater is transmitted not through images representing the laceration or incineration of flesh, but through such means as the corpuscular tattoo and the polyphonic symphony of visceral vibrations and the ritualized wearing of masks by enormous puppets – meanings pressed into the flesh itself. But this operation of metaphysical cruelty cannot be expressed in words, nor can it be repeated even in memory. “It will not even offer the presentation of a present, if present signifies that which is maintained in front of me.” The theater of cruelty is a theater of permeation, a viscous and throbbing medium in which we move and which moves upon us and in us and through us.

Artaud’s theater was never built, its hallucinatory performances were ever presented. What remains to us are these tortured meanderings in the labyrinth, these shattered glimpses of a creation unmade.

A Spectator in Someone Else’s Dream

 

“I had been sick for a long time.”

– Paul Auster, Oracle Night, 2004

An ominous enough beginning even if the patient seems to have recovered. Everyone had given him up for dead, but he “mysteriously failed to die.” And so he begins to live life again, as if he had a future.

What happens when you walk into the future on the other side of your own death? Perhaps you carry your new life with you, touching those around you with something like hope. Maybe you occupy a bubble of life that surrounds you; those who enter the bubble enter this second life. Or perhaps death has claimed you after all; perhaps you have become the bearer of that dark night from which we all run only to discover that we’ve always been heading straight into it.

Maybe God had just come from death when he set about creating the heavens and the earth. He pushed against the walls of the formless void that entombed him, creating a universe inside his own coffin.

An Eye that Sees a Sun, A Hand that Feels an Earth

“The world is my representation”: this is a truth valid with reference to every living and knowing being, although man alone can bring it into reflective, abstract consciousness.”

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (Volume 1), 1819

We postmoderns raise one eyebrow condescendingly at Schopenhauer’s first sentence. “How quaint.” It’s hardly worth saying that Schopenhauer was wrong, that what’s in our head bears no direct correspondence to what’s in the world. We fail to credit the inversions and reversions of thought as it winds its convoluted path through time.

“We call a book ‘rectangular,’ not ‘trapezoidal,’ though it projects a trapezoid on the retina. We mold our fingers into a rectangular (not trapezoidal) posture as we reach for it. We build rectangular (not trapezoidal) shelves to hold it, and we deduce that it can support a broken couch by fitting into the rectangular space beneath it. Somewhere in the mind there must be a mental symbol for ‘rectangle,’ delivered by vision but available at once to the rest of the verbal and nonverbal mind.” Stephen Pinker, How the Mind Works, 1997.

The mind creates a “symbol,” transforming the retinal image into a useful “description” of the object. Part of that description is verbal: “book,” “rectangle,” “pick-uppable with hands,” “line-uppable on horizontal shelves.” The words are signifiers. When we speak the words to one another we can act as if the words weren’t even there, and that we’re talking about the physical objects to which they point. Or we can act as if the physical objects weren’t there, and that we’re talking about the symbols within a self-contained linguistic system. Which perspective is the right one?

Mental descriptions of external objects aren’t just verbal; they’re also perceptual. Other animals make the same transformation from trapezoid to rectangle that we do, without recourse to language. A gerbil will without hesitation climb onto a book as if it “understands” that the book is a solid horizontal surface. Performing mental transformations of objects doesn’t require conscious calculation of mathematical symbols: a wren can snatch a moth right out of the air without having verbal or mathematical symbols for “speed,” “acceleration,” and “trajectory.” Pinker continues:

“The visual system… is contrived to deliver a sense of the true forms and materials in the world. The selective advantage is obvious: animals that know where the food, the predators, and the cliffs are can put the food in their stomachs, keep themselves out of the stomachs of others, and stay on the right side of the clifftop.”

When we dismiss representation as a Platonic abstraction we forget that our cognitive-linguistic minds are built on top of animal brains. The two eyes positioned at the front of our heads give us stereoscopic vision, which in turn makes depth perception possible, which in turn lets us construct mental 3-D representations of 2-D retinal images. Wolves can do it too; so can hawks. Why shouldn’t we build our linguistic systems on top of this more primitive, yet extremely effective, perceptual representation system?

So, when elohim said “Let there be light,” we don’t have to assume that he was making a material representation of an eternal form, like Socrates projecting shadows on the cave wall. Conversely, we don’t have to assert that elohim was creating a purely cognitive-linguistic construct in which the term “light” makes sense only in the context of all the other words in the language system. Instead, when elohim points to the light-emitting object and says “light,” we understand: the word is associated with a mental representation is associated with a retinal image is associated with something that exists in the world. The mental image is there; the word makes sense of the image and makes it conceptually “real.” Yes?

…and another thing… Now that we’ve contemplated the first sentence of Schopenhauer’s book – Volume I, First Book, §1 – here’s the first sentence of §2: “That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject.” Bearing that sentence in mind, I encourage you to scroll down to the first installment of these First Lines posts, the one entitled “We Creators.” The similarity of Nietzsche’s sentence to Schopenhauer’s is no coincidence, inasmuch as Nietzsche began reading Schopenhauer as a 21-year-old philology student.

As always, I call your attention to the Genesis 1 Pages over there at the upper right side of the screen.

 

The Clouds that Race Before My Your His Our Yours Their Faces

“It’ll never be known how this has to be told, in the first person or the second, using the third person plural or continually inventing modes that will serve for nothing.”

– Julio Cortázar, “Blow-Up”

You may have seen Antonioni’s film adaptation of Cortázar’s short story – the film where the legendary Yardbirds play to a zombified London club scene. I saw the Yardbirds play once – we were seventh graders, never been to a rock concert, didn’t know what to wear. Bill had the right idea – jeans, Madras shirt, penny loafers. Jimmy was completely wrong in his suit and tie. Positioned somewhere in the middle, I felt comfortable enough to enjoy the show. Eric Clapton had left the band by then: so was it Jeff Beck on lead guitar, or Jimmie Page? Or both? No idea – I didn’t know any of these guys yet. Both, definitely.

Antonioni said this about filmmaking: “The periods of filming are the times when I live most intensely.” Don’t try to explain or understand a film; instead, “penetrate and enjoy the inner being of the film.” He’s still alive, Antonioni. Cortázar was alive when the film was made – I wonder what he thought of it. David Hemmings died this year, a bloated white-haired old man; he was the skinny young mod photographer back then.

As Antonioni’s film begins, an anarchic band of merrymakers surges up from a deserted concrete plaza fronting a stark concrete-and-glass office building. This, it turns out, is 25 St. James’s Street: now the headquarters for the publishers of The Economist, it was the first work of Modern architecture in this part of London, famous among the architectural avant-garde when it was put up in the sixties. The merrymakers, it turns out, are architecture students working as extras in the film. They’re dressed in carnivale costumes, their faces painted black and white. They are mute.

Cortázar’s story begins in the photographer’s studio. The photographer is the narrator, and despite the ambivalence of his first sentence he settles into the first person singular, present tense. He imagines his Remington typewriter writing the story by itself, the camera taking the photograph by itself – get him out of the way altogether; let it be a purely objective telling and showing. “But I have the dumb luck to know that if I go this Remington will sit turned to stone on top of the table with the air of being twice as quiet that mobile things have when they are not moving. So, I have to write.”

The cinematographer follows the merrymakers through the crowded London streets. The camera watches a soldier marching behind the merrymakers; talking amicably with one another, two black nuns in white habits pass the soldier in the opposite direction; the soldier about-faces and, still marching, follows the nuns. Another camera is positioned outside the gates of a factory; the besooted and overalled workers, carrying their lunchpails, are leaving for the day. After talking with his comrades, one of the workers walks down the street and climbs into a new convertible sportscar – this is David Hemmings. The merrymakers surround the car. Hemmings, seemingly happy to see them, reaches into the back seat for a one-pound note, hands it to them, they go on their way. The money was hidden under a newspaper – “Sniper in Town” reads the headline. The newspaper also covers his camera. Hemmings drives: all the other cars are blue and yellow; his is black. The camera is above the car now, following it, spying on the driver through the open roof. Hemmings picks up his CB mike (an obsolete technology now): “Blue 439,” he says into it.

We could go back to Cortázar’s narrator now, see how he and his machines are progressing, see whether he can rouse himself from immobility in order to tell the story. (We know that he does, of course – otherwise Cortázar would never have read it, written his name on it, put it in his book.) We could witness the precise moment when the narrator switches to the first person plural present and then to the traditional third-singular-past, when we discover that the narrator isn’t David Hemmings but Roberto Michel, a French-Chilean translator (Cortázar was a French-Argentinian translator); not a professional like Antonioni’s photographer but an amateur; a resident of Paris, not London. But we must do something else now. There was some other point I had in mind. Was it something about Hemmings’ studio (Hemmings was an exhibited painter; later he would become a director for television series like Magnum P.I.), or the fashion models looking like birds in their feathered dresses. “Love, love, love for me, yes, yes,” he croons to the emaciated, nearly-naked model as he snaps the shutter again and again; then he’s done, he looks away, he only sees for the camera. No, this isn’t it either.

I wanted to show you something about Genesis 1, about God’s persistent vacillation between first and third person, about man as image and likeness of this singular plural God, about the invisibility of the one who narrates this story – as if the story was writing itself. But you’ll have to look for yourself now.

“I raised the camera, pretended to study a focus which did not include them, and waited and watched closely, sure that I would finally catch the revealing expression, one that would sum it all up, life that is rhythmed by movement but which a stiff image destroys, taking time in cross section, if we do not choose the essential imperceptible fraction of it.”

The Science of the Concrete

“It has long been the fashion to invoke languages which lack the terms for expressing such a concept as ‘tree’ or ‘animal,’ even though they contain all the words necessary for a detailed inventory of species and varieties.”

– Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 1962

This is the very first sentence of Levi-Strauss’ book, the point of entry rather than the conclusion. Already in the early sixties it wasn’t just the anthropological avant-garde who dismissed linguistic abstraction as just so much modernist alienation from our ancient narrative traditions. Immediately Levi-Strauss sets out to debunk the romantic notion of primitive concreteness.

Do we believe Franz Boas when, early in the twentieth century, he reports that the proposition “The bad man killed the poor child” is rendered in Chinook “The man’s badness killed the child’s poverty”? Perhaps not: he may have been misled by the indeterminacy of translation. We instead tend to believe those anthropologists who insist that primitive peoples assign categorical names only when there’s a pragmatic need to do so: to distinguish the edible berry from the poisonous, for example, rather than berry from not-berry. Levi-Strauss demurs:

“Words like ‘oak,’ ‘beech,’ ‘birch’, etc., are no less entitled to be considered as abstract words than the word ‘tree’… The proliferation of concepts, as in the case of technical languages, goes with more constant attention to properties of the world, with an interest that is more alert to possible distinctions which can be introduced between them. This thirst for objective knowledge is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ Even if it is rarely directed toward facts of the same level as those with which modern science is concerned, it implies comparable intellectual application and methods of observation. In both cases the universe is an object of thought at least as much as it is a means of satisfying needs.”

Levi-Strauss cites example after example of idiosyncratically complex taxonomic schemes devised by “primitive” cultures around the world. His conclusion:

“[A]nimals and plants are not known as a result of their usefulness; they are deemed to be useful or interesting because they are first of all known. It may be objected that science of this kind can scarcely be of much practical effect. The answer to this is that its main purpose is not a practical one. It meets intellectual requirements rather than or instead of satisfying needs.”

And we’re only on page 9 of his book.

“Let there be light,” proclaims elohim. “And elohim separated the light from the darkness; and elohim called the light day, and the darkness He called night.” Light and darkness, day and night: are these the properties of a raw natural universe that God is creating? Or is God imposing a system of abstract categories on raw nature? We are at day one, when God began creating the first science of the concrete.

For more on the first science of the concrete, see my exegesis of Genesis 1 on this blog, especially LET THERE BE and SEPARATE AND NAME.

That Ghastly Whiteness

“Call me Ishmael.”

Ishmael: is this also the name by which he calls himself? Rarely does the narrator speak of himself; rarely do others speak of him. On that pilgrimage all eyes are fixed elsewhere: toward the horizon, into the Deep, upon the voiceless terror that bears another name.

“Praise be to God who has given me Ishmael and Isaac in my old age!” – so said father Abraham; so is it written in Surah 14. Had not Ishmael helped his father build the Sacred House of Ka‘bah, to which all the faithful must bow, to which all shall make the Hajj? Say: “We believe in God and that which has been revealed to us; in what was revealed to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and the tribes; to Moses and Jesus and the other prophets by their Lord.”

Queequeg the South Sea islander; Tashtego the red man; Daggoo the black African – each harpooneer squires one of the mates, good New Englanders all. Fedallah the yellow Parsee, servant of Zarathustra, leader of the five dusky phantoms, “a muffled mystery to the last” – he it is who steers the monomaniacal captain to his fate, who wields the iron of death.

“Fedallah was a creature such as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and then but dimly. The likes of him glide among the Oriental isles – those insulated, immemorial lands, which even in modern days preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal generations. There all men eye each other as real phantoms and ask the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end. There, according to scriptures, angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men – and devils also indulged in mundane amours.”

And the captain himself, his leg carried off in the whale’s jaws, his leg now fashioned of the jaw of a whale — already mystically united with his nemesis, he lurches toward the  one final reconciliation. All array themselves against the spectral monster of brooding cruelty becloaked in his “ghastly whiteness.”

“I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these things,” Ishmael exhorts us near the beginning of his tale, “and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals, pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits.” We good Presbyterians – why does Ishmael, ever cautious, choose to grant us this glimpse behind the veil? Spewed from the black vortex of that watery desolation, buoyed by Queequeg’s floating coffin, was he born again as one of us, or as another, as Ishmael?

In Theology There Is No Novelty Without Danger

The gardens ravaged, the altars and chalices profaned, the Huns rode their horses into the monastery library and mangled the incomprehensible books and reviled and burned them – fearful perhaps that the letters of the books might harbor blasphemies against their god, which was a scimitar of iron.

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Theologians”

 

A palpable nostalgia broods over a beginning catastrophe. Of course the gardens were paradisiacal; of course the holy vessels, untarnished and empty, had graced the sacred space. The codices and palimpsests, whose subtle illuminations granted iconic access to the thrones of heaven itself – had they fueled the very holocaust that consumed them? Annealing themselves in those enflamed words, the worshippers of the forged blade bridled their ungainly horses as, tentative and ashamed, they pawed the ashes.

Though the labyrinthine gardens had for a time perplexed the victorious riders, they had come to know that in such places the heart and the mind are one. In their legends the garden itself was the center; in their conquests they would fight themselves as, breathing the scented and bowered air, they maintained their soldierly discipline until the devastation was fulfilled.

The altars they recognized but did not fear, for their god had been born of fire. But the books? That the monks would seek protection from their books seemed madness, for the monks themselves had made them, had rendered them vulnerable. It was an honor to destroy those who would render homage to such weakness.

When, seeking tribute and refreshment, the riders returned to the monastery, they would not find the scriptorium where the monks labored, bringing forth the fragile new gods of their infinite pantheon.

 

Rules of engagement. Freud drew our attention to the obvious — that all the people who occupy our dreams come from within our own imaginings. Does this make them also part of ourselves?

 

We Creators

Writers concentrate all their craft into the shaping of a first sentence. They want it to be masterfully crafted, and they want it to grab your attention. Here’s the first sentence from one of the books I happen to have on my shelves:

We knowers are unknown to ourselves, and for a good reason: how can we ever hope to find what we have never looked for?

This sentence links together two abstract ideas, both of which are controversial: we don’t know ourselves, and we’ve never tried to understand ourselves. The writer begins with the second person plural, present tense – we are – then links the two big thoughts together in the form of a question. We presume that the author is trying to engage his readers in a dialogue. What common ground do we as potential readers share with the writer, so that we might want to accept his invitation to participate in a verbal exchange with a dead white male (for the writer is all three)?

We are, asserts the author, knowers. The author seems to be addressing a pretty broad potential audience, since everybody knows things. Still, how often do I think of myself as a “knower”? It’s a strange noun, though maybe it’s fairly common in German (for this sentence was originally written in German). I have knowledge, but the writer is asking me to think of myself as a knower. He’s directing my attention away from the world, from what I know, and toward myself. And I’m to think of myself not as a knowledgeable person, nor even as a learner, but as someone who actively knows, as one of those honey gatherers of the mind that he describes three sentences later. It’s a little disconcerting, this beginning

We knowers are unknown, says the writer. It’s a paradox: we know, but we ourselves are not known. Isn’t that part of the fun of being a knower? It’s like being a spy, keeping the subject of investigation under covert surveillance. By remaining in the shadows, we’re able to exert a kind of power over the world. But the author goes on: We knowers are unknown to ourselves. It’s a double paradox: we lay claim to being knowers, but something is eluding our scrutiny, something very important and close to us: ourselves. How can we hope to find what we have never looked for, the author asks us. Is that true? I tend to believe that we already spend inordinate amounts of time trying to understand who we really are, to the point where we barely bother to know about anything other than ourselves. Maybe this first sentence was generally true at the time it was written (for it was written over a hundred years ago), but now? Maybe the book is obsolete.

But now I’m reminded of another first sentence – not first sequentially in the book where it appears, but first in a historical sense: I think, therefore I am. Without question our writer was familiar with this older and more famous sentence (for our writer was a philosopher, or at least that’s how we think of him today). The grand edifice of modern Western philosophy was built on Descartes’ assertion of self-awareness. Was our writer blatantly claiming, right in the very first sentence, that the foundation stone is set in sand? Also, he seems deliberately to contrast Descartes’ thinking with another mental activity: knowing. This is probably an important distinction, but since I’m not a professional philosopher maybe the rest of the book isn’t really meant for the likes of me. But the writer begins with “we knowers,” not “we philosophers,” which encourages me: he’s proposing to take the dialogue outside the walls of the academy into the world at large. As I move on to the next sentence, I’m expecting neither a modern self-help book nor an impenetrable and arcane work of scholarship, but the ideas of someone who wants to engage me simply as a fellow-knower.

The book is The Genealogy of Morals; the writer, Friedrich Nietzsche.

 

We believe that we can know morality by discovering it; Nietzsche spends the greater part of his book spinning out alternative versions of how the human race created morality. For Nietzsche, knowing isn’t just a matter of gathering honey. Knowing too is an act of creating. If we want to know ourselves as creators, where do we look? Can we gather this self-knowledge and store it up for ourselves, or do we also have to create what we know about ourselves?

Start picking books off the shelves and reading the first sentences. Not just philosophy books, but all kinds of books – also short stories, plays, screenplays… Post, comment, file under FIRST LINES.

It’s Hard Getting Noticed

Here’s a transcript of a recent round of email correspondence with one of my old seminary professors. This bit of whining isn’t really the start of my blog — unless it is.

17 August

Dear Dr. ___

When I was at ___ in the late 70s I greatly admired your teaching and scholarship. Since getting my MDiv I’ve had zero contact with the old school. Now I approach you with some trepidation.

I’ve been working on an exegesis of Genesis 1 (yes, another one). It’s a literal exegesis, but I suppose it manifests the “postmodern” approach in a fairly rigorous sense. It’s a close reading, but a “post-structural” one; that is, it doesn’t rely on the rest of the Bible as interpretive context. As a result, that pathway takes some unexpected turns.

Briefly, I assert that the creation narrative has a narrator, an eyewitness to the events described. The “Let there be X;” and there was X creation formula is read as a dialogue between elohim and the witness, where elohim is teacher and the witness is student. Elohim asserts a series of scientific propositions about the material universe, and the witness confirms his understanding of these propositions. In the end the witness becomes like elohim: able to make sense of the world he inhabits, able thereby to use this knowledge to subdue the earth. In essence, and ironically, Genesis 1 becomes a text about elohim creating an empirically-based natural science.

I think it’s a pretty sound exegesis, though clearly not an orthodox one. It does solve certain problems in the current creation-vs-evolution controversy, only to open a different can of worms.

I’ve written a book embedding the exegesis in a broader interpretive and cultural context, but I’m not sure if anyone besides me will find it interesting. Not being an academician or a radio talkshow host, I have no ready-made platform from which to launch publication success. So, starting this week, I’ve been lurking around in the internet looking for people who might resonate with what I’ve done. The creation science people are too dug in to their own interpretations to look at mine; the evolutionists are interested mostly in Bible studies that debunk Scriptural accuracy.

Now I’ve come across the “emergents.” Having never heard of them before, I started reading some of their stuff. It’s kind of interesting, though I haven’t yet figured out the content of their “conversation.” In this search I found a reference to your critiques. I read one of your articles online: civil, reasonable and rigorous.

So, I wonder if you’d be interested in seeing what I’ve come up with. I understand that your a New Testament specialist, but I’d bet good money that your knowledge of the Old Testament and of Hebrew exceeds mine by a long shot. Also, as a kind of spokesman for “traditional evangelicalism” in the discussion with the emergents, you might have an interest in what I at least regard as a civil, reasonable and rigorous — if perhaps heretical — treatment of a Biblical text.

I’ve posted the exegesis on a website — the Introduction Page can be found by clicking here. If it captures your interest you can read the whole exegesis on that website. The rest of the book deals with the current controversy, early church debates, creativity within the Reformation, and the ascendancy of a hedonic ethos of creativity. Following the exegesis I discuss implications for an “elohimic ethos of creation” that contrasts with hedonism and social Darwinism. I can, if you like, email you the rest of the book.

I probably will send an email also to Dr. ___, from whom I learned to enjoy the exegetical practice. What his position is regarding the emergents I don’t know — but I don’t know my own position in that regard either.

Sincerely,
John Doyle

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August 20

Dear Mr. Doyle:

Thanks for your email of 17 August. Unfortunately, so many book-length manuscripts are offered me, usually several a week, that I simply have to turn down the overwhelming majority of them. Sorry!

With all good wishes,

Yours faithfully,

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20 August

Dear Dr. ___

Thank you for your timely response, in which you graciously declined to look at my manuscript called Creating Like Gods. It’s disheartening to think that my book constitutes such an indistinguishably insignificant contribution to the sludge conduit passing through your office that it merits no personalized comment from you or your asssistant as to why my particular offering is chosen for rejection. Wrong topic? Wrong theology? Don’t know me from Adam?

Maybe you could customize your standard rejection letter a little bit; e.g. by cutting and pasting any random phrase from the writer’s petition and saying it doesn’t suit you. Try this:

Dear X,
In your letter of 17 August you say: The “Let there be X;” and there was X creation formula is read as a dialogue between elohim and the witness, where elohim is teacher and the witness is student. Unfortunately, I’m not currentlly pursuing this line of inquiry…

Or how about assigning the unsolicited manuscripts to your students for review? When I was in seminary I would have been thrilled if you or one of my other professors had asked me to preview an unpublished manuscript. You wouldn’t even have had to pay me. Frankly, as an unpublished writter I’d be thrilled to have anybody read my book, even a lowly sem student.

Sincerely,
John Doyle

Seeking a Raison d’Etre

I set up this blog as a sounding board for the GENESIS 1 REVISITED project, which is presented as a series of rather long Pages over there on the right of the screen. Being new to blogspace, I wasn’t aware that nobody reads the archives and nobody comments on anything that’s been posted for more than a week. So I’m starting to get the hang of it. Now I have to decide what to write that spotlights the Gen1 exegesis without just repeating chunks of it as Posts or duplicates stuff that’s on some of the other excellent blogs out there. I’ll keep you posted.

Introducing Ktismatics

… a website dedicated to the theory and practice of creation. Artist or scientist, revolutionary or entrepreneur, adventurer or dreamer — if you create, Ktismatics is for you. Here you can read and comment on the GENESIS 1 REVISITED project, a new literal reading of the Biblical creation narrative. The SUMMARY OF FINDINGS identifies the core themes of the Western creative tradition embedded in the ancient text and outlines a profoundly ironic resolution of the creation-versus-evolution debate. Read, think, comment, pass the word.

Regular updates, called KTISMATA, will focus on pertinent aspects of the contemporary creative calling, as well as consensus and controversy surrounding the issues raised on the website.