Truth in Orthodoxy . . . Or in Bucking Orthodoxy?

Orin Buck

In light of my post two days ago -- about Lindall's talk on "Satan's Peculiar Grace" and Bien's "Satanic Free Rhapsody" -- the artist Orin Buck sent those of us in the WAH Circle a 'peculiar' email:

Terry, are you guys going to start a new schism in the Western Church, advocating an appreciation for Satan's role in God's Plan? That would also fit with the appreciation of Judas as Christ's collaborator in the Salvation of Man -- you should include that, also. I think that view has an older precedent, which is always good.

Orin's link led to this surprising 'revelation': "Judas the Misunderstood: Vatican moves to clear reviled disciple's name" (Times Online, January 2006):

Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrayed Jesus with a kiss, is to be given a makeover by Vatican scholars . . . . on the ground that he was not deliberately evil, but was just "fulfilling his part in God's plan" . . . . [A] campaign led by Monsignor Walter Brandmuller, head of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Science, is aimed at persuading believers to look kindly at a man reviled for 2,000 years . . . . Brandmuller told fellow scholars it was time for a "re-reading" of the Judas story. He is supported by Vittorio Messori, a prominent Catholic writer close to both Pope Benedict XVI and the late John Paul II . . . . Messori said that the rehabilitation of Judas would "resolve the problem of an apparent lack of mercy by Jesus toward one of his closest collaborators" . . . . [and he added] that there was a Christian tradition that held that Judas was forgiven by Jesus and ordered to purify himself with "spiritual exercises" in the desert . . . . Father Allen Morris, Christian Life and Worship secretary for the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales, said: "If Christ died for all -- is it possible that Judas too was redeemed through the Master he betrayed?" . . . . The move to clear Judas's name coincides with plans to publish the alleged Gospel of Judas for the first time in English, German and French. Though not written by Judas, it is said to reflect the belief among early Christians -- now gaining ground in the Vatican -- that in betraying Christ Judas was fulfilling a divine mission, which led to the arrest and Crucifixion of Jesus and hence to man's salvation . . . . The "Gospel of Judas," a 62-page worn and tattered papyrus, was found in Egypt half a century ago and later sold by antiquities dealers to the Maecenas Foundation in Basle, Switzerland.

That was back in 2006, and I've not heard that anything has come of it, but a similar idea was entertained by none other than Jorge Luis Borges in the short story "Three versions of Judas" way back during the twilight of the Nazi gods in 1944. The protagonist of this story was a Swedish theologian named Nils Runeberg whose scriptural investigations combined with a bent toward metaphysical speculations and led not merely to a complete rehabilitation of Judas, but indeed to that disciple's apotheosis in Runeberg's magnum opus:

Toward the end of 1907, Runeberg finished and revised the manuscript text; almost two years passed without his handing it to the printer. In October of 1909, the book appeared with a prologue (tepid to the point of being enigmatic) by the Danish Hebraist Erik Erfjord and bearing this perfidious epigraph: In the world he was, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not (John 1:10). The general argument is not complex, even if the conclusion is monstrous. God, argues Nils Runeberg, lowered himself to be a man for the redemption of the human race; it is reasonable to assume that the sacrifice offered by him was perfect, not invalidated or attenuated by any omission. To limit all that happened to the agony of one afternoon on the cross is blasphemous. To affirm that he was a man and that he was incapable of sin contains a contradiction; the attributes of impeccabilitas and of humanitas are not compatible. Kemnitz admits that the Redeemer could feel fatigue, cold, confusion, hunger and thirst; it is reasonable to admit that he could also sin and be damned. The famous text "He will sprout like a root in a dry soil; there is not good mien to him, nor beauty; despised of men and the least of them; a man of sorrow, and experienced in heartbreaks" (Isaiah 53:2-3) is for many people a forecast of the Crucified in the hour of his death; for some (as for instance, Hans Lassen Martensen), it is a refutation of the beauty which the vulgar consensus attributes to Christ; for Runeberg, it is a precise prophecy, not of one moment, but of all the atrocious future, in time and eternity, of the Word made flesh. God became a man completely, a man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of being reprehensible -- all the way to the abyss. In order to save us, He could have chosen any of the destinies which together weave the uncertain web of history; He could have been Alexander, or Pythagoras, or Rurik, or Jesus; He chose an infamous destiny: He was Judas.

The fictional Runeberg went far beyond the rehabilitation of Judas proposed by the Catholic scholar Monsignor Brandmuller, but should one not expect a Protestant to forge far beyond Catholics in heresy, there being fewer institutional boundaries and more theological splitting?

Only a writer like Borges could come up with such a fictional economy of salvation, more fabulous even than the utopian economy of salvation concocted by Karl Marx! As an Italian girlfriend of thirty years ago once told me, "Marxists read Marx, bourgeoisie read Borges." Like her, I prefer the latter's fiction over that of the former . . .

A Terminal Deferment . . .

Jorge Luis Borges

In a Hotel of the Universe of This Curse

Wikipedia

Eli Park Sorensen has written another interesting column for The Korea Herald: "The gigantic, confusing library of the universe" (December 24, 2012). This time, he meditates on a writer who has fascinated me since I first read "The Library of Babel" at age 19, though I could, at that tender age, scarcely grasp its meaning. It is a rich text, as Sorensen reminds us:

Jorge Luis Borges imagines the universe as a gigantic library, consisting of an indefinite number of hexagonal rooms, each filled with rows of books. "Each book," writes Borges, "is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are in black color." Most of the text inside the books, however, consists of sequences of letters utterly incomprehensible and unreadable to the people inhabiting this mysterious library. Occasionally, some have made valuable discoveries of fragments of meaningful text; but "for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherence."

Who created this library -- let alone authored the books -- no one knows. For a long time, the inhabitants believed that these enigmatic books were written in old, forgotten languages. But since some of the books consist of only one or two letters, the language theory is eventually rejected. Finally, a librarian makes the deduction that the library is total - that everything which can possibly be expressed in any language at any time throughout history, every possible linguistic combination, is contained in these books. "Everything," writes Borges; "the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue" -- and so on.

This library is a confusing farrago of the senseless and the meaningful, the stochastic and the orderly, the chance and the regular -- a bibliographication of the atoms and their swerve! Everything seems to repeat almost as though Nietzsche's eternal recurrence had congealed from temporal to spatial -- a point that one can ambiguously take, pausing either before or after "almost."

Sorensen himself goes on to make a number of interesting points, but I want to focus on his initial couple of points, which follow his above summary on Borges's story:

Borges' hilarious story illustrates an uncanny dimension of language; that our language has a limit, which in effect limits what we may say and think about the world. That is, language is essentially a vast, but finite, system of different signs and codes which in various combinations generate meanings, albeit not by referring to something outside the system, but rather from within the system itself -- between the different signs. Using a dictionary to understand the meaning of a particular word, for example, will lead to other words; these words, in turn, lead to new words, and so on. Somewhere between these words, meaning temporarily resides. However, the meaning -- of things, objects, phenomena -- is never permanently fixed, but constantly slides, or is deferred, along an interminable chain of signifiers.

First, Sorensen catches me by surprise by affirming that the story implies a finite universe of discourse. I had thought that by "indefinite number of hexagonal rooms," he meant an unbounded number, indicating that there is always 'room' for one more section of books, a bit like Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel, a hypothetical building with an infinite number of rooms, each of them occupied, yet the hotel always accommodates more guests by moving the guests residing in the first room into the second room, those in the second room into the third room, those in the third room into the fourth room, and so on endlessly (suggesting that Mary and Joseph ought to have tried Hilbert's Hotel in Bethlehem).

But perhaps I've not quite understood. Maybe Sorensen means that language is finite, but the universe is infinite because every book occurs infinitely many times. Yet, if I recall, Borges doesn't state quite that, for he speaks of books that differ only by a letter or a comma, not books that are identical, nor does Sorensen say this either. Perhaps I'd better re-read Borges . . . or talk to Sorensen.

Second, Sorensen makes a point often found in Continental philosophy and Critical Theory, namely, that the meaning of a word is interminably deferred because checking a dictionary leads only to further words, which lead to more words, leading to other words -- in other words, endless deferral of meaning. But I think that there's a problem with this picture of how we seek meaning. Allow me to explain by drawing upon a point made by Jennifer Robertson in her article "Robots of the Rising Sun" (The American Interest, Volume VI, Number 1, Autumn (September/October) 2010):

What distinguished Japanese robotics early on -- and now almost all roboticists have followed suit -- is the concept of embodied intelligence or embodied cognition. Roboticists point out that intelligence cannot exist in the form of an abstract algorithm, but requires a material body. The emphasis on embodiment recognizes that the body (whether human or robotic) is actively and continually in touch with its surroundings. Moreover, cognitive processes originate in an organism's sensory-motor experience. Only dynamic interaction between a robot and its environment can generate emergent autonomous behavior; behavior initiated by some external control system cannot. Advances in artificial life, including nanotechnology and self-evolving genetic algorithms, have led to the development of new sensory, actuation and locomotion components for robots that, in turn, have enabled the actualization of artificial embodied cognition. Central to the emphasis in robotics on embodied intelligence are qualitative studies in the field of child development.

Data from studies of infants are also used dialectically, and Japanese scientists have taken the lead in both. In June 2007, the Japanese Science and Technology Agency unveiled the Child Robot with Biomimetic Body, or CB2, that will teach researchers about sensory-motor development in human children. The androgynous CB2 moves like a human child between the ages of one and three, although it is disproportionately large and heavy at 1.2 meters tall and 33 kilograms. Its 56 actuators take the place of muscles, and it has 197 sensors for touch, small cameras working as eyes, and an audio sensor. CB2 can also speak through a set of artificial vocal chords. With this robot, researchers hope to "study human recognition development" such as language acquisition and communication skills. (page 68ab)

My point is that the meaning of words does not ultimately derive solely from the meaning of other words. Continental philosophy is too fixated on the abstract level of Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic theory, thus ignoring the concrete manner in which language learning is embodied. Language learning initially begins with the child learning rather concrete things through interacting with its environment and learning language by hearing what things are called -- though I don't mean that language is fundamentally a matter of learning nouns, even if, as Gertrude Stein noted, "A noun has been the name of something for such a very long time" -- but if meaning were really constantly deferred, the child would never learn to communicate.

I could of course -- as an adult -- prepare a lecture in which I offer a sequence, arbitrarily long, of words that I don't know defined in terms of other words that I don't know. But eventually, the words would lead to a word that I do understand, and deference to deferment would terminate. I could defer termination for an indefinite term only artificially, but not interminably, for "language is essentially a vast, but finite, system of different signs and codes," as Sorensen notes, and I thus must eventually encounter a word that I do know. I therefore differ on deferment . . . unless I simply don't yet know what this word means.

Now where did my dictionary get to . . .

Literary Criticism: "play[ing] tennis with the net down"

Hoar Frost

The muse is a fickle mistress . . .

and criticism an ill-tempered husband.

(Image from Wikipedia)

I recently posted an old 'poem' of mine from my days living an absurd, freewheeling life as a wastrel in romantic Tubingen before I began paying my debt to society after meeting Sun-Ae. Here's that poem again:

Free Verse!

Free it from ironic cages,
Interwoven webs of language,
Patterns binding through the ages,
Meter, accent, feet, and beat. Wedge

A way. Scheme rhyme's end. And break all
Mind-deformed maniacals like
Those who'd have the udder gall
To bilk a bitter tense-peed bike

As though it took of bovine ilk!
So stand a stanza on its head,
Cup a couplet on the ear, milk
All metaphoricals! 'Nuff said.

Obviously nonsensical . . . and hardly 'free' verse despite its freewheeling style. My online friend Malcolm 'Malcontent' Pollack decided to express himself humorously about the poem's putative message:

"Tennis with the net down."

To which I retorted:

That's a frosty remark.

Thereby prompting Malcolm's quick quip:

Ah! Whose words these are, I think you know.

Thus inviting this response from me (the date just happening to be June 21st):

Though one might think it rather queer,
Indeed I do -- the words appear;
with clarity, I see your fake,
this brightest evening of the year.

Inspiring Malcolm to compose a reply in kind:

A lot of fun, this game has been,
Indeed, your latest made me grin.
But perhaps it's worn a little thin,
And so I think I'll pack it in.

But I wasn't quite finished yet:

Oh pack it in, then pack it out.
That's what this game is all about.
Let's call a tie -- there's been no rout.
We've proved we neither one's a lout.

And neither was Malcolm:

And so the ball went to and fro,
As it did 'twixt Borg and McEnroe.
With every serve, we scored an ace,
And we did it with the net in place!

I tried my hand one more time:

Time now to choose at forking path,
Where ways diverge in wood or grove,
Past apple-picking time, one hath
sun's golden apples for the rove.

And closed "[w]ith apologies to Borges, Frost, and Yeats" for that last endeavor.

I've heard nothing since from Malcolm, but perhaps that wandering aengus is off plucking, till time and times are done, some silver apples of the moon for golden apples of the sun.

But feel free to pick up the ball...

If I'm so smart...

Glenn Gould

Toronto, around the 1970s

Don Hunstein/Sony BMG Masterworks

(Image from NYT)

As I grow older and wiser but not richer, I find myself mulling over that old retort "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" And I ask myself,

"Jeff...

...HODGES!"

Sorry, I had to get my attention. That sometimes happens when I'm talking to myself. I realize that my unexpected shout must be disconcerting to others on the subway.

Anyway, as I was saying, I ask myself,

"Jeff, if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"

This has really had me puzzled, but I think that I've now figured out the reason. I'm not so smart. If I were only smarter, I'd have realized this long ago.

I used to think that I was quite smart because I was eccentric . . . like Glenn Gould being eccentric. He was eccentric, and smart. I'm eccentric. Therefore, I must be smart. Pretty stupid of me, to draw that hasty conclusion, but what do you expect? I'm not so smart.

But it's true that really smart people are eccentric, right? They've got smarts, which is another way of saying that their brains hurt, I guess. As in "Ow, my brain smarts."

Glenn Gould's brain smarted. And he made a lot of money in addition to making a lot of music. Oddly -- though appropriate for an odd person and thus not oddly at all -- he didn't make a lot of money from his music but from his investments:

Gould, a sufferer from extreme stage fright but a winner in the stock market, had quit performing in public 18 years earlier [than his untimely death in 1982], using the proceeds of his financial ventures to soften the burdens of early retirement.

Or so says Bernard Holland, who has written a fascinating, smart if short article on Gould for the New York Times: "The Continuing Cult of Glenn Gould, Deserved or Not" (November 24, 2007).

In short, Gould got rich not from his skilled hands for music but from his smart head for stocks. If he had only survived his death, he might have gotten rich from his music, too. Bernard Holland implies that he did survive:

In death, Gould came to life.

A neat trick. Holland explains:

Record companies that had not been paying much attention introduced great piles of discs into the marketplace, from big-ticket items of Bach and Beethoven down to the sweepings that Gould had left behind in the studio.

Brisk business was done over his body, and it hasn't stopped yet. A cleaned-up version of his career-making 1955 recording of Bach's "Goldberg" Variations appeared this year and is now prominently on sale.

Gould's untimely death was thus a timely, savvy career move. Maybe I should try that?

Holland is also very smart, and writes lots of music reviews for the Times, so maybe he's also rich. I don't think that he's dead. I wonder if he's eccentric. He seems to appreciate Gould's eccentricities:

Tales of his personal oddities were a thriving spinoff industry. There was Gould bundled up for blizzard conditions in tropical summer heat -- indeed, he was apparently once arrested in Florida as a park bench vagrant.

That sounds preferable to dying, so perhaps I should try that instead, not in Florida but here in Seoul next summer . . . except that mere eccentricity is not enough. I'd first have to be as smart as Gould. Why, I'd settle just to be as smart as Holland, who writes of things beyond my ken:

With Angela Hewitt's recent presentation of Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier" at Zankel Hall still in the ears, I have been going back to the Gould recordings of these preludes and fugues on Sony Classical. At a number of moments, Bach is brilliantly served. Gould's intelligent use of astonishing muscular control in the C sharp and E flat fugues of Book 1 gives separate personalities to two and three voices in simultaneous conversation, this on a modern piano constructed to make individual notes sound uniform rather than distinctive.

I could never have written that except by copying it, word for word, like Pierre Menard rewriting Don Quixote and claiming it as his own in the fantasy elaborated by Borges, another very smart guy.

I wonder if Borges is rich. He was eccentric. And he is dead...