There is no substitute . . .

Porsche

Spare parts are hard to come by, too!

Postmodern Values: Rights of Time Passages

Broken Clock
Time Passages

"A broken clock is right twice a day."

"Right" about what?

Right about now.

Right you are!

But no clock is ever right because every working clock is either fast or slow, and a stopped, broken clock preserves those moments in potential. Thus is every broken clock never current, but always errant.

Photos from a Korean Conference of Postmodern Medieval Modernists

Here are some photos from my most recent conference presentation. I only go these days if I'm invited, so I don't go to many - though I've gone to more than I anticipated back when I made this decision to go only if invited. Here's the first photo, one of the final photos, actually and obviously:

The Postmodern Medieval Modernist Gang

I'm in the back row, just left of center, wearing a cap. Now for the second photo:

Bae Kyung Jin and I Trying not to 'Wrecktify' a Right

Professor Bae Kyung Jin is the kind lady who invited me to present a paper at the conference, and we were trying to find the paintings I had located on the internet to use for illustrating the occasional instances of the peach as forbidden fruit. One image I had carefully located had simply vanished! We did without that slide into the fallen world . . . Next comes the man with all the questions, Professor Suh Hong Won:

Me Deferring to Genuine Milton Scholar

Professor Suh was kind enough to refer to the paper as a "work in progress" - and it became that over these last two weeks as I read and re-read the paper and made changes . . . subtle changes. By the bye, that lady on the screen is even offering a peach as the forbidden fruit, a painting used in the paper's section on T. S. Eliot's famous peach in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" even though no connection was proven . . . Here's what the brouhaha was all about:

Our Names in Lights

As you see, the paper was co-authored by me and Professor Salwa Khoddam, who couldn't make the trip from Oklahoma, "where the wind comes sweeping across the plains" . . . though I don't think that the sweeping wind was the sole good reason that she couldn't attend (and there's a poem in there somewhere). Finally, the real reason for going to these conferences anyway, as shown in the next photo!

Postmodern Relaxation

Well . . . this is the reason I go. If I can't have a career, I can at least have fun!

Uncle Cran's Farm Report: Exchanging Roles?

Uncle Cran has sent along another of his regularly sporadic, reliably unannounced, philosophically postmodern Ozark farm reports:

Do you ever wonder just what a farmer does in his spare time?

I have to admit that this very question has preyed deeply on my mind, and I'm bustin' to find out:

Well, in addition to the daily feeding of the cats and dogs, taking hay and grain to the cows, chopping holes in the ice on the pond so the critters can get a drink, and cutting and hauling wood for the stove most weeks, there are times when you have to become a mother to a calf, whose real mother doesn't have enough milk for the calf to survive.

Uncle Cran does all this in his spare time? Where does he find time for the farm work? And -- as we also see from the photo above -- Uncle Cran even uses some of his leisure time in taking on a mothering role toward a creature of another species! But why doesn't that real mother have enough milk for her own offspring? What's she doing with most of her milk, anyway? And why does Uncle Cran use a comma after "calf"?

The mother is always suspicious of me, and checks me out every time to make sure I'm not hurting her baby. I give her a few range cubes to keep her occupied. After all, a guy doesn't want another broken hip from an angry critter.

Broken hip? By a one-head-of-cattle stampede? That'll never happen . . . so long as Uncle Cran is more restrictive with cattle than with his relative clauses. But why's this mother cow so suspicious towards Uncle Cran? She's the one to be an object of suspicion, not giving her own calf enough milk! But what does the calf think about all this?

I don't think the calf cares whether I'm male or female, as long as I give it a bottle of calf milk replacer twice a day. The bottle holds two quarts. When I go out to feed him, all I have to do is call, and it comes running. I add some corn syrup and molasses each time, so it will like the stuff, and every other day I beat up an egg in the milk mix, so it's doing ok. Now I get some grain in my hand, and stick on its tongue. It's starting to nibble a little bit. Once I get it to eating it, it should really begin to grow.

The indefinite pronoun "it" is way out of control in this passage, especially in that there last sentence: "Once I get it to eating it, it should really begin to grow." I think "it" has already grown quite enough, thank you.

Otherwise, we are coping with the cold weather fairly well. Keep warm.

Thanks, but Seoul is not quite so cold this winter as the Ozarks are. So much for Uncle Cran's farm report. Oh wait. Talk about regularly sporadic and reliably unannounced! Another report has just come in, along with this curious photograph:

What more does Uncle Cran have to say for himself?

Some of you may be wondering if I still have my wife, Linda Gay.

I have to admit that this very question has also preyed deeply on my mind, given Uncle Cran's new role as mother to a calf. A mother doesn't generally need a wife, but in today's postmodern times . . . well, let's hear Uncle Cran out in his words about his wife Linda Gay:

She is so busy with house cleaning, laundry, cooking, and all the other things here in the house, she doesn't get in the pictures very often. But she also has another job assignment: She is my designated wood splitter.

No leisure time left for that activity, Uncle Cran? But what qualifies Linda Gay for that particular job?

Here she is, all dressed in her sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, and just finished up splitting that pile of wood behind her. I know she is only 4 feet eleven inches tall, but don't let that fool you. SHE HAS JUST FINISHED SPLITTING A HUGE PILE OF WOOD, WITH THE POWER OF FIVE HORSES, AND EXERTING A FORCE OF TWENTY TONS AT THE POINT OF IMPACT. And she did it by using only the power of her little right hand. Now you know one of the reasons I married her. I needed a personal protector.

Ah, a very powerful woman, one who can even protect Uncle Cran . . . leading inquiring minds to wonder just why Uncle Cran needed protection in the first place. Maybe from those angry cattle that he worries so much about? Is there some history here that we don't know yet?

We have been using this much wood every two weeks, with the extreme cold, snow, ice and high winds. Hopefully the weather will improve the rest of the winter.

Hope springs eternal that spring is just around the corner . . .

"Memory as Performance" - An Old, First Draft of an Old, Neglected Article . . .

Neon Church

Justin Alley

I'm resurrecting several old articles in the hope of publishing them now, some of them from several years ago. The passage below is the introduction to an article titled "Memory as Performance: Toward a Biblical Soteriology of Remembering." I wrote it about ten years ago when I had 'tenure' and access to a theology library, just slightly prior to the time when that particular university decided that foreigners couldn't have tenure in Korean universities -- which I never believed and which doesn't appear to have been true -- and relabled me as a "Visiting Professor" on temporary contract. I put the article aside, partly from being shot off the course of my career trajectory, partly from lack of time to pursue the project, partly from je ne sais quoi . . . Anyway, here's the introduction to that nearly forty-page paper:

The exponential growth of information that characterizes the modern and inchoate postmodern ages has placed an enormous burden upon memory, whether individual or cultural.[2] Indeed, the emerging postmodern age stems in part from the breakdown of memory's integrative function,[3] for postmodernism's explicitly declared mistrust of metanarratives partially derives from recognizing that finite memory’s necessary selectiveness excludes an ever-vaster temporal landscape of events, perspectives, values, practices, and narratives. Postmodernists therefore reject metanarratives such as those propounded by Marxists, positivists, free-market liberals, and Christians and embrace instead a multifold particularity of experience. We see a material analogy to this in postmodern architecture, which often picks and chooses randomly from various architectural styles -- both past and present -- in its constructions. We thus would not find ourselves at all surprised if confronted by a Gothic church with glaring neon images flashing religious icons from recesses in the walls where traditional Gothic windows would originally have displayed their stained glass beauty. Postmodernism, then, employs allusion where previous epochs (including the modernist one) would have attempted to achieve integration. Yet, allusion itself relies upon memory -- even if merely of discrete memories linked at random. Such discrete memories, moreover, presuppose a memory of narratives within which each has an integrated sense borrowed even in its postmodern negation. Despite the burden placed on memory by the exponential growth of information, despite postmodernism's distrust of memory's integrative function, we confront the ineluctability of memory. Yet, how should we understand a Christian Biblical soteriology[4] of memory?[5] I suggest that we note two corresponding aspects of remembering as "doing": 1) memory as actively remembering the inauguration of the covenant through a symbolic re-enacting of the original covenantal institution as though one were reliving a personally experienced event; and 2) memory as actively remembering the covenant itself through the lived enacting of the covenantal principles in one's daily actions.[6] This article will present a number of Biblical passages relevant to memory in order to examine the evidence that these two aspects of remembering mutually characterize a Christian Biblical soteriology of remembering.

Here are the footnotes to this introduction, which start with footnote 2 because footnote 1 belongs with a quote that goes with the article's title:

[2] This is the case not only despite new technologies of information processing, transmission, and storage but especially because of them. See Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulterellen Gedächtnisses (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999): "In der westlichen Zivilisation verschärft sich das Problem des kulturellen Gedächtnisses unter den Druck der neuen Medien, die zugleich unvorstellbare Speicherkapazitäten freisetzen und Information in immer schnelleren Rhythmen zirkulieren lassen. Immer dichtere Kommunikationsnetze vergellschaften entfernteste Regionen. Radio und Fernsehen schicken ihre Programme pausenlos und gedankenschnell über Satelliten um den Globus. Die Speicherkapazität neuer Datenträger und Archive sprengt die Konturen eines kulturellen Gedächtnisses. Die Bilderflut des Fernsehens macht die Schrift als zentrales Gedächtnis-Medien obsolet; neue Speicher- und Informationstechnologien basieren auf einer anderen Art von Schrift, nämlich der digitalen, die in ihrer flüssigen Gestalt nichts mehr zu tun hat mit dem alten Gestus des Einschreibens. Diese Schrift läßt keinen trennscharfen Unterschied mehr zu zwischen Erinnern und Vergessen" (213-214). Translation: "In western civilization, the problem of cultural memory is growing ever sharper under the pressure of new media that simultaneously create unimaginable storage capacities and allow information to circulate in ever faster rhythms. An ever tighter communication net draws distant regions into society. Radio and television send their programs without pause and as quick as thought by satellite around the globe. The storage capacity of new databases and archives explodes the contours of cultural memory. The flood of images from television make writing as the central medium of memory obsolete; new storage- and information-technologies base themselves on a different manner of writing, namely, the digital, which in its fluid form has nothing more to do with the old gesture of inscribing. This writing no longer allows a sharp distinction between remembering and forgetting." Assmann here apparently means cultural remembering and forgetting, not personal remembering and forgetting.

[3] In fact, an earlier breakup of "comprehensive social memory," as Danièle Hervieu-Léger notes, "came with the emergence and historical development of modernity," itself as "[t]he affirmation of the autonomous individual, the advance of rationalization breaking up the 'sacred canopies,' and the process of institutional differentiation denote the end of societies based upon memory," in Religion as a Chain of Memory (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 127. However, Hervieu-Léger also notes the more recent loss of memory that Assmann analyzes, and she points to much the same reason for this loss, i.e., overabundance of information: "The complexity of the world shown in the vast incoherent mass of available information is decreasingly amenable to being ordered in the more or less impromptu way that collective memory was able to achieve by finding explanatory links," 128. The growth of the internet is exacerbating this overabundance and constructing an informational ediface that evermore resembles that seductive and baffling labyrinth of an endless library described by Jorge Luis Borges in his story "The Library of Babel" (see the fine anthology of several of Borges's short stories: Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (Norton, 1988), edited by James E. Irby and Donald A. Yates).

[4] Some would question the possibility of a Biblical soteriology (or theology) of anything since the Bible is a collection of various documents written at various times by various individuals. This misses two points: 1) these documents were written within a religious tradition in communication with itself over the same central religious experiences and issues, and 2) the historical process of the early Common Era that resulted in the Bible as the Christian canon has conferred upon the Church the privilege of interpreting for itself what this self-communication means to say. In other words, the method should not be one of simply adding up what the individual texts state as an expression of what the individual authors meant but one of working toward a more unified Biblical soteriology by looking at the texts within the context of the canon as a whole as interpreted by the Church. For the purposes of this article, I will be working within the general framework of what is known as canon criticism, an interpretive approach in which "exegesis endeavors to determine what a given passage means not only in the immediate context of its date, authorship and setting but in the wider context of the canon in which it was ultimately incorporated" (Joel B. Green and Scot McKnight, Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 99a). Further on the issue of the canon, see Luke Timothy Johnson's "Epilogue: The New Testament as the Church's Book," in The Writings of the New Testament: An Interpretation (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1999), 595–619.

[5] Memory as cultural artefact has been the subject of analysis by cultural theorists. Aside, from Assmann, mentioned above, many others have addressed this issue. For instance, Harold Weinrich, Sprache in Texten (Stuttgart: 1976), pp. 291-294, analyzes two metaphors of memory: "Gedächtnis-Magazin" ("Memory-Storehouse") and "Tafel der Erinnering" ("Table of Recollection"). The former is a spatial metaphor, the latter more of a visual one. Both, however, are purely mental and mostly static. My suggestion in this paper is that the Biblical tradition presents a yet another understanding of memory in addition to storehouse and table. In the Bible, "to remember" very often means "to do." Thus, to remember God's covenant means to fulfill God's covenant. This does not rule out other meanings of memory -- memory as table emerges in a few places -- but the understanding of memory as action is pervasive in the Bible.

[6] This conceptualization of memory has a secular counterpart in that "to remember" can also mean to "to do." For example, the imperatival expression "Remember your promise!" means far more than simply to recall it intellectually; it implicitly means "Keep your promise!" Thus, the present article does not intend to draw a pragmatic-linguistics distinction between Biblical and secular expressions of remembering but, rather, to focus upon a neglected aspect of the Biblical understanding of remembering -- and which may also be neglected in its secular counterpart. Of course, the Biblical sense of remembering has a powerful soteriological significance lacking in its secular counterpart.

Such is the project upon which I labored, a hard labor cut short by a miscarriage of justice -- one might well call it the literary equivalent of a partial birth abortion! Actually, though, I did finish a draft of the projected article before the university terminated my tenure and put me on temporary contract, and I now hope to polish this article and send it off for publication somewhere or other. I confess that the writing sounds so much better than anything I could attempt today -- I can't even recall how I managed to write it, though I suppose that I still had hopes of a career in religious studies back then, and thus had the motivation to push myself beyond my usual intellectual limitations.

Wish me luck . . .

"If space and time, as sages say . . ."

Literature Across the Spatiotemporal Continuum?

Illustration by O.O.P.S.

New York Times

In a recent NYT review of Hari Kunzru's Gods Without Men, "Convergences" (March 8, 2012), Douglas Coupland tells us that the book belongs to a new literary genre that reflects our current reality, or in his words:

[W]e appear to have entered an aura-free universe in which all eras coexist at once -- a state of possibly permanent atemporality given to us courtesy of the Internet. No particular era now dominates. We live in a post-era era without forms of its own powerful enough to brand the times. The zeitgeist of 2012 is that we have a lot of zeit but not much geist. I can't believe I just wrote that last sentence, but it's true; there is something psychically sparse about the present era, and artists of all stripes are responding with fresh strategies.

A sort of twilight zone of the gods, one might say. Or I might, anyway. But what's that new genre Coupland mentioned?

This new reality seems to have manifested in the literary world in what must undeniably be called a new literary genre. For lack of a better word, let's call it Translit. Translit novels cross history without being historical; they span geography without changing psychic place. Translit collapses time and space as it seeks to generate narrative traction in the reader's mind. It inserts the contemporary reader into other locations and times, while leaving no doubt that its viewpoint is relentlessly modern and speaks entirely of our extreme present. Imagine traveling back to Victorian England -- only with vaccinations, a wad of cash and a clean set of ruling-class garb. With Translit we get our very delicious cake, and we get to eat it, too, as we visit multiple pasts safe in the knowledge we'll get off the ride intact, in our bold new perpetual every-era/no-era. Translit's precursors are, say, "Winesburg, Ohio" and "Orlando," and the genre's 21st-­century tent poles are Michael Cunningham's novel "The Hours" and David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas." To these books we can add Hari Kunzru's gorgeous and wise "Gods Without Men."

Having read Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, I see what Coupland means by this and why he calls the writing translit. Mitchell's novel spans several centuries and tells various interrelated stories of characters who seem to be related across space and time, at times as if they share the same soul transmigrating over time and place. One can also consider Mitchell's tendency to link his various novels in minor but notable ways, as when a character from one novel appears briefly in another, giving one a sense of familiarity across novels, as though some sort of community were being established to bring all characters into communion despite their conflicts with one another. Is that a feature of translit? Can the genre include characters from one novel appearing unexpectedly in another, especially if that other novel is by a different writer? Intertextuality gone wild? Perhaps I should ask Coupland his opinion?

And what's this O.O.P.S. illustration thing?

Milton and the 'Fall' of Language?

Biohazard Sign

"This biohazard sign

is a completely conventional symbol

with no inherent relationship

to what it represents."

(Image from Wikipedia)

The effect of original sin upon language was a major theme of the West's Early Modern period as the great increase in knowledge sharpened the issue of what one could securely know, and there has been some scholarly debate over whether or not Milton held to some version of a 'fall' of language. I think that he did, but he doesn't seem to have held to a radical version since, as we saw in yesterday's post, he promotes education as a means of repairing the impairment effected by original sin.

The scholar Herman Rapaport, in Milton and the Postmodern (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), seems to have argued that Milton believed that postlapsarian language was fallen, and he applied postmodern theory -- drawing particularly Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Derrida -- to describe what Milton believed. I've not read Rapaport firsthand, however, so I offer a passage from Richard Bradford's 2001 work, The Complete Critical Guide to John Milton, in which Rapaport's views are recapitulated:

The closest that anyone has come to a comprehensive deconstructive survey of Milton is Rapaport (1983). To properly describe, let alone explain, the panorama and complexity of Rapaport's survey would require another chapter: what can be said is that the book regularly involves encounters between Rapaport's perceptions of Derrida and Milton. One of the more accessible occurs at pages 38-41, considering the last two books of Paradise Lost. Here, 'Milton clearly shows how the sin that Adam and Eve commit initiates the Fall of language, causes signifiers and signifieds to break their natural bonds' (Rapaport 1983: 38). 'Signifier' and 'signified' are Saussurean terms; the former referring to the actual, material sign, the word uttered or on paper, the latter to the prelinguistic object or concept that the sign is held to represent. Saussure argued that their relationship is arbitrary and customary, that there is no natural relationship between the two, but that our ingrained familiarity with language causes us to presume that there might be: when we use or think of the signifiers 'mother' or 'father', for instance, they seem innately bound into our particular perception of their signifieds.

Rapaport suggests that in Books XI and XII Milton pre-empts Derrida, albeit within a limiting theological framework. He argues that the Fall causes Adam and Eve to first encounter the arbitrary relation between signifiers and signifieds.

Nature first gave Signs, imprest
On bird, Beast, Aire, Aire suddenly eclips'd
After short blush of morn

(XI, 182-4)

That is to say, things are no longer signifieds but signifiers; things are not archetypes but only copies of archetypes . . . things have faded, and all that remains is their residual semiotic significance.

(Rapaport 1983:39)

Much is implied here. Before the Fall, so Rapaport argues, things, objects and ideas were in some way organically related, almost blended, with their linguistic representations. One of the consequences of the Fall was that language became only arbitrarily related to prelinguistic reality -- which is consistent with the orthodox Christian view that the Fall caused humanity to be denied any proper knowledge of ultimate truth, God. (Richard Bradford, The Complete Critical Guide to John Milton, Routledge, 2001 pages 187-188)

Although I've not found a complete edition of Rapaport online, Google Books offers some help, allowing us to fill out the block quote from page 39 of Rapaport's book:

That is to say, things are no longer signifieds but signifiers; things are not archetypes but only copies of archetypes. It is as if nature suddenly turns into a book and man into a reader or interpreter of the signs written in that book. Things have faded, and all that remains is their residual semiotic significance. (Rapaport, in Milton and the Postmodern, page 39)

Perhaps we should also look at the passage quoted by Rapaport from Milton's Paradise Lost, Book 11, which follows Eve's wish to remain content, though fallen, in the garden:

So spake, so wish'd much-humbl'd Eve, but Fate
Subscrib'd not; Nature first gave Signs, imprest
On Bird, Beast, Aire, Aire suddenly eclips'd
After short blush of Morn; nigh in her sight
The Bird of Jove, stoopt from his aerie tour, [ 185 ]
Two Birds of gayest plume before him drove:
Down from a Hill the Beast that reigns in Woods,
First hunter then, pursu'd a gentle brace,
Goodliest of all the Forrest, Hart and Hinde;
Direct to th' Eastern Gate was bent thir flight. [ 190 ]
Adam observ'd, and with his Eye the chase
Pursuing, not unmov'd . . . . (PL 11.181-192)

Rapaport might be pressing his postmodern analysis here, though I'd have to read his book itself to decide, but there may be something to what he argues. Milton depicts Adam reading the signs of fallen nature and inferring a significant shift in nature's meaning. Moreover, the fact that the signs observed by Adam signify the effects of the first couple's sins might be significant, given the origin of personified Sin's name:

Then shining Heav'nly fair, a Goddess arm'd
Out of thy head I sprung; amazement seis'd
All th' Host of Heav'n back they recoild affraid
At first, and call'd me Sin, and for a Sign [ 760 ]
Portentous held me (PL 2.757-761)

The "Host of Heav'n" are here the fallen angels prior to their expulsion from heaven, and as they observe the 'birth' of Sin, first conceived in the mind of Satan and now bursting forth from his head, they link "Sin" to "sign" in naming the unexpected creature.

In the passage from Paradise Lost 11, then, Milton might again be punning on the relation between "signs" and "sins," such that the signs "imprest On Bird, Beast, Aire" are in fact the sins of Adam and Eve "imprest On Bird, Beast, Aire." As such, given the confusion of sign and sin, perhaps one can argue that Milton believed postlapsarian language to be fallen, with the consequence that the relation between signifier and signified is now arbitrary, ambiguous.

I leave the significance of this for readers to consider . . .

Warren T. Reich on the Consolation of Phronesis?

Boethius (480-524/5) Teaching Students Consolation

Folio 4r in 1385 Manuscript of Consolation of Philosophy

MS Hunter 374 (V.1.11), Glasgow University Library

(Image from Wikipedia)

Because I'm even more pressed for time this morning, I'll just paraphrase the summary that I've prepared of Professor Reich's paper, "Consoling the Dying and Those Who Mourn: Reviving an Ancient Tradition," which he presented yesterday and which I'll be commenting upon in a session of the conference today:

Reich informs us that the most fundamental and proper form of care that we can show to those who are dying or mourning is by consoling them, which offers an active, direct, and practical approach to these problems, in contrast to the virtues of empathy and compassion, which are also important but which are not essentially connected to action. Consolation thus fills a need that no other virtue can, and Reich turns to the lengthy, 3000-year-old 'European' tradition of consolation for 'new' sources to draw upon in care for the dying. Among these sources are pagan, Jewish, and Christian ones. Common to all three is an understanding of consolation as aiming at anxious care, which consolation attempts to alleviate. Of particular interest is that Reich extends the consolation to be provided far beyond an art of dying to an art of living, an extension that he also finds in late antiquity and that he suggests may be needed even in our present, anxious times, for the various sorts of anxiety can be depicted as a single, unified object of consolation: anxious worry. Reich notes three approaches within the Christian tradition toward alleviating anxious worry: a belief in security, especially divine security; a willingness to let God be God; and a trust that one can cast one's cares upon God and be cared for in return. Reich calls this third sort a care-care dialectic and treats it as something that human beings can also provide, offering consoling care for the anxious care. In the ancient practice, consolation meant not to share grief but to remove it by appeal to reason and exhortation. This practice entails an art of living well, of knowing the telos of human desire and action, and of seeking happiness. Reich goes on to note the stages that a sufferer undergoes cases of severe health problems and in cases of dying, and he suggests that at a stage where the consoler and the one being consoled are communicating, the consoler should cite and comment upon aphorisms, for these resonate with the larger traditions of practical wisdom (phronesis) from which they stem and have been used in the past to console because they draw upon a broader, richer ground of moral understanding. Reich concludes by calling for a broad-based effort to recover the long tradition of consolation and bring it again into use. In my opinion, he has made a good case for this need, and he has even raised the central question that I would raise, namely, how to develop consolation for a pluralistic society of competing beliefs and values.

That last point is the tough one. In our fragmented, postmodern world of competing values, can a caregiver console the dying if their values are fundamentally different? Some religious traditions are exclusivistic and offer no consolation to those outside. A caregiver belonging to an exclusivistic religion might believe that consolation follows from conversion and that the means toward converting the outsider would first involve raising the outsider's level of anxiety about what to expect after death before extending the only hope of consolation.

That sounds like an issue for discussion at the conference today.

Textual Relations with a T-Shirt

Let's keep things in context...

I'm merely trying to help.

(Image from Engrish.com)

Yesterday's blog entry about a woman's t-shirt has occasioned a number of insinuations -- with a bit too much accent on that second syllable:

in·SIN·u·a·tion

Please note that the "sin" here deserves only minor stress, the major emphasis being elsewhere, way elsewhere:

in·sin·u·A·tion

Now as to my other-than-prurient interests in a certain t-shirt, allow me explain myself clearly -- and I will draw upon some of the discussion in yesterday's comments to make my point.

In staring at the back side of that woman's t-shirt, I was -- as I later discovered upon learning the meaning of "allantion" -- merely trying to educate myself about skin care.

Close readers will have noted that my eyes were directed solely to the text inscribed upon the t-shirt, not to the woman beneath that skirt. I mean shirt. Anyway, as I explained in the comments, although postmodernists would have it that all the world's a text -- a convenient philosophy for anyone who might wish to imply that my textual interests extended beyond the text on the shirt to the text beneath the text -- I insist that I was merely looking at the body of text on the shirt. That the shirt was clothing a woman was immaterial, mere pretext.

But I want to say one thing to my readers. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again. I did not have textual relations with that woman.

I admit that I did have textual relations with that woman's shirt, so I should perhaps remind readers of precisely what the text was:

In your life and work, you will meet many kinds of people. Some will be hardworking. Others will be less so. Some will be outgoing. Others will be shy. Some will be kind. Others will be unkind. Some will be your friends. Some will not (etc.) . . . . They all deserve your allantion.

Such was my focus, my attention, and even as I passed the woman bearing this text, I didn't so much as glance at her face, so intent was I upon retaining the puzzling wisdom that I'd just read concerning the fact of everybody needing my allantion.

Not that a glance would have made any difference anyway, for I'm just a little bit too married for any other woman...