Time and Again

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana

     Time is tricky business. That much is certain. It is also a very nice orchestral piece by Hans Zimmer from Inception, and just about as tricky for me to figure out on the piano. But when humankind gets in the way of time, it does some interesting things.

     Time is often modeled as a linear, eternal progression. Timelines, for example, are obviously lines. Not squares or parabolas. Viewing time as a line is convenient and logical. I think however, that approaching time, but more importantly history, with a linear viewpoint can obscure some interesting facts about how time interacts with the world. For example, I think we could all attest to the fact that history has a tendency to repeat itself. Why does history repeat? Simply because those in the present do not learn from the past. Until humanity as a whole returns to the failures of the past (an impossibly idealistic assumption), the events of time will continue to loop around in circles. Imagine a cog rolling down a slightly inclined board. Humanity is this cog, and the board is time. The cog is going somewhere, but it continues repeating and repeating until it falls off the board, or it hits a wall, or is struck by a meteor. Imagine that the present is a single spoke on the cog. Perhaps you might think that this spoke would simply move in a uniform circle around the center of the cog, and you would be right. But that would be a rather hopeless situation if that spoke turns and turns forever without any linear progression. That is why the board is important. It creates opportunity for a new pattern for the spoke on the cog to trace. Now, that spoke, when viewed relative to the board, neither goes in a circle or a straight line. It moves in a pattern of cycloids. I just found out about cycloids when studying pendulums, and it further proves that there is a word for everything. A cycloid is the arch that is traced by a point on the diameter of a rolling circle. It looks like this:

     Imagine a whole bunch of these arches lined up, and you can picture how I think the timeline of history should be drawn. This model has its low points and its high points, but it is a consistent pattern that I think could be fitted to the history of the world in a suitable fashion. Only when we learn and study this repetition of history can we begin to foresee the tell-tale signs of the low points and the high points of the future. 

The Devolution of Evolution

In which I unravel a global conspiracy.

"We cannot otherwise think and make comprehensible the purposiveness which must lie at the bottom of our cognition of the internal possibility of many natural things than by representing it and the world in general as a product of an intelligent cause" - Immanuel Kant

     I've been connecting some dots in the past few weeks and starting to understand just how complex is the web that has produced much of the moral decline of recent years. Specifically looking into the origins of the theory of evolution in my secular online school, I've realized that the theory has a long and dark root system that winds all the way back to Descartes if not further.

     It started with a simple idealization. The materialist approach to science, supported by Descartes, limited science to direct physical interactions. It's been called the "billiard ball" approach to science where no "forces" exist, and all operations in nature are the result of particles and objects banging into each other. This sounds harmless enough, but a simple theory like this (even though it was disproved) sparked a distrust of all invisible "forces."

     The gap left by the disproved materialism was soon filled by the theory of mathematics. Mathematics was a much stronger system used to fill the scary void of the question of invisible forces. Suddenly, anything that could not be explained by mathematics or statistics could not be considered a science. This was the origin of positivism, and by this point, the ground had gotten much shakier.

      This requisite of mathematic explanation posed a serious problem to one tiny little scientific discipline: the young field of biology. Biology implies morphology; the study of forms as opposed to matter. Morphology, in turn, implies teleology; the explanation of phenomena by purpose. And if there weren't enough "ologies" already, teleology directly implies theology; the doctrine of an ultimate purpose in the material world. Quite obviously, mathematic theory cannot, in any way, explain theology. This realization prompted Immanuel Kant, in 1790, to conclude that biology could never be a science because it had to be explained by an appeal to ultimate purpose; a designer.

     As we can now see, Kant's conclusion was not the end of the debate. Biology is obviously among the sciences today, so we're left wondering what happened. To resolve the biology problem, science took a hint from the field of literature. It is my understanding that textual interpretation in bygone eras was mainly directed toward a determination of the intent of the author. As time progressed, though, interpretation began to become a thing of personal preference. The authority of the individual reader was elevated above the authority of the writer, and individual reason outweighed traditional institutions. It was now acceptable to bypass acknowledgment of absolute meaning, absolute truth, or absolute purpose. Slowly, scientists began to see that "absolute intent" was a thing of the past. And if absolute intent was not as important as it once was, perhaps the biology "problem" wasn't as big of a "problem" to science as they once thought. Positivism had gained the upper hand. "Confound theology! Confound ultimate purpose!" They said. "We'll make biology fit with a mathematical model." 

     As soon as intelligent design became a non-starter simply because it was not mathematical, scientists were left scrambling to find an alternative that explained how hundreds of thousands of complex organisms developed from nothing.

     Enter Charles Darwin. The poor fellow is branded as the figurehead of evolutionary theory, but Darwin really only developed the theory of natural selection, a commendable theory that is very observable and provable. Unfortunately, media and sheer mass of information has made natural selection and evolution interchangeable terms. This is not the case. Natural selection is merely a process by which species change and adapt, and does not generate new genetic information to produce entirely new species. In natural selection, complex organisms remain complex, just different. 

     Darwin helped, but he still didn't solve the biology "problem." Scientists were still left scrambling. Natural selection was a mechanism of evolution, but biologists still needed to find some mathematical explanation for new genetic information. For this, early biologists proposed that successive generations could inherit information that was gained during the lifetime of the parents. In other words, scientists thought that if you chopped the tails off of two mice and bred them, the offspring would be born without tails. This theory obviously failed miserably, but, like materialism, it caused some serious problems later on. (I'm getting to those). In the mean time though, biologists turned to mutation to describe this continual increase in genetic information. Suffice it to say that even though they still hold to this theory, mutation only shuffles genes, but never generates entirely new ones.

     The faulty idea that information gained during the lifetime of parents would be passed on to their offspring gave direct rise to the practice of eugenics. In a nutshell, eugenics is the controlled breeding of the human population by increasing the inheritance of "good" characteristics and suppressing the inheritance of "bad" characteristics. It led to compulsory sterilization of 36,000 lower-class individuals in the United States by 1941, and it was the theory that the Nazis held to when they attempted to create the Arian race by destroying all "inferior" people groups. It was also brought to my attention that the eugenics movement was one of the leading inspirations behind modern abortion. Bad stuff.

     All this to say that so much of the evil, and so many of the lies in this world may all be part of a single web that the Enemy is weaving. And it all starts so innocently.

Nottingham Wall

"I like a man who grins when he fights." -Winston Churchill

     Fortunately, Lego men can do nothing but. 

     Below is a recently finished stop-motion animation of mine with music composed and orchestrated by my good friend Max. It's been quite some time since I've dabbled in stop-motion, so I went with the most plot-free, dialogue-free, and character development-free subject I could think of. Plus, I like swords. The editing was done in Final Cut Pro, music composition in Sibelius 7, and sound effects are credit of StarWars.com and Apple. The film is only a minute and a half but it can be viewed in HD.

Cookies

"Nothing tastes better than a cookie baked in a tree." - Jerry the Gourd

     Upon pondering my life the other day while banging on the piano, I was given somewhat of a revelation. There is one chord, in particular--one that I couldn't name to save my soul--that sounds so frank and statement-like when it is banged upon. I've grown rather fond of that chord, and whilst I was banging on this particular one, and reflecting on the blunt jolliness of its sound, I decided that I needed to bake myself a batch of chocolate chip cookies. It had been far too long since I had baked a batch of cookies for the sole purpose of baking a batch of cookies. The last time, as I recall, was several years ago when I started a headed argument between myself and a friend as to the fact that the cookies were not salty enough. They needed to be "sharper,"I argued; something with a more pungent sensation like cheddar cheese or Welsh's grape juice. I'm not sure what recipe we used back, but it certainly wasn't the secret recipe I intended to use this time. Passed down from my great great great grandmother, Nestlie Tollhouse, I found this sacred recipe loving printed on the back of a $5.45 plastic bag of chocolate chips from Wal Mart. Secret recipe in hand, I resolved to make these cookies as close to perfection as possible. I ran down to the chicken coop for fresh eggs, turned on the most epic, cookie-making music I could conjure out of my iTunes library, and set to work. Before long, the kitchen resembled mid February; so deep was the snowfall of all-purpose flour on the counters, floor, and, to my surprise, the ceiling as well. I had briefly considered milling my own flour for the sheer authenticity of it, but no doubt that would have resulted a blizzard too intense for my snow plows. Following my better judgement, I still made sure to add a touch more salt to the recipe, and used even more stirring and mixing utensils than necessary for the mere pleasure of licking them all clean when I was finished. While my cookies were baking, I poured myself a glass of farm-fresh milk and set up some lights to snap my cookbook-perfect photograph. Needless to say, they were terribly tasty, even if they were a touch under baked. Fully baked though, was my desire to make chocolate chip cookies. 

     The moral of the story is threefold: do things you haven't done in a while just because pressing your own envelope is very fulfilling. Second, banging on the piano can give you epiphanic revelations, and third, (in the case of VeggieTales) cookies ward off evil sporks. Sporks be warned. Be afraid. I have cookies.

The Frame: A Theory of Textual Interpretation

"Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame." - G.K. Chesterton

     The following is a paper written for a literature class arguing for my (minority) perspective on textual interpretation. I've changed the formatting slightly here and omitted boring endnotes and the list of works cited. It was a fun paper to write, and I hope you enjoy it as well. In the mean time, I'm off to finish that other eight page paper due tonight...

     The author is to a text as the frame is to a picture. The writer plays the role of the absolute authority over the meaning in a text, defining and complimenting the text, or even intentionally removing himself from it. The job of the critical interpreter is not to “pare” the author from the text (Sontag, 209), or anarchically place himself on the same level as the author, but to continually search for the author’s intention, keeping essential critical distance: constantly asking why.

     The frame around a piece of art tells the viewer where the picture is, and where it is not. But not only does the frame create limitation, the frame must compliment or somehow add to the work. As critical readers and textual interpreters, we should not remove the author from the text to interpret it, any less than we should remove the frame from a picture to view it. We must look at a picture in relation to the frame in the same way we must look at a text in relation to the author’s intention. Like Susan Sontag’s observation that “reducing a work of art to its content” (208) is the modern way of understanding something, it is also the popular interpretive choice to remove the author from a text, reducing the text to less than even Sontag herself may have realized. These theories of reduction run parallel to democratic or even anarchic perspectives, while the author-oriented theory presented here aligns itself more closely with a cautious monarchal perspective.

     Most anyone can tell you that absolutism at its worst extreme is despotism. Absolutism however is not limited to derogatory expression. There is such a thing as benevolent dictatorship, though it is rare and unfortunately carries much of the same baggage as despotism. Democracy and federated republics are inventions to stand in the place of the ideal of benevolent dictatorship. The three theories of interpretation presented by Umberto Eco in his essay The Intention of the Text, namely, the “intention of the interpreter,” “the intention of the author,” and the “intention of the text” mirror these political approaches in their methodologies (210). 

     The intention of the interpreter; the “beating a text into shape” (210), parallels the worst extreme of democratic methodology--anarchy--in which the author and reader are on an equal plane, and there is no governing power or limitation on the interpretation of a text. 

     Eco himself proposes something under the same influences as a democratic federated republic. In his theory, the “intention of the text” (210), the text acts like the elected representative in a republic, a sort of middle ground between the people and the governance. In this theory, the interpreter has nearly complete freedom within the bounds of the author’s intention in a text. Some critics of the author-intent oriented theory will still argue that the author does create the boundaries of interpretation, letting the reader know where he can and cannot interpret. The author creates the limitation but inside that limitation, the work can be interpreted in different ways. In other words, the author is reduced to a limiter and nothing more. Republican government in America, the model of Eco’s theory, was only established in the wake of a bloody separation from a corrupt monarchy. Democracy is a compromise, not an ideal. It reduces governance to a limiter and not much more.

     Eco’s misconception of the “intention of the author” theory of interpretation seems to pair with the methodology of despotism. He argues against this interpretive theory by stating that it is is “very difficult to find out and frequently irrelevant for the interpretation of a text” (210). To the contrary, this method of interpretation is only irrelevant if one disregards the critical distance necessary for discerning the authors whom you trust and those whom you do not. Potential for revolution keeps monarchy in check. Similarly, critical distance and constant questioning will keep the author’s intention from influencing the reader’s own perspective outside the text. Critical distance cannot change the author’s perspective, but it can protect the interpreter’s. 

     After observing the frame around a picture, the critical reader cannot blithely accept the whole. We can never leave without asking why. We cannot leave until we have made the decision to accept the absolute meaning of the author as a monarch, or rather to reject that meaning on grounds of critical distance. Many times, the end result will be rejection, but the reader should always search for a “benevolent dictator”--an author who’s perspective does not run against the reader’s--who will produce ideas that can be accepted.

     Frank Kermode’s theory of interpretation as outlined in his essay, “The Genesis of Secrecy” is closer to to this author intent-oriented theory than the two others excerpted in Text Book. He writes, “to divine the true, the latent sense, you need to be of the elect, of the institution” (208). Kermode here acknowledges that there is such thing as a “true,” “latent” meaning in a text. Where Kermode goes awry though, is when he asserts that this “true” meaning can only be discovered by the “elect of the institution.” Kermode defends this assertion by appealing to the parables of Jesus. He neglects to include, though, the key phrase that follows several parables of Jesus: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear;” a phrase that invites any and all to search out meaning, and is not elitist or institutional in any sense of the words.

     Susan Sontag, a writer and interpreter coming from a more democratic interpretive perspective, argues against the use of institutions to box in the meaning of a text. She argues that fitting texts into pre-determined institutions creates a bloated interpretive textual network that she deridingly labels “the thick encrustations of interpretation” (209). For this argument, Susan Sontag can be praised. Though her theory does allow interpreters to read into a text--to look past the significance of the frame-- and make a text “conformable” (208), her position opposing institutionalized interpretation is admirable. Susan Sontag is also on the right track when she writes, “By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art” (208). Sontag is referring to and arguing against leaving out the form from a text: the “dim lighting” and “refined feelings” that she mentions later in paragraph four (209). While this argument against reduction is a step in the right direction, the need to make art “about something” eclipses the need to keep the author’s intentions the focus of interpretation. Even in Sontag’s theory that bad interpretation is a “paring down” to the “essentials,” she herself pares the author’s intention from a text in order to make the text “about something.”

     It is common to find photographs or paintings hung without frames at all. In the same way, it is common to find works of literature with no pretense of authorial intent whatsoever. In these cases, the author has often (ironically) intentionally removed intention from his text. When interpreting a text without any clue to the intention of the author either in the text or in the textual network surrounding a text, we can then question why an author is so disconnecting himself from his own text. How does the lack of intention add or subtract to the feel the author is conveying in his work? Does this lack of intention add to the chaos of a work? Does it show that the author has succumbed to the “encrustations of interpreters”? Is the author cautious? Or is he silently screaming rebellion against classical literature? Even in an author’s silence, the critical reader should always ask why.

     All to often, problems and blatant misinterpretations arise from either text-oriented or reader-oriented interpretations. In these cases of paring the author from a text, a medieval phrase intended as a mere pithy title can be interpreted as a racial slur, or an amendment to the Constitution intended to promote liberty can be interpreted to drive a boundary between religion and government. If we take the monarchal approach to literary priority, and cautiously and critically look for the intent of the author in the text and in the textual network around the text, the frequency of textual misunderstandings will be greatly diminished. 

     A text’s author should be critically viewed in direct relation with, the sole authority of, and the determiner of the meaning in a text. Even when the author obscures himself, we must continue to ask why. Ceasing to ask why dangerously removes the necessary critical distance, but asking why only after “paring” the author from a text can place a reader on equally dangerous ground for misinterpretation. The frame is a much more important part of the picture than many think.

     Now that that thing's over, on a completely unrelated note, my forays into the woods in search of the artesian well have finally produced results. After following two other river tributaries to no avail, I found the source of a third trickling stream to be the spring I was after. Tin ladle and all.

Drifting into Spring

"It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade." - Charles Dickens

     Overall, it's been a mild winter. The weather has been strange all over the place, but despite Dr. Don Easterbrook's declaration of global cooling, Michigan's had one of it's warmest winters yet. That is, until March first. Northern Michigan found itself under 20 inches of wet snow overnight, and the power lines had fallen with it. Without electricity for four days, we survived off of our wood-burning stove and melted snow for water, playing card games by candlelight. But after rescuing two stranded cars, having to move all of the food from the refrigerator to the barn, and throwing out all our backs shoveling snow, winter got old. Fast. 

     Interestingly, the ancient Hebrew cycle of seven Biblical holidays is structured with three feasts in the fall and four feasts in the spring. Conspicuously missing are any feasts in either the summer or winter. These are the dry spells; the long stretches of burning heat or feet of snow. Representing and commemorating historic and futuristic events, one can map out one "year" of Biblical feasts and dry spells over the entire history of the world with each grouping of feasts roughly denoting the time period in which the intent of the feasts were fulfilled. The spring feasts listed in the Bible, Passover, Unleavened Bread, First Fruits, and Pentecost, were fulfilled in the life of Jesus and his disciples in the first century, putting an end to the long winter that stretched from the (somewhat ironic) "Fall" of mankind to Christ's birth. This millennia-long winter, as history tells us, was much worse than any comparison with Michigan's winter this season. The wars and disasters of those past centuries were power outages that lasted for years.

     The first century is long gone, and the world has been plunged into the second long dry spell that reflects summer. We are awaiting the fulfillment of the fall feasts at the second coming of Christ. 

     But stepping away from the big picture, I'm still watching our five foot snow drifts melt away as we simultaneously drift into this weird transitory season we call spring. But maybe it's not as transitory as we thought. Maybe, on that grander scale, it represents not the transition but the objective. Perhaps winter and summer are the transitory seasons, and spring and fall are the seasons to look forward to. Either way, I'll be glad when this winter is over for good.

In any case, here's a couple black and white shots from the past few days.

     

A Walk Through the Woods in Winter

"It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit." - Robert Louis Stevenson

     I once told someone that when I'm not holding Cheerio eating contests with myself, I'm usually running blindly through the woods on invisible quests of imponderable insignificance. They have to be quests, you see, because it runs contrary to my nature to go walking in the woods merely for the sake of walking in the woods. If I can convince myself that such a venture is not a mere venture, but actually an adventure, then I am satisfied in my productivity, and I can enjoy the journey for all it's idealistic and swashbuckling journeyness.
     I was upon one such quest the other day; a quest that, unlike many of my other quests, actually had a destination. Legend had told of a natural spring, hidden within nearly fifty acres of dense forest, from which continuously flowed an abundance of clear, fresh water. Beside this hidden spring, so the legend went, there hung a tin cup with which to drinketh of the waters of the spring. This sounded Holy Grailish enough for me, so donning my winter coat and imaginary chain mail, I set out like Ponce de León in search of the Fountain of Youth. 

     Suffice it to say, I was just as successful as León was. I failed twice to discover this elusive tin cup; a fact that, simply in the failure itself, carried the significance of León's expedition. This was strangely comforting. Despite my disappointing results, however, the means had justified the end. I had tromped through cedar forest and swamp, whipping out the camera like a rapier when interesting compositions doth blocked my way, and I discovered that Stevenson was right. Forests do have a singular captivating power about them that is hard to find anywhere else. God seems to have imbued the trees with that spark of prehistoric nobility that whispers specialness in the wind. No mere quest, regardless of its productivity or significance, can take the place of that.