And More Lego

"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve." - J.R.R Tolkien

"I'm twice as tall as half of you and half as short as twice of you." -Archibald Asparagus

     I couldn't pass up an opportunity to inject some Fellowship quotes. There's not much relevance here,  just that I'm donating these fun little Gandalf and Frodo Lego figures to a charity that raises funds to purchase Lego sets for underprivileged children. This isn't my style--I've stolen it from another talented builder, but these figures can be yours for a ridiculously outrageous price from creationsforcharity.org

On another, unrelated note, here's a submarine sandwich that I built a couple weeks back. Visual puns are too good to pass up.

Leaves Not Turned

     It's been some time since my last post. That annoying little thing called life has gotten in the way of blogging. But I'm back at the keys, and here's a poemish thing I wrote. For the record, I don't write poetry. And certainly not free verse. I'm no Wordsworth. But in the words of a friend in reference to a Kandinsky painting, "feast your soul on this for a while." 

    

Spines rot of leaves

Not turned. Knowledge limitless,

Yet not enough. Head

In hands, spectacles

On the desk. Lenses of

Distinction. Of choice,

Lie beside the flower dead.

Spine bowed straightened

To stand. To search

For the spine fresh but

Covered with dust.

Gust of breath, of wind.

Clear the haze, the dust.

Stone rolled away

Like the clouds under

The sun. 

Not ink but meaning;

Not clutter but cleaning.

Something new under

The sun. The Son.

Head in hands no longer.

He stands stronger.

Straighter.

But good intenders

With noble intent

Miss intentions. In emphasizing 

The royal thorns

They become the thorns

That choke the meaning.

Spectacles clean, green,

The institutions lead

Him. Fingers steepled,

Or folded, he is told the meaning

Is convenient.

Bogged down in specifics

Is the danger. So they say. 

Bending to drink rather

Than drinking from cupped hands,

Watching lest

They misunderstand.

He follows.

Controversy covered

With heavenly sheet.

Robbing Peter but

Not paying Paul.

The spectacles of

Choice clouding again. 

His trunk branching out

With no root.

his ink becomes grey.

His ink turns pink.

Water, blood, and sweat.

My ink was written grey,

That it may either rot

Or be watered.

But his was not

Nor His.

It was vibrant and crisp;

It was dark, with a bondage 

Light; refracted through

That distorted lens called

Time and preconception.

If he loves the one

Who created the trees, the life, 

The light, the mountains, the seas,

Then what?

Does he stop at love?

Intangible? Unprovable?

Like a prostrate statue?

his ink says by no means.

The tree must blossom.

The fruit must grow.

So the roots must extend 

Deep into the leaves where

The meaning is clear and

The dirt is black.

Nourishment enough from

Spreading roots to press

Through the thorns.

To see without lens,

Undistorted, untainted,

Unspoiled. Above

The fog and clouds; yet

Still under the Son.

An Obligation

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." - Winston Churchill 

     Even though this sad truism from Churchill is, of course, in reference to England, today's post probably won't contain much relevance for my lovely 21% foreign readership. Sorry chaps.

     When the Puritan settlers first knocked shores of New England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the world became a changed place and "a terrible beauty was born" to steal the words of Yeats. A beast had been let out of the cage that had the potential to rip out the literal and figurative lifeblood of Europe. But that beast was tamed. It was tamed slowly, painfully, and at severe cost of life. Europe watched the American experiment like a gladiatorial combat; with a morbid fascination to see who would win the bloody struggle. Would it be the nobly savage American lion with its matted fur and arrowhead-sharp claws? Or would it be the religious outcast from Holland with his sword of the spirit, shield of faith, and breastplate of righteousness? The crowd jeered. The colosseum echoed and thumbs turned down toward the Puritan. Others turned up. Most of the audience had the secret bloodlust desire to see the man wearing the belt of truth mauled, but the bleeding gladiator surprised them all. Not only did he pin down the lion, he made the lion roll over in submission.
     The first Puritans fulfilled John Winthrop's charge to do just that: to be that "shining city on a hill" and to baffle the expectations of all the onlookers. To this day, America has never stopped baffling its observers. It is the longest surviving and most successful experiment in democratic republicanism in history. America works because the gladiator didn't stop once he won the contest. He continued to tame the lion, passing that responsibility to his sons and grandsons.
     America passes from generation to the next, and each generation is responsible for keeping the lion tame. But as the founding fathers stipulated, that responsibility could not fall to one man alone lest the noble lion show his savage side devour him. The responsibility was instead given to each and every person who had the nerve to himself an American. Each generation would collectively make a choice to either let America grow savage and terrible, or to nurture the noble and beautiful side of America. While each American had the freedom to accept or reject the responsibility of the nation's future, it went beyond the level of freedom. It was an obligation. Each and every American would be held accountable for the country's decline if they chose not to speak out.
     The issue goes far beyond party lines. It is a matter of responsibility and national pride far more than it is a matter of choice. We must exercise the freedom, right, and responsibility to vote before that freedom vanishes as it did in the Roman Empire.

     As one who cannot yet vote, the best I can do is urge my readers who are of age to not drop the ball this coming election. Whomever you vote for, you certainly cannot afford to let your commitment to this country fall to the wayside. As I step down off of my soapbox, just remember that America's experiment in democracy has only defied all expectations because of citizens like you who have accepted the responsibility passed down to them. Let your voice be heard.

On a String

"Pull the string, and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all." - Dwight Eisenhower

     This week's a bit more fun than last. This is my most recent Lego project that's a bit outside my comfort zone. I was inspired by the arch piece that I ended up using as the nose, but a macro scale figurine would have been so terribly boring by itself. So I remedied that problem by putting strings on the figure and turning him into a marionette. The fellow was originally a sort of Elizabethan Thespian, but doublets are nigh impossible. That version was quickly scrapped.

Preserving the Spark

"You see but you do not observe" - Sherlock Holmes, "A Scandal in Bohemia"

"He sees many things, but does not observe them" - Isaiah 42:20

     "All that matters to me is the work," shouts the modern day Holmes to his blogger Watson. "Put that in your blog," he says, "or better yet, stop inflicting your opinions on the world." With that word of wisdom from history's greatest consulting detective, I shall begin to inflict my own opinions upon you, my poor reader. Even worse, I am naming this lengthy and droll piece of writing my 'maximum opus ad modernum' because, of course, everything sounds far awesomer in Latin, thanks to Ooglegay Ranslatetay. I suggest you close your browser now before the pain of this blog post becomes intolerable.

Without further ado...

     For a few weeks, my thoughts have wandered about the streets of the world with and without aim before finally coagulating at the door of 221b Baker Street. I am unashamedly something of a "Sherlockian," and have been found stalking around the house with an antique pipe in my mouth for its sheer classiness. I've read the majority of the "pre-resurrection" adventures and memoirs of Sherlock Holmes in the past, watched a few of Basil Rathbone's charming shows from the 1930s, built the Baker Street residence out of Lego, and most recently, enjoyed Benedict Cumberbatch's stunning modern interpretation of the famous detective in the new Masterpiece Theatre drama series. It was no surprise, then, when an opinion article on BBC News caught my interest. It was titled "The Enduring Appeal of Sherlock Holmes." 

     Before long, my printed version of the article was doused with a heavy layer of highlighter ink and pencil lead. The article connected the dots that had been shuffling around in my head for these several weeks. From the campus of Patrick Henry College, to Einstein's religiosity, to Chesterton's molehill mountains, to "Sticky Ideas," to the communication of the core of the Gospel, to the future of America. 

     And what picture did all these connected dots form? They formed a picture of the divine spark. Not a spark of rational thinking, but a spark of emotion. I began to see that emotion and the human ability to feel are inseparable from God. Logic without emotion is a denial of Divine Providence; a slap in the face of the Creator. 

     Perhaps the most intriguing example of this divine spark is the paradoxical figure of Sherlock Holmes himself. A man who appears to be rigorously rational, yet is so enduringly appealing because he is not as rational as he seems. Under the stony surface of Holmes' visage, emotion, guesswork, whimsy, and faith play as large or greater a role than reason. "What's striking is that Holmes relies on guesswork and imagination, supplemented and corrected by observation, as much as on reasoning" writes John Gray, the author of the BBC article. Holmes personally declared that he followed a "science of deduction" and additionally that "I never guess. It is a shocking habit." But, as my philosophy of science professor last year prided himself on proving, Sherlock was wrong on both these fronts. Sherlock did guess, and Sherlock didn't follow the 'rules' of any particular method of reasoning. If anything, it certainly wasn't deduction, but closest to abduction: the more unconstrained process of moving from facts to explanation by process of elimination. 

     Sherlock, then, begins to become an exemplar of the proper blend of reason and emotion by letting go of the rules that reason forces upon it's practitioners in favor of the freedom of imagination and guesswork.

     I tried Sherlock's method a few weekends ago while eating soup on a busy sidewalk. It was amazing how much clarity was given to that busy sidewalk simply by observing cobwebs and shoe soles and awning colors and imagining why they existed the way they did. It was as if a new layer of context was added to my perception. The BBC article highlights a Sherlock quote that I found rather wonderful. "You know my method," he says. "It's founded on the observation of trifles." 

     G.K. Chesterton, officially one of my favorite writers, authored a tremendously trifling collection of essays titled "Tremendous Trifles." Chesterton's method was the same as Sherlock's. I roughly quote one of Chesterton's witty phrases that sum up his perspective. "The most efficient form of manufacture," he writes, "is making mountains out of molehills." Chesterton waged war against the dogmas of rationality by hurling his spears of common sense. Chesterton shows us the next rung on the ladder to preserving the divine spark of emotion in a world of reason. It takes a bit of whimsy to read Chesterton, but he argues that the things commonly seen as abstract, (feeling, imagination, and the miraculous) are all far more reasonable and less abstract than the cold rigidity of reason itself. "But I would add this not unimportant fact," writes Chesterton, "that molehills are mountains; one has only to become a pigmy [...] to discover that."

     Yet, as John Gray states in his article, "it's not the methods used by the fictional detective that fascinate us. It's the contradictory figure of Holmes himself." To further investigate the contradiction that Sherlock presents us, I turn to a little college in Purceville, Virginia where Chesterton is not unfamiliar.

      I was blessed with the recent opportunity to travel to Patrick Henry College outside of Washington DC to participate in a rigorous two weeks of debating. I have never debated before, but the camp, taught by the family owned Ethos Debate company, certainly got me hooked. 

     Patrick Henry is a gorgeous little Christian college; the kind of place where Chesterton and Lewis can be found on all the coffee tables, and the glass trophy cases are devoid of sports trophies, but filled to overflowing with moot court awards, mock trial awards, and debate awards. There are only two main buildings on campus, and just ga few dorms surrounding a deathly bacterial pond lovingly titled Lake Bob. The healthy Christian environment of the politically oriented college provided an ideal backdrop for learning the ropes of formal debate.

     This part of my story began while staying awake in a lecture given by the brilliant professor of rhetoric at PHC, Dr. James Tallmon. And unlike some of the other lecturers, staying awake during Dr. Tallmon's talks was hardly a task at all. Dr. Tallmon played funny Monty Python clips. All we had to do was identify enthemematic lines of dialogue, convert the enthymemes into syllogistic construction, diagram the syllogism to locate the major, minor, and middle terms in addition to the hidden assumption before finally determining if that assumption was fallacious and, if so, what kind and to what extent. 

     Easy cheesy. During one of these clips, I raised my hand to humiliate myself by stumbling through the above process before concluding that the argument in the clip was indeed fallacious (built upon faulty reasoning) because it included an appeal to the viewer's pity. Without missing a beat, Dr. Tallmon asked me where I had been taught that an appeal to pity was a fallacy. "A book" I lamely replied, drawing a blank on the title. "Was the person who wrote your book a Vulcan?" Asked Dr. Tallmon, doing the Spock finger thing. "I should certainly hope not." I replied after a moment's hesitation. Dr. Tallmon gave a mysterious smile and returned to the lectern. 

     It turned out that that very evening, Dr. Tallmon was delivering another speech on this very topic. His core idea was simple: emotional engagement in discussion, argument, delivery, or the like is essential to remaining human. Without appeals to pity or appeals to fear or appeals to sentiment, we become "rationality machines." We become Vulcans. We deny the divine spark of mystery, faith, and feeling in favor of a logical framework, abstract numbers, and rules. Calling appeals to emotion erroneous, he argued, should immediately put up red flags.

     Dr. Tallmon is a big fan of the rhetorician Richard Weaver, a contemporary of C.S. Lewis who is considered to be the shaper of modern conservatism. In this second speech, delivered on the lawn, Dr. Tallmon read pieces from Weaver's treatise, "Language is Sermonic." Though Weaver's "sermonic language" was a bit heady and academic, his point came across decently enough. He writes, "the discourse that is favored today is without feeling and resonance, so that it is no exaggeration to say that eloquence itself has fallen into disfavor. Moments of great crisis to indeed encourage people to listen for a while to a Churchill or a MacArthur, and this is proof of the indispensability of rhetoric when men feel that great things are at stake. But today when the danger is past, they lapse again into their dislike of the rhetorical mode, labeling all discourse which has discernible emotional appeal 'propaganda.'" All the ten letter words aside, the passaged can be paraphrased, (as Chesterton prefers) with one-to-two syllable words to read, "Rick thinks that emotional speeches are frowned upon unless people need to be inspired when bad stuff is happening. But when the bad stuff is over, people go back to thinking that that emotional speeches are deceptive and untruthful and sneaky."

      Near the end of my time at PHC, I was given a speaking award in the form of a nice hardcover book titled "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die." Written in the style of Malcolm Gladwell's work (another of my favorite writers), the 300 page nonfiction guide outlined a six step checklist for communicating ideas. The checklist was contained in the acronym "SUCCESs:" Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and Stories. Even as I write this complex, expected, wishy-washy, uninspiring piece of internet opinion, I am reminded of how terribly difficult communicating ideas is. However, the book summarizes Richard Weaver in two simple, concrete sentences: "How can we get people to care about our ideas? We get them to take off their Analytical Hats."

      Back to Holmes, the man who's simple deerstalker cap has become THE symbol of an "Analytical Hat." The new Masterpiece drama, which places Sherlock in the modern day, has an interesting interpretation of the deerstalker cap that fits snugly into my little connect-the-dots picture. Holmes personally detests the hat in the series, yet the media, after one incident, continues to associate the hat with the detective. "Why is it always the hat picture?" fumes Sherlock after seeing the front page of the daily news. It's a fitting picture of how the media plays up the logic, the reason, and the analysis while downplaying the substantive emotion. The BBC article picks up on this too. "Can we learn to be reasonable without expecting too much of reason?" Asks the writer. "Or will we blunder on, trying to remodel the world on rational principles that in practice produce chaos?" The world wants to believe that reason works, but underneath it all, the world subconsciously knows that reason doesn't work on it's own. Society simultaneously rejects the proper blend of emotion and reason, and desperately wants it. The BBC article continues to highlight the final link in the chain of the preservation of the divine spark when it says, "Seeming to find order in the chaos of events by using purely rational methods, [Holmes] actually demonstrates the enduring power of magic." 

      Magic. The supernatural. Emotion taken to its extreme. I have heard it said that Einstein, arguably the most analytical and rational figure in science began his career to some degree as a mystic, perhaps something like a Jewish Chesterton, before formulas and abstract mathematics led him away from pursuit of the divine absolute truth, and toward a relative (pun intended) scientific truth.

     Sherlock Holmes is the Einstein who, though still secular, is properly searching for an absolute truth somewhere out there in the supernatural realm. In The Adventure of the Cardboard Box, published in 1892, he asks, "What is the object of this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must have a purpose, or else our universe has no meaning and that is unthinkable. But what purpose? That is humanity's great problem, to which reason, so far, has no answer." Holmes never reaches a conclusion to this "great problem" but there are many of us who can safely and securely say that we have a one-up on Holmes because we do have the answer to that "great problem." The answer is that there is indeed a meaning behind "this circle of misery and violence and fear;" a living being who both created and redeemed this "circle" we know as earth.

     Eric Metaxis, a former writer at VeggieTales, biographer, and comedian said during a recent address in Grand Rapids that "You can't reason your way to faith in Jesus Christ any more than you can swim to Hawaii." Faith is something that is far from rational, yet is as concrete as the cement in your driveway.

      For me it vividly took the form of an emotional skit enacted by current PHC students. For others, it takes the form of an answered prayer, or a feeling of confidence or hope. 

      I have hope for our world. We're slowly becoming conscious of the fact that reason fails without a connection to emotion and to the divine. We see it in articles like John Gray's on Sherlock Holmes. We see it in the incredible, bestselling success of stirringly prophetic novels like Jonathan Cahn's "The Harbinger." We see it in against-the-grain media personalities like Glenn Beck. And hopefully we begin to see it in tedious blog posts like this one, however unmemorable they may be.

If you've actually read this far, go read some Sherlock Holmes stories. They're far more interesting.

If you just skipped to the end to look at the picture, you're the smart one.

  

Hiatus

"Beware the barrenness of a busy life." - Socrates

My summer has been a busy one, but it's also been a wonderful one. At the risk of falling into the barrenness that Socrates speaks of, I'll be taking a writing break for a few more weeks. Expect to see me again at the end of August. I thought I would share this completely unrelated photo though. Last monday was one of the most gorgeous nights in a long time.

Return to Fascination

"The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder." - G.K. Chesterton

     It was with no little consternation that I had to re-read this quote when I first stumbled across it in a little book by Chesterton called Tremendous Trifles. Like so much of what he writes, the sentence is a small rhetorical explosion that sends painful shrapnel into your brain if you're not careful. Chesterton is like that. It's one epiphany after another, hurled like grenades over the pages of the book. His literary explosives are hand-formulated from a deadly combination of common sense and chiasmus. Recently, I was compelled to return again to the front lines, and, like a soldier in the trenches, hold up against Chesterton's genius, battling my way to a rough understanding of his premices.
    One of the more interesting these premises, pulled from the chapter titled "The Ethics of Elf Land" in his theological autobiography, Orthodoxy, holds that fairy tales are more "coldly rational" than the "sentimental" associations of science. The sentimentalist looks at an apple blossom, and it reminds him of his childhood. The desperately, yet unconsciously sentimental scientist looks at an apple blossom, and it reminds him of an apple. The resident of that wonderful world of Elf Land looks at an apple blossom, it makes him wonder if it might not turn into a crimson tulip. The only pure rationality in the world is the fact that one apple blossom plus another apple blossom equals two apple blossoms. The scientist's association between apple blossoms and apples is not rational, Chesterton argues, but a narrow-minded generalization. It excludes the possibility and probability of miracles. But then again, an apple blossom turning into an apple is a miracle itself. And ay, there's the rub. Fairy tales about apple blossoms turning into crimson tulips are built solely to revive that moment when we discovered that an apple blossom turned into an apple. This is why, Chesterton argues, babies do not "need fairy tales." He writes, "a child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door." Life is exciting enough in and of itself for a child of three, but for the old and weary, fairy tales rekindle that excitement of initial discovery.

    Writing in the the early twentieth century, Chesterton was an advocate of fairy tales, and a self proclaimed inhabitant of Elf Land where miracles were commonplace, because the commonplace was a miracle. But a lot has changed in a single century. All too suddenly, the elves have invaded in mass, and these elves have none of the ethics of the fairy tales of Chesterton's day.
    I recently tried my hand at a cousin's fascinating computer game called Portal. The concept was mind blowing, and the quality of the digital environment drew me into an appreciation of impossible physics and impossible technology. Portal is a perfect illustration of a century's change in storytelling. In Chesterton's day, fairy tales were often crude, crafted on the spot around the fire or the hearth, and infused with a subtle or obvious set of ethics. These stories and fairy tales were passed down in books or by mouth, with the abstract moral retained and ingrained. Then there came the modern era; first with movies, then televisions, then computers, then the Internet, then the media player, smartphone, and tablet. The result has been the exponential rise of a new breed of fairy tales: ones that are not crude, but sonically and visually immersive; ones that are not told on the spot, but constructed over years of work with hundreds of people; ones that celebrate technique or tactic over ethic; and ones that are not passed down in books or by word of mouth, but are instantly distributed to the masses of millions. The new fairy tales are the television shows, the movies, and the video games of our century. 

     I certainly have nothing against the media machine, and personally think it can be used as a positive force; but there are two important distinctions between the fairy tales of Chesterton's era, and the fairy tales of our own era.
     First, the fairy tales of the twenty-first century are largely devoid of all ethics; both the anthropologically practical and the moral, as Kant so wonderfully divided the field. Without a moral absolute guiding the message of a story, the tale is bodiless. And yes. That pun was intended.
    Second, the sheer mass of twenty-first century fairy tales have reversed the roles of reality. The quality of the new fictional environments (never even a factor in Chesterton's written and spoken day) combined with the large volume of all these alternative environments, has made fiction "realer" than reality. Show "The Avengers" to an audience in Chesterton's era, and not one live person would emerge from the theater after the show. They all would have died of heart attacks.
    This second conundrum can be solved by turning, not to fairy tales as was the solution in Chesterton's day, but by returning to a fascination with reality. We must again become the children of three who are excited when they are told that Tommy opened a door. A real door. Made of wood. Not light. Woah.
    The first conundrum can be solved simply by returning to the words of scripture; that one and only moral absolute amid a sea of shifting sand and shifting pixels.