Month: August 2019

My morning run didn’t go as well as I had hoped. My hip was tight at the start, but that loosened up; the problem was breathing. I just couldn’t get enough air into my lungs, or oxygenate it rapidly enough to fuel a decent pace. Time was 10:38, and most of those seconds were spent in despond.

Margaret and I had a relaxing midweek visit to Wallingford, where we stayed at the Town Arms (whose very agreeable landlords practically became extended family). We unwound, we ate well, we tramped from church to church (on which more later), and relished the last few days of summer before we put our heads down and turn back to the coal face.

All the walking may have helped relax and strengthen the groin muscle/ligament nexus that had been bothering me, so that even though I didn’t run Wednesday morning, my mile this morning went by in an improved 10:32. That’s nowhere near my triumph of the sub-ten-minute mile, but since my running has been intermittent since that day I’ve been working my way back into shape.

The news has recently called our attention to special events at cathedrals, a session of ‘crazy golf’ in Rochester, and a Helter Skelter in Norwich. These extraordinary installations have been planned to get people into cathedrals, on the premise that someone who has never set foot in a cathedral before (or never in that particular cathedral) would be more likely to come in for a second time (say, for Sunday Mass) if they had been once to get in a quick eighteen holes of crazy golf.

Now, Margaret and I are far from antithetical to crazy golf. Viz. —

(We played this course in Ayr, where Margaret triumphed gloriously over her determined spouse.) We love the absurd activity and the mild competition. We also love cathedrals. (Not so keen on helter skelters, but….)

But all this provokes a fair question about whether the characteristics of this sort of summer recreation reasonably converge with the point of cathedrals. There’s an inaccurate but often overcooked claim that cathedral naves were normally used as large open indoor spaces for all sorts of secular purposes, so that having a golf course in your nave is just harking back to ancient practice, from before a time when people got overly fastidious about the sanctity of church spaces. Add to that the apparent urgency of getting people into cathedrals (for any purpose whatever), and the case seems to be strong indeed.

I’m not convinced that they do so converge, and I haven’t seen any evidence that people who like funfair rides then take up church attendance, or even cultivate a more favourable attitude toward the church. Someone who’s been deeply disturbed by sexual abuse scandals, for instance, may not be mollified by crazy golf. There are lots of plausible reasons for not going to church, and I haven’t quite seen round the way that casual recreation might counteract any of them. Let’s allow, though, that by disarming the suspicion that church people are too stuffy and no fun does some good for the church’s standing in the community.

We may also allow, though, that some of the purposes of the cathedral aren’t immediately compatible with secular frivolities. You may have noticed that there’s a lot of palaver these days about ‘sacred space’, about ‘thin places’ where everyday concerns melt away and the presence of deeper presences allegedly take on greater prominence; it would seem odd to suggest that crazy golf makes a cathedral seem more ‘sacred’ or ‘thin’. The function of a cathedral isn’t entertainment, either; even on a charitably expansive account (say, ‘helping people shed their worries and experience the relief and joy that come from reconciliation with God’), playing crazy golf or riding down a helter skelter doesn’t seem predictably to correlate with ‘experiencing something akin to holy joy’. Sometimes I find crazy golf very frustrating indeed, and I’m uncomfortable with the prospect of riding a helter skelter (though I can’t say I’ve tried, within a cathedral or without).

John Henry Newman, as an Anglican travelling around Europe, observed of the superstitions and political scheming and (especially) the questionable means deployed to draw people into the Roman Catholic Church, ‘Who can but feel shame when the religion of Ximenes, Borromeo, and Pascal is so overlaid?’ Is it fair to ask, ‘Who can fail to feel shame when the religion of Hooker, Donne, and Pusey is so overlaid?’ (Or fill in with the names of your favourite profound Anglicans.)

On one hand, obviously, one may justly so ask. Try to imagine Cranmer or Andrewes or Wilberforce preaching from a roller-coaster, or in the midst of an Aunt Sally contest. (Indeed, ‘sanctity’ was the characteristic Newman held up as the English Church’s bulwark against Romanism.) General solemnity and sanctity ordinarily attend — if they do not necessarily define — Christian worship.

On the other hand: Newman eventually crossed over to join the Roman Catholic Church, however much he may have deplored the mummery and politics he perceived in it. And the cathedrals of England have been restored to normal functioning by now, so [probably] no [lasting] harm done.

Still, it would be heartening to see more completely into reasoning that supports the connection between extravaganzas and the gospel so forcefully proclaimed by the saints, at the cost of their lives. ‘When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and… putt’? Bonhoeffer didn’t think so.

Ah, when the morning showers fall on the newly-laid hot-top…

• Since I’m blogging again, more or less, it seems as though I should rely more on Flickr as my medium for online images, so I spent some time uploading to and titling and tagging photos in my Flickr feed. I’ll devote mindless moments to retrospective Flickring, too, so the Facebook years should be covered in Flickr as well.

• Testing Greek Unicode on this server: ?? ???? ?? ? ?????…. Okay, that will need attention.

• I did run this morning, though heavy legs and rough breathing (see what I did there, Greek readers?) after a two-week layoff meant an embarrassingly slow time. I’ll miss Wednesday too, so next Sunday will be slow again, but I trust that diligent application will bring me back to times that are closer to my recent plateau. (This morning, 11:04 — I told you it was bad).

Just re-reading Lyotard’s Driftworks for my hermeneutics monograph project, and admiring all the more some of his observations. In ‘Adrift’, the preface to the collection, he notes (with regard to criticism, but it applies much more generally) the phenomenon of wayfinding when you’re out of place: ‘…when you enter a foreign city and follow the arrows indicating the Zentrum, the centro citta, until you lose them, the absence of indication indicating that you are at the center…’* So with hermeneutics, right? If you’re doing it the officially approved way, it’s just ‘hermeneutics’, but if you’re Black or a feminist or a Marxist or just somebody who acknowledges divergence in interpretation, you need a modifier, an arrow pointing toward the centre and implicitly indicating ‘This ain’t the centre, we do things differently here’. If you’re an officially normal, acceptable interpreter you can just say what you want (because it comes pre-approved, it speaks from the centre).

Likewise, a bit later, he notes ‘desire baffles knowledge and power’, and again it’s in a context in which he’s making a different point with which I don’t necessarily agree. But he’s surely correct to suggest here that you can’t out-think desire, you can’t out-will desire. If you think you are, if you think you can, then desire is just playing a different game with you than the one you thought it was playing.

If I write this out someday, it should be in a work that takes ‘desire’ as its topic, spells it out as an effect on interpretation (this will probably appear in the future monograph) and then shows the unconquerable wildness of desire as a theme in biblical literature, so as to point out that if anyone were to be an expert about desire, it should be the exegetes — who, in their earnest desire to control interpretation, instead belie their claims to knowledge about desire by enacting in their repudiation just what desire wants them to do.

* He goes on to say ‘and rather that there is no center’, but hashing that out would involve drifting away from my point here.

No, of course you can get from Oxford to Cambridge (and back) — but it’s annoyingly complicated, involving a choice among (a) train in to London, then out to Cambridge; (b) coach from Oxford to Cambridge, a long ride stopping numerous times and navigating every roundabout possible along the route; or (c) Margaret just learned that some people take the airport coach to Heathrow, and then take the coach out to Cambridge.

One might think there to be a rationale for a rail route between these two locations, but that route — the Varsity Line — was axed under the Beeching reforms (as also most routes that don’t ultimately fit an hub-and-spoke routing model). Now there’s a government scheme for an expressway between the two cities, because auto transport is the wave of the future, and some advocacy for reviving the rail route, but for the time being, travelers without their own transport have the three not entirely palatable choices.

All that being said, once we get to Cambridge we will have a splendid time at the patronal feast for Little St Mary’s, seeing SSH alumnus Fr Gregory, spending more time with Fr Robert, and enjoying the excellent navigational skills of a driver for Stagecoach.

I just started out on my mile despite the pit-a-pat of the beginning of showers — I thought I could get it in before the heavier rain — but within about twenty strides I turned back. The tendon/ligament inside my thigh was prominently uncomfortable, and I decline to risk aggravating it (especially in slippery weather).

Anyone who’s thinking that Trump will be a white knight for a No-Deal Britain, offering a trade haven to make up for the loss of EU trade arrangements, should take a quick look at his modus operandi in past deal-making. He typically zeroes in on a perceived weakness, and exploits it to gain favourable terms for his side of any deal. He lies. He makes vague promises for the future, which he has no intention of fulfilling. And even when he makes contractual arrangements, he feels free to walk away without upholding his side of the bargain.

Of course, he would never do that to the UK.…

I’ve been distracted for a day or so by the discovery of the Digital Diamond Baseball game, available through Steam. Among the many virtues of this baseball sim lies in its openness to user-prepared content (if you don’t see this as prime AKMA-bait, you don’t know me that well). The game itself offers many recreated seasons, and users have generated more, but I wondered whether there was a Hall of Fame team option (it looks as though there’s something similar, but I haven’t taken the time to investigate yet).

That then reminded me of my own past research into sabermetric questions, when I was calculating (by hand, children) career performance probabilities for a baseball sim on which I was working decades ago. I’m persuaded that for a simulation game, nobody really wants a simulation of a player’s full career; too many tremendous athletes have had long intervals of decline (or long intervals of development) for which they ought not be remembered. Some might want recreations of a player’s single best season, but that rewards one-hit wonders and penalises players who were consistently excellent, but without a single extraordinary season.

The answer, then, must be an averaged peak-performance profile for each player. That leaves two vital questions still to answer: ‘How many seasons count toward (or against) someone’s “peak”?’ and ‘Consecutive years, or best X seasons regardless?’

Right now, I’m inclined toward a six-consecutive-year peak value. I haven’t looked at any of my favourite ballplayers’ statistics, so I’m not biased by my desire to see Joe ‘Burrhead’ Dobson represented at his best; I was wavering between five and seven years, and split the difference. And consecutive years, because… I don’t know, anything else feels like cheating, cherry-picking.

At a [birth]day party for Brendan, discovering that I’ll actually be preaching at two patronal festivals in the coming days, not only the one I expected.…

Next time, I won’t print the densely-typeset French article two-a-page.

‘Therefore, the more manifestly each drawing demonstrates the truth, the more openly through this dissimilar similitude it proves that it is a drawing and not the truth. And in this, dissimilar similitudes lead our understanding further toward the truth because they do not allow it to dwell on likeness alone.’ [translation Oliver W. Norris, in Discourse, Figure]

St Hugh, commenting on Pseudo-Dionysius, in Lyotard

I thought I’d paste my response to her query on the rationale of using incense in worship here.

(A) Whatever is pleasing and costly to humans is plausibly offered to God as a sacrificial gesture (in the double sense of the gesture of renunciation by the human and the gesture of endeavouring to please the deity);
(B) It visibly ascends to heaven, where (presumably) God can relish its aroma;
(C) It signifies prayer (Ps 141:2, ‘Let my prayer be set forth in thy sight as the incense; the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice’), especially important since after the destruction of the Temple and the incense-alter therein, it was deemed that observance of daily prayer fulfilled the commands in the Torah to make daily sacrifices, morning and evening.
(D) Its pleasing aroma adorns the liturgy, in keeping with the premise that we ‘worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness’; it is fitting that worship communicate via all the senses that something splendid and glorious is taking place.

Since I’m determined to strengthen my practice of daily blogging (and turning away from FB), I’ll take just a minute or two fifteen thirty sixty away from reading about Lyotard in French to sketch in a bit more detail the rationale for connecting differential hermeneutics to psychoanalysis and specifically to dream interpretation.
In the first place, then, Big Thinkers have been wrestling with the hermeneutics of dreams for more than a century, with little attention paid from the side of biblical hermeneutics. That is, little attention from theoretical hermeneutics as a general biblical field, not ‘psychological criticism’ whose practitioners have obviously attended to dream interpretation — as have psychological interpreters who turn to the Bible as an object of their interpretive attention. Moreover, since the sort of interpretive attention in question is widely associated with ‘the masters of suspicion’ (Marx, Nietzsche, and especially in this case, Freud), and since many scholars take it as axiomatic that one must approach biblical texts with that ‘suspicion’, I stand to benefit from immersing myself in the relevant thoughts of one of the Masters.
Second, as I said several days ago, dreams provide the interesting case of a text (the dream, not simply the dream-report) whose ‘intentionality’ is open to inquiry, which we also feel it important to interpret one way or another. While one can quickly enough jump to the assumption that a subconscious process in the dreamer, or the unconscious, or some other impulse can stand in for the author of the dream (thus providing intentionality), that’s a different quality of ‘intention’ from (say) my determining to wear a red shirt today (and doing so). Indeed part of what’s perplexing in dream interpretation involves devising some form of coherent agency which might compose the outlandish pastiches that we recall on waking. So if we can learn something about dream interpretation without obvious intentional agency, we may be better situated to address the possibility that an ascribed intention need not provide the be-all and end-all of hermeneutical deliberation.
Third, many of the thinkers who weigh in on dream interpretation express comfort with the premise that dreams might not have one and only one definitive meaning. Since differential hermeneutics (as I envision it) sets out to investigate the ways and reasons for interpretive divergence, the study of multiple ‘meanings’ for dreams seems particularly apposite.
Fourth, even the pro-plurality phalanx of contemporary oneirologists treat some interpretations (or interpretive gestures) as better, wiser, sounder, more productive than others, any effort I make to espouse a hermeneutic that moves away from single correct answers to multiple plausible responses will always encounter the question of whether this makes all interpretations equal, whether one can say any damn thing one wants, whether I take away the grounds for distinguishing right from wrong. If I’m on a sound track, though, I will at the end be equipped to articulate a rationale for those distinctions that does not rest on transcendent Rules of Interpretation or The Nature of Meaning or any other such problematic construct.

In the preface to my first book, the ‘What Is…?’ book about postmodern biblical criticism, I allude to a neon installation on the façade of the Lenbachhaus in Munich. Working by memory, before the heyday of the internet, I quoted the inscription and circumstances from memory. At the time, I thought I recalled that the neon spelled out the words ‘You can think the opposite‘ written backwards, and I couldn’t recall the name of the artist.

It just occurred to me that I could make that reference more explicit now, so I will:

Maurizio Nannucci, ‘You can imagine the opposite’ [not written backwards], the Lenbachhaus, Munich.

I’m reading material in which authors make a great deal of the difference between textuality that one can apprehend readily, without hesitation or uncertainty (on one hand) and textuality that throws us back on our capacity to make inferences from evidence. That’s not the language they use, of course, that’s chosen to reflect my own pet perspective; the current article refers to the space of signification and the space of designation, insists that they are incompossible, and that we usually read transparently until we encounter a word or phrase that opaquely disrupts the system of oppositions by which we make meanings.
Contrariwise, I propose that ordinarily we read in the same way we ordinarily ‘calculate’ 2 + 2 = 4; it’s already known, there’s no need to deliberate or slow down in assessing it. If, however, one were to infer that ‘addition’ is ‘transparent’, one would have to account for the difference presented by 21793 + 68337; when I see that mathematical expression, I must pause to calculate the sum before I go forward. Simple sums aren’t ‘transparent’ and longer sums ‘opaque’; they just evoke different responses from people with different attitudes and capacities. No linguistic formulation simply is transparent or opaque, and it’s a conceptual mistake to posit this manner of distinction when trying to suss out how language works (much more so when trying to figure out how communication works).

I had no initial inclination to take up the psychodynamics of biblical interpretation; my research in hermeneutics just kept driving me that way (this way).
And yes, I am self-conscious enough to realise how absurd that sounds in this context. It doesn’t stop its being true, though; there’s no trace of my current chapter in earlier drafts of the project. At most, I might refer to Jung’s amplification as a paradigm of sorts of interpretation, entirely deracinated of its original embeddedness in analytical practice. Now, though, all I can see is condensation and displacement and especially cathexis, cathexis, cathexis.

(Later edit: not that I haven’t talked about this general topic before, whether here or in the Breu Without Authorial Intention volume, in ‘The Good That I Mean I Do Not Say: Meaning, Intention, Psychology and Romans 7.’)