Our Universal Trouble with Jesus

This weekend, a friend gave me a book I’d not yet read, one by Hans Küng.  So I read it. I read Edward Quinn’s English translation entitled, not Christ Sein, but On Being A Christian.  (My friend also gave me a book by Brennan Manning, who is also Catholic, which I also read, and I’m mentioning this just to ask you, Guess what religious persuasion my friend has?).  Küng, as Quinn translates him, quotes Martin Buber as saying “God [is] the most loaded of all human words.”  Elsewhere, Küng says (as Quinn puts it in English):

“After Auschwitz there can be no more excuses.  Christendom cannot avoid a clear admission of its guilt.”

He had already insisted (when discussing Christians being anti-Jewish) that

“It was not the Reformation, but humanism (Reuchlin, Scaliger), then pietism (Zinzendorf) and particularly the tolerance of the Enlightenment (with its declarations of the rights of man in the United States and in the French Revolution) which prepared the way for a change and up to a point also brought it about.”

Do we see what the Christian Küng (as Quinn translates him into our English) is clearly admitting? It is something, somethings of people, of us humans, beyond the Bible, beyond the New Testament, beyond its Jesus Christ that provides helpful change to the hearts and behavior of Christians.

What I did then was to read Martin Buber in Asher D. Biemann’s The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings. I had just finished up Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and was well into Michael Cunnigham’s The Hours. I’m telling you all of this because there are connections. There are connections not just because I’m reading all of these things at once, or, rather, in some sort of rapid succession. There are connections also because I’m finding my trouble with Jesus. I’m finding that it’s our universal trouble. And, believe me if you can, I absolutely hate imposing trouble on anyone, especially you.

So let’s just get to it. I do remember Küng’s having said something about Jesus to an interviewer for Newsweek magazine, was it now a decade ago, more, nearly two? Yes, there it is, right there in the English language wikipedia (though not in the Deutsch):

“If you cannot see that divinity includes male and female characteristics and at the same time transcends them, you have bad consequences. Rome and Cardinal O’Connor base the exclusion of women priests on the idea that God is the Father and Jesus is His Son, there were only male disciples, etc. They are defending a patriarchal Church with a patriarchal God. We must fight the patriarchal misunderstanding of God.”

I could keep quoting, Küng, Buber, Manning, Woolf, Cunningham, Shakespeare. And you could read my quotations in English, or in German, or in Spanish, perhaps in Chinese. I’d love to give you what Buber says about translation, or to show you his translations, or to give you his statement on logic, on how logic is not troublesome (which, of course, is very problematic). A feminist Küng, a translational Buber, what’s the connection here? What is our universal trouble with Jesus?

Well, everything anyone of us has from Jesus is translational. It’s translated. Yes, and even Küng clearly admits that scholars of Plato do better finding Socrates who never wrote a thing himself than Christians do finding Christ. Maybe feminist scholar Cheryl Glenn does a better job reading Plato and finding Aspasia than most do with Jesus. “Jesus” is a loaded term for us humans, like Buber’s “God.” He calls it our term. But the trouble universally is not that Jesus said something, like Socrates did, as Aspasia did, as God did and likely still does. Our trouble is that what Jesus said only comes to us in translation. What he spoke that we read crosses the boundary of one language before it gets to any of us.

Now we have to get translation. Would even a third edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies help us all, universally?

“Translation” is a loaded human word.

“That is all.” “I am unhappy.”

With respect to blogging, come November this year, I’m saying “That is all.” I’ve got much to do, as David Ker says, IRL (“in real life”), too much. I can’t predict then whether I’ll be saying, “I am unhappy.” I sincerely hope all you other bloggers and commenters will be happy. But this is not the real, or at least not the only, reason for my post.

I’ve been reading Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. I’ve been seeing things analogous to reading the Bible. By analogy, I’ve been thinking about translation, about novel translation, about Bible translation. So I’m posting. Did that with To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. (Think far more of you read my post “Whose Mockingbird? A Parable for Bible Translators” far more than any other so far.) Do our novel writers do with their language things similar to what our Bible writers have done? Yes, I believe so.

So, in my edition of Mrs. Dalloway, there’s a wonderful forward written by Maureen Howard, in which she begins getting us readers noticing Virginia Woolf’s language. (I’d tried to get us looking also in this post and in this one. Anyway.) Howard pays attention (like some of us might pay attention to the Hebrew of the Bible, and the Hebrew Aramaic, and the Hebraic Hellene), and she begins with this paragraph:

With what pleasure we read the famous opening sentence of Mrs. Dalloway, for it rings with the confidence of the writer: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Virginia Woolf knew exactly what she was up to–title and heroine’s name sprung in her first line, the clarity of diction, the very simplicity of the domestic errand suggesting a world that we will comprehend. The novel is tempered by such easy lines: “That is all”; “I am unhappy”; “I have five sons.” Placed like stones at the rim of a billowing tent, these clear little sentences seem necessary stakes in the shimmering flow of language and emotion that strains, in paragraph after paragraph, to contain the intricacies of life.

Now if you’ve already read my two earlier posts on Mrs. Dalloway‘s language, then you’ve already read a couple of really really long English sentences from the novel. What Howard is trying to peg down for us is this “billowing tent” of a novel, and she notices how its author stakes it down with “clear little sentences” that are “like stones” well placed. And this, she suggests, is for the writer and for us her readers not just language of communication but is somehow our look into life. How did Howard put it? Isn’t it life with some few bits of language also “to contain the intricacies of life”?

But what if a translator, concerned for the “message” of the novel, comes along? What if native English speakers are polled, if natural language is field tested? What if the first sentence constructed and the long billowy ones and the short stony ones, what if they just point to the clearer meaning? What if the translator could just get that? What if he could be accurate then? And clear and precise? Well then. Readers would get it. Sure, they still might argue over who is over whom. Whether men really should be the head of the homes in the novel. Whether the marriages really ought to be complementarian or egalitarian. But the translators, of course, could reassure everyone that the copy of Mrs. Dalloway that they are now buying is better because it is linguistically based now. By linguistic, rather than theological or feministical or some such biased perspective, one must see that it is pragmatic. Yes, if we need a label for pragmatic linguistics, we know it’s Relevance Theory. That is better like Better bibles. It’s a better Mrs. Dalloway because we’re looking at context and such and coming up with what Virgina Woolf (like God and Paul) actually meant, the actual language, the actual message communicated in inferences from her (like Peter) to you and to me (like little stones). Wordplay does not matter because meaning does.

If you’re a Spanish reader, then know that the sentence length must be consistently natural Spanish sentence length. Otherwise, well, otherwise your novel La Señora Dalloway might come across unnatural; and that is not good. If you’re a Spanish reader, then know too that “La señora Dalloway decidió que ella misma compraría las flores” is a better translation than what the English readers got. We all know now, of course, that “When Mrs. Dalloway said” then it was Virginia Woolf deciding that this Mrs. had “decided.” When Woolf was saying, she was, rather, deciding. This is the essence of the communique, the practical inference, that implicature.

Just sayin. That is all.

Virginia Woolf did not use Pompatus of Love

No, Virginia Woolf did not use the English phrase “pompatus of love.” Rather, that “pompatus” phrase is one we’ll come back to. When Woolf did write of a song of love, however, she did use this phrasing:

ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo—

What I’m wanting us to do is to listen to words. Are they ours? What’s a reader of Mrs. Dalloway to do with these words? What’s a translator of this novel to do with them?

By analogy, what’s a Bible translator to do with old-sounding Hebrew “original” words that may hearken back somehow to someone else from some time back? What’s a Bible translator to do with some new-fangled Greek neologism in the New Testament? Oh, I could give you examples. I’d love for you to give me some examples. Is the communicated meaning really always a message we much somehow apply? Is Revelance Theory (i.e., communication science applied to missionary Bible translation) really relevant?

Does it always help us to know exactly with some accurate precision what a writer is doing? Does a footnote help you read? Or, if you’re reading in translation without footnotes, does some translator’s give-away-the-meaning translation really help you?

Oh well, why not? Let me just give you the skinny on Woolf’s phrase. Remember? It’s “ee um fah um so / foo swee too eem oo—.” (After that, then, you can read it for yourself.) What follows here is the detailed commentary from a couple of experts, from page 150 of Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, by Julia Briggs, who is one of the experts. Briggs makes sure we all understand that the singer of the lines noted here is a “beggar woman” who belongs to the present, the distant past, and the distant future; Briggs continues:

Her song consists of a series of meaningless syllables – ‘ee um fah um so/ foo swee too eem oo –’, noises that mean nothing to her listeners (or readers), yet they are also, and antithetically, given a specific point of reference, for as Hillis Miller has pointed out, they are a rough translation of a German poem Allerseelen (‘All Souls’ Day’), by Hebert von Gilm. It was set to music by Richard Strauss, and also by a Belgian composer, Eduard Lassen (1830-1940).
…Concerned with the past, lost love and the return of the dead, his melancholy version was popular in its day (1894), and was apparently part of Leonard’s repertoire (he [Leonard Woolf, Virginia's husband] was impressively well versed in German poetry and music). In January 1931, [Virginia] Woolf reported to her nephew Quentin that Leonard had sung it at a family party (though whether seriously or as a joke is unclear). The English version (written by Mrs. Malcolm Lawson) runs thus:

Lay by my side your bunch of purple heather,
The last red asters of an autumn day,
And let us sit and talk of love together,
As one in May, as once in May.

Give me your hand, that I may press it gently,
And if the others see, what matter they?
Look in mine eyes with your sweet eyes intently,
As one in May, as once in May.

What is fascinating is that Woolf, according to the experts, is offering us readers and listeners some neologistic sounds for a love song. It’s supposed to sound old, and foreign, and ancient perhaps. To Woolf, the experts suggest, this is a loose translation of some English translation of some German, the English once sung by her husband, perhaps in jest, perhaps not. At any rate, the explanation is fairly recent (relative to Bible commentaries) and extremely precise and accurate (compared, again, to what Bible commentary writers can offer us).

With that bit of information, then, a Spanish translator might (and does) do the following. The translator of La Señora Dalloway might just render the song from English (which of course is from German from English from German, and old and female and nonsense sounding) into English thusly:

i am fa am so
fu sui tu im u

So what does that sound like in Spanish?

But I’m reading Mrs. Dalloway again, hearing again, in English. It’s not “original” English that I’m hearing, even though it’s Virginia Woolf’s original English writing. She is its author. She has her own meaning, her own intent. The Revelance Theory Bible translator wants us to get in our heads what was surely in Virginia Woolf’s head. We must get this accurately, in context, with precision.

So let’s do it in English. Again, here’s that perplexed Peter Walsh and what he hears upon remembering reading Daisy Simmons’s infuriating letter to him, upon walking into Regent’s Park. Listen for the song, like the “pompatus of love.” Oh yeah, we’ve said nothing yet of that original English. So stay tuned. Here’s just Virginia Woolf:

That was what tortured him, that was what came over him when he saw Clarissa so calm, so cold, so intent on her dress or whatever it was; realising what she might have spared him, what she had reduced him to — a whimpering, snivelling old ass. But women, he thought, shutting his pocket-knife, don’t know what passion is. They don’t know the meaning of it to men. Clarissa was as cold as an icicle. There she would sit on the sofa by his side, let him take her hand, give him one kiss–Here he was at the crossing.
…A sound interrupted him; a frail quivering sound, a voice bubbling up without direction, vigour, beginning or end, running weakly and shrilly and with an absence of all human meaning into

ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo—

the voice of no age or sex, the voice of an ancient spring spouting from the earth; which issued, just opposite Regent’s Park Tube station from a tall quivering shape, like a funnel, like a rusty pump, like a wind-beaten tree for ever barren of leaves which lets the wind run up and down its branches singing

ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo

and rocks and creaks and moans in the eternal breeze.
… Through all ages—when the pavement was grass, when it was swamp, through the age of tusk and mammoth, through the age of silent sunrise, the battered woman—for she wore a skirt—with her right hand exposed, her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love—love which has lasted a million years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of years ago, her lover, who had been dead these centuries, had walked, she crooned, with her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had gone; death’s enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth, now become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her side a bunch of purple-heather, there on her high burial place which the last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the pageant of the universe would be over.

Now you understand Mrs. Dalloway or at least Mrs. Dalloway. The words make so much more meaning now that we know what they mean, what the commentator knows that Woolf meant by them. But what about the “pompatus of love” that Virginia Woolf did not sing and could not have meant? What’s pompatus?

Well, that’s easy. We just find that it’s in an old sounding real Latin song, a Gregorian chant:

“Beatus martir domini pompatus vitae meritis a servis caesus gladiis martitium promeruit”

You tell me what that means. You read it with me in Einführung in die Gregorianische Melodien: ein Handbuch der Choralwissenschaft by Peter Wagner. Or you can read with me what an Urban Dictionary lexicographer says pompatus comes from: from “‘puppetutes’, a combination of ‘puppets’ and ‘prostitutes’. A puppetute was a woman of your fantasies who would do anything you wanted.” Or we can go to other experts, to Cecil Adams and his assistant J.K. Fabian. They give us the Straight Dope:

“Some people call me the space cowboy. / Yeah! Some call me the gangster of love. / Some people call me Maurice, / Cause I speak of the Pompatus of love.” — that’s the original authored by Steve Miller

“My dearest darling, come closer to Maurice so I can whisper sweet words of epismetology in your ear and speak to you of the pompitous of love.” — that’s Steve Miller’s original source [himself as original writer of these lyrics you just read now, the pompitous ones, also authored by Miller one year earlier]

Now, actually, according to yet another expert, Brent Mann, these words come from Vernon Green’s original words:

“Let me whisper sweet words of pismotology / And discuss the puppetutes of love”

And Fabian says that Jon Cryer says that Green says that comes from this:

“Pizmotality described words of such secrecy that they could only be spoken to the one you loved…. [and puppetutes is a] term I coined to mean a secret paper-doll fantasy figure [thus puppet], who would be my everything and bear my children.”

Mann says “pizmatology” was Green’s “more or less translating into sweet nothings.”

All that makes me just wonder if

ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo—

isn’t English for the original Latin

pompatus.

What I am sure of is that these are words of songs, of love.  How do you want to read and to translate that?

Virginia Woolf used kindle, nook, twitter, yahoo, google, and the web

Blogger Theophrastus got me reading Virginia Woolf again. (Well, he got me re-reading Mrs. Dalloway [my idea] in preparation for reading Michael Cunnigham’s The Hours [again my idea] by getting me to read Cunningham’s op ed essay, “Found in Translation.”) Then I noticed the very modern Virginia Woolf used the phrases kindle, nook, twitter, yahoo, google, and the web.

I’d been paying attention to such, I guess, as I was composing my sms poem for a context. And this week at the library, my daughter found for me a paper book called Twitterature, that pretends to have txtd Mrs. Dalloway and To Kill A Mockingbird (and it killed both Woolf’s and Harper Lee’s classic works by its awful mocking). Anyway, as I was saying, Virginia Woolf used terms in her great literary works and in her letters that the turn of the century info agers recently have claimed for their buzz.

Have a read for yourself:

And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it; wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies, whose forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung, the whirling young men, and laughing girls in their transparent muslins who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run; and even now, at this hour, discreet old dowagers were shooting out in their motor cars on errands of mystery; and the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds, their lovely old sea-green brooches in eighteenth-century settings to tempt Americans (but one must economise, not buy things rashly for Elizabeth), and she, too, loving it as she did with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it, since her people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges, she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party. (from Mrs. Dalloway)

The whole book is full of nooks and corners which I enjoy exploring. Sometimes one wants a candle in one’s hand though — Thats my only criticism — you’ve left (I daresay in haste) one or two dangling dim places. (in her letter to Vita Sackville-West)

The sounds of laughter, deep genuine laughter from Helen, a derisive twitter from Mr Pepper, came to her across the deeps; but, having loosed her grasp completely, she could not say why popery should make them laugh. (from Melymbrosia)

He withdrew the finger that was still thrust between the pages of Gulliver, opened the book, and ran his eye down the list of chapters, as though he were about to select the one most suitable for reading aloud. [The fulsome embraces of the young female Yahoo at the river arouse all the horrors of miscegenation in Gulliver...] (an allusion to Swift’s novel’s reference to yahoo, in Night and Day)

Arnold Bennett lies, it is said, like the picture of a dying fox in Uncle Remus… [Twel de day Mr. Fox got back fum de woods... an' sezee, ... "its 'Google-goody!' an' its 'Google-good!'"] (from her letter to Clive Bell referencing Uncle Remus and the Fox)

For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in. (from A Room of One’s Own)

Democracy, Psychology: The Bible Tells Me So

This morning, I received two emails with news articles that respectively contain our Greek-based words, democratic and psychological. The respective authors of the news pieces, a rabbi and a reporter, discuss a supportive connection between the two Greekish English words and the Bible.

Our English uses of the former word derive pretty directly from a phrase we could translate as “people power” transliterated from δῆμος (dêmos) and κράτος (krátos). The latter word, by our uses, comes from ψυχή (psūkhē) and λόγος (lógos) for “soul, or personality” and “study, or statement as in logic.” Incidentally, neither democracy nor psychology, as Greek phrases, is in the Bible. Nonetheless, coincidentally, our proper noun *Bible* is from the Hebraic-Hellene or Jewish-Greek phrase to refer to the Scriptures, as in the Greek translation of [or insert into] this excerpt of Hebrew Torah, which we now call Genesis 2:4

אלה [**] תולדות השמים והארץ בהבראם ביום עשות יהוה אלהים ארץ ושמים׃

αὕτη ἡ *βίβλος* γενέσεως οὐρανοῦ καὶ γῆς ὅτε ἐγένετο ᾗ ἡμέρᾳ ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν γῆν

Here are the connections made. First, by Rabbi Marvin Hier in his op ed piece for the Washington Post:

Rashi, in his monumental commentary on the Torah points out that G-d made the patriarch Abraham two promises, that he would have children, even though he was 100 years old, and that the land of Israel would be his. On having children, Abraham was willing to take G-d’s word for it. But when it came to the Promised Land, he insisted on a pre-condition: that G-d show him a sign of ownership. G-d concurred (Genesis 15, v. 8). For 3,500 years, land ownership in the Middle East has always required pre-conditions…. In this region, there will be a Jewish democratic state, Israel, that is here to stay and to them belongs a ‘piece of the rock.’

Second, are the connections made by op-ed writer intern Paige Chapman for the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Elizabeth Earle-Warfel (right), says psych majors at Trinity College of Florida will need 30 hours of psychology courses, including research methods, as well as 54 Bible and theology credits….
Ms. Earle-Warfel says she treats all patients with empathy, as she says the Bible guides her to. “The only difference is, in a secular counseling situation, you’re not as open to using the Bible or Scripture to illuminate unless the counselee starts the discussion,” she says.

So what? It’s words, we might say; just words. Exactly. We want them straight and hard and fast; we mix and borrow and mean things by them, we together. We make nations with people power by them. We probe our personalities by them. We find them nowhere in the Bible or make this book find them in our realities. It’s talked-about reality. And my Dad used to tell me, Mind your language.

I Like God

“I like God,” is what my young son told my wife once. Now, to be sure, he also liked baseball, drawing, the beach, motorcycles, playgrounds, big work machines, and Batman. We had him in a Christian preschool at the time, so undoubtedly he picked up some of his likeable ideas about God there. But his teachers also made him recite Bible verses in public assembly, and I remember he unintentionally brought the house down, and brought some embarrassment to his mother, when he quoted the following:

“And Jesus said: ‘I am in the way of the truth and the life.’”

Well, I’m a son too, and I tried out this notion of “I like God” on my own father, who is a Christian minister. Lately, we like to talk about a lot of things together. I’d been telling him how I liked that Facebook only has a “like” button and not a “dislike” button. This was following our discussion of Dallas Willard’s “acid test of theology” (i.e., whether the theology in the test will “set a lovable God–a radiant, happy, friendly, accessible, and totally competent being–before ordinary people”). And we’d also already talked about how poet and translator Anne Carson, who knows something about gods, tried to answer the question about her relationship with God this way (allowing Dad’s conversation with me to approach that “Acid Test” of lovability); Carson says:

the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t…. He’s not available because he’s not a being of a kind that would fit into our availability. “Not knowable” as the mystics would say. And knowing is what a worshipper wants to get from God, the sense of being in an exchange of knowledge, knowing and being known. It’s what anybody wants from any relationship of love and the relationship with God is supposed to be one of love. But I don’t think any kind of knowing is ever going to materialize between humans and gods.

So we’d gone from Carson to Willard to Facebook. To be sure, Dad has not yet read Carson; he had read Willard (but declared to Mom, who liked Willard’s book apparently too much, that “Dallas Willard is NOT God”); and he only occasionally visits FB. “I like the ‘like’ button on Facebook,” I’d told him. And then I mused, “I wonder if God should be likable. I’d like for God to like me. Then I think I could say, ‘I like God.’”

To this he replied, as if reassuring:

“Kurk, God doesn’t just like you. He loves you.”

Well, of course he does, I thought to myself and said so to Dad, adding, “God has to love, doesn’t he?”

Where we left it, or rather where I’d hope we would leave it if we could agree, is that likability is as important as lovability. Well, likability might have been more important to me, especially when I was growing up as I’d hear my Dad insist to my older brother who was bigger than me and was bullying me:

“You don’t have to like your brother. But you’d better make sure you show him love, or else.”

And my brother, to be sure, would mind Dad, showing his love, to me his little brother, but only just enough love, because he had to show some.

Please know, nonetheless, that to this day my elder brother and I still show love and respect to each other, and still defend the other when necessary. Maybe it’s because the nature of our family. Maybe there are times when we have to stand up for each other. Maybe we have to love each other, to show it. We are, after all, in a relationship; we are related.  To this day, however, my brother still doesn’t like me very much. And, for my part, I’d say the feeling is still mutual; on Facebook, where we’re friends, neither of us extends that “like” to the other very much. But it’s not just the little “like” but rather a big condition of our hearts, our minds, our volitions, our bodies. There’s not some formula I have for liking my brother.

So I think a good bit about our English words “love” and “God” and “like.” And through all my recent readings and conversations and thought, I like to remember when my little boy once could say so sincerely, so profoundly, so simply and so small, “I like God.”

coda

When i was young
It seemed that life was so wonderful
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical
And all the birds in the trees
Well they´d be singing so happily
Oh joyfully, oh playfully watching me
But then they sent me away
To teach me how to be sensible
Logical, oh responsible ,practical
And they showed me a world
Where i could be so dependable
Oh clinical, oh intellectual, cynical

There are times when all the world´s asleep
The questions run too deep
For such a simple man
Won´t you please, please tell me what we´ve learned
I know it sounds absurd
But please tell me who i am

Now watch what you say
Or they´ll be calling you a radical
A liberal, oh fanatical, criminal
Oh won´t you sign up your name
We´d like to feel you´re
Acceptable, respectable, oh presentable, a vegetable!

At night when all the world´s asleep
The questions run too deep
For such a simple man
Won´t you please, please tell me what we’ve learned
I know it sounds absurd
But please tell me who i am, who i am ,who i am.

–Supertramp, “The Logical Song”

I Like Bloggers Who…

This blogpost has two parts. First, you get a partial sampling of some the bloggers I like who… Second, I go on about why “I like bloggers who…”

First, without my even having asked their permission, I note just some bloggers who… :

• David Ker posts today on his GAD and his progress with GAD.

• Jane Stranz several times this year has blogged on now her “second decade of living with MS” sometimes as a caretaker and as a mourner, as often with “some considerable laughter.”

• Rodney A. Thomas Jr. was laughing considerably one Sunday this summer long before the New York Yankees fans weren’t; and while he was changing (and see his comment at his post) he was acknowledging “only God can change people’s hearts.”
• (Rod has let on board at his blog one “Optimistic Chad” who’s also going through some public blogged-about changes recently: “Saturday might be the day I lost hope. Perhaps the future will be new and different, like the mercies of God.”)

• Al Johnson, the pseudonymous poet blogger, went public in April of this year,
• and this encouraged blogger Bob MacDonald to go public with his story.

• Sue McCarthy comments last week on her “moving from fundamentalism to a liberal environment.”

• Joel Watts, whose blog was once named “The Church of Jesus Christ,” has renamed it “Unsettled Christianity” and has blogged on a number of changes he’s been going through personally, experientially. Let me give Joel credit for keeping me at blogging!

• Rachel Barenblat posts her poetry regularly, recently poetry on having become and on being a mother. She is also blogging on what it means for her to be a rabbi, on not hiding all of who she is becoming, which, of course, “gives us permission to be in-process,” admitting: “Allowing myself to be wholly seen feels dangerous.”

Second, here’s something that feels dangerous from my viewpoint (after I may have unnecessarily pointed out something else about your viewpoint). This is just Part Two of One Blogpost. What if I were a blogger who… I might post something like this:

“Jane Stranz is an example of transparent feminism for me, she comments in context from her viewpoint but doesn’t try to highjack the conversation or point out what a chauvinist I am.”
–David Ker (aka Lingamish, aka DAK)

I like bloggers. (And if I were talking to you in person, I’d just say “I like bloggers period.”) Of course I can qualify this a bit. Yes, I like smart bloggers. Likewise, I like bloggers that for smart reasons blog anonymously and pseudonymously. Moreover, I like bloggers that are intelligent about their passions. I used to blogroll the most brilliant and funniest bloggers because I thought you like them too. But let me qualify my likes more.

I most like bloggers who tell who they are, where they’re coming from, where they’re going, what they’re up to, and even what gets them down.

I’m bringing up this up for a reason. And pardon, if you like, my ramblings.

I like context. So please let me give you some context. You may want to know that David Ker brought up context again yesterday in the context of the Better Bibles Blog and his post he entitles, “A question of context”. You really should have noticed already how he brought up “context” some time ago (as in my quoting him in the epigraph above). Back then, he was bringing up blogger Jane Stranz’s context; and he brought up her context in the context of my post at another blog of mine (Aristotle’s Feminist Subject), in the context of my post I’d entitled, “Pheminist Phooh”. As you can imagine, and as you can see if you do more reading, there’s a bit more of a context. As he suggests in his comment there, now my epigraph here, I was, in his view, at one time trying to hijack a conversation at one of his blogs and also, in his view, attempting to point out what a chauvinist he was. I am truly sorry for that.

So, you can see there’s more than context here. There’s the personal. These are very, very personal things, not just abstractions, not just formulas, not just constructs, not just ideas, not just words. David has remained one of the bloggers who I like the most. Despite everything impersonal between us (such as my imposing my viewpoints, in his view, of course), David has remained “friends” with me (if Facebook counts). (I’m not even saying this because he ably, and with good humor, took the helm at one of my blogs once). In the context of his observation about Jane, David points me, maybe you too, to some very very important things.

So this is the reason I’m posting here on bloggers I like. Like many of them, I am going through some very personal things. Some tough days. Yes, it’s new experiences with my second child preparing to leave home and going through her own battles not only as a cancer survivor living in the identity-shadow of that deadly, scaring disease but also as her own person. Yes, it’s new experiences with my spouse as she looks to making some changes. Yes, it’s new experiences for us outside of the “faith community” we grew up in. Yes, for me, it’s new experiences with my changing Dad fighting deadly cancer. Yes, it’s facing how I’ve lived reluctantly and so resistantly as a missionary kid in my Dad’s shadow, and it’s facing how I’ve treated and mistreated so many, at home, at work, in my neighborhood, in circles of close friendships and of more distant acquaintances, and even people online whether FB “friends” or bloggers. As a blogger, I have not always been kind, and yet I’m bent on becoming, on being a kinder kind of person to you.

(My wife just posted on our refrigerator door a quotation by Mother Teresa. In the context of receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Mother Teresa was asked, “What can we do to promote world peace?” This very woman — who left home at the age of 18 and never saw her family again but, as a missionary obeying God’s calling and struggling with her own demons of depression, worked with orphans and the homeless for the rest of her life — said this to the person asking how to promote peace in the world: “Go home and love your family.” I like that. Mother Teresa did not set the bar too high for me. Neither have many of those bloggers who I like set the bar too high for me. Maybe the bar is now high and dangerous and very good. What’s your viewpoint?)