Write on

Since recovering from the surgery (August 29) that removed my cancerous prostate, i've returned to regular work on Turning Words. Having been away from it for a long time, my feel for the task has changed considerably (actually my feel for everything has changed over the past year and a half, but i haven't found a way to write or talk about the change comprehensively).

One thing i've considered is a more systematic attempt to enter into dialogue with readers (especially my friends on Manitoulin Island). This would certainly be instructive for me and would affect my revision of the existing draft. But whether it would improve the book in the long run, i.e. enhance its value for subsequent readers, is another question, and one i have no answer for. So i keep on writing and revising without giving much thought to recruiting readers.

Actually i doubt that any reader would understand what the book was driving at unless they were already driving at it themselves; and in that case, they might well arrive at it (or not) regardless of whether they read my book or not.

Yet i suppose the authors i've read (and, i hope, learned from) might well have had the same thoughts about future readers, and if so, it didn't stop them writing. So i labour on, not because i am convinced that my work will end up being useful to somebody, but because i simply feel as if something quite beyond me is using me to manifest itself. No doubt there are other manifestations of it as well; i have no way of knowing whether the one i'm responsible for will actually reach anyone. The meaning doesn't belong to me, i belong to it. The writing is integral with the total practice of my life that i owe to it. So i muddle on, not even knowing whether anyone will actually read it or not. (And the same goes for this post, come to think of it.)

Energy matters

I'm back to the blog after a busy spring and summer. Much of the time taken from blogging (and from working on Turning Words) went into changes to our homestead, or its connections with the local (Manitoulin Island) community. Meanwhile a bad back and other physical challenges cut deeply into my energy. I'm dealing with that by deliberately changing my habits, so that i move more deliberately … and the same goes for our use of electrical energy, as we adjust to our newly installed solar energy system. It's a kind of ‘mindfulness.’ The details are more relevant elsewhere (such as the Resilient Manitoulin blog), but it's all part of ‘settling our whole being into interpenetrating reality’ – as Shohaku Okumura puts it in his recent book, Realizing Genjokoan: The key to Dogen's Shobogenzo (p. 90).

I didn't do much reading this summer, but Okumura's book was certainly a highlight. He is a lifelong practitioner and scholar of Dogen's work, and the more personal side of this book struck a chord with me as well, because Okumura (who is a few years younger than me) also takes note of his declining energy levels. I can't call myself a Buddhist because i was never taken on by a ‘live’ Buddhist teacher, but immersion in Dogen's way of reading, thinking and nonthinking is deeply affecting what i can say about intimacy, intimologies, interpenetrating reality.

Back to work on (play with) Turning Words. While i still have some energy left, right?

Rehabilitating Information

That's the title of a paper i've just had published by the open access journal Entropy. Yesterday i updated my gnoxic home page to reflect some of the recent work that i've been doing instead of posting here.

While working on all this, it's occurred to me that humanity suffers from a global attention deficit disorder.

The cure won't be found at the end of any path or any rainbow; it's not something lost or hidden somewhere else; it's a matter of raising the quality, breadth and depth of our attention right here and now. What is the path right in front of us?

As Dogen said: a dream within a dream.

(You can be sure that whatever you write about it will be misread.)

Common and uncommon Causes

Here and elsewhere i've put in a few plugs for Chris Martenson's Crash Course, which analyzes the current global crisis in terms of economy, energy and environment as key pieces of the puzzle. Near the end of Chapter 10, Martenson says: ‘There is literally nothing more important for you to be doing right now than gaining an understanding of how these pieces fit together, assessing the risks for yourself, and taking actions to prepare for the possibility of a future that is substantially different from today.’

Martenson's website also invites you to ‘Help the Cause’ by spreading the word about it – as i've tried to do – because it's all about our common future.

Now, i'd bet that at least one other Cause is currently telling you the same thing: that nothing is more important than devoting your time to it right now.

If these are separate Causes, and you have only one chance at now, then at least one of those voices must be wrong. If not, they must both belong to a common Cause.

How do you decide which Cause has the greatest claim on your attention and commitment?   – Is there a better way to make that kind of decision?

My own calling is working toward answers to those questions, through inquiry and dialogue, as expressed in Turning Words. That's my primary mission, and other Causes are either secondary branches of it or distractions from it, for me.

What's your mission?

I call it your mission, but of course it doesn't belong to you. You belong to it, as the Person you try to live up to. You might call that Person your true Self, or maybe God, for all i know.

‘Abdu'l-Bahá and Black Elk

On this day, Bahá'ís around the world commemorate the Ascension of ‘Abdu'l-Bahá, the head of the Bahá'í faith from the passing of his father Bahá'u'lláh in 1892 until his own death in 1921. Throughout his life he was most commonly known as ‘The Master’, but the name he chose for himself means ‘servant of Baha’. ‘Abdu'l-Bahá was an examplar of servant leadership long before Robert Greenleaf coined the term.

‘Abdu'l-Bahá was the author of many prayers, and one of the most typical begins like this:

He is the All-Glorious!
O God, my God! Lowly and tearful, I raise my suppliant hands to Thee and cover my face in the dust of that Threshold of Thine, exalted above the knowledge of the learned, and the praise of all that glorify Thee.

Tears come naturally to a servant leader, especially when he contemplates the state of the world and the condition to which so many of its people are reduced because of human ignorance and error. I see another example in the Ogalala Sioux visionary Black Elk — especially in the ‘Dog Vision’ chapter of Black Elk Speaks. At the age of 18 he was acutely aware that his visionary power had been given to be used in service to his people, but also that he didn't yet know how to render that service.

I had made a good start to fulfill my duty to the Grandfathers, but I had much more to do; and so the winter was like a long night of waiting for the daybreak.

When the grasses began to show their faces again, I was happy, for I could hear the thunder beings coming in the earth and I could hear them saying: ‘It is time to do the work of your Grandfathers.’

After the long winter of waiting, it was my first duty to go out lamenting. So after the first rain storm I began to get ready.

When going out to lament it is necessary to choose a wise old medicine man, who is quiet and generous, to help.

Black Elk chose a medicine man named Few Tails to guide him through the long and arduous preparation for ‘lamenting’.

Few Tails now told me what I was to do so that the spirits would hear me and make clear my next duty. I was to stand in the middle, crying and praying for understanding. Then I was to advance from the center to the quarter of the west and mourn there awhile. Then I was to back up to the center, and from there approach the quarter of the north, wailing and praying there, and so on all around the circle. This I had to do all night long.

Black Elk's prayer was essentially the same as ‘Abdu'l-Bahá's — despite many obvious differences — and motivated by the same spirit of servant leadership. And for me there is a special poignancy in this passage from that same chapter in Black Elk's story:

And now when I look about me upon my people in despair, I feel like crying and I wish and wish my vision could have been given to a man more worthy. I wonder why it came to me, a pitiful old man who can do nothing. Men and women and children I have cured of sickness with the power the vision gave me; but my nation I could not help. If a man or woman or child dies, it does not matter long, for the nation lives on. It was the nation that was dying, and the vision was for the nation; but I have done nothing with it.

A century and a half later, the same forces of greed and ignorance which nearly destroyed the Sioux nation are still at work, only on a much bigger scale — the entire planetary ecosystem is at risk, and the suffering people of far outnumber the entire human population of the earth in Black Elk's time. I certainly feel like crying when i think about it, and even more so when i think of how little i have done to help — for i haven't even healed a single person, as Black Elk did many times. Yet i see that Black Elk's vision lives on through the story told in Black Elk Speaks, and may yet make a difference — perhaps even because this blog post has directed your attention to it!

I am neither a visionary like Black Elk nor a servant leader like ‘Abdu'l-Bahá; neither my work in progress nor this blog can begin to compare with what they accomplished. Yet i confess to a faint flickering hope that my work may serve some purpose, especially in its blending of spiritual and scientific visions. ‘Abdu'l-Bahá said that ‘religion and science are the two wings upon which man's intelligence can soar into the heights, with which the human soul can progress.’ And i'm encouraged that at least one precursor along this double path — C.S. Peirce — did his best work in his mid-60s. That's why i haven't succumbed entirely to despair …

Hermeneutics, history and scripture

Chapter 6 of my work in progress delves into the process of reading scripture, with a special focus on one example, the Gospel of Thomas. For the purpose of outlining the historical context from which this Gospel emerged, my chapter draws upon April DeConick's book The Original Gospel of Thomas in Translation (2007). However, my way of reading this (or any) scripture is quite different from DeConick's in some respects. The crucial difference is that my way of reading is dialogic: the role of the reader is to search for possible ways in which the text may express her own primary experience, which thus constitutes a common ground for author and reader.

DeConick's approach, by contrast, is quite strictly that of a historian: the ancient text is taken as evidence of what other people believed at some other time, and the possibility that it may connect with the reader's own primary experience is irrelevant. This way of reading is certainly useful as an aid to critical thinking, which is needed in order to avoid indulging in excessively subjective readings. However, it lends itself to indulging in the opposite tendency, which is to treat every ancient text as a museum piece. The historical specialist, relieved of any responsibility to relate the text to primary experience, tends to cut its meaning to fit some Procrustean framework, asking only how to label this particular exhibit. We study the text to learn about it, or to fill in some details in our picture of a fossilized past—never considering that we might learn something from a scripture that could affect our own path into the future. But according to the gnoxic way of reading, that very possibility defines scripture as such.

The purely historical approach is so anxious to avoid bending the text to the reader's beliefs that it sometimes uses extremely strained logic to rationalize a more conventional reading, one that bends the text to suit the historian's habitual category structures. One example is the reading of Saying 13 in Thomas, which is among those examined in my Chapter 6. Here is DeConick's own translation as given in her book on Thomas (p. 83):

Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Speculate about me. Tell me, who am I like?’
Simon Peter said to him, ‘You are like a righteous angel.’
Matthew said to him, ‘You are like a sage, a temperate person.’
Thomas said to him, ‘Master, my mouth cannot attempt to say whom you are like.’
Jesus said, ‘I am not your master. After you drank, you became intoxicated from the bubbling fount which I had measured out.’
And he took him and retreated. He told him three words.
Then when Thomas returned to his friends, they asked him, ‘What did Jesus say to you?’
Thomas said to them, ‘If I tell you one of the words which he told me, you will pick up stones and throw them at me. Then fire will come out of the stones and burn you up.’

DeConick guesses that the ‘words’ spoken privately to Thomas by Jesus include the ‘unpronouncable [sic] Name of God’; and, based on some rather oblique references in another text called the Acts of Thomas, she claims that this would by implication reveal his own ‘true Name’ as ‘Jesus the Messiah’ (p. 85). She continues as follows: ‘This Christology is quite cogent with that expressed in the Gospel of John, especially 10.30-39 …’

To me it seems quite odd to speak of ‘Christology’ in reference to the Gospel of Thomas, a book which never once uses the term ‘Christ’ or ‘Messiah’. My chapter also draws a conclusion opposed to DeConick's concerning the relationship between the Gospels of Thomas and John. As Elaine Pagels does in Beyond Belief (2003), i stress the contrast between the two—though she does not frame it in quite the same way i do, as the way of inquiry vs. the way of belief.

DeConick returns to the subject in her more recent book on the Gospel of Judas (The Thirteenth Apostle, 2007). Here again she is referring to Thomas 13:

Thomas' confession is quite remarkable in that it overrides two of the confessions of the other disciples (Peter and Matthew), who understand Jesus in terms of angels and sages. Since stoning is the punishment for blasphemy in early Judaism, it is quite certain that the secret words Jesus confided to Thomas included the pronunciation of the unutterable divine Name of God, Yahweh. So Thomas' confession places Jesus on the level of God, bearer of his great Name. This is quite consistent with the opinion of the author of the Gospel of John.

— DeConick (2007b, 97)

I think any reader who tries to follow this reasoning step by step will see how illogical it is. It seems to me a dubious rationalization of an eisegesis, or reading of DeConick's own (highly specialized) idea into the text—in this case an idea which is not explicitly expressed anywhere in the Gospel of Thomas. The way of inquiry, on the other hand, could hardly be more explicit in Thomas, as i try to show in my chapter.

I am arguing here that DeConick's historical approach to the reading of scripture does not necessarily produce a more reasonable understanding than other approaches. I am not saying that DeConick's approach is without value—on the contrary, i consider her work to be essential reading for anyone deeply interested in the Gospel of Thomas or other texts from that era. My point is that a sound reading of scripture must be grounded in both one's own primary experience and the historical facts about the culture which generated the text, as gleaned from the work of specialists such as DeConick (and Pagels and many others).

Wrevelation

The process of revising the first draft of my book Turning Words has been surprising in many ways. I now have six chapters online from each ‘side’ of the book; the sixth, uploaded this week, had to be almost totally rewritten, which took over two months. It's about ‘revelation’, with special reference to the Gospel of Thomas, and my take on both has been developing and deepening over the 5 years or so since the first draft was completed.

All this effort on the book would make no sense if i didn't believe the outcome to be as true, clear and concise as i can make it. In these days of information overload, adding another 300 pages or so to the millions spewed forth every day is not something i take lightly. However, as you know if you've ever tried it, intense concentration on a text tends to make its rough spots invisible to the writer. That's why i'm placing the chapters online as i finish each one in this round of revision—hoping that a reader or two can respond to it, and thus give me a few clues that might help to carry the process further. It does make some demands on the reader's attention. That's intentional—i think it's important to push the envelope of language a little—but how can you tell in advance whether it will be worth the effort? You can't be sure, but you should be able to guess well enough by the end of Chapter 1, if you follow it closely enough to catch the clues. Anyway, if i didn't think it was already worth a reader's while, i wouldn't be doing any of this. In fact, i'm pretty sure that the current draft of this book has been more carefully thought and written out than many published books. I suppose that makes me a ‘perfectionist’ … Well, nobody's perfect!

A few prospective readers have told me that they need a printed text, since it's too much of a strain to read from a screen. If so, you should be able to print it with your browser, but you may need to make some adjustments before printing in order to reduce the amount of paper you use. (No chapter in this book should take more than 20 pages to print—or 10 if you print on both sides.) First, you can reduce the text size with your browser settings (since i have deliberately refrained from specifying the text size in my HTML coding). Second, you should probably set the side margins at zero in your print settings, because this text has margins ‘built in’ (to make it more presentable on the screen). If you still have trouble printing a chapter, you can always e-mail me for help: gnox -at- xplornet (dot) com. By the way, i still haven't decided whether conventional printing is the way this book should be published after it's finished—which may take a couple more years …

Meanwhile, most of what i need to say these days seems to need the context of the book in order to make adequate sense; so this blog's been pretty quiet. But perhaps this too will change, now that i'm liberated from Chapter 6! We shall see.

Meaning and the logic of vagueness

My work in progress, Turning Words, documents an inquiry guided by the question How do you mean?. The question is not What do you mean?—although that is sometimes a good question for clarification purposes. The root question is how meaning happens, or how semiosis works.

Writers, thinkers and scholars have been asking this kind of question for a long time, but their work tends to be ignored because most of us are either too busy committing our acts of meaning to reflect on how we do it, or don't see the point of thus reflecting. A century ago, C. S. Peirce and Victoria Welby were both looking into the nature of meaning, but they didn't learn of each other's work until near the end of their lives. The correspondence between them began in 1903, and parts of it are among the clearest explanations of Peirce's mature semiotics. Most of it was published in 1977 under the title Semiotic and Significs (which i cite as PW), but copies of this are hard to find, and i only got hold of one recently.

In one of his earliest letters to Welby, Peirce explained why the study of what we mean, important as it is, should not be taken too far:

I fully and heartily agree that the study of what we mean ought to be the … general purpose of a liberal education, as distinguished from special education,—of that education which should be required of everybody with whose society and conversation we are expected to be content. But, then, perfect accuracy of thought is unattainable,—theoretically unattainable. And undue striving for it is worse than time wasted. It positively renders thought unclear.

— Peirce to Welby (PW 11, 1903)

When a theorist like Peirce says that something is theoretically unattainable, he is not implying that it might be attained in practice (because theory is unreliable); he is saying just the opposite, that ‘perfect accuracy’ is unattainable because of the way meaning works. The very logic of meaning guarantees that all language is necessarily vague to some degree. Here's a fuller explanation of the point, written a year or two later (CP 5.506):

No communication of one person to another can be entirely definite, i.e., non-vague. We may reasonably hope that physiologists will some day find some means of comparing the qualities of one person's feelings with those of another, so that it would not be fair to insist upon their present incomparability as an inevitable source of misunderstanding. Besides, it does not affect the intellectual purport of communications. But wherever degree or any other possibility of continuous variation subsists, absolute precision is impossible. Much else must be vague, because no man's interpretation of words is based on exactly the same experience as any other man's. Even in our most intellectual conceptions, the more we strive to be precise, the more unattainable precision seems. It should never be forgotten that our own thinking is carried on as a dialogue, and though mostly in a lesser degree, is subject to almost every imperfection of language. I have worked out the logic of vagueness with something like completeness, but need not inflict more of it upon you, at present.

That last sentence has inspired scholars to look for a text among Peirce's papers that ‘works out the logic of vagueness with something like completeness’, but as far as i know, nobody has claimed to find it. And considering how well that final sentence works as a pragmatic ‘punchline’ to Peirce's argument, it would be at least a little ironic if anyone did find such a text.

When Peirce says that ‘no man's interpretation of words is based on exactly the same experience as any other man's’, he is talking about what i call polyversity (see TW Chapter 2). In the earlier stages of writing this book, i collected quite a few examples of what i took to be statements of the same idea expressed in diverse ways. But there's a limit to the usefulness of that, just as there's a limit to how exactly you can say what you mean. Indeed, as Peirce said, ‘the multiplication of equivalent modes of expression is itself a burden’ (PW 20). I hope that my final draft will not burden the reader too much in this way.

The ‘trust’ in dialog includes a willingness to let most of the meaning process work implicitly—trusting that it can become explicit, can bear the spotlight beam of attention, if that becomes necessary. Genuine dialogue requires an exquisite sense of what needs to be explicated and what needs to work implicitly.

The gnoxic orientation

I got a note from someone who read the latest chapter of my book draft and asked, ‘is your main stance theist? religious? christian? catholic?’ The writer also asked about the Gospel of Thomas, which is quoted in that chapter without explanation (because it's introduced in Chapter 1 of the book). Here's my reply, revised a bit for a broader audience, and with some links to resources on my home site. I'll also have more to say tomorrow about the Gospel of Thomas.

The stance of my work in progress (Turning Words) and the gnoxic stance more generally, is pragmatic in the Peircean sense, and not theist or religious. The book does focus quite a lot on the reading of (what i call) scriptures, but on the role of the reader rather than on the scripture's role with respect to religious institutions. The Gospel of Thomas is the one scripture most frequently quoted and mentioned in the book. You can find out more about it, and a list of the resources i've used for studying this and other gospels, on my Sourcenet page.

However, Turning Words also employs the Buddhist idiom as much as the Christian—in fact the title is a Zen term. It draws upon several other religious discourses as well, especially when they are (in my reading) semiotically equivalent. I guess you could call my stance ‘catholic’ (small c) in that sense! Basically i treat them all as signs and challenge the reader to take responsibility for their meaning, and to reflect on the semiotic process as well. (And the same for the various scientific discourses also found in the book.)

That's the gnoxic stance, which is philosophical by nature. The philosopher's role, as i see it, is to promote critical thinking and reflection rather than anyone's claim to spiritual authority. I haven't gone into my personal religious orientation here because i don't think that's what the question called for; anyone curious about that can find out more about me from my blogger profile or the home page of my website.

Here Comes Everybody

This space has been silent for awhile as i was working on the fourth chapter of Turning Words. It wouldn't take so long if i weren't such a Penelope emulator as i am, weaving a text one day only to unweave it the next and rework it. But at last, that chapter is now online in this its second complete draft. I hope it's better than the first draft was, at least. And this time i've also uploaded the ‘reverse’ side of that chapter—the one that covers the same territory, in a less linear way, but cites far more sources, and presupposes some understanding of the whole book's theme and idiom.

The obverse chapter, Here Comes Everybody, fits into a linear sequence, so it's recommended to start at the beginning of that sequence to better get the drift.

While i'm here, an observation on the process behind all this:

Since i retired from teaching and moved to Manitoulin Island, most of my waking hours go to wandering in the woods or wandering in the words—that is, reading. Maybe i should say ‘exploring’ instead of ‘wandering’, but there's no firm boundary between the two. And there's a certain similarity between woods and words as well.

At first it's a matter of groping in the wilderness, making trails by trial and error. You make a path by walking on it repeatedly, and gradually it becomes familiar, and certain landmarks begin to stand out. The paths become connections between places, which begin to form a network, and places proliferate as the network becomes finer and more detailed. Knowing a place means knowing how to get there from where you are. Sometimes you see another way to get there, perhaps a simpler way, and feel that you know the place better.

Sometimes it helps to have a view from above—perhaps an aerial or satellite photograph, or a map, which is a more abstract representation of the territory. The actual use of a map in navigation requires you to read yourself into it. Once you have located yourself and your goal on the map, then your on-the-ground know-how takes over, and your actual moves are guided by a specific view from within the path-network—a view bearing no resemblance at all to the map. Once on your way, the view from above can be put aside (until you need it again).

Theoretical knowledge is a kind of map. It can show you several paths of inquiry at once, and how they cross, diverge or converge. But it contributes nothing to your actual know-how unless you have some experience of navigating such a path from inside the territory. A dictionary (especially an etymological one) can contribute to your knowledge of a word, or a concept, but only if you already know something of its actual use. A definition makes connections or reveals relationships among locutions as locations in a universe of discourse, filling in some of the spaces between them.

But it behooves us to remember that all the maps come originally from somebody's exploration …