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Flannery O’Conner on the Eucharist: “If it’s a symbol, then to hell with it.”
Being interested in linguistics is a funny thing. The more I learn about it, the more I get the sense that most people’s conceptions of how languages work and what they do is totally different from linguists’ conceptions of these things. Take the split infinitive, for example (or indeed any other finicky grammatical rule that either bugs you when people get uptight about getting it right or bugs you when people get it wrong). The “rule” is that one shouldn’t separate the “to” from the verb itself (“to go boldly”, not “to boldly go”). The reasoning behind it is that, in Latin and Greek (the languages of knowledge, culture and status for centuries), the infinitive is expressed in a single word (dicere, currere, amare). In other words, because it’s impossible to split an infinitive in Latin, 18th-and 19th-century grammarians (my history is a little fuzzy) decided that it wasn’t “correct” to split it in English, even though separating the “to” from the “go” creates absolutely no conflict in terms of meaning. And yet, most people still assume that keeping the parts of the infinitive together is the right way to use English. Whether they get irritated at people who don’t follow the rule (I have to count myself in this group) or whether they get irritated at people correcting them, there’s still, I feel, a general cultural sense that the rule itself is a valid one.
(If any of my former students read this, they are going to call me a hypocrite; I was pretty hardcore about using standard English grammar in papers. I tried to justify it by arguing that, whether or not the rules have a valid basis, they are still the standard set by the people who hold power in this country; and one of the best ways to get some of that power and make a success of yourself is to write according to the standards by which they’ll judge you. Really, though, it’s just that it BOTHERS me when people make grammatical mistakes. Cognitive dissonance or straightforward hypocrisy? You decide.)
Another linguistic question comes up a lot when Hebrew is discussed. I imagine it’s mostly because Hebrew’s a non-Indo-European language, so its structure is totally different from either English or most of the languages people take in high school; also, it’s a sacred language, so a whole lot of people are pretty invested in texts translated from Hebrew, while relatively few can actually read the original. Well, as close to the original as we can get, which isn’t actually all that close. But that’s another story. The point is that, several times over the past few months, I’ve been in conversations with people who asked me whether and to what extent the structure and vocabulary of Hebrew influences the types and patterns of thought that we find in the Hebrew Bible. That is, does the way that Hebrew grammar works have to do with the way that the “Old Testament mind” works? Let me make one thing very very clear: this is not a dumb question. When I first started learning Hebrew, I was struck with, and enchanted by, its utter alienness of structure and idiom. In the case of poetry especially, it became clear to me that even the best English poetry is a poor substitute for the original; the form of Hebrew Bible poetry (based on parallelism of meaning rather than rhyme or meter) seemed to me ideally suited to the patterns and rhythms of the language. I’m told that this question was a matter of scholarly debate for some time, and like I said, it’s not a dumb hypothesis.
(Also? Before I go any farther, I’d like to point out that I don’t have much of a linguistics background and I can’t really be said to know what I’m talking about by people who actually know about these things. So, grain of salt. Right. Onward.)
Now, though, I get the sense that it’s not really the case, that every “natural” language has the capacity to express whatever thoughts its thinkers damn well please. We can see this in modern Hebrew, which has essentially the same grammatical structure (somewhat simplified) as Biblical Hebrew, and much of the same vocabulary. Admittedly, my exposure to modern Hebrew is limited to six weeks of floundering over “where are the toilets?” and one long-drawn-out struggle with a great article by Mordechai Cogan. But in the latter instance, especially having the English translation of the article to work from as well, it became abundantly clear that Hebrew is just as well suited to expressing ideas drawn from a firmly Western European scholarly tradition as it is to discussing the God of the Hebrew Bible.
Maybe we think that there’s this connection between Hebrew language and “Hebraic” thought because the Bible is essentially our entire corpus of ancient Hebrew. True, we’ve had the Dead Sea Scrolls for the past 60 years or so, but that’s a blip in theological terms. And the mindsets of the writers of the Bible–even such vastly different writers as, say, the Deuteronomist and the author of Ecclesiastes–are still much more similar to each other than they are to ours. So I guess it makes sense to posit that the weltanschauung and the linguistic structure are inherently related, even though I’m increasingly thinking that this isn’t actually the case.
A related-but-different phenomenon is the old saying of “Eskimos have 300 different words for snow but no word for __.” The idea behind this, I think, is that, without the lexical category for a thing or concept, recognition or understanding of the thing or concept is impossible. If you’ve read 1984, Orwell uses the same idea for Newspeak–the government systematically erases the language necessary to express rebellious ideas, and so the capacity to have rebellious ideas disappears from the people’s minds. Only I’m pretty sure language doesn’t work that way. This post from the Language Log several years ago is both deliciously snarky and expresses why, exactly, it doesn’t. It’s also the reason I wrote this behemoth of an entry in the first case. Lastly, I wish to have it on record that I thought Orwell was wrong about the way language and thought are related when I read this my senior year of high school–I distinctly remember having a heated discussion with Mr. Wood and the entire rest of the class about it–and now science proves that I’m right. (Okay, Luke, fine, not science. Science-ish. Science-y things. We need a word for fields that aren’t science but are closer to it than, say, art history.)
This is part of an email I sent to a friend recently, describing one church-shopping experience that Luke and I went through:
“Luke and I are trying out churches, looking for one that works with our very different backgrounds. We went to a Methodist church this Sunday, and liked it, except that it was Consecration Sunday and they had a guest preacher there to exhort the congregation to tithe–Luke and I both have tithing as a personal financial goal, but the way this priest went about it made us both very uncomfortable, and not just because his sermon was easily 40 minutes long! (Though that is a black mark in my book any day.) He repeated the necessity of putting God first over and over, which is something I think both of us can get behind, but didn’t really discuss the WAYS in which the church did God’s work. Obviously the first goal is to keep the electricity on and the salaries paid, and a lot of the time this is a hard enough goal as it is, but I don’t think you can really separate tithing from outreach–if the money you’re giving is only going back into things that directly benefit you, well, that’s not really giving it to God, is it? It’s hard to articulate–but his sermon made me feel pretty icky. Also, did I mention that he talked for far too long?”
Yeah, I’m a big fan of the 10 minute sermon. 20 minutes had better be fairly spectacular.
Another thing I’ve been struggling with since arriving at Notre Dame: What does it mean to be a Christian institution? And what does it mean to be a part of an institution whose denomination/religion you don’t share? People (meaning myself) will joke about Episcopalians being “Catholic Lite”, but both Catholics and Episcopalians know it’s not actually a good analogy. And, while I wouldn’t call myself a die-hard Episcopalian, I’m comfortable in an Episcopal institution. I’ve cozied up to our differences, so to speak. Whereas now I am finding my life impacted in very real ways by religious beliefs and decisions that I don’t subscribe to. And it’s making me touchy, which is a bad thing. A friend recently made a comment that could be interpreted to mean that since I wasn’t Catholic, my spiritual journey was incomplete. I’m still pissed off about that–and the thing is, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t what he meant to say.
The best analogy I can think of is the summer I spent in Israel, where I discovered that many of the clothes I had brought–namely, tank tops and shorts–were not commonly worn. It wasn’t like they were banned; it wasn’t like Egypt, where I got hissed at for not wearing a head scarf, but it was just…awkward. I could see in other people’s minds, “This girl is dressed inappropriately,” and it made me uncomfortable…so I just didn’t wear the shorts. (I still wore the tank tops. It was ridiculously hot.)
I think it’s probably good for me to be in the minority somewhere. And I like that Notre Dame is unapologetic about being a non-secular institution. But most of my peers came here to deepen their Christian faith and knowledge. I came here to be an academic. And that makes me feel a little like a fraud.
So I guess it’s fair to say that I’m a Christian.
You might be surprised at how hesitantly I make that claim, and how many caveats go along with it. Though I am (probably too) fond of telling people that I come from a clan of Episcopal priests and am a 3rd-generation, at least, preacher’s kid, for a significant portion of my life I’ve been at best agnostic. I think part of this comes from the adolescent’s natural inclination to piss off her parents in the best way she knows how, part comes from needing very badly to have God make sense to my mind as well as my heart, and a whole lot comes from having been very depressed for a very long time as a child. In case you don’t know, I had severe bouts of depression from about age 6 onward. When I was 8 or 9 I used to pray that they would go away. Needless to say, they didn’t, and it was impossible for me at that point to reconcile the emotional states I was in–let’s just say they were very intense and very bad–with the idea of a just and benevolent God.
Being depression-free for around two years may have helped–I don’t think of “clinically depressed” as a self-definition any more, and I’m certainly feeling more optimistic. But I think believing in God comes mainly from becoming increasingly emotionally and, perhaps even more, intellectually mature. At some point along the line I figured out that I didn’t need to prove God’s existence or non-existence–I just had to figure out which was the more coherent and convincing argument. Being a humanities major and getting used to the idea that few things of importance are ever really proven helped. Having times where I felt as though I was experiencing God’s presence helped.
But to go from being rationally convinced that God is more likely to exist than not to exist to being a straight-up Christian is another huge leap–and here’s where the caveats come in. I call myself a Christian–but depending on your definition, you might not agree with me. For one thing, I don’t believe that Jesus is divine or preexisting. It just doesn’t make sense to me. It seems less likely than the various alternatives. For another, I don’t really know what I think about the whole ethereal structure, by which I mean heaven, hell, angels, Satan, and the afterlife in general. I don’t think that believing in God necessarily implies the existence of an afterlife, except in the sense that someone is living after I am–I’m pretty sure the world won’t end when I die. I believe that liturgical and ritual practice is important, but I think it’s important to us rather than to God, and I have no idea how it’s important–I just know that it is. I believe that the Bible is sacred in some way, but I’ve done too much translation and study to have any illusions that it’s “infallible.” What does “infallible” even mean? For me, its sanctity is kind of analogous to the sanctity of a security blanket to a four-year-old–the kid loves his blanket passionately, takes it everywhere, turns to it in times of crisis and distress, but he doesn’t treat it with kid gloves. He plays with it, tears it by accident or to see what’s inside, gets it dirty. It is sacred through use–and use, for me, involves critical analysis. If I didn’t take the Bible apart to see what’s behind or inside it, it wouldn’t mean anything to me.
So yeah, I’m a Christian. (Next up: Now what?)
From Faith in History and Society by Johann Baptist Metz:
“…the Gospel is already political for the Christian and makes political claims on the Christian just by the fact that it proclaims all men and women being subjects before God, and the price of being a subject in this way is nothing less than fighting against every form of hatred of human beings and every kind of oppression…”
We’re just starting Qohelet (otherwise known as Ecclesiastes), which is one of my favorite books in the Hebrew Bible. It’s both deceptively simple and tricky to translate–the vocabulary repeats itself constantly, but there’s lots of interesting syntactical stuff going on, which is always fun in Hebrew. (I think of Greek and Latin as type-A languages–they’re always very clear on what they mean, and if you don’t remember what the 2nd person plural aorist subjunctive passive looks like, it’s your own damn fault. Whereas Hebrew is more of a type-B language–it’s like, “mmm, I don’t FEEL LIKE having more than two main tenses, so I’ll just use word order and vocabulary if I want to say anything complicated and you can just sort of feel your way to a translation. Also, for extra fun, sometimes the tenses will switch places! It’ll be awesome!”) (If anyone who ever taught me Hebrew is reading this, please forgive me. A real linguist would have a conniption at what I just said.)
ANYWAY, it’s fun to read, but I mostly like it for what it says. Qohelet appealed to me a lot as a teenager, because it was bleak and existentialist and addressed the underlying futility of existence. Its speaker, Qohelet, calls himself a king of Jerusalem. He starts off by saying, “Vapour, vapour, everything is vapour.” Yes, I know most versions say “vanity,” but that’s no longer a good English gloss–the word “vanity” used to mean simply “futility, emptiness, uselessness” when the King James Version people were doing their thing, but since then it’s come to take on the primary meaning of “personal pride,” which is not in the Hebrew at all, not even a little bit.
Qohelet presents himself as an eminently successful man: wise, good, rich, successful, with many sons and daughters, a ruler of people and a giver of advice, who has vineyards and pleasure-gardens (the word for which, incidentally, pardes, shares a common source with the root of the word “paradise”), the luxuries that only a few in that society could even dream of. And he discovers that all of it is useless–hevel, literally a puff of steam. All of his riches, and all of the works that he has labored over, will be given to another man when he dies–and who knows whether this man will be wise or foolish?
What I like about this is that it’s the total opposite of the prevailing value system of the Hebrew Bible. By and large in the Tanakh, people get what they deserve. So having wealth, wisdom, vineyards, children, isn’t an accident; it means that you are a good and virtuous person and God has rewarded you for all that. You have, of course, to separate out the greedy and selfish wealthy people that the prophets like to yell at. But the prophets were telling all those greedy and selfish people that God was going to squash them like bugs any day now, so they’d better shape up STAT. The same basic value system, I think, holds: material success corresponds to moral success. Either justice has prevailed, or the Bible’s authors are trying to reassure us that justice will prevail.
Qoheleth acknowledges this basic framework, and then completely undermines it. Everything that the Bible holds out as a carrot for good behavior–everything that it’s just assumed we will think is good in itself–Qohelet says, “nope, that’s pointless too.” He’s undermining the very foundations of Israelite society and religion, questioning everything we’re supposed to think matters.
Interestingly enough, a couple of passages (I’m thinking of the beginning of chapter 8 especially) are so drastically different from the rest of the book–saying basically the opposite (you SHOULD trust the way society works, God WILL ensure that justice happens)–that some scholars believe they are later interpolations by nervous editors who weren’t comfortable with something so scary and bleak.
But I think it’s awesome–not necessarily the sentiment in itself, more the fact of its being in the Hebrew Bible at all. How badass is a canon that says, “well, mostly we’re going to talk about God’s justice, but we’re also going to include a book that calls the whole rest of the Bible into question, and call that sacred too.” How cool is it that self-questioning is an integral part of what the Bible’s trying to do. It’s not saying, “this is the way the world works, period.” It’s saying, “you HAVE to take this other perspective into account. You can conclude that it’s wrong, or outdated, or that it’s saying something other than the surface meaning, or whatever. But it’s there. It’s Scripture. You can’t ignore it because it makes you uncomfortable. You HAVE to deal with it.”
I finally finished translating Esther. SPOILER ALERT: the Jews win.
This has been one of my favorite bits of the Bible to read thus far. Maybe it’s just because I spent the last year reading everything with an eye to subtext (desperately trying to keep ahead of the 10th-graders), but I found it incredibly well-written. The structure is interesting–one commentator has noted that the whole thing is structured as a chiasmus (ABCBA, with each letter standing for an event). So we start with King Ahashverosh’s two feasts, and we end with two days of feasting for the Jews. After that we get Haman (the bad guy) raised to a position of power, and right before the Jews’ feast we get Mordecai (the good guy) raised to power.
There are tons of interesting parallels, too–one of the ones I haven’t seen anyone talk about yet (though I’m sure someone has) is the role of Haman’s wife paralleling that of Esther, Mordecai’s ward–Esther is obviously the more important character, but right after the scene where she agrees to plead for the lives of the Jews and takes on a position of real authority in doing so, Haman’s wife urges him to build a scaffold and hang Mordecai on it. Interesting gender/power dynamics there–as the commentator I’ve been reading notes, this is the only book of the Bible explicitly interested in sexual politics. Altogether a satisfying read, with the exception of the two words I just couldn’t find in the lexicon and am hoping I don’t get stuck translating. AND we’re spending most of the actual class time talking about the characteristics of late Biblical Hebrew, and getting into how scholars actually date texts–the nitty-gritty of the thing, rather than the vague “Oh, we know that this is from the third century at the latest” stuff you find in annotated Bibles and undergraduate textbooks.
Also, puppy!
Clementine likes to sleep in my stuff.
She’s taken to chewing on the corners of the woodwork, which is obviously very bad. So I got some of that no-chew-spray, which works okay, but not great. I found that a spray bottle of vinegar works just as well (thanks to Kat in my apartment complex!), and it’s really funny to watch her react to it–she kind of wants to play with it, but it obviously bothers her, so she jumps all around barking at it. This weekend my good friend Scottie and her good friend and roommate Jonathan have VERY kindly agreed to watch her and take her to the Blessing of the Animals service! Yay! I am a little worried that she’ll miss me a lot, or that she’ll destroy something valuable, or that I will miss HER a lot, but I am also kind of excited about being able to sleep in on Saturday morning.
Am off to make oatmeal scones. I make this recipe a lot, and would definitely recommend it. I never put the cream of tartar in, since I a) don’t have any and b) am not even sure what it does. I also don’t put raisins in, because I dislike them. Sometimes I do chocolate chips instead. If you’re looking for a way to make them lower-fat (the recipe does call for a stick of melted butter) there are lots of ideas in the comments. I just go with the butter.
Yes, I know the semicolon is incorrectly used. Sometimes, I feel, a semicolon is just a classy and ambiguous version of an emoticon. Also sometimes I like to pretend that if I know the rules it’s cool when I break them. Makes me feel all dangerous like Virginia Woolf.
Here’s the thing: I have been moping all evening. I’m not going to go into my reasons here–they’re not bad, but the point is, they’re not good enough. I have no excuse for moping. I have a comfortable, one might even say indulgent, lifestyle; I have dear friends and a boyfriend who defies adjectives and an offer from a great grad school. My spiritual life makes me mostly joyful and occasionally uncomfortable; I ran my first 10k last weekend; I am getting my teeth fixed; I am going to be just fine. So stop whining, Mary.
April is Poetry Month. Maybe if I’m feeling especially risk-taking I’ll share some poetry.
The season of Lent draws to a close, and it’s been a pretty slack one on my part. Since I was raised an Episcopalian, and I pretty much believe in God these days, I figure I’m supposed to do the Lent things–give up something that I love but that’s bad for me, take on some kind of prayer routine, try to purify myself body and soul for the celebration of that strange and compelling and credibility-stretching event that is the resurrection. And I’ve been truly sucking. I managed to come up with something that would be actually good for me to give up (since giving up fattening/sugary foods doesn’t make me holier, just grumpier), namely, unnecessary spending. Then I decided that enjoying my time with loved one over food and delicious beverages was absolutely necessary, and well, the momentum has just run out on that one.
But I did have a bit of a Lenten epiphany, albeit a last-minute and a slow one, and it all came from my visit to the dentist.
I have terrible teeth. Terrible. Comes from poor/nonexistent brushing habits as a child and a 5-cup a day habit of tea with milk and sugar. I know that the tea is a bad habit, but I justify it to myself by saying, well, it’s my only real vice (I don’t smoke or get plastered or do pot) and I lead a stressful life and I need it to stay awake during the day and it’s even kind of classy, right, I mean, hey, tea is so British. And I keep on sucking it down, cup after soothing cup of black tea (Ceylon and Earl Grey or Chai if I’m at Starbucks), with an ideal mix of roughly two teaspoonfuls of sugar per eight ounces. And I don’t give myself a hard time about it, for the reasons described above.
But the dentist does not understand that tea is British and that I am a virtuous person otherwise. What he understands is that my teeth are decaying. (I’m not even going to name the number of cavities because I’m embarrassed. Suffice it to say that they will require more than one visit.) And, in the most charming way possible, he has given me an ultimatum: no more sugary drinks. Ever. Period. No excuses.
As I try to adjust to life without sugar, I find myself thinking about my other bad habits. I spend more money than I can afford in an effort to convince myself I’m not as poor as I know myself to be. (Yeesh, that’s a scary one.) I never ever do the dishes. I rarely clean my apartment, period. I ignore work that I don’t want to do in the hope that it will go away. I waste time on the internet when I’m at work. I don’t take care of myself, physically or mentally. I never ever learn my Coptic/Hebrew/Greek vocabulary. I say that I’m too busy to do things that I just haven’t bothered to do yet. I somehow, despite all of this, manage to feed my already-overlarge ego by feeling superior to other people. I look at myself in mirrors as I walk by. I go to bed an hour later and leave the house 15 minutes later than I intend to…every single day. I feel sorry for myself. I bite my nails. I drink too much tea.
Maybe I should work on these. The spending diet helped, and I think I’m going to try to implement a modified version for the rest of the year (while allowing myself to buy things that I need, just not right away). I don’t bite my nails as much any more; ever since the dentist fixed my chipped front tooth, I can’t get a really good hold any more. Training for the 10k is helping, too, though I have allowed myself to get behind with that. I have actually kept 2 to 3 days ahead all week (though, granted, it’s the first week of the trimester). But that leaves a lot still to work on.
On the other hand, I found that giving up sugared tea–which, as anyone who knows me can attest, is almost unthinkable for me–has been easier than I expected once the stakes got high enough. And if I can give up sugar in my tea…either I’m a lot stronger than I thought I was, or there really is such a thing as divine grace. Or perhaps both.
