Moulton Lava ~ Last Thing in the World ~ Recovered Comments
Here are the recovered comments from "The Last Thing in the World" on Moulton Lava:
14 Comments:
Higs; said...
I’m not all that keen on Harold Bloom’s towering babel, but he’s an interesting voice, all the same. He doesn’t understand William Blake any better than he understands the Torah (or the Tanakh, for that matter) but he’s no fool. The creation of clever—even stunning—one-liners is certainly a real talent; look at Oscar Wilde or Yogi Berra. But to suggest that Yahweh’s covenant with Abraham was returned to sender at Auschwitz demonstrates a complete failure to comprehend the nature of that covenant or what it involved, in the first place. One can’t give something back that one’s never accepted; that would be like spitting out a mouthful of the Mad Hatter’s tea one hasn’t yet sipped—whether among mad people, or no. And, after all—Yahweh’s the one who does the spitting-out of tepid tea, and there’s never been more that a cup or two per generation that was actually hot enough. At least according to the story, the Dithyram of Doubt. That’s precisely what the Tanakh (and the New Testament, too—which Harold Bloom considers to be less than pulp fiction) is—the Dithyram of Doubt.
Unless I’m wildly mistaken, Moulton, I think that’s your point, actually. Or that’s my way of grasping your point. The thing is—that trusting faith, that Emunah, is by definition—God help me for having to descend to this level of cliché to say it—“unconditional.” I can’t help but wonder whether or not Harold Bloom has even read The Book of Job; I can’t imagine that he hasn’t, but he can’t possibly have understood it—in any of its many different interpretations—and continue to make the apostate pronouncements on behalf of the People of Israel that he does.
I know this is all beside your point, of course. Apostasy from failed—that is to say petrified, dead, institutionalized—spiritual revelations of enlightenment is a necessary stage of development in the quest for a genuinely socially cohesive Emunah. But I don’t think Bloom’s attempt to blame God for not keeping his end of the bargain serves your argument very well.
That unshakable core philosophy whose adamantine we lament is already a monument to the general human—that is to say: social—rejection of Emunah. Bloom’s doubt is just the reverse of the coin of the adversary’s unshakably flawed faith.
Tsunamis come and go, but Fuji remains. Perspective is always subjective, and therefore always deceptive to some degree, as well.
Moulton said...
In case it's not obvious, I was applying apostasy and emunah to secular beliefs such as pedestrian belief that the Rule of Law is the key to Law and Order.
The clue, of course, was that I was proposing to trade in the (secular) Pledge of Allegiance for the Dithyramb of Doubt.
What I like about Bloom is that he makes me think. I don't automatically adopt his thoughts as my own.
For example, I had no reason to dismiss his work on Shakespeare or the Canon of Western Literature. For me, his ideas provided a jumping-off point that didn't depend on whether his model survived peer-review.
For another example of riffing off Bloom, see Sheesh and Oy Vey: The Geshrais Sublime
Higs; said...
Yes, it was obvious.
I know I can sound dismissive when I only mean to be blunt, but I don’t dismiss Harold Bloom (or Allan Bloom, either—about both of whom I’ve been having a long, running conversation with a personal correspondent. Harold Blooms makes me think, as well, and I use him as a spring board for trying to figure out just what it is about his authority, his ethos, I don’t quite see eye-to-eye-with much the time. He’s very far from being in danger of violating peer review, though. He’s cock of the walk in just about everyone’s book, with perhaps the exception of the few temeritous colleges that are trying to keep their Classics Degree programs alive—Macalester, for example—where Michel Foucault is finally cock of the walk. But the way things are going, before long Bloom won’t have any liberal arts/humanities peers to review him.
Please don’t think I’d vote to have Bloom removed from our episode of Survival just because I disagree with him about a thing or two.
The leap from the dead, petrified husks that religions are to the dead, petrified social contract that the Pledge of Allegiance is an artifact of—yes—that’s the important question. My own focus of concern—or at least one of them—is the possibility, if not likelihood, that the doubtful leap from the petrified secular anchor will end up in petrified religion’s returning its crown to its own head.
I agree entirely with your notion of a Cybernetic Age putting an end to the Chaotic Age. But even Harold Bloom would see how this suggests the possibility of a Viconian return to a new Theocratic age.
As a teller of stories—and a teller of stories about tellers of stories—all I can say is, “I’m on your side,” whether or not it’s obvious.
Moulton said...
Quoting from Finnegan's Wiki:
The Viconian cycle consists of three recurring phases:
(1) The Theocratic or Divine Age, represented in primitive society by the family life of the cave, to which the thunderous voice of God has driven mankind;
(2) The Aristocratic or Heroic Age, characterized by incessant conflict between the ruling patricians and their subject plebeians;
(3) The Democratic Age, in which rank and privilege have finally been eradicated by the revolutions of the preceding age.
These three ages are typified by the institutions of birth, marriage and burial respectively.
In Vico, they are followed by a short period of Chaos caused by the collapse of democratic society, which is inherently corrupt.
Out of this Chaos a new cycle is initiated by the ricorso, or "recursive return" to the Theocratic Age.
In Finnegan's Wake, Joyce elevated the lacuna between successive cycles into a fourth age: The Chaotic Age.
Vico's theory is applied to the image of the history of mankind as depicted in dream.
The four phases also symbolize the four evangelists, the four points of the compass and the four provinces of Ireland.
And now it makes sense to resolve Vico's loopy recursion by introducing the Cybernetic Age in which the otherwise mind-boggling math of recursive loops is tamed and tuned to converge to the long-dreamed of Omega Point.
Any chance of translating that theory into a narrative that Umberto Eco would be proud of?
Higs; said...
Sure.
All stories, more or less, tell that.
They’ve been telling for a long time. I doubt that the internet and all the king’s digital men will be able to do any better, though. Neither more nor less, mind you.
Taming the math of recursive loops is just another way of naming death, it seems to me. Of course I only find Vico someone who makes me think. I don't take any of his ideas for granted, or even seriously.
Moulton said...
I'm not yet convinced there is a reliable way to convey the mathematical concept of recursion to a lay audience that isn't already primed to apprehend STEM subjects.
If you have the math, all the narrative attempts seem like a strange way to reveal the math without actually doing the math.
And if you don't have the math (as was true for me before I learned the math), the narratives seem utterly irrelevant except perhaps as literature or entertainment.
For my money, Doug Hofstadter did it better than anyone else, but I also suppose his books are read mainly by people who have some chops in STEM subjects.
Higs; said...
Dumbledore knows Harry and crew have to break every rule in the book in order to be functional. I get that. But what it immediately suggests to me is YHVH’s knowing that there has to be a rule to break before Eve and Adam can be functional. I don’t know why only a handful of people have ever seen what that story—any story—the story—is really telling or suggesting. I can’t believe it’s simply because they don’t have the math. The storytelling precedes the math by quite a long time. But there it is. We don’t—for the most part—get the story’s meaning in the first place. And we certainly—most of us—will never get the math.
It’s always been my sense that the Omega Point is reached one man or woman at a time.
STEM is a world that one in my position could easily get paranoid about, fearful that the liberal arts or humanities or philosophy or even history—anything else that isn’t STEM will inevitably be shunted to the nether, sketchy reaches of the Kansas City railroad stockyards—if not altogether banished from the land and its track torn up, its sleepers resurrected and parceled out for garden timbers.
I don’t feel that way, myself, as it happens, but I struggle mightily with the possibility all the same.
I suppose I first ran into Hofstadter in the mid seventies, when my older brother was teaching at the University of Oregon, where Hofstadter was making some noise at the time. Ran into his name, I mean. What I’ve read since fascinates me and is right up there in my conjecture with Lacan’s Neo-Freudian notion that the ego is essentially a neurotic complex and Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields—that include “brain fields.” Jung and, of course, Spinoza still hold a good deal of credibility for me, too.
Moulton said...
Here's what astonishes me about the story in Genesis 2.
Let's say I were living in the Fertile Crescent some 3500 years ago. Let's say I had the intuition that a binary dichotomy dividing the spectrum ranging from Saintly Good to Demonic Evil was problematic, because it's not obvious that there is any basis for selecting the location of the dividing line, where the response switches abruptly from Blessing to Curse.
Suppose I wanted to suggest a gradual transition with shades of gray between the extremes of Blessing and Curse. That is to say, I want to illustrate the S-shaped (sigmoid) curve. Casting about for something to use as a visual aid, my best choice is a the body of a dead snake. I reckon they are a shekel a dozen in the Middle Eastern desert.
So what better critter to use in an allegory than the very reptile who, being a mendacious spokesmodel, is selling something he cannot model with his own body. Had Adam and Eve inquired of the Good Sage what a better model might have been, all they had to do was to put wax in their ears and merely gaze upon the physique of the serpent, whose body suggested the S-curve as the Better Idea.
Now, it's quite possible that someone out there in Theology Land has already pointed out this remarkable mathematical observation. But if so, it's never shown up on my radar screen.
I tend to agree with you that tuning up the exact parameters of the S-curve to converge to the stable equilibrium (Fixed Point or Omega Point) is probably a personal calculus rather than a crowd-based computation, but if mimesis works for thought processes, eventually the idea of the method could catch on.
I very much want to get the Artists involved in mapping the math to storytelling media. That is I want to expand STEM to STEAM.
Higs; said...
Harold Bloom thinks—and this is one thing I tend to agree with him about—the Jawist Thread of the Tanakh (the thread that uses YHVH as the name of God, including the Genesis 2 story of the error in the Garden) was composed during the reign of Solomon, and probably by a woman, at that, perhaps one of his wives or concubines. I wonder if maybe she wasn’t more apt to see the serpentine sigma depicted in gold and bronze jewelry strewn about the seraglio than as desert road kill. But I think your insight there is valid. I sense a strong connection here, too, with the “brazen serpent” held up before the Children of Israel during their wilderness trek in order to protect them from the deadly snakes that were plaguing them. The serpent’s shape as sculpture, as art—and depicted as a component of a proto-crucifix—has the power to cure their sickness from the living serpent’s venom (Numbers 21 :9).
I also don’t know of any theologians who’ve made anything of the serpentine curve in the direct mathematical way you have, but I think a number of philosophers have resonated with it. And to mention Pynchon again, his novels have from the beginning contained references to “heat death,” the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, Maxwell’s Demon and the like as leitmotifs.
Had I a better grasp of the math I could express my sense of all this in a less clunky way, but I see the Gen. 2 story of the Fall as representing the preliminary groundwork (the NAND gate out of which our horses Adam and Eve begin their race) for the narrative’s development of the kinder, gentler curves of the sigmoid. Foucault has done a lot of work in the general area of Transgression as a model for examining the archaeology of the human sciences. I suppose the idea is that a Zeroeth has to be established as a conscious benchmark before one can then go on.
I realize that what concerns you is the “going on.”
Moulton said...
I wrote a piece about the Caduceus a few years ago ...
Higs; said...
Yes. I almost went on to mention the Caduceus connection, but I was pretty sure I was raising an issue you had thoroughly in hand. The only thing I might add is: I’ve always felt that the doubling of the snake in the Caduceus—aside from the general symbolic resonance with the shape of DNA—had to do with the Greek story of Tiresias, the prophet who, to make a long story short, ends up being turned into a woman for a while as a result of his misfortune to stumble upon Zeus and Hera having it off together in the forest floor in the form of a couple of snakes coiled about one another. His perspicacity being so great, he couldn’t switch off his awareness in time to avoid the wrath of Zeus at being recognized. But I’ve long felt that these two parts of stories—Moses elevating the serpent in the wilderness and the story of Tiresias spotting the divine couple in their favorite of all forms—were the source of the physician’s logo.
Moulton said...
Hrmmm... Never really thought about the double helix snake vs single helix version.
I was not familiar with the Myth of Tiresias, but it does explain the reason for intertwining two snakes in the Greek Caduceus.
It is fascinating to reckon the geometric similarity with the Double Helix of DNA, but I presume one would have to chalk that up to fractal similarity, rather than to a Raëlian Theology
Higs; said...
I'll settle for the Jungian Collective Unconscious. But that probably boils down to fractal similarity, anyway.
Nancy Williams said...
What a pile of Swiss cheese.