Day One: A Sir Toby's Creation Myth

Posted 17 February, 2010 - 05:39 by john doyle

As an experiment, I present for your consideration not a written text but an oral reading. I tried embedding this video in the post, but either I lack the skill or OST will not accept the Youtube format.

And so the link is HERE.

To be continued…

 

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Re: Day One: A Sir Toby's Creation Myth

by john doyle - 18/02/2010 - 18:23

Day One, part two: the link is HERE.

Part three to follow in a day or two…

Re: Day One: A Sir Toby's Creation Myth

by peter wilkinson - 18/02/2010 - 20:11

This represents a considerable upping of the anti, a raising of the stakes.

But should we be disappointing each other in destroying the mental image we had formed of each other’s appearance? You have aged much less than I, and less than in my imagined picture of you. But that’s because your identity has become too closely associated with the Elderly Sage in my mind.

As for the story - who are these intruders: the Eremite, the Tuareg? And what does a desert-loving nomad of West Africa have to do with a conclave of scholars?

I’ve also noticed: the room has become very empty of late. Do you think there is anyone else in here, apart from ourselves (and Jacob)?

Now for the second instalment - and a question. Do I repay the compliment with my own video-recorded response? (Somehow, I don’t think so, but it’s a nice development).

And the Treasure Island story is not yet finished.

Re: Day One: A Sir Toby's Creation Myth

by john doyle - 18/02/2010 - 20:46

I knew that the T.I. story hadn’t finished, but given the amount of open space currently available at OST I thought I’d use some of it.

Your remark about my appearance suggests that my CGI enhancements have been successful. By all means video yourself: other than Jacob and the auto refinancier, it seems that there are no other witnesses to be disappointed by our self-abasements.

The Tuareg: I had originally called her a Marionite, but then I thought about the blue clothing. After all, why shouldn’t there be Tuaregians at the Inn? Who is she, and who the Eremite? Presumably members of the cabal who have now stepped out of complete anonymity into… well, into continued obscurity.

 

Re: Day One: A Sir Toby's Creation Myth

by john doyle - 19/02/2010 - 19:58

Peter, as for being marooned on a deserted OST, someone named “plesseym” left a comment at Youtube as follows: “Your reading of the story, I found to be more gripping than reading it on the forum. If you could continue the reading I will be an eager hearer.” So presumably there’s at least one other person on the island. Given the tenor of his posts and our recent conversation, Jacob too might enjoy the Sage’s understanding of the creation narrative.

I think there may be some virtue in setting aside the usual text-based exchange for this “adventure.” The relationship of teller and hearer, even if it is an artifact of remote technological transmission rather than a face-to-face encounter, captures something intrinsic to the story itself.

And so, the Day One, part three link is HERE.

Re: Day One: A Sir Toby's Creation Myth

by peter wilkinson - 20/02/2010 - 14:04

I was getting more interested in trying to read the titles of the books on the bookshelves behind you, so some of the impact of Part 3 may have missed me. 

The account is a bit like the Jesus Christ the spaceman myth, except that with the Genesis narrative, whoever came back from the future and gave the primitive inhabitants of the world at that time their myth, seems to have given them something very unlike our popular present day understanding of how things came to be.

From the point of view that things are only as they are perceived to be, wouldn’t it make more sense to say that the Genesis account was composed within the worldview and perceptions of people at that time, rather than given by a spaceman? (Which has already been proposed, by the way). I merely pose a question.

Anyway, it’s encouraging to know that on the desert island/OST website, as in the universe at large, we are not alone. Meanwhile, bedtime stories with the Elderly Sage continue!

Re: Day One: A Sir Toby's Creation Myth

by john doyle - 20/02/2010 - 15:30

“The account is a bit like the Jesus Christ the spaceman myth”

It seems that you were too distracted by the bookshelf to hear the Sage explaining that he isn’t talking about spacemen any more. Neither is he now, nor was he ever, talking about travelers from the future. Apparently your expectations have overridden what is actually being said, which is a common enough problem in communication. I encourage you to listen again. (“Or not,” said Dupin.) I could save you the trouble and simply give you a one-sentence description of the Sage’s interpretation, but presumably part of the fun is cutting one’s own way through the undergrowth, is it not? But of course the Trappist does have a history of being more interested in the hidden document than in the one right in front of him, in the unopened books on the shelf than in the book being read to him.

“(Which has already been proposed, by the way)”

I hope you’d agree that novelty is less important than truth. Out of curiosity, in your opinion would its having already been proposed make the spaceman interpretation less likely to be true, or more likely? It has already been proposed by many people, in many places and times, that a god or gods created the material universe ex nihilo. Does the popularity of this proposition add to its credibility, or weaken it?

“on the desert island/OST website… we are not alone.”

It seems we’re getting more alone with each passing day. The Youtube site shows the number of views for each video. I believe that you, sir, are one of at most two people to have watched episode 3 in the nearly 21 hours since I uploaded it. As I implicitly asked Jacob on my latest comment to his post, if no one watches episode 4 does that mean it isn’t even real?

Re: Day One: A Sir Toby's Creation Myth

by john doyle - 20/02/2010 - 16:16

Regarding the “first contact” spaceman story which the Sage recounts at the beginning of his discourse: someone else who read this bit claims to have seen that very episode of Star Trek. There was no such episode per se I don’t believe, but at the same time it’s a central conceit to the whole series. Similarly the idea of Westerners being perceived as gods by primitive tribes has been thematic to much anthropology, as well as Western fantasies of conquest and empire. Last night we watched The Man Who Would Be King, in which a British soldier of fortune is treated as a god by Kafiri villagers. (Ironically, Kafiristan, which straddles the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, is now regarded as a safe haven for Al Qaeda and Bin Laden, making it a focal point for ongoing Western military action in the war against terror.)

Incidentally, the books behind me in episode three are all works of fiction, which seemed appropriate to the context of the reading.

Re: Day One: A Sir Toby's Creation Myth

by peter wilkinson - 20/02/2010 - 17:07

It seems you have understood my response less than you claim I have understood the Sage’s interpretation.

So we are more alone than we had thought. There is no-one else sitting around the campfire in our impenetrable cave, in which we had thought we were passing the time by telling narratives to each other.

We were only telling narratives to ourselves.

Re: Day One: A Sir Toby's Creation Myth

by john doyle - 20/02/2010 - 18:06

Knowing where we have misundersood one another gives us the opportunity to get closer to mutual understanding. You seemed to think that I regarded the creator as a visitor from another planet or a time traveler. Were you offering these interpretations as metaphors; i.e., someone from an advanced culture is perceived by the less advanced as alien in both space and time? If so then we are seeing eye to eye.

Re: Day One: A Sir Toby's Creation Myth

by peter wilkinson - 20/02/2010 - 18:43

A visitor from a so-called advanced culture to a so-called less advanced culture might bring the the changes in perception which could be compared with a supposed handing of the Genesis creation story to a supposedly less advanced people. If this was not in your mind, or somewhere near it, then I misunderstood you. The rest of what I said would not make sense to you either. At this point, I’m not at all sure what your position is vis a vis language, perception and reality, or even the Genesis creation story.

Re: Day One: A Sir Toby's Creation Myth

by john doyle - 20/02/2010 - 18:55

I believe you have understood the Sage’s intent at least in part. However, there is no handing of the Genesis creation story from the more to the less advanced cultural representatives. The first language game ever, the invention of a verbally mediated set of meanings in which all things are embedded — this is itself the creation story, per the Sage’s reading. Yes?

Re: Day One: A Sir Toby's Creation Myth

by peter wilkinson - 20/02/2010 - 19:02

So you say. The Trappist would, of course, contest the description of the Genesis creation account as a language game. But then the Trappist contests most opinions other than his own.

Re: Day One: A Sir Toby's Creation Myth

by john doyle - 20/02/2010 - 22:34

As the story goes on the Trappist does contest the language game interpretation: that’s the focus of Day Two. Eventually the Trappist grows bored with the topic and others engage the Sage in conversation. On day seven he leaves the Inn.

I believe I’d mentioned previously that I was trying to rewrite what had originally been a nonfiction book about Genesis 1 as a Sir Toby’s conversation. The main advantage of fictionalization is that I don’t have to claim on scholarly grounds that the “language game” reading of Gen. 1 is true — though I believe it has much to recommend it. I can let the monks argue, then move on to even more speculative issues. For example, what if the Church were to embrace the Sage’s reading: could it re-invent itself as the wellspring of creativity in secular culture? And what if God hadn’t created the universe ex nihilo: how might He manage to talk with people inside their heads, perform miracles, bring people back from the dead, and so on?

Of course I’d be happy to engage in a discussion of the “language game” hypothesis at greater length if anyone’s interested.

In the meantime, have you read anything about The Lost World of Genesis One? Written by John Walton, an OT professor at Wheaton (solid evangelical credential), the book contends that Genesis 1 does not describe the creation of the material universe, but rather God’s dedicating the universe as his temple. The guy at Jesus Creed wrote posts for each chapter awhile back, and it seemed to generate at least some enthusiasm. I purchased a copy of the book some months ago but haven’t read much of it yet. Here’s a quote from Chapter Two, which supports the pragmatic language-game idea we’ve been discussing with Jacob:

“In this book I propose that people in the ancient world believed that something existed not by virtue of its material properties, but by virtue of its having a function in an ordered system… In theory, this way of thinking could result in something being included in the ‘existent’ category in a material way, but still considered in the ‘non-existent’ category in functional terms… Consequently, the actual creative act is to assign something its functioning role in the ordered system.”


Re: Day One: A Sir Toby's Creation Myth

by john doyle - 25/02/2010 - 17:01

One of the reasons I’ve reframed my Genesis 1 reading I mentioned on a recent thread elsewhere. I don’t want to justify the accuracy of my reading by intense scholarship; preferring instead to elaborate on the implications of such a reading.

Another reason for turning to fiction is that I no longer hope that my work will mediate some sort of reconciliation between natural science and the Biblical creation narrative. The realization came to me after finishing the nonfiction that, even if such a reconciliation could be achieved via my reading, no one particularly wanted it to happen.

There’s a third reason I went fictional, and I can illustrate it by reference to my daughter. She’s an excellent artist, and this year her art teacher required her to choose a theme for the works she would create this year. She chose “fiction” — drawings inspired by novels and films, characters she writes her own stories about, etc. Currently as part of this overarching fiction theme she’s doing a series of paintings based on the Greek gods. Clearly she regards these gods as fictional characters.

Finally, I wrote a comment to myself on this thread in part to offset the spate of anti-NazNet screeds that have pushed this post off the front page and into invisibility.

 

Re: Day One: A Sir Toby's Creation Myth

by john doyle - 16/03/2010 - 20:56

I’ve pretty well finished editing this book now, which stands at 35 thousand words. In it, as can be seen in the videos, the Sage proposes that Genesis 1 is a description of a 7-day interval during which the Creator embeds the already-existing material universe inside a system of meaning. Says the Sage:

“Writing was invented independently perhaps only three times in human history; complex language, maybe just once. How many times did abstract thinking arise in world history? Who can say when someone first conceived the idea of the heavens and the earth, a hierarchically-organized scheme for categorizing absolutely everything?”

The Sage’s interpretation isn’t that different from that of evangelical Old Testament scholar John Walton. As Peter outlines in his book review, Walton claims that Genesis 1 describes not the creation of material reality but the creation of the universe’s function.

The Sage goes on…

“Humans are adept mimics, and language is the best medium for transmitting something like abstract thought or natural science from one human to another. Creating ways of understanding the world that transcend local cultures and the immediate demands of raw survival: this seems like a distinctly metropolitan sort of undertaking. A Sumerian scout would likely have been the first to expose nearby tribes to the city’s advanced ideas, ratcheting them gently across the frontier into history and civilization. Who knows? Perhaps the earliest Mesopotamian settlements once were visited by a traveling Emissary of an even higher culture, one not of this world or of any other, who gave them a cultural head start.

“Light and darkness, declare the Creator; day and night, land and sea, sun and moon and stars, swimming and creeping and flying things. Heavens and earth. What a startling series of revelations it would have been to anyone who happened to be there to witness it. In retrospect we can say that, through the natural course of cultural evolution, it was inevitable that the tribespeople would eventually have conceived of the idea of a universe. Still, there would just as surely have been a time before that idea took shape, just as there was a time before music, or beer, or the differential calculus.”

So that’s the general premise. The book consists entirely of conversations and monologues stimulated by the Sage’s interpretation of the Creation narrative. I’m rather pleased with it actually.



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