Angry

It's been eleven years since I was this angry, sad, and generally rendered incapable of much useful work. It's shocked me how hard the last two days have been: I mean, yes, it's awful—twenty first graders shot dead in their classroom, and the teachers and principal and so on. Of course it's awful. But there have been lots of awful things over the last ten years.

I'm not alone in this. Something about the events in Newtown have made us as a nation viscerally, boiling-over angry in a way that we haven't seen since 9/11/01. We are grief-stricken in a way we don't know what to do with.

I realized tonight that underneath the weeping for those 20 six- and seven-year-olds is something bigger. I am weeping for my country. I am weeping for the sense that this is becoming a place that isn't mine anymore. But I'm not from anywhere else. This is my home. I'm an American.

It isn't cheap political rhetoric. I spent a few days in Toronto on September, and it was such a startling weight off of me, walking through the streets of a very urban, gritty, full-of-urban-problems city, and not feeling the sense of anxiety that hangs even over my nice hometown of Minneapolis. It was like losing a headache I'd forgotten was there.

Toronto's no paradise. Canada's no paradise. I'm probably never moving to Canada. But I just don't get how so many people, including some of my friends, look at Canada and Western and Nothern Europe, and sneer at universal health care and pooh-pooh the lack of gun violence. I could quote figures at you, but I don't want to here. That's not the point. The point is, I felt more at home and at peace in a strange city than I do in my own front yard. I found that profoundly unsettling.

I am angry, angrier than I've been willing to admit to myself. I cover it up pretty well most of the time, I think—both from others and myself—but what I've seen in some of my liberal friends—the bitterness and fatalism—well, I worry I'm coming down with it too. I love my country, and I want it to be a place of love and peace. That's the picture I grew up with, and as I get older, I realize most of my fellow Americans have either given up on that vision as childish, or never had it in the first place. Instead it's a nation filled with demons needing to be stomped out with vigor. No dream of a better place in the here and now, just a resigned sigh that the battle is never won, and hope for peace in the next world.

But we're the nation that made a great industry out of dreams and fantasies. You'd think we'd know better, that we could learn to harness this great national talent for self-invention, and become a nation of Ray Bradburys. But we're not. We produce Ray Bradburys in a way no other country could, but the fantasies we adopt as our national scripts are full not of magic and hope, but of moralizing and fear and brimstone.

We are not the Greatest Nation on Earth. Whoever said that anyway? It sounds like a P. T. Barnum line. It's cheap boasting, and we've always been good at that. But we've also been good at self-deprecation, and we've been sorely lacking that in our national debate lately, outside of Comedy Central. Maybe we were the greatest nation on earth for a while after World War II, but we didn't even get to enjoy it, because we were so consumed with hate for dissent and fear within ourselves.

I love my country, but my country lies to itself. It hates itself. It's like loving someone with anorexia: their body image doesn't match their body, and becomes an ugly tool of self-mutilation, instead of a guide to positive change.

I am angry that we need revisionists like Howard Zinn (We who live in a nation that prides itself on a clarity and practical know-how. No fancy theories with abstact thises and thats—we leave that to the old world. No outdated, ossified social hierarchies). But we need the Howard Zinns to to show us how we have lied and lied again to ourselves. Lies upon lies. No fancy theories, just plain bald-faced ignorance of evidence and stubbornness. We let people say science is just someone's opinion, and all opinions are equal, and so it doesn't matter a whit how much research and effort you've done.

Jonathan Haidt thinks liberals don't care about sanctity and loyalty and respect. We do. I do anyway. And it hurts to think that what was sacred, what I want to be loyal to, and respect, has been dragged through the filth, betrayed my loyalty, and unearned my respect.

I want to live in a country where ideology is not king, especially ideology that masks rapaciousness and greed. I know we're never going to be rid of ideologues, and that's OK. But the floor of our national sense of self is rotting from underneath, and all we seem to be able to summon the collective will to do is tap on the floor with our foot and complain about the funny smell, and argue about whose job it is to hire the contractor and whether we really ought to pay for new sills.

And weep when twenty children fall through the hole and into the basement, gone forever.

Careful of that dead thing

I had a terrifying dream last week. I was driving my family in the car, on a nearby nondescript suburban road (County Rd C in Roseville, MN, if you care). It was late twilight and cloudy. Suddenly ahead of us, there was a burst of flame: the afterburner engaging as a jet fighter swooped up and to the right. It startled my wife, who yelled. There were flashes in the sky, like lightning behind a cloudbank.

Then off in the distance, way off in the distance, ahead of us and slightly to the left, was a blinding blue-white flash, with a shockwave visible pushing away from it. I knew right away it was a nuclear explosion. Someone had set off an atomic bomb. My immediate question was, what do we do, where do we go? Do I turn the car around and run like hell for home? Would I make it? Would the shockwave get us this far away? Would more bombs explode?

This was the cultural shared nightmare from my growing-up years: nuclear armageddon. I don't remember actually having nightmares about it then—I remember nightmares where I watched passenger jets crash nearby, coming in low and screaming and flying all wrong, and then a cloud of moke from behind a line of trees. But not the Big One. Neither is it really a daylight nightmare for me, and hasn't been since glasnost. Terrorist attacks and pandemics are what tend to set me off in the same way today.

What the heck?

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I've been coming back over and over this spring to how we tend to avoid awareness of mortality—not just ours, but the mortality of those entities we are part of. In particular, when we found an institution, we seldom build into that institution's structure the assumption that it will one day be dissolved. Most legal entities have procedures built into their generic type: how to dissolve a foundation, corporation or church. But when we found most institutions, we expect them to go on "in perpetuity."

I think I had forgotten how viscerally overwhelming it is to actually face the end of our own bodily life. No philosophy, no rationality, just an overwhelming urge to figure out how to go on living; how to get out of this dangerous situation now.

As I keep moving forward in this exploration (can I really call it that? seems like pretty random wandering much of the time), I need to bear this in mind: the subject of endings can touch off a panicked response that seems to come out of left field. No-one who is not facing excruciating pain wants to die. And no-one who feels their very life depends on a larger organization will therefore respond well to suggestions that the organization ought to be left for dead.

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I really enjoyed, earlier this week, listening to Kevin Kling talk about what to him was a new an revelatory way of thinking about storytelling, as part of an interview with Krista Tippett on On Being. He says:

Well... with this post-traumatic stress a few months ago, after years and years, it came back with a vengeance. And I went to a therapist and she said, "You got to understand... it's not time [that heals]— it... doesn't work, it sits in such a deep place that it's not triggered in ways you would think. It's not something that time heals. It will come back." And so what she had me do, which was so right fit just with my weird, Jungian sensibility, she had me tell the story of my motorcycle accident.

It was a bit more complicated than this. She told me the story, but instead of hitting the car, I missed the car, and I went to where I was going. And by retelling the story and having a different outcome, I started sleeping better. I started, all of a sudden the post-traumatic stress really dissipated in a significant way. And it was because I retold the story in another way that had me survive in another way.

Now the struggle with me is, I still wake up in the morning with my arm not working, with all these things. So there's a reality, and then there's another story I've created. And it really seems to fit with the way we work as, as humans, especially these days. We need to rewrite our stories sometimes just so we can sleep at night.

...but it's not the reality. But we can't live in the story that makes us sleep, but we need it to sleep. And so that's my struggle now, putting those two together, taking the myths we form to make ourselves feel better and fitting it with the reality that we live in.

And I think that about sums it up.

Sherlock, Spock, Encyclopedia, and Corlis.

I've had this archetype on my mind. My wife and I just finished watching the first season of the modernized BBC Sherlock. My son is reading Encyclopedia Brown and (as intended by the author) trying to solve problems through knowledge and logic. And we've been reading Sherlock Holmes as bedtime stories. Star Trek's Mr Spock is in there too, and the ideal of old-fashioned science fiction in general.

It's an ideal of mental acuity and compiled knowledge, able to defeat raw ambition and violent oppression. Brains over brawn—but not trickster-y brains, mostly. Brains in service of Public Order. Sherlock as brother to Mycroft, presiding over a (mostly) enlightened Empire.

Sherlock Holmes was written before Gandhi showed the corrupt underbelly of the empire that Dr Watson had fought for, and never really addressed what that empire did to the generation of young men who marched off to destruction in the trenches of World War I. The archetype after Holmes turned away from Empire. The Star Trek universe is more ambivalent about smarts: There's Spock, of course, and his successor, Data, but these are more uncertain geniuses, uncertain about their magnificent rational minds, and tenderly exploring the gulf between themselves and that confusing, alien, emotional humanity. And defending against the seemingly perfect, rational but totalitarian Borg.

Barry Lopez's Corlis Benefideo is a bit like these characters, in his sense that if we just make enough maps, we'll get the answer to our question. If we make a broad and deep enough atlas, we'll come to know a place.

The truth is, it's too easy to keep our focus on Sherlock. He's flashy; he's impressive, and he's way smarter than us. But he is always an actor in a play. He reveals a human drama, but he seldom actually controls the drama, and he gets bored and restless when other people aren't providing the other necessary elements. He is reactive.

And Spock is not the captain of the Enterprise, any more than Merlin is king of Britain. Encyclopedia Brown is not the leader of his group, he's just the go-to problem solver. He finds the faults in the bully's story, and lets the police and the other grownups take it from there. The mistake I think people who want to identify with Sherlock as their hero, is to make him the center of everything. But he is an impatient (and in some ways self-destructive, as in his cocaine habit) outsider to most of the dramas he plays out in, withdrawing into the wings when his role is done.

Sherlock Holmes never really addresses the deeper "why" of criminal behavior. We never find out why Moriarty is such a twisted evil mastermind. That was left for 20th century crime writers, raised on Freud and his successors. Holmes' job is to simply assume the goodness of the law and to shine the light on places where it has been crossed.

He is working in a fixed system of truth, morality and justice, within which he jumps about like an agile monkey, acknowledging that there are sometimes places where morality and decency trump law, but always believing that revealing the truth will clarify the situation and make moral choices clear.

It's a nice dream.

Blind Spot

There's an old trick where you place a dark spot on a white wall, then sit back and with one eye open, look slightly to the left or right, and at some point, the spot will simply disappear from view. This marks the small area (scotoma) on the retina where there are no visual receptors (no cones or rods) because that's where the optic nerve connects the retina to the brain.

I think we each have points like this is our psychic landscape, which cannot be approached in the direct way we know how to approach most of the world, not because they are too painful (that's another story—see below) but because they simply contradict our ways of understanding; they are incomprehensible because they are in the blind spots of our comprehension.

The annihilation of being is the big one for most people. Of course we can see death all the time; all living things die. But we cannot understand what it means to die, because it would be to imagine not imagining, to think about not thinking—ever again.

We construct all sorts of ways to bridge this blank spot, but at root it is almost impossible to understand a world without a self. That is to say, a story with no narrator, a picture not drawn from a point of view. So when a character in a story (or, in the particular case I'm thinking of, a play I saw last week) considers his or her undoing, and the creator is portraying this as straightforwardly as possible, there comes a kind of gray moment, when the artist (and character) is simply lost.

All of this assumes that the "soul" does in fact die, that consciousness, the self, does not have an immortal component. And I suspect that the power of that "blind spot" is a big part of the impetus to discover alternatives to total death of the self, whether immortality of the soul, or reincarnation, or some other process by which something happens after the end.

Well, something does happen to the body of course: it decomposes and—one way or another—is eaten. And that eating is a root of horror. There was an interesting discussion on Minnesota Public Radio's Midmorning recently, with the author of the hot new werewolf novel, The Last Werewolf. My question for him was about the horrific effect of having a sympathetic character become meat, how viscerally painful this is for the audience, and how he as a writer used—or at any rate dealt with—this horror. He said that specifically it was being eaten that to his mind was the horror: that all you have worked for in your life is summed up in being a meal for some other creature, and that this was in a way the key to horror as a genre and as a tool. I think he was spot on. Like death, the prospect that we (or our bodies if our sense of self is gone) will be consumed elicits a visceral turn of the stomach.

It is not, however, as powerful a blind spot, because we can in fact imagine being captured in a great monstrous maw like a bird in a cat's jaws. It's painful and horrible but the horror is comprehensible.

I wrote earlier about Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, and about my troubles with the ending. In the denouement, she pulls from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets an image of Nowhere as a place, in her book an eddying gray horror, a pool at the foot of a garden, the maw of Hell — not a fiery place but an utterly empty negation of everything, good and bad. I think this is the blind spot, and perhaps this is why I find the ending of the book unsatisfying: it takes us up to the lip of a visible impossibility, and then uses a sort of rule-manipulating trick to turn us away, pull us through and out. In the end, that horror is simply left behind, unaddressed.

I recently read William Styron's Darkness Visible, an account of his own deep clinical depression. The book was recommended to me as the truest and clearest description of clinical depression a friend had ever read. It is an excellent book, but one of the things it makes very clear is that depression in itself is indescribable: you can approach it, you can say something about it, but it is a pain of absence, an experience of void, and as such is not really possible to put into words, because the words fill a space in the audience's heads that are simply missing in the sufferer. Depression is like a blind spot of the self, a place that by definition cannot be held and looked at directly. It can be described in the descent, and—as Styron notes, quoting Dante in his return from the Inferno—in the ascent back out of it, but because description is itself something, the void cannot be captured in words.

Is there any way out of these blind spots? If the analogy were perfect, one could just open the other eye. If one trusted the vision of others, one could ask what they saw, but no-one else can truly see our selves from the inside, or be a sufferer of depression for the sufferer. People describe near-death experiences, but these experiences are unsatisfactory because they are about someone else's negation, not ours. Our blind spots are places where our frame of understanding is fundamentally personal, and because we are conscious in some essential way within our own bodies, there is no sure-fire way to add the equivalent of parallel vision. Even a close companionship like Styron had with his wife can't bridge the disease, though of course it sure can't hurt either. It probably saved his life—his realization as he considered suicide that he couldn't just do this selfishly to those he loved. But it didn't cure or offer a window to his condition.

Buddhist practice, with its focus on non-self and non-being, maybe comes closest. But here I fall short, never having really studied such practices. And my understanding is that in Buddhist meditation, the goal is a stilling of self so one can experience the not-self, not the prospect of the soul's extinguishment.

Perhaps the key to addressing these blind spots is to think of them not in terms of their being things we see, but products of how we look. That is to say, it is not self-negation, or death, that we cannot see, but our way of seeing that keeps us from seeing death. The idea—and this is really just an untested idea on my part—that depression is similar in kind to the gray space around the idea of the absence of self, suggests that there is something organic in us, as there clearly is in depression, that makes our seeing unclear. If we saw the world differently—as some who believe in an immortal soul do, for instance—that nothingness would not be a gray and shimmering horror.

What the blind spots do show pretty definitively to me at least, is that description, the set tools we use to say what the world is, has inherent paradoxical limits. It's not that we won't look at them—in the way we won't look at being eaten, or at any of a number of bogeymen and women we set up as furniture in our psychic household—it's that description itself is housed within a finite, mortal frame and cannot therefore see the absence of that frame itself.

The territory of race

The thing that keeps coming back to me, after the White Privilege Conference I attended a couple weeks ago, is a futile sort of ping-pong:

Point 1: While the justification for the idea of race is "biological," there is no real basis for "races" in terms of genetic variation. There are no "subspecies." There's more genetic variation within sub-Saharan Africans than there is between all of the peoples who in 1500 were living in the arc between England and Japan. So: race is arbitrary. It doesn't have a basis in biology.

Point 2: Race has become fundamental to identity. You can't just say "race is meaningless," because this deeply disrespects the suffering that has been endured in its name, and the sheer effort that has been made to reclaim identity and pride. It has meaning grounded in history.

Point 3: The founding of the idea of race is bound up in power. People brought to America from Africa in the age of slavery weren't "black" or "Negro" or "colored" or even "African" before they arrived here— they were whatever nation or tribe or clan or other classification they identified with in Africa. Same is true of "Indians"/"Native Americans"/"First Nations." These broad terms only make sense within the context of European colonization of the Americas. And today, the terms used in the United States for people from vaguely south of the border, or from Spanish colonial heritage within our borders, terms like "Hispanic" and "Latino/a" and "Chicana/o" only make sense in the context of the United States: in Venezuela the terms are effectively meaningless, because the major cultural divides there are other than Anglo/Spanish-speaking. So the very idea of race as we live it has no meaning outside of our American culture.

Point 4: Just because something is a construct, specific to your culture—an arbitrary line drawn in the sand—doesn't mean it doesn't hold extraordinary power...

Just like the Grid—latitude, township, plat and so forth—we've spoken of so much here.

But—as I've argued about the Grid—race (or rather the thing race is supposed to measure) is not inherently evil. In the case of race, the idea of grouping people by ancestral heritage isn't the problem. I dance English folk dances in my spare time... nothing actually dangerous about that. Consider how different European heritages in American that were once at each others' throats have become essentially fodder for folkloric festivals and tourism in midwestern towns; you never see anti-Irish riots like you did 150 years ago. The sense of identity we white people derive from our specific heritages adds variety and interest to what is sometimes a bland "American" cheese product...

So: where is the cause of race as a cancer?...because the use of race as a basis for action is a cancer on this country. Look at the populations in our prisons, in our slums, in our schools, in our places of employment, in our graveyards...

I go back to my earlier discussions of the Grid, and my conclusion that the problem is not in the Grid itself as a tool for measurement, but in its checkerboard reapplication back on the land, ignoring the texture and shape of that land in itself.

Race was never a really useful way of measuring out the American people, except as it provided an excuse to summarily take away rights and property from some and give it to others. It is grounded in enslavement of Africans and the de-nationing of American Indians and Spanish-speaking colonials. It doesn't actually say anything about what we are capable of as individuals. Nevertheless, it forms a part of our heritage...

It's a mistaken and misused shorthand for ancestry—where we and our parents came from. It's a way of not saying our actual ancestor stories, but instead linking to a common story. In this sense it's like latitude, which links to a planet we do not interact with as a planet on a day-to-day basis. And unlike latitude, it doesn't even actually relate to real physical differences.

Race only means anything because people were and are forced to live within its arbitrary lines. And that in itself carries a lot of meaning, as much like nation-states, whose arbitrary lines make territories we send soldiers out to die over. Our history of enslavement, displacement, lies, cheating, and papering it all over with niceties about law and rights.... that is the can of worms. When we address it forthrightly, as for example Howard Zinn did, and as all sorts of "radical" or "alternative" historians and artists have done, we don't necessarily heal anything, any more than making a map solves a mess like Israel and Palestine.

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I feel as if, in my sense of the world, I have cleared away a pile of brush that covered a big, unsightly hole. It's more exposed, but it looks raw and ugly from here. We can't fill it—that's what the brush was, an attempt at covering it over. What we can do is step back and see how we can make it a useful and pleasing part of the landscape. Can we take race and make it charmingly ethnic over time? Can we plant seedlings and let it grass over, not changing its shape or denying it was ever there, but making it a part of our landscape? I think something like that may, in the end, be the best we can hope for...

Great Work of Time

Who hasn't run into old Shelley's "Ozymandias" in an English Lit class, the ruined claim of eternity disintegrating back into sand. We think we are free of the pride of our permanence—the mortality of ourselves and our endeavors gets drilled into us over and over: hubris and vanity and the problem of seeking immortality (cf. Voldemort).

I just finished rereading John Crowley's Great Work of Time, a compact, melancholy and thorough dismantling of the idea of an eternal empire. It's a time travel story in baldest terms—one where the attempt to make the British Empire truly eternal, the protector of world peace and preventer of the horrors of the twentieth century, turns out to make the world go horribly wrong: the future fills with monsters and angels, a strange and unnatural stasis that in the end is imagined as a silent forest underwater, forever still and unchanging. The angels and the wise magi that the messing with time produces, do not want to have been created. They long for death.

We mapmakers make some claim of permanence—more modest than eternity, but what I take away from Crowley's book is the false seductiveness of the idea that what lasts beyond our lives lasts forever. We don't know what happens after "The End," and so we imagine a universe that never ends, an empire on which the sun never sets. An immortal soul. Streets that are somehow permanent. But someday the streets in my neighborhood will become meaningless. It might be a very very long time (in doing research this week I realized I will likely live to see the basic streeet pattern of Harvard Square celebrate its 500th anniversary), but there is no such thing as "forever", only "over the horizon." I don't think there is anything, anyway.

Maps only act as a way of contrasting relatively transient with relatively permanent phenomena: the states shapes remain the same as votes move from bloe to red and back again. Streets remain the same as taxi routes wiggle back and forth across them. Continents retain their rough outlines as glaciers push forward and retreat.

We need ground to stand on—a stage as I've said before, here—in order to make our performances and arguments. People who have attempted to eliminate that stage in the name of acknowledgining our impermanence have unleashed a peculiar kind of madness we see in some kinds of modern art and philosophy. Eliminate permanence, and there's no "there" there, as Ms Stein said. Perhaps the answer is to sadly acknowledge that our stage, our permanence, is itself impermanent, and find a platform that fits our lives, and the terms of permanence we can find— the land that stays more-or-less the same between glaciations, the nation that for a while retains the same basic shape, the family and friendship we have for the span we are lucky enough to have it.

Happy New Year, all. Here's to what permanence we can muster in the coming year, and what good we can perform upon that permanence.

Lies, damned lies, and plagiarism

This paragraph stuck out at me in Stanley Fish's latest piece on plagiarism on the NY Times web site:

And if there should emerge a powerful philosophical argument saying there’s no such thing as originality, its emergence needn’t alter or even bother for a second a practice that can only get started if originality is assumed as a baseline. It may be (to offer another example), as I have argued elsewhere, that there’s no such thing as free speech, but if you want to have a free speech regime because you believe that it is essential to the maintenance of democracy, just forget what Stanley Fish said — after all it’s just a theoretical argument — and get down to it as lawyers and judges in fact do all the time without the benefit or hindrance of any metaphysical rap. Everyday disciplinary practices do not rest on a foundation of philosophy or theory; they rest on a foundation of themselves; no theory or philosophy can either prop them up or topple them. As long as the practice is ongoing and flourishing its conventions will command respect and allegiance and flouting them will have negative consequences.

Sems to me the same argument could be made about "objectivity" or "aesthetics" amongst other ideas discussed in this blog. The point, that a standard need not be somehow supported by the fundamental structure of the universe, but can be constructed largely for the needs and desires of a group of people, parallels the idea of maps as propositions or arguments rather than statements of fact.

The point I would make is that it is important to note that we are talking about the formal rules and criteria of judging communications about a subject, not about the subject itself. In the subject of the article, not attributing a quote (plagiarism) is not the same as faking lab results. In the same way, making a map with a bias is different from making a map with errors. One is untrue to the "objective" rules of map discourse, and may be disparaged within the map community for this. The other is a untrue to the physical subject of the map, and is a lie.

Letting the story go

An alignment of three things:

1. A comment on Facebook on stories. The original poster was commenting on how hard it was for her to talk with a creationist. Someone linked to the XKCD comic here. My response to a few more comments on stubborn ignorance was:

Methinks, as the comic points out, the issue is really an issue when it comes to power. Which it always does come down to one way or another when dealing with parents. But I don't care what my postal delivery worker or the guy at Mr Tire believe about creationism; or if I do care, its in the sense that Ingrid talked about: because it makes a good story.

It's kind of how I've come around to being able to (mostly) deal with Christian religious stories: I was raised by my agnostic/atheist parents to hear Biblical narration as part of an effort to push me to an orthodoxy—to exert power over me, in the same way that jingoism, pursed-lipped grandparents, and social conformity are. And so it's been great to be able to (for example) hear Ingrid tell our son the Easter story "from the inside," where it can live as a big powerful story, not part of some attempt to make me or Roo or anyone else into what the speaker wants us to be.

2. in Meeting this morning, a Friend rose to talk about her experience with other people's stories, with other people's baggage they bring to hearing your story. Her husband had come out quite publicly as bisexual, and she was recalling the pain that other people's assumptions and baggage brought her in that experience. There is a sense that when you speak Truth, that Truth is released from you—it is no longer yours. I think most people don't get this; certainly the idea of intellectual property works against this. But really, to release an idea is much more powerful than holding it. To try and hang on to it is mostly a salve for the ego. Or an attempt to control income—not that the experience of "colonized" musicians, who sold their songs for pennies to producers who then made fortunes on them, is a good thing. No one should starve when someone else is feeding themselves from one's work. But the idea itself benefits from truly being free to roam.

3. Christa Tippet in this week's Speaking of Faith, talked with Alan Dienstag, who wrote this companion commentary about his work getting early-stage Alzheimer's patients to write memories as part of their comign to terms with their illness. Part of what he talked and wrote about is writing not as hanging on to memories, but as giving them away.

As she neared the end of her life, my grandmother seemed to understand that if you can give something away, you don't lose it. This, as it turns out, is as true of memories as it is of objects and is yet another aspect of memory that is often overlooked. Memories are, in a sense, fungible. Writing is a form of memory, and unlike the spoken word, leaves a mark in the physical world. As a form of memory, writing creates possibilities for remembering, for the sharing and safeguarding of memories not provided by talking. The writing group gave memory back to its members. They were transformed in the experience of writing from people who forget to people who remember. A member of the writing group once said that when the group was together "— we forget that we don't remember." This is a statement of cure, not of biological and cellular disorder, but of the human disorder, the disorder of loss of personhood brought about by Alzheimer's disease.

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There is a scary power in letting go an idea, a teaching, a word, a picture...anything that comes out of oneself. To put your name on it keeps it somehow tied to you. It is a radical idea, to create anonymously and remain anonymous so as to be able to let the idea truly go free. It's almost a painful idea. But I feel myself drawn to it. It is an act of submission, an act of saying "these things are not mine."

I have no idea if I could do it.

Over some kind of threshold

I've been getting the sense over the last couple weeks that I've stepped over some kind of threshold. The pieces of it I can see all look like "ideas", but they also feel deeper than ideas... I think maybe they're something else besides ideas too:

Parts of parts of parts: The idea that as we are made of parts, so we are also parts ourselves, The "bigger things," the "powers" that so permeate religious life are in fact those larger entities that we are part of, going all the way up to the unimaginably huge. That's really the heart of the place I'm sitting now.

Cells and communities: Analogous ways parts work together, forming entities that do different things than we or cells do as individuals. I am also mindful of the ways that those functions are often autonomic, not under any really Mindful will.

Steering and the cerebellum: Not every entity in the universe has a cerebellum or a medulla oblongata or even a vestigial nervous system. And yet the most basic bits of matter have this "tendency" to move this way toward each other or away from each other. To me this feels like the most elementary part of "will." If you steer a boat, some of the skill comes from knowing how to get the boat to do what you want to do, but part is also being aware of currents and the boat's momentum, things about the larger system of you and the boat that aren't really under your present will.

The ordinaries of Christian religious discourse and life that have made me itchy: prayer, scripture, miracles, sainthood, souls, afterlife, sacraments, communion... I get more and more convinced that I at least as a non-theist need to come to terms with as much of this as I can manage, and understand them from my own points of view. I've been taking baby steps here for a year or so, and I think this new place I've dropped into makes that more possible, if only because I have a sense of a larger entity I actually believe in.

The ill-fittingness of "non-theism": this term makes me itchy too—as I've said before— because it frames my sense-of-things as the shadow cast by the figure of theism. It's a negative space, a figure-ground problem, and I just don't see my path in these matters as shadowy or reactionary. I really try not to make them reactionary. So the question is, what is the figure, the positive space, that occupies the space that others call "non-theist"? Does it in fact matter what it's called, and if it does matter, why does it?

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Anyway, this is my 100th post on the blog, and I think I need to take a little break and explore the landscape I seem to have dropped in on. Nothing definite in terms of length; I'll almost certainly be back by spring. Maybe a lot sooner. I just need to get my feet a little more under me before I can write coherently.

I also am finding my looming regular-life schedule for December through March daunting at best, and need to focus on that for a while.

Feel free to drop me a line at "nat dot case at mindspring dot kom" (except spell "kom" as it should be spelled and replace the "at" and "dot" with the appropriate stuff).

Thanks for reading... talk with you again soon!

Trompe l'oueil

First off, I have a warm spot in my hearts for the Mormons. In all seriousness, I do. I love a religion that consciously provides a sense of our continent as sacred space. I really like Orson Scott Card's writing, though I find his expressed political views a little disconcerting. LDS folks I've worked with or run into are generally intensely focused on whatever they are doing, have secure family lives (assuming they are not closeted), and generally nice people. Take it as snide if you will, but I really like a religion that takes wildly tall tales as seriously as they do.

We toured Temple Square this afternoon, on the last full day of visiting my in-laws, who moved here last fall. And I had a revelation of sorts sitting in the Assembly Hall while the tour-guide missionary from Canada blithely went on about the deep love of God that led the early settlers to painstakingly paint the white pine columns as faux marble and the white pine pews as oak...

I suddenly realized I was listening to someone telling me about the movie business. The dream factory.

We Americans have a cultural sense of being realists, hard-headed, plain-speaking, no-nonsense pioneers. And in some ways we are—I'm a big fan of John Kouwenhoven's work, in which he makes a pretty good case for independent, practical thought as a basis for American cultural identity. But we are also a nation that loves to be given a rosier view of things than they really are. More than that, we are a nation that reinvents itself over and over out of whole cloth, then persuades ourselves that we have always been what we have reinvented ourselves as.

Thus we can straight-facedly talk about "traditional family values" while sending wives out to earn a substantial part of family income in the marketplace. We can talk about "traditional marriage" as if women have always enjoyed equal status in our marriages. We can talk about "American health care" as if our network of hospitals and labs and insurance had been with us since the dawn of the Republic, instead of slightly over half a century.

We are a nation of scriptwriters and set decorators.

I was struck by how this observation resonated with Paul Krugman's recent post on horse-race reporting. He blames bad reporting, but I think the public audience for news reporting is also to blame. We want the story, not the analysis and discussion. We want a plot, a narrative.

I observe this, not to say, "Hey, America, get your act and your brain in gear and stop living in Fantasyland!" Though that may be tempting, it misses the point. We're not going to change America's habit of making things up as it goes along, just by wishing it to be so. But we need to be aware of the dream-making, if we are to be good scriptwriters ourselves, and we need to be good scriptwriters if we are going to be part of any real American debate.

Practice Practice Practice

In the carto-theory discussions there has been a lot of sturm und drang around the questions "what is a map?" and "what are cartographers?" — way more than I've seen in any other part of cartographic discourse. As soon as you start stating what cartography is and what cartographers are, you get yelps of indignation from folks who don't think that's what they do. This is especially true when you push the argument further, discussing what cartographers ought to do.

It's not that different in the liberal Quaker circles I'm involved in. We all gather in Meeting for Worship, and we have well-established frameworks for conducting our business. We even share a common gestalt sense, laid out in the Quaker testimonies, but just try telling a Quaker what he or she is...

I visit prisoners through Prisoner Visitation and Support (PVS). We are an organization which, while supported by a range of religious groups, does not have an evangelical or prosletyzing thrust. Our common work involves visiting prisoners, and talking with them. That's it. Now, many people do visit out of religious impulses (Jesus said, "visit the prisoners" and there are a significant number of visitors who work from this dictum). But I have been mightily impressed by how irrelevant to the common purpose that theological diversity seems at our training workshops. Practice trumps the specifics of faith.

So it's easy to come to the conclusion that we should all just ignore theory and theology and stick to practice. A lot of us do ignore it, but it is so centrally important to many individuals in their work, it makes it frankly dishonest to "leave out" of the discussion. And so we get tangled messes sometimes.

I'm thinking of situations where discord has invaded each of three three communities, and looking for a common thread in these discords. Can we get some perspective that works in general to resolve this kind of conflict on a structural level?

At PVS training sessions, people often give "personal stories" of why and how they joined PVS. I think because they are framed as personal, they are received in the spirit of personal testimonies, and I have never felt a sense of offense from the group. The only real offense I have seen taken at a PVS event was in an after-hours entertainment some years ago.

There was a recitation, clearly framed by the performer as one of her favorite poems, which involved racial stereotypes and issues of Native American suffering. It was explosive. Offense was taken. When the PVS board tried to distance itself from the performance and say it would not have allowed it had it known what the content would be, there was further irateness: some people felt that in distancing itself, the organization had betrayed the ability to speak one's mind. The whole event ended on a sour note, which is really weird for PVS. I think it shocked a lot of us, because it is normally such a "we're all in this toghether" kind of group.

What happened?

PVS does not advocate. It staunchly does not advocate. If you want to work for change in the federal prison system through advocacy or action, you need to join another group. PVS does what it does, and it is permitted access to federal prisoners because it so strictly restricts itself to this set of actions. One of the results of this non-advocacy is that the organization does not in any way link its actions to any specific theoretical or theological viewpoint. That is left solely to individuals.

Those who took offense felt that the performance violated that code. It was a statement framed not as a personal testimony, but as a performance. What caused the initial offense, I gather, was that it was seen as potentially a statement sanctioned by the organization, and there were those who strongly objected to its contents and wanted no part of such a statement. And the subsequent conflict was essentially between people who saw the performance (and perhaps performances in general) as representing the group vs those who saw it is solely personal.

In our Friends meeting, we've been wrestling for some time with a statement on theological diversity. Basically a way of saying, "the specifics of your faith are irrelevant to your being welcomed." An earlier statement was sent back, with a request to also address what it is that binds us together. A pretty broad statement was proposed this winter, and this was met with strong feelings, in large part around its deliberately non-Christian language.

The thing is, while issues of identity surrounding our Christian roots vs our non-Christian members have been brewing and percolating for some time, the meeting as a whole is steaming along. We are still a community. No real schisms. A few interest groups within meeting, and a worship group that budded off, but as far as I can tell no lasting ill-will. But the statement in question was (unintentionally) divisive. And I think the degree of passion in that divisiveness surprised most if not all.

Again, I think it was the idea that this was a statement of the whole that set things ablaze. We're used to individual statements, and have learned to frame them as such, so we can learn from them. And we do make collective statements, especially in the face of public injustice (I'm thinking here about GLBT issues, or issues around peace).

Here's what I think the difference is: We can make true collective statements if they are grounded in our collective experience. We can't make them if they are grounded in our separate experiences, even if those separate experiences seem to converge. Collective statements grounded in separate experience will be weak compromises.

The PVS performance was, I believe, not intended by the performer to somehow pressure us in to agreeing with her. I know her a little, and that's not her style. But something about the frame in which it was presented made it seem like a call to collective statement to some in the group, and I can see that standpoint too.

Likewise, the statement in meeting came out of the strongly felt sense by some members of the group which simply isn't felt by others. The group hadn't felt itself under the weight of collective experience, and so was divided on the statement.

Which brings me to cartography.

Cartography is a scattered practice. We each do our own thing, or we work within a small workgroup that does its own thing. We have common tools, mostly, and a recognizable "mappy" product, but how and why we get there are not as common collectively as we might think. And why we map is absolutely all over the board. We have assumed that there must be some commonality, but we have not really shared much specific experience as a group. And so any collective statement we made will be suspect and weak. And a proposed statement made by one of our number (or worse, someone who is not a practicing cartographer), attempting to speak for the whole, feels presumptuous.

I'm cogitating on this. Maybe hidden in this common practice are a variety of theoretical/theological types of personal bases to this practice. Maybe it would be helpful to open up the "whys" of cartographers in the same way that the "personal perspectives" pieces at PVS trainings and spoken ministry in Friends meeting can open up understanding. Maybe that would lead to a better sort of collective statement.

Or maybe it would lead to an understanding that at some level the only collective statement we can make is the practice itself.

True Stories

Fictions are stories that are admittedly not accurate reportings of the real world, but which are valued because they tell general truths about the world. Non-fictions are stories that are valued as accurate reportings on the world.

So far so good. But then we get into religious stories, where we fight each other over whether the stories are true or not. Fiercely.

Why is it important to us whether these stories are fact or fiction?

There's been a similar (if more restrained) fight in the map-theory world over the "truthiness" of maps, and I think a similar question here can be raised: why is it so important that maps be seen as a reflection of the "real world"? Here, the answer is clearer: we want an accurate portrayal of the earth so we can use it as the basis of discussion of the real world. If it's not accurate, we can't use it the way we want to.

Is the same thing true of religious stories? Fundamentalist approaches to religion take this tack: "Everything in my Scripture is literally true, so I can use that as my Certainty. That's my foundation, my bedrock." But less fundamentalist points of view still need a sense of certainty in their stories... they need to look at their scriptures not as myth, but as something closer to Truth.

I think what often happens is, religious truth goes in a different compartment than everyday truth. Because what is said in religious texts is largely about extraordinariness rather than repeatable-experiment reality, we can put them into a mental space that is neither "made up" nor "verifiable", but is instead "non-verifiable but believed in." And religious texts do contain material that, like good fiction, contains general truths about the world: morals, ethics, love, justice, the very idea of truth.

The reason maps and other reference materials carry that peculiar aura about them is that they can (within limits) be relied upon. That in doing this they satisfy a need says to me there is something inherent in humans that needs this foundation. When people then ascribe to maps a level of "objectivity" or "truth" that we cartographers are aware they don't warrant, this is not an indication that people are stupid. I think it's an indication that people are people.

Neurotheology

Here's what I don't like about Matthew Alper's The "God" Part of the Brain:

1. Mr Alper has a trajectory, which he disguises in a narrative of discovery. His whole discussion of religion is framed in the question of whether there is a deity, a god-person. That's the question he seeks at the start of the book to discern, and it's the question he answers by the end, in the process doing a fair amount of steamroller-ing.

2. Mr Alper overgeneralizes. There's a lot of "no society in human history" and "this trait is inherent in all humans." To me this obvious call to people to recall exceptions weakens his argument.

In short, it's making his discussion of the neurological basis of spirituality into an argument that I don't like.

On the other hand, here's what I like about the book:

1. Religious activity and spirituality fill a human need. Being our own subjects, it's easy to be blind to this, and Alper is relentless in zeroing in on particular activities and habits that are common enough to suggest a human predisposition.

2. The book begins as a personal narrative of a search through most of the major formal fields of knowledge, and I enjoyed the way these field are shown to fit together.

3. No only does what we call "religion" in English fill a specific set of human needs, it makes a lot of sense to me that these particualar predispositions have a historic basis in how homo sapiens and our ancestors operate. I don't agree with all of Alper's specific speculations, but I like the general question, "Why do human animals need this? What advantage does this give us?"

To me, this way of approaching spirit, of acknowledging that our experience of spirit has a functionality, feels like the beginning of a bridge between "religion is a bunch of superstitious bunkum" and "science is trying to take away that which is most precious to me." Both of which feel like crippled half-truths. The bridge isn't built, but this to me feels like a good, solid foundation to begin working on it.

True Love

Warning: this post assumes you have read Diane Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock. If you haven't, it will make very little sense, I suspect. Fair warning.
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Here's a really weird thing I realized recently about Fire and Hemlock: It's a love story (in large part) in which no-one says "I love you."

Ever.

I used the Google Books version of the text, and searched for the word "love." The word appears 24 times in about 420-some pages of the paperback. Mostly it's people saying "Here, love" to Polly. Seb Leroy is rumored to be "in love with" Polly, and later offers to go with her in the "Tunnel of Love" at the carnival. The Dumas quartet signs a letter "with love from the Dumas Quartet." And When Polly plays Pierrot in the school play, Harlequin and Pierrot are discussed falling in love. Apart from that, the instances of the word are all "I'd love to!" and "He'll love this!"

But it's not that Jones doesn't have people trying to talk about love. They just always use different words: Ivy goes on about "happiness," at the end Tom talks about "seeing you" and Nina is boy-mad: "The rest of the time Nina pursued boys."

Laurel does not talk about love. Laurel is, in fact, incapable of real human love. One of the aspects of being of the Fair Folk. She takes, she enjoys, she uses—but she does not love. And her point of view infects the whole story from beginning to end.

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I'm reaching the conclusion that the reason the ending of the book is so unsatisfying is that the real ending, the place it should have gone, is so depressing that Jones couldn't bear to go there. In order to save Tom, Polly really does have to let go of him. In doing so, she is in essence giving up her love. And in doing that, she is becoming not a little like Laurel. No technicalities, no "Nowhere is somewhere" word games.

The book, in avoiding actually talking about love—real love—swirls around a vortex. It's the pool at the bottom of the garden, which as Polly enters drains her of human emotion and connection, drains her of love.

---

Maybe afterwards, when Tom says "I want to see you anyway," they will be able to write stories together, to meet in that make-believe world where they explored being heroes together. But in the flesh-and-blood world, Tom used her, or tried to anyway. It may have been justifiable, but that's not the point. Polly's heartbreak, her teenaged jealousy of Mary Fields, which was so neatly erased by Laurel in making her "forget about Tom," has been unerased and revealed for the flawed and not-necessarily-based-on-the-real-Tom thing it was. Whatever relationship Polly and Tom go forward with, it will be tinged with the fact that they can never really trust each other the same way again.

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It's not good to ask too many questions of love, to ask it to justify itself. Basing our decisions in love and life on the patterns we see can leave us blinded to patterns we don't see. That's the part of dancing that's impossible to explicitly teach, that rules can't touch, that explicit labels hide.

Diana Wynne Jones and rules and structure

While I was sick earlier this month, I reread (after entirely too long) Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock. It's one of my favorite books; for a while in my early 20's I would have put it atop my list of favorites. As Jones explained later in an essay on the novel, it's at root about the heroic ideal—she has a really great piece of the essay where she summarizes the rise and fall of that ideal—and how it translates into modern ways of thinking. I'll write more fully on it later, and about the truly problematic ending of the book (it's the one thing pretty much everyone ends up compaining about in the book). But what it brought to mind in rereading Tufte, is the difference between structure and rules.

Jones hates rules. No, that's too strong, but a lot of her characters spend their books working their way out of a web of rules, only to discover that those been used by the villains to hide the true state of things from everyone. They've been used to cheat.

On the other hand, discovering the true state of things, which often involves learning about the structure of the story's universe, is often central to the action of her stories. She loves structure, as her nonfiction essays make clear. Fire and Hemlock was built around the structure of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, which she admires for their mix of stasis and change. If anything, her fascination with the shape of stories may be a weakness; she get so caught up with the structure sometimes it's hard for her to just follow the story where it needs to go according to emotional logic. Sometimes. Especially at the end of stories.

In her short story "The Sage of Theare," the two ideas are tied together in my mind by this pronouncement, presented as a graffito:

IF RULES MAKE A FRAMEWORK FOR THE MIND TO CLIMB ABOUT IN, WHY SHOULD THE MIND NOT CLIMB RIGHT OUT, SAYS THE SAGE OF DISSOLUTION

I love that. To me it puts structure and rules in precisely the right place: necessary but not exclusive.

Jones's stories though, differentiate between the True Structure of the universe (the way things work we can't do anything about), and rule structures set up to imitate that True Structure and replace it in people's minds. These structures are all about the maintenance of power.

I had a long conversation with Joe tonight, after entirely too long. In regards to rules, he talked about how strange it has been for him to be back in an office environment after a long time away. In particular, he has been reminded of a peculiar dynamic of work environments: everyone is working from their own rulebook. Some are there to earn their paycheck and then go do what they really love, and they pay by rules that follow this way of thinking about work; some are there to do Great Work regardless of what the needs of the company are, and they have a different set of rules; some are there because they are workaholics and they go crazy if they aren't there—another set of rules. And so on. And each person quickly learns who is playing with a comparable rulebook, and who is just weird (i.e. everyone else). In an office environment where people are allowed to play by their own rulebook and where their role in the company fits that rulebook, it can work out fine. Where everyone is expected to play by the same rulebook, those who don't end up in a Dilbertian nightmare sort of job.

It got me thinking about our "what is a map" discussions, here and elsewhere. I think the same thing applies: we want our rulebook to be the rulebook. I'm not saying we don't need rulebooks. It can be really useful to discover what your rulebook is; it can help immensely in clarifying your work. What is more useful to the wider community though is to describe (measure?) the structure we are working in—in my case, the structure of cartographic expression—and then work with that structure with our own rulebooks, without using formulated rules to proscribe that structure.

If we can stand it.

I hope that all made sense.

More soon on E Tufte.

War

It's been a little overwhelming, frankly, the amount of new stuff I've absorbed this last few weeks. Thanks to all the regulars, new and old, who have really opened some new ideas and ways of seeing/listening to me here. I'm kind of playing catch-up...

I recently read Chris Hedges War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, which came out in 2002. It's premise is that war is Hell (nothing new there) and yet deeply seductive, even to those who have lived it. It is not an especially structured book, but that's OK. It swept over me.

One thing I was reminded of in reading Hedges' book was the character Destruction in Neil Gaiman's Sandman. The premise of that series of graphic novels was a bickering family of "Endless," embodiments of forces which are within us and yet out of our control (cutely all have names beginning with D: Death, Destiny, Dream, Desire, Despair, Delerium (who used to be Delight), and Destruction). Destruction is the embodiment especially of war. But the character abandoned his work sometime in the early seventeenth century, as war came to be seen as a "science," instead of as a horseman of the apocalypse or Dulle Griet (in my mind's eye I conflate Dulle Griet with another Breughel painting, The Triumph of Death). It was no longer a force beyond human control.

Or so people wish to believe.

Hedges book to me effectively bridges that gap between war (and us-and-them conflict in general) as a force we are somehow unable to control, and the sort of scientific brutality that cartography (see, I knew we'd get back to cartography some time) has at times been party to. In particular, he looks at war's addictive qualities, and the ways in which frankly violent criminals are able to harness the seductive qualities of war for their own ultimately disastrous purposes.

As you can tell, I recommend it.

Horizontal and Vertical Trajectories

I'm just throwing this idea out there. Maybe in comparative religion studies (Joe, you out there?) there's already a term for it.

Back in high school I worked summers at the Princeton University Press. One of my jobs was researching the photo permissions for the paperback edition of Joseph Campbell's The Mythic Image. I got to know the book pretty well. One part that intrigued me particularly was the section on the Kundalini yoga system of chakras (much of the text in question is available starting on page 30 here [typo correction: should be 330] , but almost no illustrations are).

Now anyone who's spent time around New Age groups knows chakras, the light-filled centers of energy based in different parts of the body. Campbell went specifically for the symbolic meaning of them, and included illustrations from a variety of sources that really made the point.

In Kundalini yoga, the object is to train the Kundalini, the snake, to rise up from the root chakra (down by the anus), through the other six chakras and out through the head. The meanings of these chakras have a clear "higher" and "lower" hierarchy: the root chakra is about basic survival, the chakra based in the genitals is about sex, the one based in the belly is about consumption or devouring. The remaining four have more esoteric meanings in Kundalini Yoga, involving increasing levels of connection with the divine: the heart, the throat, the brow, and the crown of the head.

The goal is "up," vertical.

[And I know there's a lot of philosophical disgreement about what I just wrote, that the Theosophical aproach is a distortion of true teachings, etc etc...]

Freshman year in college, Religion 101, we read Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. I had read it once before for religion class in high school, but this time saw the book in a structural way, looking at how the central character goes through a life path of ascetic devotion to prayer, alternating with a life of the flesh, and finally finds himself in a simple, happy life of work as a ferryman, where he truly does achieve a sense of oneness with the universe.

My reading looked at the book from the point of the chakras, seeing the top chakras not so much as steps on a ladder, but (from what I realize now is a western standpoint) as "heady" aspects of self. Where he finds peace is not climbing up the vertical ladder, but in deeply loving his work, in being open to the world before him. In my understanding of the chakras, he had found a sense of balance in the center, at the heart.

In other words, he isn't aiming up, he's aiming among.

I think religious impulses form along both of these basic structural lines. Ecstatic religious experiences look up, meditative ones look across. Philosophies based on judgement tend to look up, while those based on balance tend to look across.

And I think we all have some of both in us. I know I do. Among my peak religious experiences is going to sung services in English high-church centers: Westminster Abbey, Kings College... last year Ingrid and I got to go to evensong at York Minster, and it was really lovely.

Yet, I am philosophically diametrically opposed to high church. I'm with Phillip Pullman in going for the Republic of Heaven. Down with the Priestly caste! Off with his head! Sorry, I get carried away. Taoist ideas of balance and harmony appeal to me. That of God in everyone, that kind of Universalist thing.

My point is, there tends to be an emphasis in the vertical or the horizontal in any given religious community or system or individual, but there may be a strong countervailing tendency elsewhere in the same place. My own take on Friends has been that they are radically horizontal, but it's been interesting and instructive in recent blog discussions to see how this opinion may even be a minority one. Our practice and our social teaching are decisively horizontal, but there is a strong sense of the vertical in the historical sense of seeking for God.

I don't know, is this a reasonable tree to be barking up?

Nothing but the Truth (guest post by Marshall Massey)

Marshall Massey posted a response to a previous post that I think warrants a posting of its own:

You quoted me where I wrote, "Truth, as Friends have historically understood it, is neither tolerant nor intolerant; it simply is." You then commented, "That view has been carried on largely over the last 400 years not by religions but by science."

I understand why you might say such a thing, but actually, you are misreading what I wrote. For the sentence you quoted comes from a paragraph in which I consistently used "Truth" with a capital "T", and this was to signify that I was not using the word in the sense of factual accuracy, but in the sense in which it was normally used by early Friends, and continued to be used by traditional Friends of later generations, when they spoke of being "Friends of Truth", "Publishers of Truth", and the like.

Back in the days of the first Friends, "factual accuracy" was not yet the dominant meaning of the word "truth". Let me quote two older meanings from the Oxford English Dictionary that had greater currency in those days:

1) "The character of being, or disposition to be, true to a person, principle, cause, etc.; faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty, constancy, steadfast allegiance."

2) "Disposition to speak or act truly or without deceit; truthfulness, veracity, sincerity; ... sometimes in wider sense: Honesty, uprightness, righteousness, virtue, integrity."

It may be easier to grasp these meanings if I illustrate.

The first of these meanings uses "true" in the sense of an arrow "flying true", i.e. faithfully, to the target at which the archer aimed, or a lover "being true", i.e. faithful, to his beloved. For Friends to be "Friends of Truth" in this sense was for them to be "Friends of Faithfulness", friends of faithfulness to Christ and the Gospel as the churches in apostasy were not, and friends of faithfulness to the Inward Guide which the worldly around them were not obeying very well.

The second meaning uses "true" in the sense of "true witness", i.e. honest reporter of what happened, or "true parent", i.e. parent who does what is really right for the child. "Friends of Truth" in this sense meant "Friends of Doing the Right Thing, the Thing that the Relationship Really Needs, In Every Circumstance".

Neither of these senses of "Truth" are senses in which fans of science speak of "truth". Even today, they are more the province of religion.

You go on to speak of "imperfect understandings of truth". Such things are inevitable if we're speaking of factual accuracy, because accurate perception and accurate articulation are very difficult things in relation to messy real-world phenomena. In terms of faithfulness, though, or of doing what a relationship really needs, accurate perception and articulation are often easier. We may faithfully follow the teachings of the Inward Guide even when we're not sure what's going on; the Guide may, in fact, instruct us to wait until we know more, and we can agree that we are being faithful in doing so. Or we may do what a relationship requires even when we don't fully know what the other person is going through, simply by caring, listening, giving hugs, or providing food and shelter if need be.

I won't respond here except as a separate comment, and I will also repost James' response to Marshall as a comment, so as to keep this thread intact.