In his book Light of the mind, Light of the World: illuminating Science Through Faith, Spencer Klaven examines the history of the modern scientfic enterprise through the lens of the mind-matter divide. He notes that science, used in this modernist sense, can only hand us a representation of reality, not Reality itself, and shows how the historical narrative betrays a long and winding road through the trappings of materialism back to where it ultimately must land- the relationship of the material (science) to the mind (knoweldge). To know the world, as he puts it, is to properly attend for the mind that observes it, the question of truth, or the nature of Reality, boiling down to that which the mind observes. To do away with the mind as matter, which is one of the sole aims of the modernist enterprise, leaves us marooned in time and space.

Perhaps most interesting to me, particularly because of the ways it overlaps with the history of film, another subject I’ve been immersed in as a I work through James Monaco’s monumental work How To Read a Film, is the ways in which Klaven sees light as the means of knowing. Light is what allows us to observe the world. Light illuminates Reality. And as Monaco has spent pages exploring, the most fundamental role of the filmmaker is to work with light. The fundamental question of the filmmaker is how much light do I let in so as to clarify the images that I want to show.

For Klaven, apart from the minds ability to observe an illuminated world, Reality cannot be fundamentally true and alive, let alone known. The mind gives shape to what is behind the material world, and it is precisely, then, in the mind that we can know the full shape of this Reality, not as benign mechanistic systems but as something geniunely true. Klaven brings in the essential function of this interpretive process- language. To name something is to validate its truthfulness. It is to name that which we observe and thus recognize the life behind the system. Similarly, Monaco’s own thesis has been underscoring film as language. As language it bears both form and interpretation, function and observation.

There’s a fascinating element of this discussion that he touches on in chapter four, which breaks the history of film down into three central parts: film, cinema, and movies.

• The “filmic” is the aspect of art that concerns its relationship with the world around it
• The cinematic (cinema) deals with the esthetics and internal structure of the art
• The movie deals with its function as an economic commodity

Or more succinctly: Movies as economics, film as politics, and cinema as esthetics

Here it is telling that cinema, or esthetics gets, by a large margin, the greatest attention and most amount of pages. Why? Because ultimately film is asking similar questions when it comes to how we perceive the and concieve the truth about Reality. In the inital pages concerning esthetics, Monaco compares the Lumiere Brothers with Geoge Melies, both standing at the precipice of the birth of cinema. For the Lumiere’s, their accomplishement was the simple creation of a immitated reality- bringing space and time to life on screen through a singular image (the train pulling into the station). Melies on the other hand, sought after the ability of film to “change” reality by way of utilizing its illusion.

And yet Monaco makes the point that what Melies does reflects the natural progression that would have necessarily come about, no matter who was behind the camera. This is because it is rooted in technology. Just as science is rooted in reducing reality to its material property, the function of film is the natural outflow of its constructed codes.

This matters to a discussion about eshtetics because the question of films truthfulness, or its ability to say and reveal something about Reality beyond the mechanics of its form, its technology, reaches beyond the the functional properties. It reaches beyond the utility of the technological tools. One can call what we get an illusion (Melies was, quite literally, a magician by trade), but the illusion remains the product of its mechanisitc properites. It is not trully alive. Equally so, one can call our experience of Reality an illusion in the same sense of its mechanistic functions, and yet the question still remains- how do we attend for the observer. To what end is the observent mind experiencing and thus knowing a truth which lies behind the technology, the utility? To what end is the the observant mind seeing and knowing that truth which lies behind material reality?

This gets even more fascinating to me as I consider Monaco’s observations regarding the parallels between the rise of a global culture and the development of film. Modern society is mirrored, and in many ways driven, by the presence of film, practically and symbolically. Just as we find the age of science attempting to deconstruct reality, or as Kraven suggests turn God into small gods (atoms) which we can then control and thus circumvent and supersede on the basis of our own human inventions (for example, Love gets reframed from a Deity into a matter of function, the product of atoms and chemicals we can reduce and master), we also find the age of the movie attempting to be deconstructed into its economics.

And yet, our experience of Love stays stubbornly resistant to such attempts.

Film, as cinema, or as esthetic- as  art, stays stubbornly resistant to such attempts to reduce it to its technological functions or the systems it produces. It is the art that continues to drive filmmakers, precisely because the primary role of film is to make sense of our experience of this world, not to keep us marooned on the level of its function and form. To mean something, we must observe it, and thus experience it.

In no small way then, to go back to that movie, film, cinema dichotomy, even in a world that Monaco describes as experiencing the death of cinema and film in favor of economics, even in an increasingly globalized world that is still wrestling with the reality of the dominating mechanics of the American industry that was so pervasive in the early oughts (the relationship between global industries and the Hollywood machine is a worthwhile discussion in its own right), the echos of film continue to reverberate with its cinematic presence. An artform that is tied to technology will have its inevitable and necessary advancements, but such innovations will remain empty apart from its relationship to light, to the observer. We got to the movies precisely because it is cinema.

As Klaven writes,

At this stage in our history, science and theology desperately need each other’ 

By this stage he means a modern landscape which has elevated the sceince of atoms to the level of a wholly explanatory system, leaving the world lifeless and void in its wake. The world, however, is not a machine. It is not the cruel and uncaring reality that the mind’s observation desires to contradict. Reality is that which we observe and experience. Similarly, the modern landscape has developed film into a mechanistic structure dependent on the machine that produces it. In Hollywood, even the greatest auteurs get subsumed by the system. And yet underneath this lies something more true. When film attends for the observer it becomes cinema- that which attends for the reality behind the structure.

I’m presently working through a book by Sarah Irving-Stonebraker called Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age.

In it Irving-Stonebraker makes the case that that we (the modern West) are living in an “ahistorical age.” By ahistorical she means a time that is without a history and a time that is against history. As agents and holders of the myth of progress, history stands as the enemy which we, the very product of the enlightenment, have managed to unshackle ourselves from.

In a sense, history itself has been rewritten with the modern West as its necessary starting point, origins story and all. This is the world of our own creation, our own making, thus “history” as a concept becomes a redundancy. We no longer have need of it. We have arrived in the new world.

As I’ve been reading, my mind keeps wandering back to a book I read last year called The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins by Stefanos Geroulanos.

In it Geroulanos argues that our obsession with prehistory has led to much of the problems we find in the modern age. Just as Irving-Stonebaker suggests history has become the necessary scapegoat and villain for the modern age, Geroulanos suggests that an invented prehistory has been used to create villains and scapegoats in the modern age. In the first case, it our sense of superiority that has led to the neglect and demonizing of history, effectively finding ourselves standing above it. In the second case, the way we create these demons is by inventing a prehistory that allows us to justify the demonization. This prehistory gives us the necessary language to say that we, the modern West, have been the point all along. We evoke language like primitive and savage and lizard brain, none of which are rooted in actual truth but instead allow us to conceive of these lesser-greater/us versus them categories.

I find this juxtaposition fascinating. As I’ve been mulling over this basic idea, I revisited a previous post of mine in this space about the Jewish concept of the behind days. Ancient Israel, second temple Judaism, and Jewish practice, are anchored in this practice of looking or facing backwards. The future, in this posture, will be what it will be. Their task is to remember history. Thus, it is not as though they are not moving forward, rather its that memory of the past, of history, is always being recontextualized, precisely because this is what they are looking at as one lives in the present.

As an atheist academic, historian and teacher turned Christian, Irving-Stonebraker appeals to the Judeo-Christian narrative for her employment of this notion of priesthood. Just as we are preists of creation, we are equally called to be preists of history. This is the very defintion of ones belief in the priesthood of all believers. This means we tend to history. We keep it alive. We preserve it. We exist in relationship with and to it. We allow it to shape the perspective of our present context, not to keep us bound to history, but accountable to it,

Full disclosure- I don’t share complete theological persuasion with Irving-Stonebraker. There is a certain segment of Christianity, one that seems to be experiencing a kind of revival of sorts as a sort of neo-reformed conservative movement with a modern twist led by atheist conversions. It’s usually easy to pick up on some of the cues, be it words, langauge or ideas. There’s a bit of that on display here, although I will say she also veers more distinctly classical in this regard.

However, I don’t think that’s license to write her off, and I think much of what she has to say is very worthwhile and necessary to people across those dividing lines. I only say that because there is a tendency for the circles who will lay claim to this work, such as the main gatekeepers over at the gospel coalition, to use a very narrow view of history to justify their appeal to orthodoxy as classical, reformed theology. Which is precisely how they are using this book when I glanced at the review. It’s unfortunate, and I do think the foundation of her thesis can and should actually protect against this, but nevertheless it comes with the territory.

That said, my own journey through faith, from and away and back again, has been interesting for me to think about as well, given that I grew up in a demonination (pentecostal) that is often seen to be a very modern movement and expression that is all about newness and bucking tradition. Yet it is only now that I’ve become aware of its rich historical roots (along with my families historical roots) that reach much further back into a very real historical reality. Understanding that has helped me to understand where i was and what it was. It also gave me a much deeper appreciation for it, especially as it challenged some of my ignorance. I’ll save that for a future post

Likewise, a later part of my journey also found me shifting from a non-denominational setting without a history to a Tradition (Lutheran) I knew nothing about and had zero history with. Which was hugely formative for the years I spent as a pastor there. That taught me how a people might see their faith as necessarily rooted in history.

Even further, the denomination I presently reside in, and have now for the past 11 years (Evangelical Covenant Church), is one in which I also had no history with. Rather than learning from the outside looking in though, as I did necessarily with the Lutheran Church, this has been a practice of entering into that history and allowing it to become my own.

All of this has born fruit in its own ways, challenging some of that ahistorical mindset

With each new church season we (my church) work our way through one of the Gospels. We are presently in the Gospel of Luke. This morning we looked at the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37)

The great thing about this practice is that each new season brings with it a fresh context, thus a fresh set of eyes. One point in particular stood out for me this time around, as I had never looked at it this way before.

A common observation is to rightly point out that the initial question posed by the Jewish “laywer” (who is my neighbor) is thrown back at the lawyer in the end using a different framework and emphasis (which of these was a neighbor).

This shift in focus reflects two important aspects of the text that I think are relevant to its context. The first point, one brought up and underscored by my pastor, is this;

Compassion and mercy must be taken together

The lawyer, or technically “the expert in the Law”, answers Jesus’ question by stating that it is “the one who had mercy.” The root of the word mercy in the Greek (eleos), outlined in this article, shares a meaning with the word olive oil. Why does this matter? Because often mercy is used in a modernist sense in place of “justice” or “forgiveness”, two other words equally misconstrued through a strict application to modern court room or legal/penal concerns. Mercy, like forgiveness, is often understood to be the withholding of a consequence or penalty. But that’s not how the word is used in the Greco-Roman world. The cultural and customary use of olive oil can help us understand this. As the above article points out,

Olive oil was used to treat wounds. It was soothing, comforting, and healing. It speaks then to a merciful God who is all those things

Just as the word justice, which shares a root with the word righteousness, denotes the idea of something “being made right” or whole, the word mercy denotes the act of helping, healing, restoring towards this just or right end.

Further though, mercy contains the word compassion (Strongs defines it as to show mercy” or “to have compassion”), which is defined according to the image of “the stirring of the inward parts, literally the twisting of the intestines.”

A feeling or a conviction and an act. A posture and a movement anchored in making right what is wrong in the world.

Which brings me to the second thing that stood out for me;

The direction the Priest, Levite, and the Samaritan are traveling indicate what is being made right and how it is being made right

Scot McKnight states in his recent commentary on Luke that the initial question posed by the expert in the Law, noted by my pastor as an attempt to find a loophole in which to “justify” (make right) himself, doesn’t just indicate that he is looking for “who to help”, as though having this information signed on the dotted line would ensure him eternal life, it actually had more to do with justifying those whom he was excluding for the purpose of obtaining eternal life, properly understood as the fulfillment of the covenant promise, not being saved and going to heaven. The promise was for the restoration of Israel, through which the fullness of time (creations renewal) would be found.

To unpack this idea further:

Every parable Jesus tells puts his audience in the story, in this case a religious teacher of the Law. What’s interesting to note about the context of this parable is the first half of chapter 10, which is all about the appointing and sending out (the second of two sending chapters, following the sending of the 12 in chapter 9) to the surrounding area to “harvest the fields”. Here Jesus calls out Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum, God’s representative people (10:13-15).

So what does this have to do with the story of the good Samaritan? The hint is found in the direction of their travels. The man is “going down from Jerusalem”. The Priest is following “the same road.” The Levite “came to the same place”, indicating that each of these characters are facing the same direction- away from Jerusalem.

Now, here’s a point McKnight raises, citing scholar Ben Witherington. The text tells us that the man was not dead (vs 30). This is an important point because of how the purity laws worked. If they had been going to the temple (moving in the direction of Jerusalem), purity laws would have been a part of the discussion. Heading away from the temple meant that “defilement was not so serious.” Thus, as McKnight points out, the condemnation was not on the Law, as some often state, it was placed elsewhere- namely on the nature of the movement itself and what this movement was accomplishing.

What I mean by this basic point is this. The Gospels state that Jesus came to Judea first. As chapter 10 describes, the point of coming to Judea is so that this might flow out from Jerusalem into the world. But there is a further point about the nature of this movement that remains relevant to the discussion of this parable. As my pastor pointed out, the equation Jesus presents would have been anticipated to end with the following- a priest, a levite and Israel (Ezra 10:5; Nehemiah 11:3). This would have been the equation applied to the Jewish expectation, being held now by the only surviving tribe (Judah) from the period of exile. In a very real sense the idea of Israel was seen to be pronounced dead with the Diaspora. Thus what we find in Judah in the time of Jesus is a push for reform by the Pharisees. This reform includes the strict resistance to that which they see lying at the root of the exile (idolatry), and a further return to faithfulness regarding the Torah.

To summarize:

1. The priest and the levite formulate an expectation regarding the third – the restoration of the idea of Israel, which would mark a full return from exile.

2. Jesus throws it for a loop, replacing this oft cited equation with the Samaritan

3. These are the same Samaritans that had just rejected the proclamation of the kingdom and healing of the sick in Luke 9:1-2;53.

Now notice the parallel with 9:53 and the direction of the movement in chapter 10. “The (Samaritans) did not welcome him (Jesus) because he was heading for Jerusalem.” Contrasted with heading “down” from Jerusalem.

Notice a second parallel in 9:54- “When the disciples James and John saw this (the Samaritans rejection of Jesus), they asked, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them.” Contrasted with chapter 10 where the judgment of fire is placed on Capernaum and mercy is being enacted by the Samaritan.

The movement to Jerusalem contrasted with the movement away, indicating that what the priest and levite, or the expert in the Law, have missed is the point of this movement- Jesus’ kingdom work, which is built on this call to mercy and justice.

As Jesus states in 10:13, “if the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Tyre and Sidom (pagan cities), they would have repented long ago.” But you who have been given this knowledge of the kingdom, you still fail to see what it is all for- a kingdom for the world. A kingdom moving out into the world.

This is how the idea of Israel, the harbinger of God’s promise to restore creation, left dead in the Diaspora, gets restored. The expert in the Law asumed that the point was the necessary rejection and judgment of the world, not mercy. After all, idolatry led to exile, thus Judahs return hinged on its repentance (a return to Torah faithfulness). The question who is my neighbor is looking to justify the expert in the laws commitment to this present day reform- resist idolatry by condemning the world. Have I resisted the right thing, is the question. In doing so he misses the actual work of God- mercy for the world. This is, after all, where the story of Israel, their story, has been scattered and dissolved. The call to go and do likewise then is both the answer to the initial question and to the second. How will the promised restoration come about? Through participating in the Kingdom work that is moving out into the world, thus restoring the idea of Israel in the process,

I was genuinely taken captive by Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between The World and Me, read from the vantage point of being a white male living in Canada. Yes, I am certain Coates has his detractors and his disagreements- comes with the politicized territory. But I found him to be a poignant window into a world not my own, breathing a kind of poeticism into the conversation befitting one who understands the power of langauge and words. Written from a father to a son, the non-fiction narrative approach helps enliven ideas that might otherwise get lost in the ambiguity of theory.

I recently finished his follow up called The Message, which if it lacks the pointed bite of his prior commentary, also reaches and applies more broadly as the story of the son growing into a writer. It follows his travels through three distinct places- Africa, South Carolina, Palestine- showing us how he became aware of the power of language and the word. Of story.

I’ve been mulling over some of my highlights this week, beginning with this quote,

“When I think of my earliest days as a writer, what I recall is a kind of longing- I felt everything I wished to say, even if I didn’t exactly know it.” (P 129)

I’m not so presumptuous as to call myself a “writer”, but what stood out for me hearing these words is how much resonance it holds for any act of communication. The deep felt need to communicate what is in one’s head and ones heart and the frustration that comes from either not knowing how to or of such efforts failing to be heard and understood.

One of the biggest struggles in my life is the struggle with feeling misunderstood and without the ability to bridge that understanding with others. Coates writes of story and words playing the role of “haunting”, by which he means bringing to the surface a shared understanding of what is right and wrong about a given thing or moment or state or idea. When I think back on my earliest years, pen and paper was my way of having this same dialogue with myself, both about the world I was grappling with out there and my place in it.

Coates writes,

“There are dimensions in your words- rhythm, content, shape, feeling. And so too with the world outside.” (P 44)

The relationship between word and reality helps us shape the feelings that often are caught inbetween. We do not understand the world, or for that matter ourselves (or more so yet, our place in it), and yet words speak where we cannot. As Coates describes it,

“The accretion of imperfect, discomfiting life must be seen and felt so that the space in your mind, gray, automatic, and square, fills with angle, color, and curve… But the color is not just in the physical world you observe but in the unique interaction between that world and your consciousness- in your interpretation, your subjectivity, the things you notice in yourself.” (P 44)

What we experience as one who has been set in relationship to the world around us is the product of the complexities this very relationship creates. This is what we feel, the feelings themsleves birthed from what we experience and what we observe, and these feelings, these intuitions, are brought to life through the power of langauge, of the word. To speak a word, to write a word, is to release these feelings into the spaces and places they are attempting to wrestle with and define and make sense of. This becomes, then, the necessary act of interpretation, which always needs an interpreter.

Which is perhaps the reason why being misunderstood, or the failure to communicate be it through ones own inability or a failed process, is such a pervasive and oppressive truth shared by more people than I realized for most of my waking years.  As one Psychology Today article puts it, “One of the hardest burdens to bear is being misunderstood by other people.” It’s also one of the most common experiences we humans share. When we cannot communicate what’s on the inside, especially where it relates to others perceptions of us and what is necessary and important to us, and worse yet when these become perceptions that have the power to dictate and shape us in ways that run counter to what we feel, we (or I) no longer feel like I have any control or agency in these matters at all. I am what the world tells me I am and the world remains haunted by the things that haunt it, even as the words I put out into the world say otherwise and long for the opposite.

And yet, to believe in the power of the word is to believe that there is some external truth that is drawing them forwards and out of us, however it is that we communicate it. There is a reason they are being spoken and written, which is precisely why they are worth being pursued. And sometimes, as Coates puts it, the best reminder that this is true is immersing yourself in the stories, in the words, of others. We are all stories being told, after all. We all belong to a story.

“As a reader, I changed. I was no longer merely turning words over in my head or on my tongue- I was now turning over entire stories… as I turned the stories over in my mind, I could feel the revelations spinning out of them.” P (10)

It’s a reminder that we are all speaking words precisely because we feel, and the best revelations occur when we realize that we feel the same world, even if we see and experience it from different vantage points. Even more powerful when the words of another somehow become our own. This is what Coates offered to the many persons of color encountering his work, evidence in the many reviews and responses stating that he put into words a feeling that otherwise could not be spoken, and gave a new license and ability to speak this same word, and even a new word themselves.

Which means there’s something even more powerful at play in this picture- you never know when merely speaking your word might free someone else to feel understood and thus freed to speak.

One last note, perhaps needing to be relegated its own separate thought and thread- this is also why, I think, I have found such solace and healing in the Christian narrative. The notion of the Word being spoken into our midst as God’s act of solidarity or understanding with the human experience remains one of the most haunting and powerful revelations for my own journey. It shapes the God-human relationship into a narrative, into a story, through which we can both understand and be understood, and it breathes into us the invitation to speak our own word in response.

James Monaco, in his book How To Read A Film, connects the development of film to the science of brain function. On a technical level, to tell a story on film requires understanding how it is that we process images, and the art of film, of creating on-screen storytelling methods which imitate movement in time and space, utilizes technological tools to help shape this as a coherent experience. Much in the same way that our brains process information and formulate memory.

Consider how filmmakers decipher the relationship between scenes (continuous) and sequences (a broken up series of scenes). It is the relationship between these two essential  components of narrative form that allows a film to make sense of otherwise disparate moments, activities, ideas, encounters, ect.. This is in fact how we navigate each and every day of our lives. Our brains need to take the scenes that frame our experiences in time and space and arrange them together to formulate a coherent point of view or experience. Without this we could not function

Sequences themsleves, broken down into two categories, episodic and ordinary, also allow us to distinguish between function and interpretation. When a sequential narrative is formed and coherent, it frees us, again in the same way as processing memory, to distinguish between the scenes, and to narrow in on the specifics of each scene. Without that broad, narrative view as an interpretive lens the scenes would cease to be coherent.

Even the way film is designed, establishing the necessary frames per second to accord with how long an image stays in our memory, is working in tandem with the science of brain function. This is how and why a strip of film or the movement of digital images creates the illusion of seeing an unbroken image that contains movement in space and time.

Or consider the way film takes the rules of prose, dictated by punctuation, and plays that into a visual language. We may not always realize it, but our brains are constantly moving between flashback and the processing of fresh images. In a sense this is what film language would describe as the momtage- the act of mixing images and conjoining them at the same time. All of which requires an active use of punctuation in our day to day processing. Our brains break things down, compartmentalize, and form a narrative based on the metaphorical sentences that our experiences represent.

I also found this to be a really interesting insight to go along with that. Monaco notes that while it may seem counterintuitive, something like the hard cut (shifting from one image to another) correlates more with the way our brains actually function than the panning shot. The pan, in which the camera moves from one thing to another, is effectively dictating the narrative the Director wants to tell. It is guiding us to details we would normally just pass over in day to day function. We experience the hard cut, not the pan. This is equally true with things like the jump cut, where time has the appearance of being condensed by jumping us from one moment to another, eliminating the process of getting from point a to point b. This is an obvious editing tool designed to hold our attention and engage effective storytelling, but it’s the art of manipulating actual brain function that allows it to work.

Here’s another interesting point. Monaco notes a difference in langauge between America and Europe. In Europe montage, a key element of narrative filmmaking, means editing. In America editing is its own term. What’s the significance? Editing denotes the idea of cutting down, while montages “build up from the raw materials.” If the montage creates continuity by blending unrelated things into a shared narrative, building up then is the act of forming a narrative out of the foundation that is already there, a way of seeking to understand this foundation as the natural and necessary framework for the narrative itself. On the other hand, cutting down is the act of fitting reality into an external set of rules and perceptions that we coerce and manage and formulate apart from that foundation. It’s worth stating the model the montage is following is built on the more integrated understanding of the European approach. In terms of brain function, it is a ground up approach.

On codes- this is shared langauge that filmmakers can evoke, utilize, and manipulate. These codes apply to the rules of filmmaking, defining the technical asoects of visual storytelling in film. They also apply to what these aspects are utilizing in terms of that preexisting foundation. Syntagmas (narrative elements, chronological or not), are evoking images that have a shared language. Filmmakers understand that when viewers see a particular image they are also seeing particular ideas, sharing necessary reactions, making automatic connections. Because these codes don’t need to be established or explained, they can be manipulated in service of the narrative a filmmaker wants to establish and explore. These are the natural associations that form from our shared cultural context, which is also how our brains form our sense of identity and character.

Of course there is a relationship between the art on screen and the camera movement/placement a filmmaker is employing. It’s here where the complexities of our own pov and the artists pov come into relationship with the perspective of the camera. Much in the same way, we build relationships between our selves and the world around us, only here the camera becomes that additional element which can enable us to interpret reality through the art of imitation. This is what allows film to both direct our focus and exist in relationship to it, ultimately with an awareness of how the brain sees and interprets the world around us. It can follow (stay focused on a moving subject) or utilize Rack focus (shift our focus). It can match cut (link two disparate scenes by the repetition of an action or a form), it can edit (joining two shots and determining the length of each), it can engage deep focus or narrow focus, it can jump or pan. What is perhaps most powerful about this art form though is that it informs how we see and understand the world while simultaneously enabling us to see and understand the world

Some final thoughts on why I’ve been thinking about all of this over the past week:

1. Over the years I have become more and more indebted to narrative philosophy/theology (see Walter Fisher’s book Human Communication As Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value and Action). Narrative philosophy is defined as “a theory that suggests that human beings are natural storytellers and that a good story is more convincing than a good argument.” (Wikipedia) Another definition states it as “a theory that suggests that human beings are natural storytellers and that a good story is more convincing than a good argument.” Narrative Theology is built on the same notion, using narrative approaches to bridge ancient and modern contexts by way of scripture and Tradition as story rather than doctrine. I have found this study of film as an artform to align with this philosophical approach to understanding reality, especially where it connects to how we know and how we experience it. Story is not only integral to how we interpret this reality, it’s integral to the way our brains process  reality as narrative.
2. Reality is more than what we observe and experience on a functional level. It has a foundation and an ontological shape, it requires the art of interpretation. It needs language. It’s experienced through the construction of codes. All of this invites another central conviction of mine: participationist philosophy/ theology, defined as a theory of knowledge that holds that meaning is enacted through the participation of the human mind with the world. All things known in and through relationship. The art of film is  expressly about the different components functioning in relationship. These different components are active. They participate in the establishing of the narrative, and through this the narrative can become known. Similarly we participate as viewers, engaging in the reading of a film so as to be informed and transformed by it. Taken together with narrative philosophy, these two things have a lot to say about what it means to be human.

“Film is difficult to explain because it is easy to understand… somewhere between lies the genius of film.” (P191

If film is distinguishable by its adherence to technology and technicalities, it is equally distinguishable by its esthetics. Understanding the technical dimensions (the science of film) can make us better readers of the films esthetics, or symbols (interpretation of meaning). In his book, How To Read A Film, James Monaco spends the first nearly 200 pages on the science before moving into the necessary function of interpretation.

As Monaco suggests, “much of films meaning comes not from what we see (or hear) but from what we don’t see.”  He goes on to describe this as the ongoing act of comparing what we see with what we don’t see. Here the practice of studying function and form become a foundation for asking what these signs are pointing towards. And for this we need symbol, or language. As Walter Percy so wonderfully expresses in his book The Message in the Bottle, signs and symbol are both integral to our ability to speak about this world, the world we observe and experience, with any sense of coherency. Science is but one way of knowing and gets us to a singular point- the basic constrcution of a film. For us to know what a film means we must ask what a film is saying.

Which of course means understanding the artists role and the role of the viewer. As Monaco noted earlier on, one of the outcomes of modernism and its indebtedness to a singular way of knowing (science) is the collapse of the art itself into the product of the viewers own making. There’s an irony to this, as the reason for this is the gradual deconstruction of arts sacredness along with the sacredness of the artist. Art becomes a mirror of societies true form of worship- progress, and thus it no longer mirrors the world it is imitating but remakes the world in its own image.

And yet, at its heart, beholden as it is to technology and as captive as it becomes to the modern project, film, has the power to bind us to something more eternal, and what sits behind this is the simple reality of how it is that we know anything at all

Signs will always need symbols.

“Very few films are strictly denotative; they can’t help but be connotative, for to speak film is partly to invent it.”  p 190

To speak is to invent. Invent what? Language.

Monaco bridges the line between the peculiar nature of film as a form without a language, and the fact that it functions LIKE a langauge. It simply cannot be broken down into parts that are able to speak on their own. The parts will always be compared with the whole, the same way language, or symbol, is appealing to something external to itself. The part stands for the whole or the whole for a part (p188), and in both cases remain interconnected in an appeal to knowledge, or to the act of knowing.

We learn to read the image to understand the image, as Monaco puts it.

Language analyzes. Or as Monaco insists, the real value of language, or symbol, is the wealth of meaning we can attach to it. Further, what’s unique about film is that it is a continuum of meaning. Which cannot be broken down and explained by the science of its construction. It is moving us towards something transcendent, something true about the sign, which includes a signifier and the signified, which the symbol is seeking to interpret.

There is yet another important facet of this, which connects to the difference between the page and the screen. Monaco notes that “The reader of a page invents the image, the reader of a film does not.” Yet he insists,  both… must work to interpret (sign and symbol). What does this mean? The langauge that we find in the written or spoken word is itself evoking the need to imagine the image the word is signifying. Words give meaning to that image we sense but cannot otherwise explain. Film by contrast is both word and invention. And yet the power is found in the simple fact that this becomes, in a sense, it’s own language, it’s own word that must be interpreted all the same. It would be a fallacy to state that the technology erases this need for interpretation, even if modernism has spent so long convincing us that this must be the case.

The same is true for our observation and experience of this world. If technological advancement mirrors scientific advancement, the temptation of modernism is to be convinced that we have arrived at the ultimate meaning and truth, when in fact we have simply arrived at an understanding of its function and form. We haven’t collapsed a once robust interest in knowledge of the whole into its parts, nor have we filled in what is often stated by some superficial readings to be the god of the gaps. Our world is much the same as it has always been- function and form that require language and interpretation to say something about it. To know something about it. Rather than having done away with the need for such an appeal to transcendence and meaning and truth, the real illusion is this idea that these things can either be reduced to function and form or created in its own image. Art, and film, remind us that such truth must exist in order to be appealed to. Signs and symbols must have that external force of presence for art to matter, and perhaps the most compelling evidence that it does is the simple fact that art, even when presently being consumed by the narrow confines of the modernist enterprise, still seems to matter.

Even further, it still seems necessary and essential to knowing anything about this world that it is analyzing at all.

In a recent episode of the Bema Podcast, host Marty Solomon references Brad Gray, discussing one of the distinguishing factors of the Judeo-Christian narrative. I mentioned in a previous post on this site that memory is a concept indebted to the Judeo-Christian Tradition, at least in the way it utilizes it as redemptive act and concept. Solomon notes how the Judeo-Christian tradition referred to the future as “the behind days”. Unlike pagan cultures (pagan being defined appropriately rather than polemic) which were obsessed with future and a forward facing posture, the Judeo-Christian Tradition taught and practiced a backwards facing posture. The future is unknown, the practice of faithful living is rooted in memory, or remembering. Therefore they “backed into the future”, precisely because they were always facing backwards.

I loved this concept. It’s written into the whole of the scriptures. It feels right to the posture of my own life living in a western society obsessed with the myth of progress.

It gained some weight reading through Lous Daniel’s How To Write Your Life Story.

The entire premise of this how to manual (more of a course than a book, as Daniel’s describes) is built on the notion that the author/professor firmly believes everyone should engage in this process, and second that it is built on the practice of building a memory bank. Memory is at the core of this process. More striking is the fact that Daniel’s has seen this process bear fruit in both young and old. It’s not something we do necessarily after we arrive in the future, it’s something we do as a valuable part of living our pasts into the future.

I’ve started this process. Thus far its been illuminating and fascinating- and I’m only at the part where I’m logging memory. The more I log, the more memory starts to take central focus in how I am seeing the present. In fact, this is one of the tips of formulating this into a story, is always connecting the past to the present. This allows us to see how we are formed by this practice of remembering, and likewise how it can be a part of our daily living in the now. 

He (Jesus) was teaching in their synagogues, and everyone praised him (Luke 4:15)

All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this (Luke 4:28)

Separated by a meager 13 verses, the fourth chapter of Luke’s Gospel details these polarized responses by the “people in the synagogue” in Galilee, Jesus’ hometown.

Which begs the question, what leads to the shift in posture? Why the change?

Picking up on some of the patterns embedded in this small section of text can help in parsing this out, beginning with 4:22:

All spoke well of him and were amazed

Directly preceding this we find Jesus stating “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” (4:21) What scripture? Jesus cites, in the traditional posture of a rabbi, Isaiah 61:1-2. What is this passage about?  It is about proclaiming the long awaited and long expected “year of the Lord’s favor.” The fullness of time. For any faithful Judean, the people occupying the synagogues, this would have been marked by the return from exile. Hence why stating that the time had come led to amazement.

But here’s the key to understand the shift: note what precedes the proclamation of the Lord’s favor

• Proclaim good news to the poor
• Proclaim freedom for the prisoners
• Proclaim recovery of sight for the blind
• Proclam liberation of the oppressed

Now look at how Jesus responds to the amazement. Sure, you’re amazed now, but I know how this story goes- the prophet is always rejected in their hometown. Remember Elijah (vs 25)? Instead of going to the widows in Israel he went to a widow in Zarapath. Remember Elisha? Instead of attending to leprosy in Israel he cleansed the Syrian.

Hence, your amazement is because you will want me to do here what I did in Capernaum, missing who I am and what it is I came to do- the scripture is fulfilled (Israel’s renewal) in the outflow of the spirit, not in its containment. This is the great paradox Jesus represents. It’s like Paul states in Romans 9-12. The outflow to the Gentiles is good news for Israel, and the salvation of Israel (the outcome of this outflow) is good news for the Gentiles. It is in the outflow that “all Israel shall be saved”, and it is in the salvation of Israel that we find this salvation (good news) flowing out into the whole of the world.

There’s a familiarity to the response we get from the people in the synagogue. They are furious. So angry in fact they want to throw him off a cliff. Any amazement they had is now gone. And where does Jesus go? To capernaum. Luke underscores the irony by contrasting the people of the synagogue (who is this, isn’t this the son of Joseph) with the demons (I know who you are). The synagogue- are you going to leave us languishing? The demons- have you come to destroy us? 

Welcome to the life of the prophet.

Only here we come to perhaps the most important part. Jesus concludes this passage by stating,

I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that is why I was sent

The good news

The fulfillment of the promise made with Israel for the sake of the world.

Here’s the thing about the Gospels being situated within the prophetic Tradition. Prophecies were always about immennce. It was about the thing sitting directly upon the horizon (the judgment of the surrounding nations bearing down on faithless Israel) and always set in contrast with God’s continued faithfulness. In Jesus, the imminence shifts to fulfillment. It is about “today.” It is about the person standing in their midst.

This is the good news, even if it doesn’t sound like good news to the Galileans watching this person heading in the direction of Capernaum to bring good news to the poor, freedom to the prisoners, sight to the blind, liberation to the oppressed. For any Judean seeing themselves as the sole survivors of exile and sole representative of this idea called Israel, this was deemed a condemnation of their faithfulness to the Torah. Jesus looking outwards was, in their minds, like speaking to a dead idea. The hope of the world started with them. In a sense this is true. Jesus’ resurrection would begin in Jerusalem with the arrival of the kingdom of God. But it is in the outflow that this dead idea called Israel would turn into good news for Judea.

In his commentary on Luke Scot McKnight calls this an act of holistic redemption. Everything being turned inside out.

This is our faith, that God has interrupted history from its middle in Jesus Christ, and we know the end from the middle because God has known the end from the beginning

This is the persistent witness of God’s faithfulness. This is the good news. What was imminent has become today. Which is precisely why we continue to look to the outflow. If we want to know who Jesus is and what Jesus did we look to what He continues to do all around us in the world. Good news for the world becomes good news for our own lives. This was always the point, that God’s glory (presence) would fill the earth and that in so doing Sin and Death itself, that enslaving agent that has creation in its grip, would be defeated.

I acknowledge that the majority of my friends and acquaintances find this weird. I also know I’m not the only one who feels this and thinks this. But whenever I find myself in discussions with others about an assumed and seemingly common and pervasive desire to escape or retreat back to nature and the outdoors, I often feel obligated to reply by stating that my ideal conception of a retreat or escape is actually going further into the heart of a city. I find what is often described as “nature”- the woods, remote hikes, mountains, camping- to be stressful rather than therapeutic. What is therapeutic to me has always been experiencing and embracing a marriage of culture and environment.

I’ve been working my way through Christopher Alexander’s book The Timeless Way of Building. I’m loving it so far, described since it’s release as revolutionizing the way we think and theorize about archecture and city spaces, but it was a chapter dealing with the “nature” of building (or building’s) that shed new light on why it is I feel the way I do about this common desire to escape to nature,

It largely stems from his appeal to broadening our definition of nature. Rather than conceiving of it as non-human and non-human created physical properties, objects or spaces found in the world, or further spaces uncorrupted by and absent of human activity (as though we exist apart from or against nature), nature should be reapplied to mean, more appropriately, the true quality (or nature) of a thing. To speak of nature is to speak about what something is.

Along these same lines he makes a similar appeal when it comes to the concept of life itself. I remember reading a book by that same name (Life Itself) and coming to the realization that life has no accepted and agreed upon definition. In the world of academia and scholarship, and  similarly in the workings of everyday society and common understanding, the application and use of the word life is inconsistent and largely held captive by its culturally positioned usages. We use it and redefine it when it serves a functional purpose, but we cannot locate a singular, governing application that tells us where the line between what is alive and what is not, what is less or more valuable, gets drawn, or whether there is even a line at all. All we have are social constructions.

Alexander, then, utilizes the freedom this space affords to recontextualize life in a broader and more unifying sense. Even if we distinguish between the life of a space or building and the life of a creature, both things share the same universal qualities. Life denotes something that exists in relationship to the world it occupies, something with the power to both be transformed by it and to transform these surroundings. As such, we can speak of buildings and spaces as being alive, of having a presence. We can also speak of them, in cases of buildings and spaces that stand detached from their environment or those which are non-expressive in their nature, as dead space devoid of life.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of this theory is the idea that buildings and spaces can have a life of their own. This obviously evokes the fact that buildings and spaces are acts of creation, and as such cannot bring about their own existence. And yet, as subsequent chapters point out, acts of creation are imitations of reality, meaning they are always reflective of the patterns that we find governing reality as a whole and which are inherent to the world we are creating within.

This does not mean, however, that the creations themselves are static and uniform. He speaks of such things as having a dynamism that ensures each thing, for what it shares in qualities, also has a unique representation. This is in fact something we know intuitively, and exists precisely because creators of buildings and spaces each have a necessarily limiting and thus differimg and diverse vantage point and set of knowledge of the world. We understand, intuitively so, when these buildings and spaces become stripped of that perspective and become products of an established and governing system detached from this creative process- for example, suburbia, or strict enforcement of rules regarding new developments of neighborhoods and condos (where every blueprint is the same). We also understand this to be true in what we normally mean by nature. Nature is an act of creation, but it is also, in and of itself, constantly creating. What emerges from these acts of creation is diversity. No blade of grass, no tree is the same. The fact is, if it was all the same we would cease to see it as life giving or alive. The world would be perceived as dead.

Coming back to my happy place- sitting in a coffee shop connected to the sidewalk and streetside of city blocks infused with a mix of buildings, trees, parks and structures, all coexisting in relationship. Train stations, seaports, cathedrals and coliseums, old cities and sky scrapers bridges, rooftop patios and old market squares, grand old cinemas and modern arenas, quiet shops and bookstores and busy outdoor markets. These are the spaces where I find myself rejuvenated. The best of these buildimgs are creative acts that open the door to reshaping its relationship to the space that surrounds it. Where lakesides meet living, or where shared roadways lead to shared destinations, where reclaimed history leads to remagined lands of the living.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not disparaging the woods or dumping on the tranquility many find in the outdoors. It’s simply that I personally feel disconnected from the world in these spaces. I lose sight of where I fit within it, and it makes it harder to appreciate the patterns. I lose sight of that relationship and it’s transformative power. It creates this divide between where I feel like I am trespassing and where my own mode of living, as part of nature, is allowed to be and exist. It reduces humanity to the unwantedness and finds in nature some kind of unpolluted antidote. Which of course leaves me just as uncertain about the spaces I return to as well.

A small caveat here- I fully understand humanity’s role in neglecting and abusing it’s relationship to the world around it. This exists. I just don’t think the answer is established dichotomies. To me this actually makes the problem worse. Reimagining the relationship and building to feed this relationship is the solution. To find humanity in the world and a world with humanity in it helps to share my perspective of a world set in relationship to its different living parts

Some more thoughts on my journey through the book How To Read A Film by James Monaco.

Thoughts relating to how we see, how we know.

Monaco points out that a common artistic presence runs underneath all forms of art regardless of adaptations of technology and the subsequent  development of new technique. One can study painting, for example, without needing knowledge of oil. The single exception is film. Why? It is indebted to and a product of technology. In a sense, it acts and functions as a technological lens through which to see the entire spectrum of the arts as a unified whole.

There are two levels of narrative cohesion at play here. One anchors film as a uniquely modernist expression or creation (the lens). It locates its revelatory power in the myth of progress, having relocated the artistic process in our ability to capture and tame the mysteries of the world through the employment of physics. We have captured the laws of time and space that govern this world and use this to remake the world in our own image. Art is no longer imitating life, life is being formed through the employment of this structural and practical artistic process- life itself has become the mirror image of our technological advancements, blurring the lines between what is artificial and what is real, or creator and creation.

And yet there is another level of narrative cohesion at play here, and it lies with this simple question: can this technological advancement ever outrun its necessary foundation.

Or to put it this way- can this technological advancement ever render that common artistic presence obsolete.

I don’t think it can. The persisting critique of modernism is simply this- the promise that it can unify the world and make sense of the world through its singular lens of science and progess has left the world without a necessary foundation. The only world it can know is the world of its own making, reducing knowledge to a singular way of knowing (science) and seeing as a singular conception (progress). The danger of film is that it leads us to think that artistic progression is the point rather than the art. That the form is able to transcend the aim of its knowledge.

In truth, the form, properly understood and detached from the reality of art’s necessary progression and innovation, reveals that necessary narrative foundation, it doesn’t render it obsolete. To neglect this foundation is to find ourselves in a crisis of meaning, measuring reality as purely a matter of form and function rather than a reality that has any inherent value, meaning and defintion. This is the same thing we see in modernism’s gradual march towards redefining naturalism in opposition to appeals to the transcendent. Naturalism, once simply a concern for knowing the nature of reality itself, became a way of domesticating the necessary mystery within the structural confines of form and function- scientific progress renders the common presence of knowledge and sight obsolete. We lose that necessary foundation for knowing and seeing truthfully.

The strength of film is that it can awaken us to the reality that knowledge and sight is rooted in the necessary foundation that form and function help to reveal and to understand.

To set this directly within the practicalities of function and form, consider the film lens. As Monaco describes, there are two kinds of lenses- wide angle or telephoto (wide and narrow). These lenses are distinguished by their points of perspective, their specific angles which define how and what we see.

Monaco makes an interesting observation in pointing out just how bound these lenses are to the laws of physics. The camera cannot achieve the concept of depth purely by appealing to a singular form of perspective. It needs them both to create the illusion of depth of perspective. Depth comes from playing with both the wide and narrow lens simultaneously. As one gradually narrows the other gradually expands, establishing this sense of uniformity. In this sense, the modernist appeal to form and function as a primary interpretive lens actually creates the absence of depth, not greater knowledge. The same would go for neglecting function and form in favor of the wide angle lens, a fact that should counter responses to modernism that neglect or ignore the sciences,

There is one more aspect of the lens that becomes important here- the reality of light. Without light any such visual representation would become incoherent. We need light to see regardless of which lens we are employing, and a filmmakers primary role is to determine how much light is let in (aperture) based on how dark the space is.

Light is the illuminating source that allows us to see. No matter how much technology progresses, this basic truth remains uniform. It’s a reminder of our dependency on both form and meaning. A filmmaker can use a lens in relationship to the light to focus us on a particular image, but that image will always be purposed for the sake of revelation. Not of itself, as though a film sequence exists solely to reveal the details of its form and function, but of the meaning and nature of this reality. The foundation of art itself.