Darn You, Theophrastus Aristotle

A friend and blogger—or, to be more specific, a blogger I admire who has become an online friend—has challenged me to participate in a meme called “Books that influenced my reading of the Bible.” As he writes in his post on the subject,

There is one of those memes going around in which people volunteer a list of books that influenced their readings of the Bible. The rules say that works are not limited to Biblical studies literature, but can include religious works or works of literature. The list is nominally set at 5 books, but that is obviously an arbitrary number, and I have more than 5 books to list here.

And then he tagged me. You heard me right: he tagged me. I am, of course, utterly powerless to refuse.

But I can at least refashion to rules to my own advantage. I’m going to broaden the category very slightly. Instead of books that influenced my reading of the Bible, I’m going to recast it as books that influenced my religious worldview and moved me away from seeing scripture as verbum Dei and more as a collection of documents that recorded groups’ and individuals’ encounters with the Great Mystery and their attempts to understand and interpret that interaction. (Boy, that was a long sentence!)

The first book on the list—or the first three books, depending on how you look at it—is Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology

. It’s mostly available in three separate volumes, but my version was a heavy one-volume affair. My copy is chockablock with my notes, written in an uncustomarily small hand. They crowd the margins, they encroach on (and sometimes write over) the text, they underline, they point, they shout, and most importantly, they argue. No other book have I found so infuriating, enlightening, brilliant, important, and occasionally, downright wrong.

Tillich took me from an comfortable literalism to finding a home in the larger questions. He taught me that the gray areas are where I want to live. I liked the way Tillich struggled with the relationship of reason to revelation, and with the definition of who or what God is. For Tillich, God does not exist, which is not to say that there is no God: “existence,” for Tillich, means “that which is created,” and as God is not a created being, God cannot exist. Rather, God is something greater, something deeper: the “ground of being.”

Richard Eliott Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible?

is essentially an exploration of the

Documentary Hypothesis, which says that what we now know as the Torah was originally four or five different independent narratives woven together at a later date by a redactor. There are a lot of works on the subject, but what made Friedman’s book so seminal for me is that he treats the Bible as if its pages contain a juicy mystery, a fascinating puzzle that even casual readers can discern and unravel. He invites us to look at the loose threads in the text, and pull and tug at them until we discover where each strand leads. It made the whole area of textual criticism not something academic and remote, not a hypothesis that is overlaid onto the text, but something alive, something the biblical text itself invites us to see.

The next one is also more Bible-specific. Morton Smith’s The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel According to Mark

hit me like a brick between the eyes. In 1958, Smith (a professor of ancient history at Columbia) visited a Greek Orthodox monastery and discovered a fragment of a letter attributed to second-century theologian Clement of Alexandria. The letter discussed a supposedly expurgated passage from Mark’s gospel that revealed an inner circle among Jesus’ disciples.

Remember the mysterious passage in Mark where Jesus is being arrested in Gethsemane and there’s this young man in a linen cloak hanging around, and when the centurions grab for him, they’re left with only the cloak as they watch him run away naked? It was always such an odd little scene. Who was this fellow? Why was he there? Why was he pretty much naked? This “missing” passage answers that: new disciples were baptized in the nude, and some baptisms were undertaken at night, in secret. In the letter, Clement (if he was indeed the letter’s author) was mainly trying to squelch heresies that were arising, including some homoerotic scenarios that people familiar with the secret passage were imagining, but he quoted the entire passage and said where in Mark’s gospel it was originally located. And yes, it fits.

Smith’s discovery was of course tremendously controversial. Allegations that the document was an ancient or medieval forgery, or even that Smith himself was the forger, persisted until Smith’s death, and since then the debates have gotten even more vicious. The case is far from settled. Both sides present arguments that, to my mind, have some validity. But The Secret Gospel‘s impact on me was profound because it showed how human the development of the Bible documents were, full of wrangling and politics and venality as well as beauty and meaning.

There are lots of others: Martin Buber’s I And Thou

. Søren Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death

. Henri Bergson. Karl Barth. Karl Rahner. Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. John of the Cross. Leo Tolstoy. The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing. Abraham Joshua Heschel. Henri Nouwen. All terribly important in my theological and spiritual development. But one other book needs special mention, even in this overlong and surely stupefyingly boring post.

Rudoph Otto’s The Idea of the Holy

, published first in 1917 as The Holy—On the Irrational in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, is one of the most successful German theological books of the 20th century, has never gone out of print, and is now available in about twenty languages. The book defines the concept of the Holy as “that which is numinous.” Otto explained the numinous as a “non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self.” He called the Holy “mysterium tremendum et fascinans”: the mystery that is both terrifying and fascinating.

Otto left a broad influence on theology and philosophy of religion in the first half of the 20th century. The aforementioned Paul Tillich acknowledged Otto’s influence on him, as did Romanian-American philosopher Mircea Eliade. In fact, Eliade used the concepts from The Idea of the Holy as the starting point for his own 1957 book The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion

. And of course Eliade is best known for his seminal work Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

, the first cross-cultural examination of shamanism ever published; it was he who so aptly called shamans “technicians of the sacred.”

For me, the idea of the Holy is the direct experience of God, regardless of the terminology you’d like to use for Him or It. Whether you feel it in the vastness of nature, the intimacy of human relationships, the power of religious ritual, or the simplicity and longing of hope, that experience is what my whole life has been about. Can something be non-sensate and yet palpable?

In the end, it’s not that Otto told me something I didn’t know; he just found words, good and satisfying words, for something I had always thought was purely ineffable. And for that I am grateful.

Cuckoos in Florida

This morning I was awakened from one of the most comfortable sleeps I have had in recent memory to the sound of a cuckoo clock. Problem is, the cuckoo clock in my house ran down weeks ago and I stopped bothering to rewind it. And with the windows shut tight, I can’t hear anything from the neighbors unless they’re standing in their yard screaming; I certainly couldn’t hear a clock from inside their houses.

It was so faint, I thought I might have been dreaming, so I struggled to full wakefulness. Nope, still there. Then I thought that since it seemed to coincide with the tail end of my exhalings, I might be hearing a wheeze from my lungs or something. So I held my breath. Nope, still heard the cuckoo. Could it be the ceiling fan, a ball bearing that is grating on something internal? No, it’s clearly outside the window somewhere.

A real cuckooing cuckoo? In Florida?? Impossible. By the time I was upright, the sound had stopped. A quick Internet search was instructive, though not conclusive: Wikipedia says cuckoos have a “cosmopolitan distribution,” ranging across all the world’s continents except Antarctica, with three species in North America. But while they are “vocal species with persistent and loud calls,” the cuckoo with the familiar sound that gave the family its name is the Common Cuckoo, which is found in Europe. The most likely species in these parts would probably be the Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Coccyzus americanus, or the Mangrove Cuckoo, Coccyzus minorhese.

But then I found this post from a blogger who was startled to hear a similar sound in the Ocala National Forest:

One day in April I was down at the river’s edge washing breakfast dishes when I suddenly heard from across the river within the floodplain forest a loud “KOOK-KOO!” It sounded like a cuckoo clock announcing one o’clock. My vertebrate zoology teacher had taught us that the North American cuckoos never made that call, that it was made only by European cuckoos. I retrieved my binoculars and studied the forest over there, but never did see anyone wandering around with a cuckoo clock in hand. Two days later I heard the same call at about the same time of day, mid-morning. The Cornell Bird Lab states that the yellow-billed cuckoo (Coccyzus americanus) has 6 calls, and provides textual interpretations of 3 of them, but says nothing about the “kook-koo” call (http://tinyurl.com/2udc2k). Cornell also has two recordings of one of the yellow-billed cuckoo’s calls (http://tinyurl.com/2l8z9l). I am left wondering just what it was that I heard on those mornings? Was it a rare type of call that the yellow-billed cuckoo is not otherwise known to make? If so, I was quite lucky to have heard it! This would not be an unusual occurrence, as other birds are known to have many more calls than the average person ever hears. The common crow, for instance, has been said to have over 100 distinct calls, yet most naturalists I know have heard fewer than a dozen of them. The Cornell Lab, in fact, has links to very few yellow-billed cuckoo calls, and the ones it does have are faint, so perhaps this species’ calls have not been sufficiently sampled? Could the call have been made by an escaped pet European, or common, cuckoo (Cuculus canorus)?

Not all of our Florida cuckoos are birds, however. On Friday I went to the movies. The theater had stadium seating, and shortly before the movie started, a slender man, probably in his mid-30s, came in and sat at the end of my row, a few seats away. He carried so much food and drink it looked like he had bought out the concession stand. He wore what looked like iPod earbuds. And he made noises. Some were noises that you might make if you didn’t realize anyone else could hear you, like little grunts or “settling” noises, but some seemed to be in response to whatever he was hearing. Which he continued to listen to even after the movie started, even though he was apparently watching the film.

About fifteen minutes in, a fellow came in and sat on the steps which were right next to his seat, and they chatted. Not loud enough that I felt compelled to shush them (which I am wont to do), but they chatted nonetheless, for about five minutes. Was this a caretaker of some sort, checking in with his charge? No, they were clearly pals and peers, and they were not theater employees or anything. Friend leaves, and the cuckoo goes back to watching Christian Bale scream at the machines relentlessly taking over the world. I look over after a bit and notice that he’s removed his earphones. Twenty minutes later a different man comes in and sits on the steps next to the cuckoo, and they too chat, but not for as long, and the friend leaves. At one point I let out a guffaw at a funny scene, and the cuckoo makes a sound, too, but it’s not a laugh. It’s more of a deep, short whale song: Ooo-WAW. For the rest of the film he is the picture of normalcy, but the moment the movie ends and the credits start to roll, the cuckoo grabs the leavings of his feast and bolts from the theater as if in an act of desperation. I’m sure I saw a look of panic on his face.

The final cuckoo in this story I met yesterday at 7-Eleven. As I’m heading into the store, a duck is standing on the sidewalk yelling at the storefront. And I mean yelling. Angry, insistent squawking, though one couldn’t really call it a quacking noise. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve heard a duck make that sound before. Couldn’t tell you where the duck came from; there are no duck ponds nearby. Shopping center developers around here routinely place small ponds in front of their parking lots, next to the road; they look nice, and it lets the developers pretend they’re preserving wetlands. The ponds nearby attract egrets and herons, and the occasional ibis or anhinga, but no ducks. The biggest enclave of ducks is up in Melbourne, at the big pond next to the public library. It always makes me nervous to enter that library, since these big honking ducks and geese are wandering all over the grounds, and look for all the world like they’re going to head into the library with you (some seem to want to charge the door), and I don’t want to be responsible for creating a Public Duck Disturbance in a No Talking Zone.

Back to the 7-Eleven. Other cars had pulled up by this time, and their occupants were pointing delightedly at the oblivious, furious duck. I’m thinking it might have been arguing with its own reflection. But then it turned away from the store and started walking away down the sidewalk, doing its pigeon-toed little waddle, still talking a blue streak and rather loudly, but now it was clearly talking to itself, the way a disturbed homeless person pushing a shopping cart down a city street might conduct a long conversation with the voices in his head.

I wonder: Do they manufacture cuckoo clocks that groan like a whale or quack like a frustrated duck?

Writing Like a Doctor

If graduate students in the humanities are not being taught how to write, how can we expect those in the sciences to do any better?

by Rachel Toor, Chronicle of Higher Education

I once asked my friend “Joe,” a distinguished professor of history, how he taught his graduate students to write. He reminded me that I had sat in on his mini-lecture about the three different ways to begin an article or a book. Then he stopped talking and looked kind of pleased with himself.

“That’s it?” I said.

Well, he stammered, he figured graduate students learned in some kind of osmotic process. They read a lot; surely while they did that they were picking up tips on how to write.

There were so many problems with that assumption that I think I probably started sputtering at that point. Having been an acquisitions editor of history books, I know as well as anyone that sometimes (often?) groundbreaking books with important arguments and exquisite research — field-changing books — are horrible examples of how to write. They end up being published, and read, but they should not serve as models.

The mere act of reading good books, if you are not stopping to scrutinize the moves and tools used by the writers, examining and dissecting the choices they have made and why they work, will do nothing for you when you sit down to write. If reading good literature was enough, I would have written the Great American Novel years ago.

A couple of summers ago, another friend of mine — let’s call him “Godfrey” — an academic physician, had volunteered to drive with me from Spokane to Chicago, where he had to give a talk. I was en route to Upstate New York for the summer. Godfrey is a good friend. He is a fantastic conversationalist, a terrific athlete, and the best, smartest reader of my work. He is not, however, a great driver. When he gets wrapped up in talking, he forgets about driving and tends to slow to a traffic-jamming crawl.

Godfrey realized that he had three journal articles to finish. So after we’d done enough sightseeing through Montana and Wyoming and had a couple of small spats about where to get gas, we got to work. He drove. I had his computer on my lap. There was a half-eaten bag of Kettle Korn between us.

I started to read his manuscripts, and then made a few simple questions and comments: “Were you raised by wolves?” “How did you manage to graduate from such fancy-pants schools if you can’t even write a sentence?” “Do you know what a sentence is?” “This is a comma.” (Wild body gesture from the passenger seat.) “Learn what it does. You can’t just sprinkle them on your prose like salt.”

Whenever I ask Godfrey to explain his medical and scientific work to me — something I do frequently — I am captivated. He has the ability to get at the most interesting issues, to draw out the implications of what he’s studying, and to explain them in ways that are fascinating. He knows how to tell a story in conversation. He knows which details will enhance suspense, which will come as a surprise.

But when it comes to putting it on the page, those skills desert him. He writes in simple, declarative, passive sentences. He endlessly repeats words and phrases. His language is complicated not only by terms of medical and scientific art, but by using unnecessary Latinate words when plain old Anglo-Saxon ones would do a better job. He has no idea how commas and paragraph breaks can be your friends, doesn’t understand that adverbs are the refuge of the weak and lazy, and that semicolons, like loaded guns, should only be handled by those trained to use them.

In general, none of that has hurt Godfrey in his extensive publishing career. Having read a fair number of articles and grant proposals by his colleagues and peers, I would say he’s no worse than most scientists and physicians, and better than many. Thankfully there are saintlike journal editors who follow in his wake to clean up the linguistic messes.

But there’s something crucial here that often gets lost in academic writing (it’s worse in fields like literary criticism and history). Because the work is so important to academics, sometimes they don’t do a good job of convincing readers that they, too, should find it valuable. In many cases, the writer doesn’t do a good enough job of explaining what the idea is, and then making the best argument for it.

When Godfrey told me that he’d had a manuscript rejected because the reviewers didn’t get the importance of his findings, I explained that the failing was most likely his, not theirs. It’s the burden of the writer to be clear and to let readers know why they should care. Far too many college freshmen start their papers: “In society today … ,” and then make some simplistic suggestion. To them I say, why should I believe you? That is an assertion, not an argument. You have to show me your reasoning, help me follow your train of thought. The strongest and fairest writers make the best possible case for the other side, and then show how and why it’s wrong. It’s more convincing to knock down a strongman, rather than a strawman.

If you want a journal to accept your paper, or a federal agency to grant you coin, you have to make clear what is at stake and why the reader should care. Then you have to put forward the strongest reasoning based on evidence you provide in the clearest language you are able to rally. And then you need to know when you need help.

One of the hardest lessons I learned as a book editor is that the only good editing is the editing the author accepts. I could be brilliant in figuring out what was wrong with a manuscript, but if I couldn’t sway the author, my work was worth nothing. If I couldn’t explain to Godfrey the value of a semicolon, he was never going to learn how to use one. Calling him names, I knew, didn’t help (but neither did it stop me — we’ve been good friends for a long time).

If graduate students in the humanities are not being taught how to write — how to structure an argument, how to make clear what is at stake, how to build tension on the sentence level — how can we expect those in the sciences to do any better? In every field there is an overabundance of content to master. Where do you steal the time in the curriculum to work on the form? The assumption is that whoever has gone before you in the teaching has already covered the basics. Graduate professors think that their students got it in their undergraduate years; composition instructors believe that they don’t need to teach grammar because their students learned it in high school. How many students, do you think, are learning that an understanding of grammar, syntax, and usage is integral to clear expression of thoughts? That knowing how to write well is the most important skill you can develop, regardless of your career path?

Most students don’t think about argumentation after they get their required freshman comp course out of the way. They take this important course when they are overwhelmed by the newness of college and are least ready to learn about the complexities of rhetorical strategies. Composition 101 is probably the hardest class to teach; unfortunately, it is usually led by brand-new graduate teaching assistants. It’s no wonder most people don’t know how to make an argument.

Many students also never absorb the importance of writing outlines. I was reminded of that while looking over the grant application of a pulmonologist friend. Even though I don’t know him well, I didn’t hold back: This is terrible, I said. The structure doesn’t make any sense. It’s repetitive and redundant. Did you write an outline? He told me he didn’t have time to write an outline. I tried to be patient and to explain to him what he apparently never learned in school: An outline is a time-saving tool, not the exercise in busy work that it seemed in junior high.

When I was a book editor, I rejected the work of a multitude of physicians. While I was always interested in how doctors thought about their work, most of them couldn’t get the job done when it came to the writing.

Even now, when I get letters from my own physician giving me the results of lab tests, I cringe. Can I really trust someone to interpret complicated data if she can’t maintain control over her sentence structure? Communication is the fundamental element of most professions. Writing, as Plato reminded us, is a risky business. It should be approached with fear and trembling. Doctors and scientists might sometimes need a reminder that they are writing for humans.

Rachel Toor is an assistant professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University, in Spokane. Her newest book is, Personal Record: A Love Affair With Running, and her Web site is http://www.racheltoor.com.