One would have had to be living under the proverbial rock to have somehow missed what’s been happening in the Middle East as of late.  But just in case that rock is your home, let’s get caught up to speed: 1) Protests in Egypt finally ousted President Mubarak from his 30 year reign, 2) Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi (and his regime) have met their protesters with rank military violence, 3) Moreover, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen, et plus, have all been experiencing their own upheavals.  And for what?  Answer…democracy.1

Ahhh yes, democracy.  That age old political structure that vests the power of the state, and it’s affairs, in the people.  The move to cast down dictatorial, tyrannical, totalitarian, autocratic leadership has been the driving force behind the spirit of liberation in the above mentioned Arab nations.  This, however, is not what’s ultimately interesting; rather, the media’s coverage is what stands to be observed.

One need read/watch/hear the news for only a vapor’s breath of time to see how the media has painted the situation.  Democracy is lifted up as a “beacon of hope” (according to one article), while the regimes of Gaddafi, Mubarak, Al-Khalifa, et plus are seen in the most unflattering of lights.  It is apparent that we, in the West, see democracy as the light of redemption in the ever-progressing narrative being constructed by the media concerning Middle Eastern/North African affairs.

This all reminds me of a riddle my father once told: “What’s black and white and read all over?” Once finally realizing that the riddle plays off the homophones “read” and “red,” it is clear that the answer is the newspaper.  However, in this case, black, white, and red are notable symbols to describe the media’s coverage of the recent liberation movements.  The black and white soundly represent the rigidity and static nature of truth, fact, and principle, which is what the media should (to some extent) offer its audience.  Then you have red, which has many biblical allusions to salvation and life (afforded through sacrificial acts).

This red is what courses through nearly every story.  It so tellingly portrays what’s embedded in our culture’s values, namely, freedom and victory.  We root for the underdog to rise up above the “enemy” and stand triumphantly on the war-bereaved soil of freedom and salvation from the forces of injustice.  This is the narrative that the media is constructing.  It sounds dangerously similar to the gospel.  Who knows, maybe our postmodern climate in the West is not so hostile to the “meta-narrative”2 after all.

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1Democracy is not the sole reason behind the recent protests.  There are many secondary factors that come into play.  Liberty and democracy, however, seem to be the principle issues.

2Notable French philosopher, Jean-Francois Lyotard defined postmodernism as incredulity toward the meta-narrative (see The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984, xxiv.)

The post What’s Black and White and “Red” All Over? appeared first on The Other Journal.

The Road¹, with its impersonal depictions of cannibalism and murder in the aftermath of an unknown apocalypse, is one of the most spiritual novels written in recent years.

The contrast may appear stark: how can the brutally physical reveal that which we tend to conceive of as transcendent? There is a long-standing assumption, at least in the West, that the material world of food and things is in contrast to the mental realms of ideas, values, and God. But it is precisely because he violates this dualism, paying equal attention to both thoughts and things, that Cormac McCarthy is able to measure our own conscious lives with such precision. This novel, with all of its haunting, is not the “spirituality” found in the vapid self-aggrandizement of those who promote secrets for “life improvement,” nor in the vague bourgeois mysticism of Oprahtic neo-liberal optimism, nor in the stark declarations of fundamentalist religion. It is, instead, an examination of culture at its most reduced, a vision of the commitment required to keep the spirit alive.

The narrative situation is simple; the plot, such as it is, minimal. A father and son are making their way south in an effort to flee the oncoming winter cold. The environmental threat is made worse by the fact that at some point in the recent past the sky was turned black, covered in gray clouds, presumably as the result of human action. The destruction is nearly absolute. The trees have all died. Animal life is only evidenced by the remnants of bones. Ash blows everywhere, swirling around the feet of the few remaining humans, clogging their lungs. Food is only to be found as the post-industrial fossils of an earlier time, in cans and boxes scrounged from abandoned houses and stores, a clearly finite and extremely scarce supply. Such scarcity leads some, traveling in groups or waiting in ambush, to cannibalism. Thus, the father and son must be on constant alert, suspicious of whomever they happen upon. While the father is armed, he is saving the last bullets to take his son’s life, to save him from dying an even more horrible death.

There are no chapters in this novel, as if chapters would create some sense of development and denoument, that is, an overarching order or purpose. Instead,the novel is comprised of fragments, brief passages connected by nothing more than the passage of time and the movement of the road. Indeed, the fragment can be considered both the form and content of the novel, as we soon realize that as the characters scrabble for mere biological life, they are also participating in a more fragile and tenuous struggle for language and thought, the remaining pieces of the culture that has been lost. As the father and son keep reminding each other, they, against the barbarism which surrounds them, are “carrying the fire,” seeking to hold on to whatever small acts of language and value they can uncover. These are often far apart, and fraught with moral ambiguity. In one scene, the father must use one of their precious bullets to shoot a man who is holding a knife to the son’s throat. Later, washing the gore from the boy’s hair, he realizes that “all of this [is] like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.”²

The practice of form for its own sake, of pure culture without tradition, cut off from any referent, is the definition of carrying the fire. The blackness is not merely a physical phenomenon, it is a mystical one, penetrated only by language and the creation of symbolic value. Without such forms, the darkness becomes absolute. And yet the fact that this particular pure ritual emerges after an act of violence points to the essential ambiguity surrounding the process. The son becomes suspicious of their fire, of the constant reaffirmation that they are “the good guys” resisting the cannibals around them, of the stories they tell in which the father and son are “always helping people,” since “we don’t help people”.³ If the spiritual exists, it only does so under the threat of exploitation, and of becoming another form of the darkness it is trying to resist.

But in this world there is no alternative. One must continue to evoke the forms, to hold back the encroaching threat of absolute silence. Those who have given up are reduced to mere shadows of meaning, resigned skeptics to whom language is a horrible threat, a reminder of what has been forever lost. Ely, the only character in the book with a name (who later tells the father that this is not, in fact, his name), encountered nearly blind and starving on the road, is one of these skeptics. When the father suggests to the old man that the son may in fact be a god, Ely denies the possibility: “Where men can’t live gods fare no better. You’ll see. It’s better to be alone”.⁴

According to Ely, the human and the divine are both waiting for the end when death will be defeated simply because it will have no more victims—an abandonment to nothingness. Attempting to hold back that moment is simply slowing the inevitable and causing more pain. Instead, as Ely tells us, we are to speed up the final silence, for “There is no God and we are his prophets”.⁵

The relationship between the human and the divine is perpetually reaffirmed throughout the book, not as an actual theological vision of transcendence but as an acknowledgment of the role played by the mind in the making of meaning. Without thought, without culture, without the forms and signs made by human beings, there is brute matter, indifferent space, the earth “trundling past the sun . . . as trackless and unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.”⁶ The Earth, as another book tells us, was without form and void. Only by the perpetual rekindling of the flame can one ever say: “let there be light.”

Of course, this is only half of the story. A too rigid idealism and elevation of human consciousness as the pure origin of all meaning inevitably leads to the very disaster upon which the book is premised: a destruction of the physical world upon which life rests, separation from the material sun that makes spiritual light possible. While language may be necessary to give the world meaning, the presence of the world is required for that language to have any real value. The dwindling of thought is caused by the disappearance of things, the “names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. . . . The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality.”⁷ The forms are holy, but their holiness depends on the existence of the physical world.

Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated then when the father discovers an old brass sextant in the remains of a ship, and he is “struck by its beauty.”⁸ The tool is a particularly poignant discovery, since the sextant is used to measure the Earth, to affix lines and points to the ocean upon which one sails. In this respect, it is a tool of the mind, of the spirit. And yet, the sextant works because of the shape and substance of the world and, most significantly, because of the visibility of the sun. Without the sun, without the visible horizon, it is a useless artifact, a sign without a signifier. Mind without the world is a meaningless tool. The destruction of the world can only result in the elimination of the language which gives that world light.

As distant and terrifying as the world of The Road may appear, it is clear that the threads McCarthy weaves into his novel are pulled from our own history and fears—the mystery of consciousness, the threat of violence, the conflicting and fragile definitions of barbarism and culture,⁹ the place of human existence in the world, and the risk that we may destroy the world by overreaching our own bounds. In this respect, the novel practices what it depicts. It is a form of a history that may yet come, an affirmation of T.S. Eliot’s haunting and yet hopeful call to shore fragments against our ruins.¹⁰

As the often violent dialectical process of defining and practicing culture continues, the final call may be to recognize that we are bearers of the fire, no matter how it may flicker.

Notes

1. Cormac McCarthy, The Road. (New York: Vintage, 2006), 287 pp.

2. Ibid., 74.

3. Ibid., 268.

4. Ibid., 172.

5. Ibid., 170.

6. Ibid., 181.

7. Ibid., 89.

8. Ibid., 228.

9.  One is reminded of philosopher Walter Benjamin’s famous claim that all monuments of civilization are simultaneously products of barbarism.

10. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, (1922): line 430.

When she’s not traveling in Latin America, backpacking in Colorado, performing at U.S. universities or house concerts, blogging (check out Tracy’s blog on The Other Journal blog page), building her relationships and community networks, composing music with words in English and Portuguese, playing with her Great Dane, or working on the music collaborative project The Restoration Village (www.RestorationVillage.com), Tracy Howe is in some manner or other exuding her earnest desire for reconciliation and transformation through conversations and active engagement in issues of social justice.

At a Seattle benefit house concert for Mustard Seed Associates (www.msainfo.org), I met Tracy and listened as her beautiful music unfolded a vision of hope and community, a space for thoughtful inquiry into the tension of tradition and transformation to change. I asked Tracy to share her thoughts and mission with The Other Journal.

The Other Journal (TOJ): What are your earliest experiences with music and songwriting?

Tracy Howe (TH): There was a beautiful baby grand piano in the living room while I was growing up. My parents had gotten a really good deal on it, and my dad played a little by ear. Mostly he had a three song repertoire, the feature piece being “Here Comes the Sun” by the Beatles, that he sat down and played a couple of times every year. By the time I was four, I was spending time in front of the piano, looking at all of the keys, learning some songs by ear. I begged my parents for lessons and was happy to start when I was seven or so and started to excel in classical music.

As for words, I had a vibrant imagination—I wrote an entire play when I was ten or eleven. I journaled and I wrote stories and poetry. By the time I was twelve, I started composing piano pieces, but it was not until college that my words joined the music. My very first album, in fact, which I recorded in someone’s basement while in college, is based around piano composition: the lyrics are overlaid on the music. Over the years, I matured as a songwriter, but that’s kind of where I started.

TOJ: How do you understand your purpose, and how have you found your “voice”?

TH: As the name might imply, I am a restorationist. I believe in a hope that restores people and communities and relationships. Specifically, I am a restorationist following in the way and love of Jesus. Jesus affects my perspective and the way I pursue people. In a nutshell, I understand my mission to be to reconnect broken people to Jesus and communicate things about His hope and promises in the places I go and in the relationships I have. But the music is just a piece of how that might manifest. I want my songs to be the fruit of and a catalyst for God’s work in the world, His love and justice, but I want the way that I tour and relate to communities as an artist also to manifest something of eternal hope and promise.

If my “voice,” then, is the unique expression and perspective I have and the way I am able to uniquely encourage and influence people, that is something I have matured into over the years almost entirely in the context of relationships. From my peers and mentors, who have reflected a fullness in me that I have not been able to recognize myself, to encountering Jesus in the poor and communities I have grown in relationship with—I don’t think anyone can become the fullness of who they are without help.

TOJ: There are strong themes that unfurl in much of your music. Hope, community, and restoration are three; can you describe to us the meaning and motivation inside your idea of restoration?

TH: I would love to! Originally, it was the words and promises of Isaiah, particularly Isaiah 60 and 61 that laid a foundation of vision for The Restoration Project. I had already been touring full-time for a couple of years and The Restoration Project came as a vision of creative partnership more than a musical endeavor actually—a dream of artists and leaders sharing resources, gifts, and friendship internationally and across borders of all kinds, be they political or socioeconomic, to manifest a greater reality of being a divinely created family.

Years later, I went through some restoration of identity and relationships in my own life, and I started to see how our unique expression is related to the process of restoration as well. Again, I believe it can be both the fruit of and catalyst for the manifestation of God’s purpose on the earth.

To put some narrative to these ideas, let’s look at Hosea 2. Remember, Hosea was a prophet that God told to marry a prostitute and through that relationship He taught Israel about His great and patient love for them. It is an incredible book and story, and for the most part, it recounts Hosea’s process and conversations with God. However, in chapter 2, God starts to speak about and interact directly with the woman: “Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her. There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. There she will sing as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt” (Hosea 2:14-15).

God says: (1) I will allure her and bring her into the desert; (2) I will speak tenderly to her (other versions say, “I will speak words of comfort to her”); (3) I will give back her vineyards—the promises of God are being recounted and reclaimed; (4) I will show her the Valley of Achor as a door of hope; and (5) she will sing as in the days of her youth, that is, in the days before she was a prostitute when she was simply a daughter.

There are many more things we could talk about in breaking down this passage, but as for restoration, what I want to focus on is the Valley of Achor becoming a door of hope. The Valley of Achor was a place of death and deception that no one would want to remember or talk about—the story, which is recounted in Joshua, involves deception and violence. So for God to make it a door of hope is incredibly profound. It’s as if to say, all the darkness and ugliness that have become part of your story and existence—the worst things you have gone through—I can take them all and redeem your entire story, and it will become a door of hope. After all, the depth from which we have been restored is proportional to the measure of glory for God in the process. And then look what happened: she sang “as in the days of her youth.” The days of her youth, were the days before her prostitution, the days of just being a daughter.

I very intentionally try to capture the stories of people I know and meet, often digging into the darkness, believing it can be transformed. I write about communities of living faith that inspire me, and I put them in the context of this transformational hope, the kind of hope that takes the worst things in the world and makes them a platform for worship and new songs.

TOJ: What do you hope for?

TH: I have a dream that these songs would be released—this unique expression that comes at the end of restoration and divine transformation. For example, the song of Deborah (Deborah was a judge and prophetess who was written about in the Hebrew Bible, and she sang a song about God’s faithfulness after great trial and battle); no one could have written the song besides Deborah who stood the battle and witnessed God in her journey. But we read it, and something of God is magnified for us. I believe that God has actually chosen to place a great deal of the revelation of his work and purposes in this time inside of His people. For this reason, I actually have a sense of urgency in seeing people restored and expression released. Imagine the stories of nations . . . with sad and tragic histories being redeemed and songs sung from a posture of hope, and the grace and hope those songs might carry if sung in other communities and nations, and the beauty that could be released. Those are the kinds of things I dream about.

TOJ: You spent a lot of time performing at universities. What movements do you see in which young people are living out their roles as members of the church?

TH: One of the most necessary and hopeful Spirit-led movements is an awakening to the Kingdom as a reality that is possible through the love and purpose of God, which is revealed to us in the way of Jesus. There are many things that entails, but more and more, I see a deinstitutionalization of our Kingdom identities emerging from communities of young people. Quite simply, there is a new economy in play. The old church economy, which told people that the only full-time ministry positions were being a pastor or a youth leader, is fading away. People who understand themselves as teachers and leaders in the Kingdom of Jesus are understanding it as a deeper reality than a vocational title, and so they are free to pursue business and politics and science. It is a wonderful thing. And vice versa—artists and poets are being awakened to the eternal purpose of God-breathed expression and their role in a church that not too long ago (and in some cases still) did not recognize the validity of artist leaders (despite the fact that the original Levitical leadership in Israel was one-third artists).

Anyway, it is all very hopeful. My feeling is that it is a timely global awakening of the Spirit, perhaps fueled by the desperate state of the planet and the intense suffering of the global community . . . so I want to set things in motion leading toward restoration and not despair.

Narratives are purposeful and meaningful. When we consider recorded events, even our own lives, I believe we must approach them as narrative. We must envision them as a story, long or short, with a past, present, and future; we must see purpose and meaning or chance mistaking life for a series of random footprints in the sands of time. H. Richard Niebuhr illustrates this function of narrative in life stories by describing two potential histories of a healed blind man:

A scientific case history will describe what happened to his optic nerve or to the crystalline lens, what technique the surgeon used or by what medicines a physician wrought the cure, through what stages of recovery the patient passed. An autobiography, on the other hand, may barely mention these things but it will tell what happened to a self that had lived in darkness and now saw again trees and the sunrise, children’s faces and the eyes of a friend. Which of these histories can be a parable of revelation, the outer history or the story of what happened to a self?¹

But in many respects, Western culture has forgotten the power of the narrative process. We have accepted the post-Enlightenment conception of life as linear and readily discernable and thereby lost our ability to make deeper meaning from story. The result has been to wean a generation away from the power of narrative and contribute to the malaise of meaning that is so evident in our culture .This movement has been particularly evident in many evangelical churches where, until recently, a larger emphasis was placed on looking for truth in the seemingly linear statements of scripture than the more narrative and poetic biblical literature, such as the gospels and wisdom writings.² Epistles that are merely rendered as propositional slogans can provide deceptively strong walls to define our lives by in an age that prizes clarity, predictability, and expediency. Yet such poor readings of scripture will ultimately diminish the potency of God’s redemptive, sustaining grace and mercy to the size of a bumper sticker or the benign beat of a three-minute contemporary Christian pop song.

For example, without the poetic narrative imagination that grounds and sustains the biblical canon,³ someone could read Paul’s letters without ever being confronted with the need to search for meaning, locate the proper canonical context, or humbly seek the revelation of the Holy Spirit for our reading of the text. Passages such as “All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law” (Rom. 2:12); “Do not deceive yourselves” (I Cor. 3:18); “Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love” (Eph. 4:2); “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit” (Phil. 2:3); and “Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put into practice” (Phil. 4:9) can seem fairly straightforward and leave the reader with a view that ready-at-hand pragmatism is the central concern of scripture.⁴ That is, the spiritual struggle isn’t thought to be in the act of interpretation but in how to put what is seemingly plain into practice.

However, when revelation is understood primarily in terms of isolated propositions, we run the risk of missing the forest for the trees, or in this case, we risk missing the narrative of faith as played out through the storied lives of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Solomon, Jonah, and Jesus. The narrative thrust of the scriptures is important because, as author Frederick Buechner points out, we are intrinsically woven into its tapestry-like plot line:

I think it is possible to say that in spite of all its extraordinary variety, the Bible is held together by a single plot. It is one that can be simply stated: God creates the world, the world gets lost; God seeks to restore the world to the glory for which he created it. That means that the Bible is a book about you and me, whom he also made and lost and continually seeks, so you might say that what holds it together more than anything else is us [. . .]⁵

In this essay, I will discuss three critical uses of narrative in the context of faith formation. In the course of this discussion, I will use scripture and other narrative sources, especially C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia in conversation with Sir Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century retelling of the Arthurian quest for the Holy Grail, Le Morte d’Arthur, to show that nonscriptural sources can and should be used to make faith accessible to people who are resistant to things transcendent, people who Friedrich Schleiermacher, the nineteenth-century theologian and father of modern theology, termed the “cultured despisers of religion.”⁶ More particularly, I will focus on how narrative can provide direction, release, and integration in faith formation toward an articulation of our lives as things of beauty—what I will refer to as “the life poetic.”

Direction: Narrative as a Syllabus for the Eternal Quest

Few plot devices feature as prominently in the literary tradition as the quest, which for the purpose of this discussion I define as a chivalrous enterprise in the medieval romantic tradition, usually involving an adventurous journey. The theme of the quest is one that C. S. Lewis employs prominently throughout his Chronicles of Narnia series, most notably in The Silver Chair and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. As with most literature, especially in the fantasy genre, the text can engage the reader on multiple levels. For our purposes, there are four primary tiers of meaning a reader can engage a work in that utilizes a quest motif: the literal story level (the story is merely the story), the analogy level (the story is analogous to something else), the moral or character level (the story imparts a deeper meaning for how one organizes one’s earthly existence), and the anagogical level (the story directs the reader beyond itself, beyond comparisons or analogies, and beyond the earthly concerns of the moment toward a religious or mystical transcendence and deep awakening of Sehnsucht or joy).⁷ As we shall see in The Silver Chair and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lewis carries the reader not only through the literal level of a quest story, but to an anagogical level where faith formation can take shape. This anagogical level is in the tradition of Sir Thomas Malory’s “The Tale of the Sangreal” from Le Morte d’Arthur, where the quest for the Holy Grail provides a lens for our search for meaning as one “looking through a glass darkly” to view humanity’s broken nature and search for truth. As author Madeleine L’Engel writes, “there is an allegorical level to his [Lewis’s] stories, and, when he is at his best, an anagogical level”⁸ It is through Lewis’s use of the quest that the reader can engage in not just a story, but a what I refer to as “the life poetic,” where the truths found in the literal quest can be carried into the reader’s real-world quest for ultimate meaning.

Although the characters, place, and time differ dramatically from book to book, the basic plot of a quest story remains constant on the literal level. A hero is called upon to undertake a journey or task that is vital to either the individual or the community. Others are called upon to assist the hero, and instructions are provided for the journey. As the quest progresses, obstacles occur, and at times of great despair, help from outside the traveling party appears, usually of a supernatural kind. And at last, there is some form of goal attainment.⁹

In both The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair, Lewis sticks to this formula. In The Silver Chair, Eustace and Jill are “called” from outside of their world and into Narnia for the purpose of a quest:

“Please, what task, Sir?” said Jill.

“The task for which I called you and him here out of your own world [. . .] you would not have been called to me unless I had been calling to you,” said the Lion. ”[. . . .] “And now hear your task. [. . .] I lay on you this command, that you seek this lost Prince until either you have found him and brought him to his father’s house, or else died in the attempt, or else gone back into your world.”¹⁰

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the children (Lucy, Edmund, and Eustace) are brought into Narnia to join an in-progress quest that is led by King Caspian who tells the children the task before them:

“And where are we heading for?” asked Edmund. “[. . .] Well, on my coronation day, with Aslan’s approval, I swore an oath that, if once I established peace in Narnia, I would sail east myself for a year and a day to find my father’s friends or to learn of their deaths and avenge them if I could.”¹¹

In both cases, the travelers are given instructions to guide them on their quests. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the travelers are to sail east “for a year a day through the Eastern Seas beyond the Lone Islands.”¹² In The Silver Chair, Aslan gives instructions in the form of signs:

“I will tell you, Child,” said the Lion. “These are the signs by which I will guide you in your quest. [. . .] Remember the signs and believe the signs. Nothing else matters.”¹³

As is basic to a quest story, the travelers in both The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair encounter numerous distractions and obstacles that get in the way of their goal. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the travelers encounter obstacles through their journey in the Lone Islands, such as their surprise capture by Governor Grumpas at Narrowhaven: “But hardly had they raised their cups to their lips when the black-haired man nodded to his companions and, as quick as lightening, all the five visitors found themselves wrapped in strong arms.”¹⁴

While throughout The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the travelers are distracted from the goal by physical obstacles, such as the capture by Governor Grumpas and the transformation of Eustace into a dragon, the travelers in The Silver Chair deal with numerous mental and spiritual distractions as well from the signs that were given to them by Aslan. This is demonstrated when the Green Witch is interrogating the travelers as to the true identity of Aslan and the Sun:

The Witch shook her head. “I see,” she said, “that we should do no better with your lion, as you call it, than we did with your sun. You have seen lamps, and so you imagined a bigger and better lamp and called it the sun. You’ve seen cats, and now you want a bigger and better cat, and it’s to be called a lion. [. . .] Come, all of you. Put away these childish tricks. I have work for you all in the real world. There is no Narnia, no Overworld, no sky, no sun, no Aslan.¹⁵

A common element of a quest story is the coming of help from outside the group on the quest, usually of a supernatural variety. This help often enters the tale when the hero does not expect it and when it is most needed. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, this is displayed when Eustace becomes a dragon: “He had turned into a dragon while he was asleep. Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.” At the moment of Eustace’s greatest despair, Aslan arrives to help: “I was laying awake and wondering what on earth would become of me. And then [. . .] I looked up and saw the very last thing I expected: a huge lion coming slowly towards me.”¹⁶

The attainment of the goal is just as essential to a quest story as any other element. Yet, it is often the case where a secondary goal attainment will occur during the journey that was not planned by the travelers and it is often the secondary, unplanned goal that gives the quest its transcendent purpose. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the seemingly primary goal of discovering the whereabouts of the Seven Noble Lords is attained and the crew of the Dawn Treader “all reached Narnia in the end.”] A secondary goal attainment was that of Eustace’s redemption as a result of his journey to Narnia: “Back in our own world everyone soon started saying how Eustace had improved, and how “you’d never know him for the same boy.”¹⁷

Apart from its strength as a literary device, the theme of the quest provides a powerful anagogical medium for the reader to engage in as well. The story can capture the reader with the plot and action of the story, while also imparting higher ideals that the reader can integrate personally into the real world. An example of this is vividly displayed in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, perhaps the most famous of quest tales. In “The Tale of the Sengreal” from Le Morte d’Arthur, Sir Gawain, the purest knight of the Round Table, puts out the call to the quest for the Holy Grail:

Therefore I make this vow: to set off in search of the Holy Grail tomorrow and not to return for at least a year and a day without seeing it more clearly, but to accept it as in accordance with God’s will if this is not vouchsafed me.¹⁸

Note here the similarities between Sir Gawain’s call to the quest and King Caspian’s call in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where the king states that “I would sail east myself for a year and a day to find my father’s friends.”¹⁹

In the “Tale of the Sangreal,” the Holy Grail represents a search for healing and ultimate wholeness through king and country, which were intertwined. As the various Grail knights come in contact with the Holy Grail, they would be healed of both physical and spiritual ailment. Sir Lancelot has a vision of a wounded knight calling him to healing:

“Sweet Jesu, when shall I see the Holy Grail and be cured? Surely, lying on this litter, I have suffered for long, for a trespass which is not great. [. . . A] silver table bearing the Holy Grail appeared before the knight. Sir Lancelot recognized the Grail, having seen it before in King Pelles’ castle. The wounded knight lifted both hands and spoke again: “Sweet Lord, I pray you that as you are present in this Holy Vessel, so will you cure me of my malady!” So saying, he knelt before the Holy Grail and kissed it, and thereupon was cured.²⁰

The healing of Eustace Scrubb, both physically as a dragon and mentally as a boy (who Lewis suggests almost deserved such a pitiful surname given what a mess he was at the beginning of the tale), represents a similar image to the healing offered by the wounded knight in “The Tale of the Sangreal.” After his physical transformation into a dragon, Eustace at first realizes that people value him for this transformation—he is fearsome and can perform helpful tasks such as lifting large objects. He celebrates and is celebrated for embracing the evil that has become his life. Yet once he wishes to return to his true nature, he cannot free himself from this facade that he has become. The task of release is greater than he is able to accomplish. After multiple failures at cleansing himself of his dragon nature, Eustace listens to Aslan:

Then the Lion said—but I don’t know if it spoke it—you will have to let me undress you. I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. [. . .T]he only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off [. . . ]. I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again.²¹

In both accounts, the healing vision of Sir Lancelot to partake of the Grail and the de-dragoning of Eustace under the claw of Aslan, the true quest speaks not only at the literal level but also at the anagogical level—contact with the Holy is the key to healing and wholeness.

The anagogical levels of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader are evident from the beginning when King Caspian is explaining the quest to the children:

“I would sail east myself for a year and a day to find my father’s friends [. . .]. But Reepicheep here has an even higher hope.” Everyone’s eyes turned to the Mouse.

“As high as my spirit,” it said [. . .] “Why should we not come to the very eastern end of the world? And what might we find there? I expect to find Aslan’s own country.”²²

Reepiceep’s high hope of finding Aslan’s country represents just one example of how the literal level of adventure in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair transports readers to an anagogical experience.

In discussing the theme of the quest in relation to Malory’s “Tale of the Sengreal” from Le Morte d’Arthur, Lewis writes the following:

The human tragedy becomes all the more impressive if we see it against the background of the Grail, and the failure of the Quest becomes all the more impressive if it is felt thus reverberating through all the human relationships of the Arthurian world. No one wants the Grail to overthrow the Round Table directly, by a fiat of spiritual magic. What we want is to see the Round Table sibi relictus, falling back from the peak that failed to reach heaven and so abandoned to those tendencies within it which must work its destruction. [. . .] It is in such a tragic glass that most men, especially Englishmen, first see their sins with clarity.²³

As with Le Morte d’Arthur, Lewis’s fiction also becomes “all the more impressive” when set against the life of the reader. Aslan’s healing of Eustace, the admonition of Jill to “Remember the Signs!”, and the resurrection of Caspian at the end of The Silver Chair are images that the reader can retrieve and revive through their day-to-day lives. The story then moves from the pages and literally moves the reader to grasp that possibilities held in narrative can be embodied in our lives. This is what is meant by a “living myth” as stated by Marjorie Evelyn Wright in regard to the Narnia books in her research on the role of mythopoetic cosmology in C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and J. R. R. Tolkien:

These stories [the Narnia Chronicles] satisfy the requirements for the “living myth”: They have correspondence with Man’s condition in the modern world, yet serve all times and all conditions in that they are set in eternal mobility.²⁴

As Lewis states, most people will only see their falling short from grace through the “tragic glass” of myth, specifically the quest for the Holy Grail. The theme of the quest is therefore a powerful motif, more “impressive” due to its relation to the human drama. As the historian and biographer Frances Gies writes, the theme of the quest has been developed by artists through the centuries to show that “further than the theme of the Grail, building a story on the knight’s search, beyond adventure, human love, and even the brotherly spirit of the Round Table, [the quest motif] naturally searches for the meaning of life itself.”²⁵

In turning to scripture, the narrative examples of the quest abound. What does it look and feel like not to know exactly where God is leading me? The narrative of Abraham being called by God. What does it look and feel like to be led astray during my personal quest? The narrative of Job’s temptation from his friends Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar to turn his back on God due to his great misfortune. What does it look and feel like to abandon my personal quest set forth by God? The narrative of Jonah. What is it like to trust God in the face of overwhelming odds? The narrative of David and Goliath. What does it look and feel like to have God call you on a quest that seems irrational? The narrative of Gideon’s circling the walled city. And what will it be like to return to my quest after searching for meaning apart from God? The parable of the Prodigal Son.

As stated by the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, the quest is conclusively more than a literary device, it is life itself:

The unity of human life is the unity of a narrative quest. Quests sometimes fail, are frustrated, abandoned, or dissipated into distractions; and human lives may in all these ways also fail. But the only criteria for success or failure in a human life as a whole are the criteria of success or failure in a narrated or to-be-narrated quest. [. . .] It is in the course of the quest and only through encountering and coping with the various particular harms, dangers, temptation, and distractions which provide any quest with its episodes and incidents that the goal of the quest is finally to be understood.²⁶

In this way, MacIntyre reminds us that the human life is framed by unity and not discord. But this is a narrative unity rather than merely the reflection of data points that populate our days. What seems random and haphazard is instead the effect of plotting the meaning and context of our lives on too limited a canvas. For our lives to move toward that for which we are created, we need to embrace the reality of fiction in our existence—the reality that much of what is truly real and enduring requires an imaginative leap as much as a critical and reasoned reflection.

Release: Narrative as the Canvas to Steward Personal and Collective Pain

Turning from the role that narrative plays in providing a direction for the life quest, we see that narrative is also capable of moving us from suffering to acceptance of the potential healing and redemption that are found on the quest. In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short story “Notes from the Underground,” the protagonist states that the only true proof of our existence is through our pain. He argues that whereas everything else in life can be argued to be an illusion, no one would purposefully choose pain; it possesses a self-identity apart from our id impulse to pleasure and is hence a verifiable reality. Lewis argues that pain is “God’s megaphone to awake a sleeping world.”²⁷ He sees pain as God’s means of grabbing our attention and showing us how much we need him.

The use of narrative in relation to the processing of pain is multi-purposeful. First, narrative provides a means of organizing the internal chaos that results from childhood. For instance, the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim makes the following observation:

The child is subject to desperate feelings of loneliness and isolation, and he often experiences mortal anxiety. More often than not, he is unable to express those feelings in words or he can do so only by indirection: fear of the dark, of some animal, anxiety about his body. Parents tend to overlook [. . .] those spoken fears. The fairy tale, by contrast, takes these existential anxieties and dilemmas very seriously and addresses itself directly to them: the need to be loved and the fear that one is thought worthless; the love of life, and the fear of death. Further, the fairy tale offers solutions in ways that the child can grasp on his level of understanding. [. . .] As a child listens to a fairy tale, he gets ideas about how he may create order out of the chaos that is his inner life.²⁸

It is through narrative, in this case fairy tales, that children learn how to engage themselves and understand social structures and reality. When deprived of the right kinds of narrative, children will not fully assimilate salient developmental questions such as “Who am I?” “Where do I come from?” “How did the world come into being?” and “What is the purpose of life?” Without such questions being asked early on, a child’s world will remain, on many levels, an unresolved chaos of mystery and pain.

Second, the use of narrative provides a template to organize pain in a way that can be constructively expressed and therefore released. Therapists utilize open-ended questions as a means of drawing people out of their pain and learning to express what’s going on internally. Statements such as “Tell me about your first childhood memories,” “Tell me about your relationship with your father,” and “Tell me about dinnertime with your family” are representative of this notion. In this “tell me” framework, adults can create a safe environment, like an internal cinema, where children can watch the events and circumstances of their pain unfold before them as both player and spectator.

Pain is a human constant, yet what we do with the pain in our lives varies greatly. For many people it is an almost intolerable burden. In Ray Bradbury’s classic novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, Mr. Halloway makes the following observation to his young son Will, illustrating the burden of pain and the potential for sin that all people endure:

Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town [. . .] is the one carrying the biggest load of sin. There are smiles and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light [. . .] and men do love sin, Will, oh how they love it, never doubt, in all shapes, sizes, colors, and smells [. . . .] For being good is a fearful occupation; men strain at it and sometimes break in two.²⁹

Frederick Buechner expresses this idea in relation to the parable of the talents and our failure to acknowledge the reality of pain in our lives:

To bury your life is to stop growing [. . .] the buried pain in particular and all the other things we tend to bury along with pain, including joy, which tends to get buried too when we start burying things, that the buried life is itself darkness and wailing and gnashing of teeth and the one who casts us into it is no one other than ourselves.³⁰

To release our pain and suffering for the sake of others is what Buechner sees as being a good “steward of your pain”—investing not only our joys and gifts with others, but to be fully investing all of ourselves into the life of the Kingdom of God as a testimony of God’s providence. To be investors in accord with Jesus’s parable of the talents found in Saint Matthew’s gospel is what it means to walk with others on the journey of life in both dark and light. This is what it is to tell the story of our life as we sojourn with others and not to walk in silence, but to speak and interact along the pebbled path of life, leaning on each other and bandaging our wounds through the sharing of our personal and collective scars. It is to be real as the Velveteen Rabbit was, with all its fur rubbed off and two buttons missing. It is to be cut to the heart with the claw of the great lion who, as Lewis suggests, is “good, but not tame.”

Integration: Narrative as the Intersection of Internal and External Histories

Where a narrative shape to our lives provides both a direction for our life’s quest and a means of release from the pain that is part of our journey, the life poetic is also a commitment to seeing the intersection of our narrated life with the stories of those who have gone before us, those who share this season of time, and those who will inherit our stories in the future generations. As theologian James McClendon put so succulently, biography is essentially theology if read properly.³¹ In this way, I would argue that history when read through biography also takes on the depth of theology in its desire after ultimate concerns. And although history at its base is the rendering of facts and events, narrative serves as the frame within which history is displayed, revealing the fullness of our story as it intersects with the fullness of history’s larger story. This is what the theologian David F. Ford calls providing a “middle distance perspective”:

The middle distance is that focus which best does justice to the ordinary social world of people in interaction. It portrays them acting, talking, suffering, thinking, and involved in institutions, societies, and networks of relationships over time [. . . and] helps to translate one mode of experience into another.³²

As we look at history in a purely objective sense and as utterly distinct from us, we are unmoved, or better yet, removed from a personal sense of affinity, and in many ways, we are without a sense of spiritual mooring to a past or a future. Without a deep and imaginative orientation to the past and ultimate future, it is impossible to fully embody our lives in the present. As we are reminded by Saint Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, the three grand Christian virtues are faith, hope, and love: the past is apprehended through reflection upon our faith and those who have lived lives of faith before us,³³ and our future is lived with a repose of hope that creates the context of the present for us to love and be loved. In this way, if we are without faith and hope (or disconnected from our past and future), we cannot love (in the present). In the middle distance view, we live in the present as part of history from a middle distance, tethered between a constantly re-membering past of our faith and the coming promise of our future as one filled with hope. So we are not isolated from the events of our world, and history walks with swollen feet in the desert with us, wonders about the purpose of life in this world, like we do, and laughs at the humor found in the eyes of a newborn child, as we would. This view is accomplished through the story of history, which is our past framed in smiles, tears, jeers, stumbles, and leaps. As put by H. Richard Niebuhr:

It may be said that to speak of history in this fashion is to try to think with poets rather than with scientists. That is what we mean, for poets think of persons, purposes, and destinies. It is just their Jobs and Hamlets that are not dreamt of in philosophies which rule out from the company of true being whatever cannot be numbered or included in an impersonal pattern. Drama and epic set forth pattern too, but it is one of personal relations. Hence we may call internal history dramatic and its truth dramatic truth, though drama in this case does not mean fiction.³⁴

Niebuhr continues this idea by suggesting that our internal history and the history of the world, particularly God’s history, are correlated:

To be a self is to have a god; to have a god is to have a history, that is, events connected in a meaningful pattern; to have one God is to have one history. God and the history of the selves in community belong together in inseparable union [. . .] the God who is found in inner history, or rather who reveals himself there, is not the spiritual life but universal God, the creator not only of the events through which he discloses himself but also of all other happenings. The standpoint of the Christian community is limited, being in history, faith, and sin. But what is seen from this standpoint is unlimited.³⁵

Writer and theologian Eugene Peterson suggests that life “is not managing a religious business but a spiritual quest.”³⁶ Yet without the challenge of the quest, many in our society settle for the pithy and the quaint rather than the mystery and the wonder that is the fullness of the life poetic in God.

We are members of a disillusioned society. People in Western culture have been force-fed bumper-sticker slogans for the past five decades and lost their sense of spiritual mooring, both in regard to community and themselves. Propositional Pop Psychology has stripped much of the dynamic flesh from our humanity, yet it is merely a symptom of a deeper societal sickness—fear.

The challenge that is presented in the work of theorists such as philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of personhood³⁷ and Alasdair MacIntyre’s narrative approach are helpful in moving beyond the overt rationalism and dismissive irrationalism that characterizes much modern and postmodern discourse. The drive in modernity for control, clarity, and ease, often manifested in cold rationalism or high-minded atheism, is merely the mirror of many postmodern attempts, through irrationalism and relativism, to embrace play over progress, to embrace a seemingly indifferent stance to absolutes, wallowing in uncertainty without attempting to seek for answers, and to embrace laughter coupled with cynicism in the face of attempts at order and taking of responsibility. Granted, there are many helpful, constructive renderings of modern and postmodern critiques. However, in some of the expressions of modernity and postmodernity, what we are left with are essentially shadow selves of each other in their respective disillusionment that comes from a loss of this “middle perspective.”

Yet if we situate our uncertainty in the tension, if we strive for faith rather than propositions, and if we embrace our suffering not in isolation but in communion with our brothers and sisters, we will reside in the uneasy yet necessary middle perspective of humility, welcoming grace and mercy. And then we can begin the process of integration both with our neighbor and God.

In John Boorman’s 1980 film Excalibur, which is based on Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, the Grail quest of Sir Percival is exemplified as a narrative that demonstrates the true integration of our lives that is to be found in the quest. At the point of his greatest despair in searching for the Holy Grail, Sir Percival beholds a vision that will direct him to the resting place of the Grail. With this beatific illumination, Percival is reminded of the integration of all things in the healing of the broken land and the dying King Arthur:

Grail Figure: What is the secret of the Grail? Who does it serve?

Perceval: You, my lord.

Grail Figure: Who am I?

Perceval: You are my lord and king. You are Arthur.

Grail Figure: Have you found the secret that I have lost?

Perceval: Yes. You and the land are one.³⁸

This unity of all things—the integration of particular life stories into the grand narrative of all things for the healing and redemption of both self and world—is the summative attainment of the quest narrative. It is the acknowledgement that the healing of one will in part be the healing of many—the land and the king are one—that offers a powerful reminder as to the role that our particular stories will play as they become interwoven into the lives of others. Similarly, the context for the healing and redemption of the world is in part not necessarily far off. As with the illumination of Percival, it is never what we have lost, but we have forgotten that becomes vital in the life poetic.

In Luke 22:19, when Jesus gathers his disciples together in the upper room and institutes the Eucharist, he does so through binding himself to the Passover as its source and substance by stating that “This is my body broken for you [. . . .] This is my blood that has been shed for you for the remission of sin.” He moves into the space of salvation for our world intimately rather than merely being a spectator from a distance.

As Christ pours himself out into this, he calls the disciples to now do this work as well in verse 19: “Do this in remembrance of me.” This type of work—do this—is rendered in the Greek as poiete—the word that is the cognate for our English term poetry. This is a deeply creative term that goes to the heart of what it means for us to be God’s people in these dark and desperate times. This is our identity in the world as we hear in Ephesians 2:10, “For you are God’s workmanship (poiete), created in Christ Jesus, to do good works which God prepared in advance for us to do.” At the very heartbreaking reality of who we are—we are called to a life of direction, release, and ultimate integration with our Creator—a poetic integration that is prepared in advance for us to do. This is what it means to be on the quest and embrace the life poetic.

At the beginning of this essay, I discussed the danger in dismissing too readily a narrative approach to our lives and thereby dismissing the deep narrative of the scriptures that seek to form and transform our lives. Frederick Buechner brings this thought full circle:

If we think the purpose of Jesus’ stories is essentially to make a point as extractable as a moral at the end of a fable, then the inevitable conclusion is that once you get the point, you can throw away the story itself like the rind of an orange when you have squeezed out the juice. Is that true? Or is the story itself the point and truth of the story? Is the point of Jesus’ stories that they point to the truth about you and me and our stories? [. . .] The truth of the story is not a motto suitable for framing. It is a truth that one way or another, God help us, we live out every day of our lives. It is a truth as complicated and sad as you and I ourselves are complicated and sad, and as joyous and as simple as we are too. The stories that Jesus tells us are about us. Once upon a time is our time, in other words.³⁹

The story is our story, yours and mine. As Percival understands through the beatific vision, our lives, our stories, are intimately interwoven into the stories of this world. The healing of the world in part begins with the healing and redemption that is readily at hand in our own lives and then committed to the world as confession and testimony. Additionally, unless we are willing to deeply read the life poetic that we have been given and of those around us, we will be left only with a shadowy tale that is without flesh and blood. This is a challenge to our reading of scripture as well. It is on one level about a man with an ark, a man interpreting dreams for a king, a pearl of great price being found in a field, a women who receives the word that she will give birth to the living Word, a man lost beside a pool who has found his sight, and young English schoolchildren asleep in the mane of a lion in a land whose signature is an ever-lit lamp post and a broken stone table. On the other hand, it is about faith, miracles seen and unseen, reaching out to the neighbor, and glimpsing God with eyes of child-like wonder. As Mark put it, “He did not say anything to them without using a parable” (Mark 4:34). In looking at the power of Christ’s ministry as a life poetic, it is small wonder he communicated so much in narrative.

1. H. Richard Niebuhr, “The Story of Our Life,” in Why Narrative?: Readings in Narrative Theology, eds. Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989) 29.

2. See James Wellmen, Evangelical vs. Liberal (New York, NY: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2007).

3. See Walter Brueggeman, Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Press, 1989).

4. Unless otherwise noted, all scripture references in this essay are from the Today’s New International Verison (TNIV).

5. Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry: Writings on Faith and Fiction (New York, NY: Harpercollins, 1992), 44.

6. See Frederich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman (New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks, [1893] 1958).

7. The Victorian poet and essayist Matthew Arnold referred to the German Romantic notion of Sehnsucht as a “wistful, soft tearful longing” in On the Study of Celtic Literature (New York, NY: Macmillian, 1907), esp. 117-118. This notion of a “wistful, soft tearful longing” is evident throughout much of Lewis’s writings. For further exploration of this four-fold deep reading of texts highlighted in the thirteenth century, see Robert Sweetman, “Micah 6:8 as Spiritual Exercise in the Search for a Christian Excellence,” The Other Journal 12 (2008), https://theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=385.

8. Madeleine L’Engel, “Forward,” In Companion to Narnia, ed. Paul F. Ford (New York, NY: Collier, 1986), xiii.

9. An excellent review of the place of the quest in comparative literature is Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Bollingen Series 3rd edition (New York, NY:New World Library, 2008).

10. C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (New York, NY: Macmillian, 1952), 18-19.

11. C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (New York, NY: Macmillian, 1952), 16.

12. Ibid., 15.

13. Lewis, Silver Chair, 19, 21.

14. Lewis, Voyage, 33.

15. Lewis, Silver Chair, 157. Italics are in the original citation.

16. Lewis, Voyage, 75; 87, 88.

17. Ibid., 216; 216.

18. Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur, ed. by Keith Baines (New York, NY: Bramhall, 19888), 365.

19. Lewis, Voyage, 16.

20. Malory, Le Morte, 376.

21. Lewis, Voyage, 90, 91.

22. Ibid. Emphasis added.

23. C. S. Lewis, “The Morte D’Arthur,” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 109-110. Italics in the original.

24. Marjorie Evelyn Wright, The Cosmic Kingdom of Myth: A Study in the Myth-Philosophy of Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Ph.D. dissertation (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, no. 0090, 1960), 65.

25. Frances Gies, The Knight in History (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1984), 76. In particular, Gies is referring to the work of Wolfram von Eschenbach and the various depictions of the Grail quest through centuries upon centuries of reimaging the quest in song, poetry, and painting as the context for providing a map for life’s search.

26. Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Virtues, the Unity of a Human Life, and the Concept of a Tradition” in Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology, eds. Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 104.

27. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York, NY: Macmillian, 1938), 45.

28. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1991), 74-75.

29. Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes (New York, NY: Avon Books, 1962, 1997), 135. Italics from the original.

30. Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry, 99.

31. See James William McClendon, Biography as Theology: How Life Stories Can Remake Today’s Theology (Portland, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002).

32. David F. Ford, “System, Story, Performance: A Proposal about the Role of Narrative in Christian Systematic Theology” in Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology, eds. Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 194-196.

33. In Hebrews 11, the writer of Hebrews frames faith as a biographical rather than purely doctrinal apprehension—a look to the embodied lives of faith of the patriarchs and prophets of old that have created a tradition of lived faith upon which we now stand. This great “cloud of witnesses” provides a depository of faith that we are reminded of and hence re-membered by, pulled together and woven into the tapestry of their stories lived through us.

34. Niebuhr, “The Story of Our Life,” 35.

35. Ibid., 38.

36. Eugene Peterson, Reality and the Vision, ed. Philip Yancey (Waco, TX: Word Publishing, 1990), 20.

37. Paul Ricoeur represents one of the great philosophers of identity formation that is able to draw together both modern and postmodern traditions through his narrative location of personhood. Key texts for reflection upon Ricoeur’s work include Oneself As Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Time and Narrative, vol. 1-3; especially vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), and Memory, History and Forgetting (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

38. Excalibur (1981), directed by John Boorman. Internet Movie Database: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082348/quotes.

39. Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry, 309, 310.

Books by Jeffrey F. Keuss

Books by C. S. Lewis and Thomas Malory

Other Referenced Books

In the beginning, there were no trees. There were no trees, for there was no rain to nourish them and no creature to tend them. In the beginning, there was the Voice. The Voice called the earth to birth the trees. As the Voice called and beckoned, the earth brought forth and the growth began: sap rushed up, limbs stretched, breaking the moist soil, reaching for the warmth of the sun. Roots groped, stretched, moved through the crumbly earth, embraced and cleft rocks, drew nourishment. Buds formed and leaves unfurled, fluffy and small, growing as the sun dried and warmed them and as sap filled them.

The Voice said, “Be trees full of life, be strong. Grow fruit for the birds and the animals, and branches for their homes. Be pleasing to look at, shout forth the grandeur of the Word. Dig your roots deep; draw nourishment from the earth.”

And the trees became living beings.

Then the trees watched as the Voice called forth once again, as the Voice formed another creature out of the earth. “This is the earth creature,” said the Voice, “who will tend you, who will dress your figs and prune your young blossoms. This is the creature who will provide water in your youth and pruning in your old age.”

Then the Voice spoke to two of the trees. “You are the tree of life,” said the Voice to one, “And you are the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” the Voice said to the other. “You are set apart for the covenantal meal I will share with my image bearer—the meal that will bring life, and, eventually, knowledge.”¹

The trees rejoiced in their calling, but not so much that they didn’t hear the words spoken to the image, the words that made the trees wonder at the gravity of their calling: “Do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for in the day that you eat of it you will die.”

The trees wondered at how it had all gone wrong so quickly. Oh, they knew what had happened, all right. They had overheard the conversation as they surrounded the serpent, the woman, and the man. They bore mute witness as the wisest of the animals discussed the words of the Voice with the woman. They watched in silence as the image took the fruit, the fruit that belonged only to the Voice, and ate it. They knew that if their gifts were taken at the wrong time, there would be no nourishment; they knew that grasping would result in death, not life.²

Before the Voice returned in the cool of the evening, the trees had already begun to mourn.

She was a young tree, as far as trees go, but she had already heard most of the stories of the land in which she stood. Some were stories of care and nurture, of a time when the earth creatures had given rest to the trees, when instruments had been fashioned from her wood to give praise to the Voice, when those who bore the image of the Voice had ensured that the fruit was dressed and the pruning done. They were stories of hospitality given under the shade of the tamarisk tree and shelter given in the shade of the broom.

But even in those stories, she saw the seeds of brutality. She had heard of Abraham, planting the great tamarisks for shelter, providing hospitality in their shade. She had also heard of Hagar, sent by that same Abraham out to the brutality of the desert, placing her son in the shelter of a broom tree as she waited for his death. The deep sweet shade of hospitality and the desperate last shade of the starving and parched.

The young tree knew the other trees in Israel—the tamarisk, whose size and water droplets create a uniquely refreshing shade; the white broom tree, whose fallen branches provide embers that never go out and bedding for a night in the desert; the sycomore, whose fast growing branches sustain many harvests for light, strong beams and whose dressed fruit provide food for the hungry; the saltplant, whose leaves provide a quick meal; the yitran tree, whose bark makes strong and sturdy rope.³ She knew the yearning of the trees to freely provide nourishment, shelter, and wood for the earth creatures who imaged the Voice.

But she knew that such gifts were scorned. She had heard how the king had conscripted forced labor out of his people, how he had taken the men from the nurturance of the land and the trees to quarry stone for the temple and palace. But not only were the people enslaved, so were the trees. No regenerative sycomore from the land of Israel for the buildings of this king. Rather, whole forests cut from other lands and used for walls and floors and roofs—cedar and cypress, the proudest of the trees of Lebanon. She had heard how one of the king’s houses was called the House of the Forest of Lebanon—a forest sacrificed and re-created for the splendor of the king.⁴

The trees felt silenced, shunned not only for building, but also for praise. The king brought wood from afar—almug wood—to make trusses and beams and steps, to shape into lyres and harps (I Kgs. 10:11-12; 2 Chron. 9:10-11).

The young tree knew that even though her fellow trees were not being shaped into instruments of praise, they could still send forth praise to the Voice. And she knew that she provided sustenance and shelter for many creatures besides those who bore the image of the Voice. But still she mourned, for there was more than neglect. There was abuse.

She had seen the idolatry of those who ceased to nurture the trees but rather worshipped them, of those who formed unwilling trees into the sacred groves. She had smelled the scent of the cakes, baked on reluctant embers and offered to a god who had no voice. She had seen the practices of those who worshipped under the young trees, in the groves. They did not allow the trees to fulfill their calling: providing shelter and warmth and food. Instead, they carved the trees into unwilling images—the earth creatures who were supposed to be the image themselves! They used the wood of the trees to make their false weights and their short measures with which to defraud the poor. They used the wood for the stalls for their warhorses, and the crafting of beds for their opulent leisure. And they took wood not to cook food, but to put their children in the fire of sacrifice (2 Kgs. 16; 2 Kgs. 17:10 ff). The trees were no longer the sustainers of life, but the bringers of death.

She did not hear the Voice, the word of life, through these people who neglected and abused her, who brought death and not life to the land. The earth had become like iron and the sky like copper: no one provided dressing for her fruit or tender pruning in the spring. No one granted the trees their Sabbath for rest and glory. Her fruit withered on the limb. She cried out, groaned. So she was not sorry when the armies invaded and the people of the land were taken away. The people were captured but the trees were free.⁵

At first, the trees rejoiced in their newfound freedom. No more was the axe heard in the forest; no more was the sound of sawing and chopping in the land. The trees enjoyed their rest; they grew to maturity once again; birds inhabited their branches, and animals ate of their fruit. The trees clapped their hands with joy. But then the land began to change. It turned from rest to wilderness. The thistles began to strangle out the seedlings and the vines began to bind the branches, choking out the sunlight, soaking up the water. Limbs that were unwieldy began to crack and drop. The shoots of the olive roots began to weaken the parent trees, and the side shoots on the fig began to sap their strength.⁶

The elder trees told the stories, then, of the earth creatures, made by the Voice to care for the trees, to cut the vines and root out the thistles, to transplant the new shoots to places of space, and to prune the saplings and weak limbs. The trees began to long for the coming of such creatures, for the return of those obedient to the Voice (Lev. 26:34-26, 43; Isa. 64:10; Ezek. 6:14).

Then, one morning the trees heard the Voice once again. It was a voice of power, a voice of love, a voice of gladness. But not a light gladness. The gladness of this voice was deep as if it had known deep sorrow and suffering, yet once again saw reason to be joyful. It was like the beginning again. The Voice called to the trees, “Awake, awake, awake.”

The sap began to answer, drawing itself up through the trees to respond to the Voice. Buds began to form leaves and then blossoms. And with the blossoms, birds came, eager for a drink of nectar and a meal of insects. Fruit formed, grew plump and ripe, and with the fruit, animals came, eager to take and eat. The trees rejoiced in the calling of the Voice; they clapped their hands, and the Voice whispered the promises. “They are coming once again. You will be tended and cared for; no longer shall the thistle choke your young and the vine bind your elders. Myrtle and cypress will shoot forth. Stumps will give birth to branches and trees. The dead shall bear life. There will be peace. You will provide shelter once more; the earth creatures will sleep securely among you (Ezek. 34:25; Ezek. 36).

“And you trees,” said the Voice, “will have a new task. No longer will you be just for food. Your fruit will be for food, but your leaves, your leaves, they will be for healing.

“My creatures are broken,” said the Voice, “they are in need of healing.” And the trees saw a great river come from the Voice, and the waters of the river nourished their roots. And their leaves sprang out, green and firm and tender—the leaves for healing.

The earth creatures began to return. The trees saw that they were broken. And they began to call as the Spirit gave them voice, “Come, all you weary, we have healing for you” (Isa. 11:55; Ezek. 34:25-27, 36:22-30, 47:3-12; cf. Ezek. 17:22-24).

At first the trees believed what the Voice had said. At first they trusted. At first the renewal seemed to come. Sabbaths were practiced once again. The land and the trees were rested and tended. They were fruitful, and they flourished. And then the wars began.

The trees saw their strongest and straightest taken for weapons, for barricades, for crosses. The trees were once again instruments of oppression, instruments of curse. They groaned under the weight of the death they were called to witness and to bear.

After a while, the war ended. But in peace, the reconstruction began: trees to rebuild houses, trees to line the temple, trees to line the palaces.

Then there was war again. And then peace. But for the trees, peace or war, the violence never stopped. They knew now that death, not healing was the only end to the story the Voice had told. The elders could not even begin to whisper the promises of healing, or the story of the earth creatures who had imaged the Voice.

* * *

The night was very dark, and the shepherds avoided the darkness of the trees, keeping their flocks to the plain. It was exceedingly dark. And then, in the darkness, there was light. Suddenly there was singing in the spheres, the heavens alive and lighted and the music of the spheres singing, “Glory to the Voice and peace on the earth where God’s favor rests.”

It was a song the trees had long forgotten. But after that night, they began to sing it once again, “Glory, glory and peace.”

For years they sang it, and occasionally a tree would experience that peace, that glory. For there were whispers that the earth creature had come, the one who would truly image the Voice, the one who would tend and bring healing to the trees. There were stories that he had sought shelter in the desert under the white broom trees for a time, along with the wild animals. There were stories of teaching he gave in the shade of the trees. There were sycomore trees who provided sight when he came to teach.

Some trees had felt his presence, experienced his touch, felt bondage lifted when he spoke. The trees again began to hope. And it truly was hope, for the brutality continued. The building progressed. The crosses were shaped. But hope came.

And then one day the trees felt their branches seized, and they were caught up in the voice of the crowd as it exclaimed, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—the King of Israel!” And the song they had been singing since that dark night on the plain was finally sung by all of creation.

Until the day of the twilight of the world. The trees knew that a violence greater than any the world had ever seen was in the air. They heard the plots. They were in the garden, silent witnesses as the image of the Word prayed to be let out, let out of the violence. They were there for the kiss, the soldiers roughly leading the image away. One of them was forced to be the instrument of torture. One of them was forced to bear the death of the only faithful earth creature, the image of the Voice, the one who had called them to life once more. Now they were complicit in the death of life itself. One of them bore the wounds, soaked up the blood, stood firm and tall until death came. When the sun refused to shine, the trees were there, weeping.⁷

The trees were also in the garden at dawn. They saw the beings who rolled away the stones. They were waiting when the creature, the image, emerged. But they saw that the creature was an image that had changed. Like the trees, the image was wounded. And coming to the trees, the image began to tend them, digging in the earth, shaping branches, touching wounds with his wounds. The trees knew that the ancient promises were coming true after all. Death had come, and with it, hope was fulfilled.

Here was the image who had borne death, who still bore the wounds of brutality and violence, living and giving healing. And the Voice came once more: “There will be a river of life from my throne, from the heart of my suffering rule. Go, find nourishment in that river, stand on its banks, drink water without price, draw its life into your roots, produce fruit in abundance, every month of every year. And your leaves, your leaves will be for the healing of all creatures.

“My creatures are violated, raped, betrayed, killed, and tortured,” said the Voice. “They are in need of healing.”

It was the promise of old. But this time it came after the death of the world, and the trees knew that life had conquered.

As the image tended the trees, a woman came and recognized him as the gardener. The trees knew that he was the gardener, for the Voice was one who tends and heals (Jn. 20:11-18; Rev. 22:1-2).

The trees have noticed a small difference. They have seen, here and there, those who share their groanings, who want to end the violence, who are like that one who so completely imaged the Voice.

The violence has not ended. But the trees once again tell the story in hope. And in that story, their wounds find a place in new life; they too bring life and healing. But even in that healing, they await the coming of the one who will make all things new. And in that hope they rejoice, clapping their wounded hands (Rom. 8:18-25; Isa. 55:12).

1. For this interpretation see Nicholas John Ansell, “The Call of Wisdom/The Voice of the Serpent: A Canonical Approach to the Tree of Knowledge,” Christian Scholars Review 31.1 (2001): 40-43 (whole article: 31-57).

2. Ibid. This interpretation is also depicted in C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew, where the witch takes the apple that can give life in a way that is illegitimate and greedy.

3. These trees and their uses are described in a fascinating book: Nogah Hareuveni, Tree and Shrub in Our Biblical Heritage (Israel: Neot Kedumim, 1984).

4. Hareuveni describes how the trees would have been reconstructed with the clever placement of mirrors so it looked as though those standing in the room were standing in the middle of a forest (1 Kgs. 7:2-5), in Hareuveni, Tree and Shrub, 100-104.

5. 1 Kgs. 5:13-18, 6:9-38, 7:1-8; Isa. 57:1-6; Jer. 2:20, 3:6-10, 17:2; Ezek. 6:11-14, 20:28; Hos 4:12-13; Lev. 26:4, 26:18-20; Deut. 11:13-17; Hos. 4:1-3; Lev. 26:34-36,43; cf Isa. 14.8. See also Susan Griffin, Women and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (New York, NY: Harper and Row: 1978), 56-64, for a description of the modern exploitation of trees.

6. Hareuveni describes how the offshoots of the olive tree are pruned out, except for a few that are kept and nurtured for new stock. The offshoots of the sycomore are pruned as well, but are not useful for starting new saplings. Tree and Shrub, 83-88.

7. See “The Dream of the Rood” (700-1000), in The Middle Age (700-1500), ed. Michael Alexander and Felicity Riddy (New York, NY: St Martins Press, 1989), 13-18. My thanks to Pauline Head for bringing this piece to my attention.

One would have had to be living under the proverbial rock to have somehow missed what’s been happening in the Middle East as of late.  But just in case that rock is your home, let’s get caught up to speed: 1) Protests in Egypt finally ousted President Mubarak from his 30 year reign, 2) Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi (and his regime) have met their protesters with rank military violence, 3) Moreover, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen, et plus, have all been experiencing their own upheavals.  And for what?  Answer…democracy.1

Ahhh yes, democracy.  That age old political structure that vests the power of the state, and it’s affairs, in the people.  The move to cast down dictatorial, tyrannical, totalitarian, autocratic leadership has been the driving force behind the spirit of liberation in the above mentioned Arab nations.  This, however, is not what’s ultimately interesting; rather, the media’s coverage is what stands to be observed.

One need read/watch/hear the news for only a vapor’s breath of time to see how the media has painted the situation.  Democracy is lifted up as a “beacon of hope” (according to one article), while the regimes of Gaddafi, Mubarak, Al-Khalifa, et plus are seen in the most unflattering of lights.  It is apparent that we, in the West, see democracy as the light of redemption in the ever-progressing narrative being constructed by the media concerning Middle Eastern/North African affairs.

This all reminds me of a riddle my father once told: “What’s black and white and read all over?” Once finally realizing that the riddle plays off the homophones “read” and “red,” it is clear that the answer is the newspaper.  However, in this case, black, white, and red are notable symbols to describe the media’s coverage of the recent liberation movements.  The black and white soundly represent the rigidity and static nature of truth, fact, and principle, which is what the media should (to some extent) offer its audience.  Then you have red, which has many biblical allusions to salvation and life (afforded through sacrificial acts).

This red is what courses through nearly every story.  It so tellingly portrays what’s embedded in our culture’s values, namely, freedom and victory.  We root for the underdog to rise up above the “enemy” and stand triumphantly on the war-bereaved soil of freedom and salvation from the forces of injustice.  This is the narrative that the media is constructing.  It sounds dangerously similar to the gospel.  Who knows, maybe our postmodern climate in the West is not so hostile to the “meta-narrative”2 after all.

_____________________________________________________

1Democracy is not the sole reason behind the recent protests.  There are many secondary factors that come into play.  Liberty and democracy, however, seem to be the principle issues.

2Notable French philosopher, Jean-Francois Lyotard defined postmodernism as incredulity toward the meta-narrative (see The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984, xxiv.)

In this three-part interview, the illustrious Irish philosopher Richard Kearney explores the human experiences of evil. Part I of the interview considers theodicy and human responsibility for evil by contrasting Gnostic understandings of cosmological evil to St. Augustine’s understanding of evil as the privation of the good. During the course of this conversation, Kearney characterizes the human imagination as a creative capacity that can be turned to both good and evil purposes, and he urges us to develop “an ethical imagination responsive to the demands of the other.”

The Other Journal (TOJ): I’d like to begin our discussion by taking you back to one of your earlier books, The Wake of Imagination. This book, as well as much of your subsequent work, defends the importance of the imagination in human life and seeks to retrieve this capacity from the philosophical and religious neglect it has suffered in modern Western intellectual history. Yet you also show how our imaginative capacities can be turned toward evil purposes. I’m thinking here especially of your first chapter, which discusses the Old Testament’s prohibition of the divine image as well as the Hebraic suspicion of our mimetic desire and ability to imitate God’s creative activity. In this discussion, you also introduce the rabbinical golem legend, a cautionary tale that issues a warning about the destructive potential of human creativity. Could you elaborate on whether the golem legend and the Hebraic understanding of imagination still have lessons for us today, particularly in terms of how we’re to come to terms with evil?[1]

Richard Kearney (RK): There’s a lot in that question. Let me begin with the golem legend. I provide more details about the background of the legend in The Wake of Imagination, but it is clearly a Jewish tale from the late Middle Ages. In the Judaic tradition, this creation of a homunculus in our own image and likeness was seen as a repetition of Yahweh’s creation, God’s creation of Adam. So the Golem is in a way the one we create in our image and likeness just as God created Adam in His image and likeness. In that sense, the creation of the golem by Rabbi Loew of Prague was a very holy act, and the golem served to protect the people and do all kinds of chores in the ghetto. The catch was that to render the golem lifeless the Rabbi had to remove the shem, or holy writing, from the golem’s forehead; otherwise, the golem would have autonomous life. One day the Rabbi forgot to remove the shem, and the golem went off and wreaked havoc, bringing everything to destruction, until the Rabbi came back and removed the shem, and the golem fell into dust.

It seems that the tale is saying that when we create, we should always create in the spirit of the good. In the Judaic heritage, there is a sense that our power of creation is not uniquely our own but that it is beholden to some principal of otherness. For Plato, that principle of otherness is the good, and for the Abrahamic tradition that otherness is also the good, as it is God, the source of the Ten Commandments and so on. And so our creative, imaginative power to shape and form and figure (a power known as yetzer) is a gift that can go in two directions. We have inherited God’s power to shape and form—this is seen in the common root between yetzer and the words for creator (yetzor), creation (yetzirah), and the Book of Creation (Sefer Yetzirah)—but we have also inherited, as it were with Adam, both the Yetzer Hatov and the Yetzer Hara, that is, both the creative capacity for good and for evil. So from the very beginning, because we’re created in the image of the good, or God, we have this ability to repeat that good or to deviate from that good and, as it were, presume and pretend that we are the sole originators of our own creative capacity.

We, of course, see this in the Adamic story, where the serpent tells Adam and Eve that they will “be as gods” if they set themselves up as the pure creators of the world rather than as cocreators with God (see Gen. 3:4). And it comes down to the same question for us: do we do this on our own, or do we do this with the Other? It’s up to us to make that choice, which returns us to the golem—you should never create a golem on your own; you should always do it in dialogue with others. So both the Adamic story and the golem legend are cautionary tales that remind us that we’re not allowed to create solely out of our own will but that we should do it in dialogue and community.

The solitary imagination can become self-sufficient and cut-off in itself, and then it forgets that it is, to quote Samuel Taylor Coleridge when he defines the primary imagination, the “repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.”[2] This is quite extraordinary—Coleridge is taking this biblical, Abrahamic, rabbinical notion and placing it at the very heart of the first major philosophical exposé of English-speaking romanticism, a generation after Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. He’s enunciating this power of the transcendental productive imagination, which is human, of course, but he’s saying this imagination is a repetition in our finite minds of the divine act of creation. So even in the most humanistic anthropological affirmation of creative power we see that we mustn’t forget that our creation is the repetition, reactivation, or refiguration of some creative power that both precedes and excedes us.

TOJ: Do you see any contemporary analogies to the evil imagination?

RK: Technology run amuck—technology that is independent of ethical principles. By that I don’t advocate moralism or judgmentalism. To juggle Shakespeare, technology is neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so; and thinking is ethical thinking when it comes to good and evil. It is up to us.[3] For example, there’s nothing wrong with atoms, but there is something wrong with dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima. The atomic bomb is the golem run wild. There’s nothing wrong with trains, but there is something wrong with trains running to Treblinka packed with poor, unfortunate Jews. Adolf Eichmann’s railway system is the golem gone mad.

One can say the same thing about any contemporary technological device. There was a discussion on NPR recently about whether Facebook should eliminate its minimum user age, which is now set at thirteen. And there are advocates, including Mark Zuckerberg, who say there should be no limit. To quote Paul Ricoeur, “Imagination knows no censorship.”[4] Thus, at the purely aesthetic level, we should be allowed to imagine anything. But when you go beyond the realm of art into the realm of action, ethics come into play. For example, you can watch all the pornography you want, but ethics prevail as soon as that pornography causes you to move into the realm of pathological behavior that is injurious to others.

On the other hand, there’s an old argument that we should burn the Marquis de Sade’s books because they are pornographic, but I would say no, we shouldn’t burn his books: they teach us something about certain perversions of human sexuality. In his own way, Sigmund Freud exposed some of these perversions too, and if we don’t know about them, then they may be repressed and be acted out in other ways. There’s something about literature and psychoanalysis that can lead us into a realm of dark sexuality that needs to be reckoned with. The Greek myths also did that for us.

And that’s where narrative comes in. I think imaginary narratives should have free reign, no matter how evil they are, until the point that those narratives bleed into action. Therefore, although Facebook seems pretty neutral—and for the most part it seems like a very good thing—there should be certain ethical limits to its usage because of how it affects people’s lives. I believe that the technology of social media can be extremely emancipatory—look at the Arab Spring; look at the way people can communicate all over the world—but there are aspects of the Internet that may, in certain future circumstances, be subject to questions of what is good. Take the examples of child pornography, incitement to genocide, or the like. These are very complex and delicate considerations that involve a critical dialogue between the aesthetic imagination and ethical imagination. My basic argument in The Wake of Imagination is that this conversation is very important today. With the aesthetic imagination, we have poetic license, and the ethical should not censor or interfere directly with art, but when it comes to politics, when we move from art to life, there is a distinction, and that’s where it’s important to ask questions about whether something is good.

In the famous New York case to ban James Joyce’s Ulysses because of a rape fantasy, the defense pointed out that no one was ever raped by a book. They correctly argued that Joyce’s book should not be censored because of an imaginary scene. By contrast, if art is misused, as it can be—and this is equally true of virtual technology—and if that misuse actually has a murderous impact on people’s lives, one has to question the ways in which we adjudicate the passage from art to life, not necessarily the original work of art. Imagination, or art that’s produced from the imagination, is neither good nor bad, but interpretation makes it so; and for a book like Ulysses, the interpreter is the reader, who after reading the book applies it to his or her life. Or as Ricoeur puts it in Time and Narrative, the formal configuration of the text is followed by the ethical refiguration of the reader. The work of Joyce or the Marquis de Sade is not evil (though the latter may be, like certain other literary works, about evil). It’s when we bring the imaginary life back into real life that the question of the ethical imagination comes into play. Literature is always a hermeneutic circle from action to text to action.

TOJ: In The Wake of Imagination you raise as a normative ideal something that you call “an ethical imagination responsive to the demands of the other.”[5] That would be an example of imagination that’s operating in life, correct?

RK: Yes, that would be an imagination in the life world (Lebenswelt); but I would also argue that the poetical imagination in art is one that opens up an ethical sensitivity in us. It opens us to other ways of thinking, living, and being. Here I am, an Irishman in Boston in 2012 reading Anna Karenina, for example, and suddenly I’m a woman in nineteenth-century Russia, and I’m committing suicide. That’s what imagination can do. The artistic imagination can, as King Lear says, expose oneself to “feel what wretches feel.”[6] And that vicarious literary imagining, it seems to me, is already protoethical in that it’s opening us up to acts of sympathy, to living as others lived, and to living as if we were them. And that’s an ethical sensitivity that I think can help us to live better.

Of course, there are misuses of imagination as well. We can go the other way and close ourselves off from others, and then it can become voyeuristic, egotistical. It can generate a kind of narcissism that feeds upon itself, and then we believe, as the serpent says to Adam and Eve, that we shall be as gods, that is, sufficient unto ourselves (see Gen. 3:4). It seems to me that the imagination that thinks it is sufficient unto itself and has no other beyond, no vis-à-vis outside of itself, is on an unethical path.

TOJ: So what saves imagination from this narcissism?

RK: One of the things that saves imagination from itself is that imagination can open the self to the other. You see what I mean? It can go both ways. It seems to me that imagination is an expression of our golems—regardless of whether we are talking about ancient Jewish tales or referring to our contemporary technology, our Facebook, our digital communication, our nuclear energy, and so on. Imagination is a golem with two faces.

TOJ: Reprogenetic technology?

RK: Exactly. That’s where the good and evil imagination is at play. Most of these technologies are neutral in themselves; it’s the way in which they are used that goes one way or the other, and that is dependent on our imagination. Going back to the Hebraic imagination, something that I think is very important about the biblical story—and I’m taking this philosophically here, as a story on par with many of the Greek stories, and not making a truth claim for it as sacred Revelation—is that much like the story of Prometheus, it is a story about imagination and how it works in terms of good and evil. I have always found a certain Talmudic reading of Genesis (developed by Eric Fromm and others) fascinating: six days of creation and then leaving the seventh day empty as a sabbatical space for humans to cocreate with God, with the good, and with the Torah (a word which means “direction” or “way”). God leaves that day free so that we might cocreate or not, so that we might keep or break with the covenant. The seventh day is an invitation to complete creation. This is a refusal of theodicy. The seventh day is left for humans to complete and therefore to direct creation in an evil or a good direction. A good direction is imagination responding to the call of the other, whereas an evil direction is an imagination that has closed itself off from alterity, strangeness, transcendence, foreignness, surprise.

TOJ: Perhaps one specific way the human imagination is put to destructive purposes is through scapegoating or through the imaginative representation of an excluded other as somehow monstrous. This is a theme you deal with at length in your book Strangers, Gods, and Monsters. As René Girard reminds us, this human tendency is productive in so far as it quells the violence associated with mimetic rivalry or our desire for what the other desires, at least for a time, and thereby brings temporary peace to a strife-ridden community. Girard thinks that the Jewish and Christian stories reveal this mechanism as unjust: unlike mythological narratives that mask the scapegoating mechanism by describing the scapegoat as somehow guilty, the Judeo-Christian narrative reveals the scapegoat as not guilty, but innocent.[7] Yet the human tendency to scapegoat continues undiminished. What does this tendency say about us? Is it perhaps an example of a bad narrative, a story that misidentifies the other?

RK: I think that’s a very good example of scapegoating imagination. There are two forms of perverse imagination: there’s propagandistic imagination, which uses images to vilify and scapegoat others, and there’s pornographic imagination, which uses the other as a consumer item. I would put scapegoating, as Girard shows, as the first example of the propagandistic. We project evil onto the other. We reduce the other to the level of the nonhuman, to the level of the animal, the monstrous, the diabolical. Take anti-Semitism. If you look at the portraits of Jews in medieval Europe, they had the feet of goats, the ears of serpents, the skin of lizards. Those artists combined different animal qualities in order to dehumanize Jews. Hitler later called them “vermin.” And in Rwanda, those who perpetuated the genocide called their enemy “cockroaches.” This propaganda was repeated again and again on the radio.

The very notion of teratology, the creation of monsters, is an expression of our fear of our own earthliness, our own darkness, our own depth. It’s a fear—be it legitimate or illegitimate—of our terrestrial origins, which we then project onto outside monsters. And in fact Claude Lévi-Strauss points this out in Structural Anthropology: mythologies very often begin with a hero defeating a monster, say Cadmus defeating the dragon or Oedipus outfoxing the Sphinx. This is always an attempt to personify in an alien and alienated fashion that part of ourselves that we most fear, and we then project it onto others so that we don’t have to deal with it ourselves. We become the pure and they become the impure. But of course, it’s not the monster that’s impure. It’s not Moby Dick that’s impure; it’s Ahab, who sees himself as utterly pure, having projected evil onto the whale but at the expense of his own humanity, because he then doubles into the sinister Parsee who is his double, dark self and who propels him to destruction. So scapegoating leads to the dehumanization not just of the other person—the Jew, the black, the Tutsi, whoever it happens to be—but it also leads to the dehumanizing of the agent, as in the case of Ahab, Hitler, and others.[8]

One way to overcome evil is to stop putting it onto others uniquely and to see that there is also a dynamism going on in ourselves. It’s the oldest story in the Bible—take the beam out of your own eye before you start condemning your neighbor. There’s that work of self- understanding that must be done, because whether we’re listening to Socrates, Augustine, or Freud, we learn that the unexamined life is not worth living. And with Ricoeur, I would add that the unnarrated life is in some respects not a fully humanized life.

The other thing I would say is that I agree with Girard’s understanding of scapegoating and periodic blood sacrifice as attempts to project evil onto some demonized minority or outsider. The only place in which I disagree with him is in his suggestion that it’s only the Abrahamic tradition, and most explicitly in Christianity, that scapegoating is exposed. He doesn’t talk much about Islam, if at all, and in some of his later work he says that it’s prefigured by Judaism in the story of Job and so on; but there’s a certain Christocentric exclusivism, it seems to me, in Girard’s approach. I agree with his general analysis of anthropology and philosophy and ethics, but I disagree with that exclusivism. I absolutely think that he’s right that the Christian crucifixion is a sacrifice that exposes the mimetic scapegoating process; it exposes the evil mechanism at the very root of blood sacrifice because it shows Jesus to be innocent. But I think it’s not only Christianity that does that—and here I’m in agreement with Simone Weil in her book Letter to a Priest—where she says we can find the good, and more particularly the ethic that challenges the scapegoating mechanism, in other narrative traditions, mythologies, and wisdom traditions. There are other spiritual cultures—Weil mentions the Homeric and Asian—that expose the very roots of our own mimetic and scapegoating strategies. Take Prometheus, for example. I mean, Christianity happens to be my particular narrative and wisdom tradition, but I don’t want to exclude the Hindus, the Buddhists, and even the good old pagan Greeks from having access to the ethical truth that challenges the scapegoating mechanism.[9]

I think it’s interesting that in the Adamic story of the fall, the serpent, who is a nonhuman creature, is outside of Adam: this raises all kinds of questions about whether Adam or the serpent is responsible for the first sin. If Adam was seduced by the serpent, we must ask how the serpent got into the garden in the first place, why God allowed it to happen, and why God allowed Adam to respond as he did. And this is where the theodicy enters in: Was this all part of a divine plan? Because if Adam and Eve hadn’t transgressed and eaten of the forbidden fruit, there would be no history. There would be no Christ, who is the felix culpa, the redemption of the happy fall. And for Christians, it is a happy fall, because it allows for Jesus Christ to become incarnate in the story of Christian revelation. That’s one way of looking at it—that it’s all part of a divine plan. Poor old Adam, like poor old Judas, was simply playing out a role that is preordained and prescripted. This is something that I would definitely challenge. I would argue that that the serpent is a scapegoat that Adam has created and projected to exonerate himself. As Adam and Eve say afterward, “It was the serpent who seduced us. We’re not responsible.” They might have gone further and said, as we read in certain Talmudic commentaries, “The serpent seduced us. It’s God’s fault, not ours!”

TOJ: So in Girardian terms, you see the Adamic narrative as masking the innocence of the serpent by making the serpent a scapegoat. And so that entire reading of the fall being necessary as part of God’s plan leading to Jesus as the felix culpa would be, in Girardian terms, a mythological reading of Christianity?

RK: I think it probably would. I’m just doing anthropological hermeneutics here, not theology proper, because what I’m saying is that there may be a projection of the human imagination onto the serpent to the extent that Adam and Eve would be saying we’re not responsible for our choices and that instead the serpent is responsible. Perhaps the serpent is a projection of Adam and Eve’s imagination; perhaps they’re saying to themselves, “We can be as gods if we make ourselves perfect and blame everything on the tempting demon”; and so it’s the imagination talking to itself. I see this as evil imagination—it’s not somebody else seducing the imagination; it’s the imagination seducing itself.

On the other hand, there is something to be learned from this narrative, which is that we humans sometimes experience what Kant calls “radical evil,” which is something so inexplicable and so horrendous that it surpasses the limits of human understanding. When that happens, something in us responds by referring to that inexplicable, horrendous act as inhuman. And that’s important. Neither of these versions of the Adamic story is good or evil, but thinking makes them so.

We’ve got to unpack such stories in different ways, and there’s something legitimate about the suggestion that evil is not just something that we do with a conscious, lucid choice, as Jean-Paul Sartre might maintain; it’s something we’re responsible for—I think that’s the bottom line—but there are also other factors at play, such as the unconscious or other agents. We’re not fully aware that what we’re doing is radically evil. There’s something outside of me—call it my DNA, my ancestral drive, my unconscious; call it collective suggestion, mass hysteria or propaganda—but I am ultimately responsible for making the choice to do good or evil. What I’m arguing against is the deterministic notion of cosmological evil, which would be a kind of gnostic notion that good and evil subsist out there as two ontological forces—divine and demonic—that are completely independent of our choice or responsibility. I believe in the “sovereignty of the good,” to borrow a phrase from Irish Murdoch, and I’m Augustinian in that I think evil is the absence of the good, the privation of the good, the privation of being. And in that sense, evil doesn’t exist independently of the human.[10]

In short, I subscribe, like Augustine, to an anthropological notion of evil. But there is no easy answer. The age-old question, Unde Malum (“Where does evil come from?”) will never be fully answered because there’s always something inscrutable to evil. In that sense, I don’t think Sartre has the whole answer. He would reduce everything, as would many modern rationalists, to conscious choices, and I think that makes sense up to a point; but there’s also something else, something that is at once anthropological and beyond the limits of anthropological reason. Evil is rooted in the human, even radical evil, but it’s rooted in the inscrutable depth of the soul such as we have not yet and maybe never will be able to completely comprehend. And again, that’s not to say it’s cosmological or ontological. I think the move from cosmological evil, which exists in many of the myths—that evil is inscribed in the universe and nature in some ineluctable and insurmountable way—is basically compromising the human part of creation. Thus, I’m for the movement away from Gnostic/cosmological evil to existential/anthropological evil, which I think is also the Judeo-Christian move: more and more we’re aware that we are the ones who are responsible for what we do, not that the gods are pushing us around, as we believed in much of Greek mythology. But even when we embrace the anthropological account of evil, imagination will still have a role to play in giving us narratives that express certain enigmas and mysteries of good and evil that reason itself cannot fully fathom or comprehend. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth’, as Hamlet says to Horatio, ‘than are dreamt of in your philosophy’.

As Bruce Ellis Benson’s recent book Liturgy as a Way of Life reminds us, “in making art, we always start with something.”[1] To be an artist is not to create ex nihilo but to creatively reinterpret and rework the preexisting forms of art, nature, and culture—including the stories and images that shape and direct our lives—into new, often radically different shapes and patterns. This process of drawing on past sources, even as one employs one’s individual vision in their creative use, is often referred to as appropriation. A less charitable word might be stealing.

When we consider appropriation or recycling in the context of art history we may think of pop art, Situationist détournement, Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, or the collagist practices of Dada. We may also think of hip-hop and DJ culture, which draw much of their potency from the creative sampling of earlier material. But appropriation is nothing new. Artists have always creatively engaged their historical, social, and aesthetic contexts to transform preexisting stories into new, unexpected patterns, from John Milton’s rewriting of Genesis in Paradise Lost and Shakespeare’s notorious plot thefts to folk music, which exists as a culture of constant recycling and reinterpretation.[2] To be an artist is to work out of what has come before while freely and spontaneously working material into new aesthetic and narrative possibilities.[3]

This process of creative appropriation, however, takes on additional complexity in an artistic and cultural age of postproduction. We live in a global culture of use where almost everyone has access to digital editing technology. The appropriation, creative transformation, and free sharing of video and audio content online has troubled the boundaries between the traditional polarities of production and consumption—suddenly everyone is an artist. This raises questions about art itself—for example, can the concept of art be restricted to a single product or object, or does the term describe a larger cultural process that breaks such boundaries by its very nature? It also raises questions about what it means to tell and inhabit particular stories in the digital age.

Postproduction is a term used in film and video-making to describe the editing process—cutting and splicing, rendering graphics, sound mixing and mastering—everything that goes into making a film after the cameras stop rolling. Nicholas Bourriaud, the controversial French curator and theorist, employs this term in his book of the same name to describe a new way of understanding art and culture at the beginning of the millennium.[4] For Bourriaud, art is no longer simply a matter of production but of creative, appropriative postproduction. What Bourriaud famously termed relational aesthetics is the social framework in which this new schema emerges.

I come to this discussion as a video editor interested in exploring what you might call an ontology of editing. Such an ontology seeks to understand what kind of a world—what kind of being—is disclosed in the process of editing images and sound together. I suggest that even with the most basic combination of two disparate shots, there is a process of narrativization, of putting things together into narrative sequences.^[5] This suggests another useful term in thinking about the ongoing role of art as appropriation: renarrativization, the process of telling a new story that simultaneously deconstructs and reconstructs earlier narratives, symbols, and networks of meaning. Fredric Jameson employed this term as a way of describing appropriative artworks that reconfigure preexisting texts and images into new, hybrid “textualities”; it has also been widely used in feminist and postcolonial criticism.^[6] I believe that considering renarrativization may help bring out important aspects of Bourriaud’s thought while pushing it in new, story-oriented directions.

If, as Bourriaud writes, the artwork rather than being a static, fixed object now “functions as the temporary terminal of a network of interconnected elements, like a narrative that extends and reinterprets preceding narratives,”[7] we must further ask how a relational aesthetic, in an age of digital postproduction, alters our experience of narrative, including the political, social, and religious narratives that shape and direct our lives. Postproduction enacts a kind of subversive, creative renarrativization of these controlling narratives, a new iteration of what art (from Milton to Andy Warhol) has always accomplished.

Relational Aesthetics

To better understand Bourriaud’s concept of the artist as an agent of cultural postproduction, it is helpful to begin with his suggestive and controversial notion of a relational aesthetics, which draws attention to the way the production and reception of art are always already embedded in the “realm of human interactions and social context.” This seemingly innocuous contemporary appropriation of the age-old question of aesthetics represents a significant break from the Kantian philosophical tradition, which posits an “independent and private symbolic space” in an individual’s encounter with a work of art. While, for Bourriaud, TV and books force one back to a private “space” of contemplation, art “tightens the space of relations” between human beings, in a way analogous to the way urbanization brings people closer together. Taking a stand against neo-Kantians like Thierry de Duve, Bourriaud suggests that an experience of art is not a “sum of judgments” made by isolated, discerning individuals in the hermetically pure space of the gallery but, rather, “a bundle of relations with the world, giving rise to other relations.” Each work of art posits “a proposal to live in a shared world.” The question is no longer “Is this art beautiful?” or “What does this piece mean?”—questions of taste and subjective response—but something along the lines of “Does this work permit me to enter into dialogue? Could I exist, and how, in the space it defines?”[8]

Bourriaud offers us an aesthetics of sharing and “interhuman exchange,” where our encounter with an artwork is not a private, individual affair but a “collective elaboration of meaning.”[9] Rather than being walled off from the real social world, art is, for Bourriaud, a “social interstice” that finds its place as a zone of alternative economic, relational, and cultural possibilities with real, if sometimes unorthodox, potentialities for “inter-human commerce” and exchange. Art is, in short, an “inter-human game.”[10] Art history can thus be thought of as the trajectory whereby aesthetic concern moves from consideration of humankind in relation to the gods (the classical paradigm) to humankind in relation to the object (modernism) to, finally, humankind and interhuman relations.[11]

Bourriaud first developed the term relational aesthetics in reference to a number of diverse artists working in the mid- to late nineties, notably Rirkrit Tiravanija, Douglas Gordon, Liam Gillick, Pierre Huyghe, Gabriel Orozco, Maurizio Cattelan and Vanessa Beecroft, who in his estimation were producing work that demanded a new theoretical structure in relation to contemporary art history. For example, Tiravanija’s Pad Thai (1990) was, rather than an art object or performance piece per se, a kind of social experiment where the artist cooked dinner for whoever came to the gallery—the transitive, communal experience of eating and conversing itself being the work of art. For such a relational artwork, Kantian (and Greenbergian) categories are not fully adequate for there is no art object. Equally unsatisfactory, however, are antecedent notions of “happening” or “drift” (derive) we might associate with the Situationists, Fluxus, or performance or conceptual art. In relational aesthetics, art does not stand autonomously against social conditions, but is itself a social, cultural phenomenon. By opening up a dialogue—by opening up the space of the gallery into an ad hoc dinner party—the rules of the game of art are altered.

Relational aesthetics also differs from earlier aesthetic models by the way it aims to effect social change. Rather than seeking to entirely reconstruct the architecture of human culture, tearing down the old world to build a new one guided by aesthetic ideals—a Romantic view that seems to have persisted in much postmodern theory—relational art is about “learning to inhabit the world in a better way.” Rather than escaping the narratives and systems that shape and direct our lives, the artist must work from within this given real, exerting creativity as a perpetual “tenant of culture,” in a phrase Bourriaud borrows from Michel de Certeau. Art becomes not just the creator or destroyer of imaginary utopias but an agent working within “the realm of human interactions and its social context.”[12]

Bourriaud describes relational aesthetics as less a theory of art than a theory of form, form being defined in quasi-Heideggerian terms as “a structure . . . which shows the typical features of a world.” Form emerges from “lasting” encounter, where the “components” of a work “form a whole whose sense ‘holds good’ at the moment of their birth, stirring up new ‘possibilities of life.’”[13] Here I find echoes of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of art as transformation into structure.[14] There is still such a thing as the work of art, but it exists in the mode of a momentary crystallization—a synaptic connection within a constantly evolving network—rather than as a static, flat object: “The upshot of this is that the fixed, final form of the work of art is destabilized in favor of a perpetual open-endedness, where the artwork serves as an ‘unfolding scenario,’ comparable to a musical score or screenplay, which spurs on further artistic creation.”[15] Such scenarios are, I suggest along with Bourriaud, narrative in nature. Yet they must always be relational, evolving out of interhuman stories. For Bourriaud, form only becomes form through human interactions.[16]

Postproduction

It is in Bourriaud’s follow-up to Relational Aesthetics, however, that his theory of the interplay of multiple forms and scenarios becomes most evocative. In Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay, Bourriaud extends his account of the relational, contextual character of art to describe the nature of creativity in a digital culture characterized by the ceaseless reprogramming, remixing, and transmission of preexistent cultural forms—a global culture of sharing and the free flow of images. Here the dominant mode of creativity is the constant recycling and recontextualization of sound and images. Digital video and audio editing technology, along with the mass accessibility of video hosting websites, have pushed the reinterpretation and reuse of earlier forms to the point of oversaturation:

Notions of originality (being at the origin of) and even of creation (making something from nothing) are slowly blurred in this new cultural landscape marked by the twin figures of the DJ and the programmer, both of whom have the task of selecting cultural objects and inserting them into new contexts.[17]

For Bourriaud, video artists like Douglas Gordon and Pierre Huyghe push the idea of appropriation one step further by “deeply reexamin[ing] notions of creation, authorship, and originality.”[18] For such artists, the working model is not the “art of appropriation” (à la Duchamp or Warhol, or found-footage filmmakers like Bruce Conner or Craig Baldwin), which still “infers an ideology of ownership” and thus of stealing, but an ecology of sharing—a culture of use, where cultural forms are tools, equipment to be freely employed by all.[19] It is in this context that Bourriaud posits the emergence of a “culture of use” or “culture of activity,” where the artwork functions as a kind of disruptive, subversive “narrative that extends and reinterprets preceding narratives.”[20]

As I previously mentioned, the term Bourriaud applies to this paradigm shift is postproduction, which he draws from video editing. The artist becomes a kind of curator or editor of cultural forms, putting elements together in recombinant patterns. Bourriaud’s language here is of the artist as semionaut, an explorer who navigates signs and who must practice the “invention of paths through culture.” In a culture of use, one seeks not only to ingest social artifacts but also to “actively inhabit” these forms. The “recycling of sounds, images, and forms implies incessant navigation within the meanderings of cultural history”; here as in relational aesthetics, the artist does not leave culture behind but dwells in it more fully.[21] By investigating and reinterpreting various scenarios, artists renarrativize the stories that make up culture.

Here a key example is the work of the Scottish video artist Douglas Gordon. Gordon, whose work Bourriaud describes at length in both Relational Aesthetics and Postproduction, is best known for his works that use found footage from classic Hollywood films to explore themes of memory, ownership, and our collective reception of these iconic texts. As one commentator puts it, “Gordon’s art [thus] resides not in the physical object but rather in the memory and actions of the viewer.”[22] In what is arguably his most famous piece, Twenty Four Hour Psycho, he slows Alfred Hitchcock’s classic horror film Psycho down to two frames per second, so the film now plays for twenty-four hours. Here is found footage filmmaking taken to an extreme: a slowing down of time so that the narrative that originally contained these images is dislocated. Even the most banal of scenes may take hours to progress. The audience must reach into their memories, individual and collective, in order to reconstruct the narrative and their current place in it. The process of renarrativization is thus not just the way Gordon “appropriates the entire story of Psycho in which one now-iconic shot follows the next,” but also the whole process by which viewers encounter the film, not least of all, as a sculptural freestanding projection in the center of the gallery around which they must physically locate themselves. The narrative of Psycho is renarrativized by its relation to the viewers.[23]

Hitchcock’s Psycho is so well known, however, that we are dealing not just with the “text” but with “paratexts”—what we already know about Psycho from mass culture, as well as our own personal experiences related to the film. All of these narratives intersect at the work of art, which shows itself to be a node in a larger social network and network of meanings. Gordon’s 2008 redaction, 24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth and To and Fro (2008), takes Psycho and instead plays it on two screens side by side: one running forward, one running backward. Thus, there will only be one single frame, at the very midpoint of the film, where both screens show the same image. Gordon has used similar strategies in other video installations: his left is right and right is wrong and left is wrong and right is right (1999) takes Otto Preminger’s film Whirlpool (1949) and separates “the odd numbered frames on one screen and the even on the other,” with the missing frames respectively filled in with black and the left projection playing in reverse.[24] In 24 Hour Psycho, in both its iterations, the interplay of memory, progression of time, and our collective reverence for Hitchcock’s film coalesce into a Zen-like meditation on the cinematic medium itself as the ontology of postproduction is made manifest. There is also no small significance to the choice of Psycho as material for the piece—is it too much to draw a link between the cuts of the knife entering the protagonist’s skin and the (now slowed down) cuts of the film editor? Psycho was also revolutionary for killing off its main character in the first quarter of the film, yet in 24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth and To and Fro, death turns backward into life.

We can, of course, take this to an even greater extreme, as Gordon has himself. His 1995 film 5 Year Drive-By (1995), rarely screened for obvious reasons, takes John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) and extends it to play for five years. Here again the extreme lengthening of the narrative calls for the initiation of multiple renarrativizations—stripped of the discernible flow of time, viewers themselves become searchers seeking to relate Wayne’s iconic image to their own cultural and cinematic memories.

24 Hour Psycho has been described as a “cinematic ready-made,”[25] and the description is appropriate. Like Duchamp, here the appropriation—or more pointedly for Bourriaud, the use—of a preexisting form is largely characterized by the decision to use that form. Gordon’s work is of particular interest in the Internet age as it is linked to fan practices and bootlegging. Indeed, his own bootleg recording of Andy Warhol’s Empire (an eight-hour long static shot of the Empire State Building) has led to other bootlegs and copies, just as bootleg selections from 24 Hour Psycho exist on the web. The Internet gives us the most striking example of a culture of use, where images and sounds with no record of their provenance suddenly appear, posted on YouTube, and then absorbed into the constant cycle of digital postproduction that endlessly reshuffles and recombines old footage into new memes and viral videos.

There are countless other important film and video artists working today with appropriated images.[26] However, the most accessible practitioners of “use” remain the thousands, if not millions of video makers making new stories out of preexisting footage on iPads and laptops across the globe. It is they who truly define the culture of activity Bourriaud sees reflected in the art world. As Bourriaud writes, “To learn how to use forms, as the artists in question invite us to do, is above all to know how to make them one’s own, to inhabit them.” We are learning to inhabit these forms, learning how to become tenants of digital culture. In the digital landscape, the romantic ideal of the solitary artist is exploded in favor of a collaborative, open-source mode of creativity that is continually re-creating and recycling preexisting material. Here, in Bourriaud’s words, “there is not living creation, on the one hand, and the dead weight of the history of forms, on the other: postproduction artists do not make a distinction between their work and that of others, or between their own gestures and those of viewers.”[27]

All this may seem to be making a mountain out of pad thai. The fact that anyone can reedit the Star Wars movies and post the result on YouTube does not mean everyone can make great new works of art. Bourriaud’s theories are not without their critics; his work has been called scattered, too “1990s,” misrepresentative of the work of the artists he cites, and perhaps guilty of turning artists into merchants and reinforcing the economic “scenario” of production and consumption rather than subverting it.[28] However, I do not wish to simply reiterate Bourriaud’s rather controversial claims about relational aesthetics and the use of forms, holding them up as the final word on the matter. Rather, I want to appropriate from Bourriaud a concern with the rewriting of narratives, the digital “culture of activity” in which we find ourselves, and the communal experience of art in culture as providing helpful ways forward for aesthetic discourse.

When You Know the Notes to Sing

Narrative is vitally important. As James K. A. Smith notes in Imagining the Kingdom, story subsists not at a refined, abstract level but in our bones. For Smith, following the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, story is “the transparent envelope of meaning” we live within on a somatic, incarnational level, a meaning-making activity extending deep down into the prelinguistic, primordial structures of our bodies. In fact, for Smith, our body itself is a “nexus of living meanings” to such an extent that an analogy can be drawn between bodies and works of art. (Here are echoes of Bourriaud’s language of art as “terminal”). Narrative shapes and guides us in the constellation of desires and phenomenological “intentions” that frame our embodied experience;[29] economic, political, ideological and religious narratives inform us at every moment of our lives. To be human is to be continually inscribed and reinscribed into various cultural stories. And as Bourriaud writes, “for artists today contributing to the birth of a culture of activity, the forms that surround us are the materializations of these narratives,” and so they are the raw material for works of artistic invention. To be an artist is not only to be aware of the “immaterial” scenarios that manifest themselves in the objects, texts, images, and, above all, relationships which pervade our lives but also to use these “precarious structures” as tools in the pursuit of “particular narrative spaces.”[30]

Here, if you’ll forgive me, I should mention my own work. In 2011 I created a video installation for Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, an all-night art event in Toronto, to accompany the Toronto Choral Artists’ production of a contemporary piece by Joby Talbot. We had over seven thousand visitors through our venue, the historic Church of the Redeemer in downtown Toronto, over the course of the twelve hours from dusk until dawn. The theme of both the videos and the choral piece was the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain to see the bones of Saint James. Using found footage from an array of sources—The Wizard of Oz, old sci-fi films, religious epics—I attempted to renarrativize through sound and images the stories of the saints whose relics lie along the road to Compostela. We attempted to introduce a relational, experiential component to the installation by having viewers move through the church in a kind of pilgrimage through moving images and by inviting them to reflect on the video meditations at each station. Our thought was that relics and bones, such as the bones of St. James, which were miraculously uncovered at Compostela, are re-membered as living bodies through our consideration of the narratives of the saints. This echoes the way art can produce an embodied, relational entrance into other narrative worlds.

I will conclude, however, with an even stranger example. A few months ago, I had the opportunity to participate in an odd cultural ritual: the Sing-a-Long Sound of Music. Though I did not dress up for the occasion, many of my fellow cinemagoers came clad as nuns, Austrian children, raindrops on roses, and brown paper packages tied up with string. The basic premise of the wildly popular cinematic sing-along phenomenon, which originated in the United Kingdom and has made its way to North America, is classic film watching as “audience participation.”[31] The audience sings along with the musical numbers, making use of subtitles provided for this purpose, and throughout a film various plot points call for specific vocal responses. It is a surprisingly engaging way to view a film—at times quite ridiculous and at other times oddly moving. For me, singing “Edelweiss” in a theater packed with Sound of Music diehards engendered an earnest, if self-reflexive, sense of communitas.

This admittedly strange experience prompted me to consider a number of questions about the nature of our experience of art. What does something like the Sing-a-Long Sound of Music presuppose? On its surface, it generally seems to rely on familiarity with the story—you are watching a movie you have watched a dozen or more times before—yet this time you are part of a community of people moved by the same narrative. Does the narrative itself somehow create the community? What is happening in the sing-along theater seems to fly in the face of the traditional, perhaps Kantian archetype of movie watching, where we sit alone in a darkened room staring silently at the luminous silver screen. Here, the balance of energy has shifted to the audience; the experience of watching, responding, and joining in with the film together becomes the art’s work, kitschy and overly sentimental as it all may be. There is the familiar narrative of the Sound of Music, but this narrative is being communally rewritten in this new, bizarre iteration.

Perhaps the Sing-a-Long Sound of Music is a small symbol of the positive trajectory of a relational, narrative approach to appropriation, a rethinking of the ontology of postproduction that draws out its interhuman aspect. If we are to tell new stories in an age of postproduction, characterized by a digital culture of use where forms circulate, proliferate, and endlessly recombine into new networks of interconnecting narratives, perhaps we need to turn our attention to our relationships with each other as viewers. Far from being passive spectators, enthralled by the society of the spectacle, we are summoned to participate in the creative renarrativization of culture. Art takes the stories that shape us and reshapes them in order to shape new narratives, new possibilities, allowing us to inhabit culture more authentically and with a radical openness to alternative modes of exchange, production, and postproduction. The narrative, relational being of film and video editing helps us approach art and culture as interhuman projects.

Benson suggests that thinking of art as appropriation does not deny the possibility of originality but rather locates artistic creativity in the generative, while still appropriative, practice of improvisation. Benson’s underlying model is that of the jazz combo, which takes a fake book tune and interprets it in a way that is both faithful to the original and radically different. Here, there is a move away from Harold Bloom’s so-called “anxiety of influence,”[32] which still relies on the outmoded model of the lone artist who must become a singular “strong poet” against the crushing weight of undead tradition, and toward a sense of authentic, tradition-sensitive community in art making and enjoyment:

As a jazz improviser, one becomes part of a community of improvisers. As improviser, one works with material that already exists rather than creating ex nihilo. As improviser, one is aware of being wholly indebted to the past. . . . As improviser, one joins a conversation.[33]

Joining a conversation, being “indebted to the past” without being constrained by it—these are helpful ways to conceive of the relationships between artistic creativity and preceding forms, between new stories and old stories, in a digital age.

[1] Benson, Liturgy as a Way of Life: Embodying the Arts in Christian Worship (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 80–81. Italics are Benson’s.

[2] Going back even further, one could examine the way the Genesis narrative itself appropriates imagery and narrative elements from ancient Near East mythologies; looking forward, we could look at William Blake’s renarrativization of John Milton.

[3] The nature of this process of influence and appropriation can in a sense be thought of as a two-way relationship. As T. S. Eliot famously writes, “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.” See Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays (New York, NY: Dover, 1998).

[4] Nicholas Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World (New York, NY: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002).

^[5] I am thinking here of the famous Kuleshov experiment: if you put two disparate shots together, like an expressionless face and a bowl of soup, the viewer will attempt to construct a narrative from just two images. Is the actor hungry? Is he looking at the soup?

^[6] See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 96.

[7] Bourriaud, Postproduction, 19.

^[8] Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon, France: Les Presses Du Reel, 2002), 14, 15, 15–16, 22, and 109. All italics are Bourriaud’s.

^[9] Ibid., 15; this sentiment is echoed in Postproduction.

^[10] Ibid., 19.

^[11] Ibid., 28.

^[12] Ibid., 13 and 14. All italics are Bourriaud’s.

^[13] Ibid., 19, 19–20.

^[14] See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York, NY: Crossroad, 1975).

^[15] Bourriaud, Postproduction, 10.

^[16] Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 22.

^[17] Bourriaud, Postproduction, 6.

^[18] Ibid., 2.

[19] See here the work of Lawrence Lessig on “free culture,” particularly in the Internet age.

^[20] Bourriaud, Postproduction, 19.

^[21] Ibid., 9.

^[22] Michael Alex Hauger II, “Dematerializing the Medium: How Sol LeWitt, Douglas Gordon, and Lawrence Wiener Reinvented the Art Object,” PhD dissertation, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, New York (2013), 22.

^[23] “By being temporally stretched, the film plays in extreme slow motion. Changes in images occur almost imperceptibly, and the sound can no longer be identified. The plot appears to barely progress, so that an audience familiar with the details of the film classic must mentally add foregoing and succeeding events to the moment of viewing the image—that is, completing the story either before or after it has taken place on screen. Thus various time dimensions—past, future, and present—consolidate into an amplified experience of time” (Sylvia Martin, Video Art [Cologne, Germany: Taschen, 2006], 52).

^[24] Elizabeth Affuso, “The Sculptural Screen: Spectatorship, Exhibition, and Hollywood in Contemporary Film/Video Art,” PhD dissertation, University of Southern California (2011), 93 and 38.

^[25] Martin, Video Art, 52.

[26] Perhaps most notable in recent (Canadian) memory is the work of Christian Marclay, whose twenty-four-hour video loop The Clock played to great acclaim at the National Gallery in Ottawa in 2012. Marclay appropriated footage having to do with time and clocks from a vast array of classic films and then stitched them together to cover the entire stretch of the day. Here again we are dealing with notions of cinematic time, the appropriation and cultural reception of visual texts, and the nature of narrativity—a creative renarrativization of our own experience of time, filtered through the Hollywood dreamscape. A longer list of artists might include filmmakers like Douglas Aitken, Thom Anderson, Matthias Muller, Matt McCormick, Jay Rosenblatt, and Craig Baldwin. In Canada, we also have Mike Hoolboom and Anne McGuire; McGuire’s Strain Andromeda The is a shot by shot reconstruction of The Andromeda Strain where each shot is taken out of its position in the film and moved to the exact opposite position, so the last shot becomes the first shot, the second-to-last shot becomes the second shot, but it still plays in “forward motion.”

[27] Bourriaud, Postproduction, 19 and 23.

^[28] See especially Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (2004): 51–79. Also insightful are Stewart Martin, “Critique of Relational Aesthetics,” Third Text 21, no. 4 (July 2007): 369–86; Toni Ross, “Aesthetic Autonomy and Interdisciplinarity: A Response to Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘Relational Aesthetics,’” Journal of Visual Art Practice 5, no. 3 (2006): 167–81.

^[29] Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 153 and 175, as quoted in Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 59 and 60.

^[30] Bourriaud, Postproduction, 23. All italics are Bourriaud’s.

[31] Other Sing-A-Long iterations include participative versions of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Grease; there is now even the rise of the “quote-a-long” version of Will Ferrell’s Anchorman.

[32] See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1973).

^[33] Benson, Liturgy as a Way of Life, 93.

According to Greek mythology, the cave of Hypnos can be found by those awaiting death on a poppy-lined mountainside in the underworld. The river Lethe trickles through the soporific cave. The Greeks say that all who sip from the waters of the Lethe will surrender to forgetfulness and be released of all earthly memories. With the lightness of liberation and the soft breath of the damp cave, their supple bodies will fall to the floor of the moonless chamber where they will remain as their souls prepare for reincarnation.

Learning, then, is the rediscovery of the knowledge that lies dormant in the soul. This rediscovery is expressed with the Greek word anamnesis, which means to unforget, remember, or recover the truths that are always already embedded in us. This also explains the derivation of aletheia, the Greek word for truth, in which the prefix a suggests the negation of what follows, lethe, or forgetting. Aletheia is the recollection of insights from our past lives, a recollection that draws truth out of concealment. To remember is to rediscover truth.¹

These are not the firm and situated empirical truths that some traditions find compelling. These are not truths that can be captured, articulated, discerned, or determined. When we cling to that form of correctness, we risk stifling and enframing the dynamism of the world; we risk mistaking this empirical account for an objective reproduction of the world as it is. And as this happens, something essential is forgotten. Such representational models of thinking reject that the world is constantly developing, and they fail to reconstruct more comprehensive truths that are sensitive to extraordinary and subtle change. Anamnesis encourages us to reimagine a truth that is amenable and responsive to all amendments and modifications, a truth that has not been decided definitively but that instead invites inquiry and adjusts itself to reflect new discoveries.

In this same way, when I speak of remembering, I am speaking of a poetic or reconstructive re-remembering and a creative revealing. Martin Heidegger refers to poiesis as the artistic gathering of diverse elements and crafting from those elements a human art that resonates deeply with and reveals the essence of the reconstructed materials.² It is through this form of poiesis that we are able to rediscover aletheia, and it is through the poetic form of storytelling that we are able to weave together the discrete materials of our lived experience. We pick up the odds and ends of what we remember and what we’ve forgotten, and we use these to make narratives about ourselves that might deviate from and subvert reality or “what really happened.” Yet, through this process, we are able to create more resonant accounts of what has happened to us and of who we are.

Reconstruction

Because memory is located within a particular kind of philosophy aimed at “capturing” being and making it accessible in the form of logical propositions, memory has been thought of as being primarily representational. It is commonly assumed that when we experience an event, it is consolidated as a mnemonic trace, which is then stored away in the singular repository of the memory, remaining there until some later moment when we are prompted to recall it.

However, in 1932, Sir Frederic Bartlett, the first professor of experimental psychology at the University of Cambridge, challenged this idea when he published Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. There, Bartlett argues for a reconstructive approach to memory that problematizes the historically accepted reproductive model. He concludes that memory does not operate as a fixed and rudimentary structure of preserving, stimulating, and reproducing experiences; on the contrary, remembrance is a creative process that actively reconstructs events from a developing network of impressions.³

This way of understanding memory establishes recollection as a mode of creative composition; to remember is to creatively assemble the past from the perspective of the present. Paul Ricoeur echoes this project philosophically in his 1984 reading of Aristotle’s Poetics, in which he posits the theory of emplotment that explores the distinctly human art of composing narratives. Narrative composition, like the mnemonic process, reconstructs experience to give a sequential order to episodic and isolated events. According to Ricoeur, we poetically reimagine scenarios so that we may lend coherence to our disjointed lives.⁴

Ricoeur’s approach suggests that when we remember and identify ourselves, we do so by telling stories. We understand our lives through our evolving narratives. We have narrative identities. However, these stories are constantly being rewritten, and as they change, our identities fluctuate with them. In this line of thought, life stories are the poetic solution to discordance, and remembering is the art form by which we reinterpret our individual experiences and derive meaning from them. Thus, memory has a distinctly personal dimension that evades objective representation and provides us with self-understanding.

Dismembering the Mnemonic Storehouse

Demonstrating, once more, the larger tradition of an objective and static approach to being, predominant theories of memory rely on metaphors and analogies of filing cabinets and storehouses in which experiences of past events are crystallized, consolidated, and tucked neatly away in chronological order, to be called upon and summoned for future review or else forgotten. Saint Augustine, for example, evokes a “great field or a spacious palace” where “countless images of all kinds” and “all the thoughts” have been stored away “for safekeeping.” Others believe, “the storehouse is [the] place where things are put in the hope that they may be found again when they are wanted exactly as they were when first stored away.”⁵

However, recent studies in neuroscience and psychology have discovered that there is no mnemonic storehouse, and thus, there are no pure memories.⁶ In fact, the reconstructive approach to memory illustrates that the memory is not a passive system of imaging and reviewing the past. Rather, each time we recall an event, we reconstruct it in a new and different way. We recall an event according to our most recent images and rememberings, attitudes and impressions, opinions, understandings, needs, desires, stories, and narratives.

When recollecting an event, we are not transported to some prior point in time as a seven-year-old witnessing our first encounter with lovemaking or death. Instead, we conjure that scene based on our present capacity to interpret what such an event would look like. As stated by Charles Fernyhough, a contemporary psychologist who explores the interstices of literature and memory, remembering can only happen in the present through a “prism of intervening selves.”⁷ Therefore, in remembering, we ask ourselves how it would feel to be in the midst of such a formative moment.

We imagine what it would feel like to walk beyond the closed door and back out it with shame and misunderstanding. Or, to be standing beside a coffin in the cold wetness of the mid-December rain, several months after the death of a young cousin to whom in the years afterwards you will be compared to and told stories of, and wonder whether you will also be struck from the earth at the age of twenty-three and whether there will be a young child standing there at your funeral in her mother’s cloak, who will walk with her soon-to-be step-dad back to the green minivan with her soon-to-be step-sisters with whom she will only speak every third-year. And you will wonder if in the years following your death, the young girl will listen to the recording of the voicemail you left for your mother, panicking, just before the towers collapsed and you died, hoping you could’ve spoken with her one last time, heard her voice, told her you loved her; and only a couple of years before listening to this tape, that same seven-year-old girl, who is now a young woman, will sit in your bedroom, exactly as you left it, on the night that your father will die of cancer in a room down the hall, and she will look at the photographs on your bedroom wall, recognize herself in them and wonder if you knew her better than she can remember. Sitting there in your bedroom she will find a Magic 8-Ball, the very same Magic 8-Ball that she will give to her now ex-boyfriend to help him make decisions, and on the night that your dad will die she will ask it, “Will my Uncle Bob get to see my cousin again?” to which it will reply, “Undoubtedly,” all while sitting at a table fourteen years following your death, contemplating the nature of remembrance and storytelling while writing a reflective essay.

This is how we remember formative events. We do not view them as one would a video reel or an exact replica of that moment frozen in time; rather, we remember definitive moments in narrative form, creating stories from bits of past and present images that seem relevant and applicable at the moment of remembrance. The story changes with each telling, to each person, for new information is often gleaned, and as this happens, the identity shifts, new understandings emerge, and the elements that comprise the story are displaced and replaced. 

The Mnemonic Schema

For Bartlett, past experiences are constituents of an evolving framework, or schema, into which active impulses are filtered and modified, and patterns of remembering and understanding are developed.⁸ Whenever a mnemonic entity enters the frame, whenever something new is remembered, the experience is molded by its relationship to other memories, and other memories are modified by their relationship to the incoming impulse. There is a constant interplay of new and former experiences. The memory system constantly rearranges itself, and as it does so, the memories themselves are reassembled. Because of this, an event is uniquely re-created with each recollection. This living mnemonic schema also weaves together emotional and intellectual information, assembling stories and narratives while reinterpreting our pasts from our situatedness in the present.

Zsolt Komáromy suggests that we would not be able to define all of the unconscious and internal as well as the outer, more observable conditions of our past experiences that relate us to the world. Memory then has the freedom to choose “among these relations, building out of them a new experience, always differing in some ways from the original it re-creates.” This does not suggest that “remembering would be free of all external factors determining it.” On the contrary:

The autonomy of memory depends precisely on these determining factors: the more such there are, paradoxically, the greater is memory’s autonomy, since the more relations to the world there are involved in a recollection, the greater the density of experiencing embraced by memory, the greater latitude there is for selection, for shaping, for the freedom of construction.⁹

With each incoming impulse there is a greater opportunity for creative composition. The larger the developing network of memories and experiences (i.e., instincts, impulses and desires, interests and ideals, knowledge, information, and inklings), the more relationships there are to be delineated and the more possibilities there are to compose personal narratives. Memory, then, is not a reduplicative system of reproducing the past; rather, memory is a complex and developing system that creates scaffolds of meaning while poetically reconstructing the past.

I do not remember the death of my cousin as a singular or untouched reproduction of the day itself. When I recall that day, I do so with all of the associations I currently have. I actively reconstruct the image of being a young girl, imagining what it would feel like to be in that body. In doing so, I impose my current understandings of death, family, children, and many more emotions and sentiments that I harbor about the effect of that day and what it represents to each of the members of my family. I take these fragments of experience—the image of a cemetery, the rain, the mourners, the green minivan, the photographs in my cousin’s room, the Magic 8-Ball, the conversations with my grandmother—and with them, I build up a scene. I build up a world. I build up a story, and within the image that I have now conjured of the funeral stands each of these elements, wound up inextricably, if only momentarily, with the memory of my cousin’s death.

The reconstructive approach brings “memory into line with imagining.” From this perspective, “memory is endlessly creative.”¹⁰ It is dynamic and fluid. Memories communicate with our desires and mimic the movement of our interests and opinions. As our understandings evolve, our memories do too. As Bartlett states, “If, then, we have to treat the traces as somehow living and carried along with these active factors of ‘schematic’ organization, it is no wonder that they display invention, condensation, elaboration, simplification and all other alterations.”¹¹ Similarly, our memories reflect our present understanding of the world and our own lived experience; we are known to assemble stories of the past to substantiate our beliefs. For these reasons, “memory [is] imprecise if viewed as a mechanism accurately reproducing discretely stored items of data.”¹² Memory is not an empirical repository of historically irrefutable evidence but an art by which we actively reconstruct, dismember, and re-remember our pasts.

Emplotment and the Poetics of Storytelling

Although the term poetry descends from poiesis, poiesis does not refer to poetry alone. Instead, the ancient Greeks used the word more generally to describe an art form that is an active doing, making, and creating. It is a meeting point of the self and the world that transforms natural material and uninterpreted experience into something entirely new and intensely personal.

In the Poetics, Aristotle speaks of two entities that together produce poiesis. The first concept is called muthos, which Ricoeur translates as emplotment. This is a process of unifying disconnected events, organizing experiences, and composing narratives. When we participate in emplotment, we situate discordant events into the narrative arc of story.

The second entity that constitutes poiesis is a concept referred to as mimetic activity or, in Greek, mimesis. Mimesis is often translated as mimicry or imitation; however, Ricoeur insists that we resist affiliating this concept with mere reproduction. Instead, we must understand mimetic activity “in the dynamic sense of making a representation, of a transposition into representative works.” That is, we must understand it as an artistic and expressive depiction of an event that alters and transforms the original.¹³

Ricoeur argues that human beings instinctually understand through narrative explanation. As a result, we have a narrative understanding of the world. We actively produce “plots in relation to every sort of static structure, anachronological paradigm, [and] temporal invariant.”¹⁴ We fathom our own lives by composing plots that represent them.

For instance, when I am prompted or inclined to explain myself and proclaim who I am and why I am Willow, I do so by telling a story. I could make use of a few adjectives, “curious, quiet, concerned,” but these traits could belong to anyone. So, if I would like to share with you the essence of what I feel—the core of emotion and understanding that sits in my upper chest cavity, that has been slowly and progressively developed through pain, passion and regret, and countless excruciating and seemingly insignificant moments of being—I will tell you a story. The story of who I am. I am not an impersonal amalgamation of events but the recipient of experience; I am the subject that is wrought with anxiety and determined to understand it. My narrative makes my life meaningful. It is the story that I tell that relates who I am and how I experience the world. The truth of who I am emerges with my story.

As demonstrated here, humans make sense of experience in narrative form. Consequently, if narratives are composed through muthos (emplotment) and mimesis (mimetic activity), and narratives produce meaning, then muthos and mimesis are the processes of making meaning. And, if poiesis is the craft of composing stories that is mediated through muthos and mimesis, then poiesis is the art form by which humans understand their lives and make them meaningful. As such, narratives are the mythopoetic result of the primal act of narratively understanding who we are.

Ricoeur illustrates how we draw from the aggregate of isolated and incongruent events and thread them together to posit a theory of how we have come to be. Each element represents a probable cause for the next, which makes the story whole and complete. Aristotle suggests that a thing is whole when it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. However, “it is only in virtue of poetic composition that something counts as a beginning, middle, or end.” Further, what constitutes “the beginning is not the absence of some antecedent but the absence of necessity” in the created sequence of events; “as for the end, it is indeed what comes after something else, but ‘either as its necessary sequel or as its usual [and hence probable] sequel.”’¹⁵ There is no beginning, middle, and end in the lived experience. As poets and narrators, we create them. Thus, “to make up a plot is already to make the intelligible spring from the accidental, the universal from the singular, the necessary or the probable from the episodic.”¹⁶ To make a plot is to create a meaningful sequence of chance events.

When emulating and representing actions and organizing events, we find pleasure in comprehending the incomprehensible, making conclusions from the unfinished, and recognizing the form of that which is often jumbled and without order. In doing so, it is possible that “this pleasure of recognition . . . presupposes . . . a prospective concept of truth, according to which to invent is to rediscover.”¹⁷ Therefore, in the process of identifying compatible elements of experience and delineating relations between them, self-truths are revealed and the inner-workings of the mind are given form.

Thus, when we speak of mimesis, the operation by which we creatively emulate experience:

We must not understand by the word some redoubling of presence, as we could still do for Platonic mimesis but rather the break that opens the space for fiction. Artisans who work with words produce not things but quasi-things; they invent the as-if.¹⁸

Each time a plot is constructed and story is told a possible truth is brought forth. When we speak of the break, the rupture, the fracture, and the fragments, we speak of the distance, the space, and the clearance that makes room for prospective connections to be drawn and redrawn, for stories to be written and rewritten and for possibilities to be disclosed and revealed. As storytellers and narrators, we poetically compose our own malleable truths, challenge them, deny them, and create them anew.

Narrative Identity and a Poetics of the Self

According to the narrative view of personal identity, as theorized by thinkers such as Marya Schectman and Alasdair MacIntyre,¹⁹ identity is constructed through the narrative composition of autobiographical memory. That is, we piece together our identities through the narration of a life story. However, these constructed identities are not like that of a physical entity with a fixed form. Rather, “these identities are mobile . . . narrative identity takes part in the story’s movement.’”²⁰ Consequently, if our identities are formed through the emplotment of autobiographical memories, and autobiographical memories are in a state of possible flux that is mediated through the scaffolding system of interchangeable fragments of experience, then identity, too, is a poetic construction. We compose stories to understand who we are and the world that we live in. We are the myths we create, the stories we tell, the narratives we compose, and the truths we bring forth. We poetically create the self. We are poetic creations; we are mythopoetic, auto-poetic beings. Through anamnesis we rediscover the self by poetically re-membering who we are.

In this vein, we ought to reconsider what we mean by truth, and the mnemonic system that creatively partakes in restructuring the self helps us to revisit ancient models of knowledge and revise them. In fact, the reconstructive approach to memory and the poetics of the self provide an avenue by which we can rethink the infallibility of representational systems of knowledge and notions of protected and unalterable truths. It is possible that many of the truths that we define ourselves by are more malleable and imperfect than we are willing to concede. And if we welcome the possibility of a dynamic and comprehensive truth that is sensitive to change and compatible with flux, we might discover that there are further delineations to be made and connections to be drawn and thus more opportunities for our narratives of the world and of others to be poetically reimagined. Through anamnesis, we rediscover truth by re-membering and redefining our relationship to it.

A few months back my wife and I were reconciling our shared calendar when she asked a simple question that struck to the heart of our social identity and the future of our small family. She turned to me and asked, “Do you have next Monday off?”

The occasion, for which I was caught completely unawares, was the Labor Day holiday. I haven’t worked jobs that closely followed the calendar of federal holidays, and so it was welcome news to learn of this holiday in which we remember the efforts of those who went before us to establish many of the labor laws we understand to be normative today.

As I reflected on this newly discovered three-day holiday, I was struck by the way in which celebration influences identity. Memorial Day, Independence Day, Thanksgiving Day—these national holidays all speak to a national identity. These times of celebration and rest and travel speak to what we as Americans consider to be our story. Each American may celebrate these days somewhat differently or feel differently about the respective histories or myths that surround these holidays, but together we take these days, place them on a calendar, and celebrate in our own ways.

***

Advent is now upon us, and a new year has begun on the Christian calendar. If the timbre of our national holidays suggests we are a people of individuality and freedom, then Advent suggests a people of longing and waiting. Like Simeon shuffling his feet every day in the temple as he awaits the Christ child, we await his returning again. We are a people of waiting, and we are in good company. Recently, the lectionary’s Sunday readings have included selections from the First Letter of Paul to the Thessalonians, which was written to a people who waited and became concerned when Christ seemed to be taking his time.

What will happen to those who died before Christ came?

How much longer will this suffering last?

Why is he running so late?

Paul’s response is to remind them of the future, of the day when Christ will come and with a blast of the trumpet make them into a new people, a new creation. Until then we are like the Thessalonians, a people who wait, who anticipate, and who continue in faith as we recall the future. In this season of Advent, we recall the future and wait in hopeful longing for the fullness of Christ to be revealed. Still, one may ask, like the Thessalonians, what does it mean to be a people of waiting and how does one wait faithfully?

As I outlined above, a people group can be identified by their collective memory and the way in which they call to mind this memory through their annual celebrations. Just as we call to mind our American state of independence in July by lighting fireworks and grilling hamburgers, Christians call to mind the proclamation and promise of a renewed creation in the eschaton, when Christ comes again to make all things new. This history is summed up in the much-quoted narrative of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation, and we are a people who sit in the tension of the final two stages.¹ But this is not a dispensationalism that calls us to prayerfully read the tea leaves, as if the eschaton were preceded by a discernible warning of the impending rapture. Instead, we are called to be a people who are identified in the very act of our waiting, a people who hold loosely to that which is not yet fully restored and who care deeply for the whole of creation with the conviction of a divinely inspired mandate.

While discussing the way in which God’s identity works within time and human agency, the late Robert Jenson states, “Her [Israel and the church’s] God is not salvific because he defends against the future but because he poses it.”² Here, Jenson is adding his name to a long line of theologians who recognize that God’s interaction with creation and time includes both act and promise. In the action of Christ’s incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension we recognize the acts of God which open up a new identity for the world. History moves forward in this progressing revelation based on each new act of God. The future of this seminal act in Christ’s coming is pushed ahead of us with the promise of his return. Therefore, the identity of the people called Christians is based on the act and promise of the person proclaimed as Christ. It is in this pilgrimage to the future that Jenson states that the eschaton belongs to lived history.³ Pushing against an existential—and ultimately gnostic—history, Jenson calls the church back to a lived reality that recognizes the acts of God in salvific history and moves us forward into a future that is open to the Spirit’s in-breaking as we await the advent of Christ and new creation.

Yet how does one practice this identity of waiting? To answer this question and to avoid the pitfalls of thumb-twiddling, antagonism to creation care, and hypersensitivity to the assumed changes in the eschatological winds, I suggest the Eucharist.

Within this revolutionary act, we celebrate the group identity given to us by hoping the past and remembering the future.⁴ We hope in the proclamation of the apostles that over many generations has reached our ears and filled our hearts, and we remember the future by not only recalling the promises of Christ but by experiencing time in a new way. At the table, we collectively recall through the action of partaking in the bread and wine both the history of God’s acts and the wedding supper of the Lamb when he returns for his bride, the church. This seminal act grounds us in history, the present, and the promised future because we recall this narrative. In fact, one might understand the eucharistic celebration as an act of narrative therapy in which we discard the narratives that latch themselves to our worried hearts and take on a new story that is shaped by the acts and promises of Christ. This narrative challenges our nihilistic cultural fears of a closed future and instead offers us a new identity, an identity set in the acts and promises of Christ who has opened to us a hope for the coming future.

Of course, eucharistic theology may make some uneasy, as it hints at a metaphysics that has separated the church for many generations. Yet this is not a call to a particular soteriological cuisine, and it is not a call to a contemporary gnosticism that separates the bread from the Spirit. Instead, it is an invitation to recognize that our group identity is one that is enacted in a shared memory of taking the bread and the cup. In this memory our physicality is affirmed through the life-giving act of eating, and the promise is brought deep into our memory through the future hope of the consummation. In this act, time itself becomes a seamless garment for us to recall dramatically, in the partaking of the elements, the history of God’s redemptive acts and to hope the future as the celebration of communion becomes for us a reenactment of the wedding supper that is being prepared.⁵

Advent is thus a time of anticipation, of waiting, and of recollection—anticipation because we remember the future presented to us in the promise of Christ; waiting because we sit in between the now-but-not-yet of resurrection and consummation; and recollection because in the act of partaking in the Eucharist we, in a way, have been here before. We have feasted with the bridegroom who in the incarnation left his Father in order to cling to his bride and whose spirit is with us now, as close as our heart is to our chest (Rom. 10:8). In the acts of God and in the promises of Christ, we have a new identity, and we celebrate this identity by being a people of waiting—a people who remember God’s love for creation by recognizing that it is full of potential because of God’s act and promise, a people who sit in the tension and expectation of Advent much like children expectantly await the Christmas holiday in which presents can be opened and family visited and hopes fulfilled.

With the coming of Advent, the sentiment of Augustine rings true, “Our hearts are restless until they find rest in you.”⁶ We thus recall the acts of God, and we remember the promised future posed by God, and it is in these group activities that our hearts rest deeply in the presence of God, who both acts and promises through the incarnation of God’s Son. And it is in this story that we find ourselves and we wait. We become a people recognized by our waiting, by a dynamic waiting that propels history forward in the action of the Eucharist. We wait with the memory of the promise; we await the new holiday to be celebrated in the eschaton with the marriage supper of the Lamb.